Note: all original writing (presented here) is copyrighted by the Library of Congress to Mary Magoulick. It may be used only according to copyright law and by permission of the author.
Women
Weaving the World
Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife as Myth
by Mary Magoulick
(from
the dissertation: Coming to Life)
„
Of course, I’m ambivalent, I’m human. There are times I wish
that I were one thing or the other, but I am a mixed-blood. Psychically doomed,
another mixed-blood friend once joked. The truth is that my background is such a
rich mixed bag I’d be crazy to want to be anything else. . . . Through the
difficulty of embracing our own contradictions we gain sympathy for the range of
ordinary failures and marvels.
~ Louise Erdrich 1993
After I got out of college, I kicked around a lot, and I finally
ended up working for the Boston Indian Council. . . . There were lots of people
with mixed blood, lots of people who had their own confusions. I realized that
this was part of my life – it wasn’t something that I was making up – and
that it was something I wanted to write about. I wanted to tell it because it
was something that should be told. I was forced to write about it. [laughs] I
didn’t choose the material; it chose me.
I think that’s because that is the part of you that is culturally different. When you live in the mainstream and you know that you’re not quite, not really there, you listen for a voice to direct you. I think, besides that, you also are a member of another nation. It gives you a strange feeling, this dual citizenship. . . . It’s kind of incomprehensible that there’s this ability to take in non-Indian culture and be comfortable in both worlds. . . . That’s one of the strengths of Indian culture, that you pick and choose and keep and discard. But it is sometimes hard because you want some of the security of the way things were. It’s not as easy to find the old as it is to find the new. ~ Louise Erdrich, 1987
Joseph Bruchac: Another theme I see strongly in Jacklight, and in all of
your writing, is the theme of strong women who become more than what they seem
to be. Transformations take place – in some cases, mythic transformations.
Louise Erdrich: That is true of women I have known. We are taught to present a
demure face to the world and yet there is a kind of wild energy behind it in
many women that is transformational energy, and not only transforming to
them but to other people. When, in some of the poems, it takes the form of the
moment when a woman allows herself to act out of her own power. . . . You know,
she’s realizing her power. She’s realizing she can say “No,” which is
something women are not taught to do, and that she can hit the sky like a truck
if she wants. Yes, it’s transformational. It goes through all of the work
I’ve been doing lately. . . . I think it’s a process of knowing who you are.
There’s a quest for one’s own background in a lot of this work . . . . One
of the characteristics of being a mixed-blood is searching. . . .You must make
certain choices. You’re able to. And it’s a blessing and it’s a curse. All
of our searches involve trying to discover where we are from.
~1987
„
„
„
In The Antelope Wife: A Novel (1998) Erdrich includes many of the
elements, symbols, and viewpoints of the processes of cultural renewal occurring
throughout the Native American world today. These characters, symbols, and
events are mythically shaped to reflect lives, concerns, events, and dichotomies
felt by many contemporary Native Americans who struggle to integrate various
cultural components and heritages into a coherent and successful identity. The
major images and characters involve a perceived split between Native American
and non-Native American cultures. The split manifests itself in a variety of
dualistic images (including animal / human affinal relationships, twins, hooved
beings, and gender confusion). Resolving “splits,” reconciling realities,
and mediating between them to make sense of the world, are major endeavors of
the characters. The plurality of characters, lives, and voices in the novel
helps underscore the widespread effects of cultural revitalization and deepens
the complexity of this mythic novel. The Antelope Wife works as a myth by
offering images and symbols of the re-birth of Native culture, suggesting how to
maintain traditions while thriving today.
Most of the characters in The Antelope Wife are mixed-blood, like
Erdrich herself (whose ancestry includes German and Chippewa heritage). In
foregrounding the realities and confusion of being “mixed” or “split”
throughout the story, Erdrich considers identity in terms of being Indian,
American, and human today. In a 1987 interview, Erdrich stated that identity is
a major concern to her, “It’s kind of incomprehensible that there’s this
ability to take in non-Indian culture and be comfortable in both worlds” (Bruchac
1987, 79). Incomprehensible though it may seem, Erdrich’s novel confirms that
being comfortable in split/mixed/blended worlds is possible. Lorena Stookey
agrees that one of her central themes is an ability to endure even apparent
incompatibility: “The Antelope Wife relates stories of characters’
survival of catastrophe, and, as one of its central themes, it celebrates the
life-affirming power of the will to survive. . . . [it] celebrates the endurance
of Ojibwa cultural tradition” (1999: 136, 139).
Erdrich brings to life the reality and some of the symbols (the language,
powwows, beading, etc.) of the cultural revitalization movement, in which she
herself participates, as she has stated in interviews. [give quote from recent
NYT article] Her use of Ojibwe language – even in her personal preface – and
ideas expressed within the novel help demonstrate her awareness of the
importance and beauty of Ojibwe culture. In another interview she explains
further: “I recently came from Manitoulin Island, a beautiful place. People
are quite traditional and keep a lot of the old, particularly the very old
crafts” (Bruchac 1987: 79). In this novel many characters’ lives are crafted
as examples of the revival of culture and its consequent confusions and rewards.
The Antelope Wife departs from the fictional North Dakota
community that centered Erdrich’s earlier novels for a new set of characters
and concerns in Minnesota (Erdrich’s current home as well). This new work
spans generations and ethnicities, but circles around three complicated, multi-generationally
inter-connected, extended families – the Roys, the Whiteheart Beads, and the
Shawanos. The most notably heroic character, Cally, is a member of all three
families. She is a modern, Native, young woman who successfully, delicately
mediates between worlds to create a new meaning, or pattern (in fact she emerges
as the pattern maker – or storyteller). In contrast to Cally, those characters
who fail existentially in this story either cannot let go of the past (nor see
it properly), or are too entrenched in the negative aspects of the modern,
Western society. The characters and how they live represent poignantly the
struggle for cultural identity among Native Americans today.
Erdrich’s title proclaims her work “a novel,” a literary genre
which is usually considered distinct from the oral genre of myth, though novels
often intentionally involve mythological elements. Yet this work fulfills many
of the definitions of myth, as a story of re-birth which provides order
symbolically for the Ojibwe universe today, and even involves heroes and some
supernatural aspects (all considered characteristically mythic elements). At the
very least this is a novel which is “highly mythically tinged” (Schrempp
1992: 25). Blending and bluring generic categories, this work should be
considered a novel and a myth at once, or a hybrid form unique to this narrative
event, a myth / novel.
PART
I
Mythic
Dimensions
As more than a novel, The Antelope Wife’s central themes place
it directly in line with typical Native American twin myths. Myths are tales of
the distant past (or origin) of cultures that may serve to direct social action
and values. Since Ojibwe culture is undergoing a renaissance, it is appropriate
that there be a mythic expression of this re-birth of culture. Among many
applicable theories of myth, the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Paul Radin
emerge as helpful in illuminating the mythic elements of The Antelope Wife
because they discuss Native American twin myths with which Erdrich’s tale
resonates. In fact, twin myths stand out as the classic examples of Native
American myths, most “common” in Lévi-Strauss’ terms, most “basic” in
Radin’s terms. Twin myths are so common and popular throughout the American
Indian world that they beg and attract attention, and have apparently shaped
Erdrich’s work, which so aptly fits the twin myth pattern.
Radin, recognizes myth as a fluid narrative form in his article “The
Basic Myth of the North American Indians.” He affirms, “folktale, myth and
legend flow into each other continually and continuously” (1950: 368). Radin
emphasizes that the “form and content” of myths “is not fixed,” which
would be impossible because of a continuous barrage of new influences and
priorities, as is constant to all human communities (1950: 370). The flexibility
of the genre in Radin’s definition better accounts for the real stories which
he and other fieldworkers typically encounter. He maintains: “It can, in fact,
be said that every generation strives to ‘rewrite’ its folktales” (1950:
370). Likewise, Franz Boas, one of anthropology’s founding fathers in the
U.S., also recognizes the variability of generic form and content when he
analyzes myths of the Northwest Coast Indians: “It would seem that
mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new
worlds were built from the fragments” (1898: 18).
Though the ancient, real and mythical worlds of the Ojibwe may have been
“shattered,” or “cracked apart” (in Erdrich’s terms), by European and
American invasions and assimilation, contemporary Ojibwe people build new worlds
from those fragments, as Erdrich builds her myth representing this process. Her
novel includes obvious fragments from the mythic traditions of her culture,
while offering images for how to blend coherently various impulses into a
comprehensive and meaningful worldview, and thrive as Native Americans in
today’s world. Clear mythic tendencies within the novel direct the reader to
consider it in terms of scholarship on myth. Mythology theories are typically
applied to oral forms. Erdrich’s novel encourages us to notice that such
fluidity of form as has been noticed in oral genres also applies to written
genres.
Recognizing and reading The Antelope Wife as a myth reveals many
messages and meanings that might otherwise remain obscure. Whenever identity is
in flux, myths can help. Myths work particularly well for critical moments in
cultural history because they deal with notions of cosmology and worldview,
symbolizing the fundamental re-shaping of human relationships. Marta Weigle
explains that myths are needed in times of identity crisis: “Significant
psychic transformation – whether an important decision, critical insight,
creative task, schizophrenic break, or change in consciousness – is heralded
and expressed by cosmogonic myths and motifs in dreams and various verbal and
visual creations” (1989: 10). Only apparent incompatibility needs myth to
resolve or make sense of social dilemmas. Erdrich’s fictional shift into the
twin and animal / human idioms bring this “novel” into the level of mythic
discourse, the only discourse that reaches the level of re-organization of the
cosmos and culture that she wants to convey.
Furthermore, as a myth of women (who comprise the central characters and
the world / myth makers, in addition to the author), we expect this not to be a
myth of the dangerous and monstrous, but of “primary creator and gift-bearing
culture heroines,” as Marta Weigle asserts as the focus of women’s myths (Weigle
1982: viii). Perhaps the most important function of myth is its world-creating,
world-affirming aspects, functions are especially common in female-centered
myths (Weigle: 1982). Erdrich highlights this theme in her opening image of
primordial female twins sewing the pattern of the world in beads. Like
bricoleurs, spinners, and spiders, they affirm that mixing cultures, like mixing
patterns in other creative endeavors, need not be a source of concern, but is
instead is the source of life itself.
In her discussions of myth, Marta Weigle notes the paucity of female
creators, deities and heroines: “Quite simply: such female creator deities are
rare” (1983: 45). She also laments the rarity of female heros, as evident in
the awkwardness of terms for them: “‘Creatoress,’ ‘creatrix’ and
‘culture heroine’ are awkward and almost meaningless designations,
reflecting the relatively weaker roles women play in creation, transformation
and origin myths – when they appear at all in such narratives about ordering
the world” (1983: 53). Erdrich’s work thus succeeds not only as a myth of
the contemporary renaissance of her culture, but also as a myth foregrounding
women. The “culture heroes,” goddesses (primordial twins sewing the world),
and other positive forces in the myth / novel, are all women. As Weigle notes:
“Culture heroes, whether human or animal, female or male, bring or bring about
valuable objects, teachings and natural changes which make possible human
society and survival” (1983, 53). Erdrich’s work offers female culture
heroes who bring about just such lessons and reorientations in conceiving and
enacting life.
Myth-makers and culture heroes not only make survival possible, they
explain symbolically how to live, as Radin notes: “A myth is always
explanatory. The explanatory theme often is so completely dominant that
everything else becomes subordinated to it . . .” (370). Myths serve to
explain and encourage worldview and good action within society. Many other
theorists of myth concur that it has a functional dimension. Structuralist
Claude Lévi-Strauss expresses similar sentiments when he postulates that myths
serve to mediate conflicting or dualistic elements of society and life.
The need for mediation presupposes antinomy and in fact Lévi-Strauss
recognizes “a basic antinomy pertaining to the nature of myth” and to human
nature (1974: 85). Such contradiction often appears mythically in the form of
dualities such as good and bad, night and day, etc., which Lévi-Strauss
emphasizes appear in “bundles” in myths (1958: 87). Looked at as whole
structures, myths reveal a typical pattern: “mythical thought always works
from the awareness of oppositions towards their progressive mediation” (1958:
99). The symbolic mediation in myths offers inspiration for culture members to
heal, flourish, or accept their reality. Lévi-Strauss, Radin, Boas, Weigle, and
others stress that mythic thought, as highly symbolic, offers rich resources for
making sense of the world, affirming worldview, and confirming human nature.
Weigle employs images of spinning and weaving in her analysis of the
world-creating, life-affirming functions of myth. Similarly, Lévi-Strauss draws
upon the image of one who weaves together bits and pieces of culture, in the
image of the bricoleur. He also draws upon sewing imagery in discussing the
function and method of the bricoleur:
More rapid cross-references, together with an increase in the number of
points of view and angles of approach have made it possible to consolidate into
a whole what might at first have seemed to be a loose and precarious assemblage
of odds and ends, all dissimilar in form, texture and color. Careful stitching
and darning, systematically applied to reinforce weak spots, has finally
produced a homogeneous fabric, clear in outline and harmonious in its blend of
shades; fragments which at first seemed disparate, once they found their
appropriate place and the correct relationship to their neighbors, come together
to form a coherent picture. In this picture, the tiniest details, however
gratuitous, bizarre, and even absurd they may have seemed at the beginning,
acquire both meaning and function. (1971: 562)
As myth
gives meaning and purpose to even the most seemingly disparate and fragmented
elements of culture, so it affirms life processes of cultural change or renewal
and refashioning identity. In reading The Antelope Wife as a myth, we
expect it to involve key images of both duality and mediating, and indeed it is
replete with both themes.
Part
II
A
Split Apart World
Dualism
in The Antelope Wife
Erdrich’s novel reveals feelings that are typical of mixed-bloods
searching for identity and a culture undergoing a renaissance. She represents
this complex process by images and the word (in Ojibwa) for splitting:
daashkiika. Although Ojibwe language is included in non-distinct type style, its
distinctness is clear (Ojibwe words look very different from English).1
Similarly, these characters and the story are part of America, yet their Indian
identity, language, and character imbue them with a unique quality. The
characters that Erdrich creates, like many Native Americans, feel and often
experience painfully or positively, a split between cultures, languages, and
identities. Erdrich gives the images of splitting and duality primacy in this
novel, implicitly and explicitly.
The split between cultures and between past and present is best
represented by characters, like the title character who represents a bridge to
the past and between human and animal worlds, as both antelope and woman / wife.
Identical twins run in the female line of the principal family (the Roys,
whom we later see are also the Shawanos and Whiteheart Beads). Identical twins
represent a split or duality inherently, and also the potential of reconciling
extremes (or halves of a whole), or of producing balance (as in the opening
image – see below). A traditional word / name which plays a crucial role in
the novel is “Dashkikaa,” which in Ojibwa means “splitting
apart,”2
or “cracked apart,” as Cally’s grandmother finally defines it (1998: 213).3
There is a persistent image of a double world split in two, but simultaneously
(at times only by implication) there is an image of wholeness. As potential and
reality, a world woven together, affirming life, ultimately prevails.
Even formally the book shows awareness of the tension between cultures.
In early press releases and publication notices the title of the novel was given
in Ojibwa as Gakahbekong, the word for Minneapolis.4
But the final version is in English. Each of the four parts of the novel bears
dual titles: “Part One,” “Part Two,” etc.; and in smaller print beneath,
“Bayzhig,” “Neej,” “Niswey,” “Neewin”: Ojibwe for one, two,
three, four. The formal cues direct the reader to awareness of a split but also
a blending of languages and thus cultures. The final title reflects the
significance of the character of the antelope wife, drawn from traditional myth,
but part of this world. The title also cues the novel as myth. Furthermore, the
setting of the novel, Minneapolis, is significantly half of the “twin
cities.” The fact that Erdrich wanted to foreground the Indian name of this
half of the city (Minneapolis rather than St. Paul), reveals the importance of
the place – a split-in-half city. The cities are literally split by the water
of the Mississippi River, which plays a role in the novel. Erdrich’s
characters live on the side of the river, which at least artificially, is the
more Indian of the sides. Minneapolis merges an Indian word for water (minne)
and a Greek work for city (polis).5
The other twin city, St. Paul, is obviously named for a Catholic saint and
Christian hero. The twin cities represent uniquely the split in American society
between Native and non-Native.
Beyond such formal cues, the opening passage / image substantiates the
duality and splitting of the world:
Ever
since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with
dark. The first twin’s beads are cut-glass whites and pales, and the other
twin’s beads are glittering deep red and blue-black indigo. One twin uses an
awl made of an otter’s sharpened penis bone, the other uses that of a bear.
They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each trying to
set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the
balance of the world (1).
The
struggle between balance and splitting are clearly signaled as major themes of
the novel right from the outset.6
“Fast and furious” work on an intricate pattern of “light and dark” are
obvious indicators of the duality of the pattern of life. The mythic dimension
of twins necessarily invokes basic social problems of struggle or splitting, but
also of mediation, which Lévi-Strauss illuminates as basic and universal
aspects of myth in The Raw and the Cooked.7
The struggle between opposites, the race to reconcile realities perceived as
separate, in fact necessitates mediation, or maintenance of a delicate balance,
even if achieved unwittingly, as in the case of these twins.
Twins represent two halves of a whole, especially here, where they sew
one pattern, with one thread. But they also represent a whole which is split,
and in this case working against wholeness, i.e. themselves. Mixed blood Indians
and “mixed culture Indians” also represent a split, and they struggle to
make of their lives a whole. Just as these twins keep creation whole in spite of
themselves, out of a struggle born of being split, so the struggle for identity
may keep many Native Americans whole or balanced. They too may be confused over
which heritage informs their lives and actions, which part of their split selves
or contrasting ethnicities is at play. And sometimes the struggle may produce
disasters (as in the case of some characters like Richard Whiteheart Beads in
the novel). The potential for a whole and balanced pattern seems to require the
opposition of impulses and elements.
In the opening image, beadwork maintains the “single thread” of life,
even though the twins themselves want to “upset the balance of the world.”
Likewise, throughout the novel, beadwork offers focus and hope to characters.
Although it is a traditional (pre-historic) element of Ojibwa culture,
beadwork flourished only after European introduction of great quantities
of glass beads.8
In fact the beads which play the greatest role in the novel (passed down through
the family line for at least 100 years) are described as “Czech glass” and
“midwest trader blue.”9
Yet they are extremely important and meaningful to the characters and the plot
of the novel. Thus, European introduced goods – or bloodlines – are
undeniable, but not necessarily negative or destructive. The culture is
maintained and can go on in spite of such splits and mixtures, as the image in
the opening passage suggests.
Identical twins are the most obvious symbol of the split-apart world
represented in The Antelope Wife. Typically twins are the heros of myths.
Lévi-Strauss writes that “this division between two individuals who are at
the beginning presented as twins, either real twins or equivalents to twins, is
a basic characteristic of all the myths in South America or North America”
(1978: 29). Though the twin hero Cally loses her twin sister Deanna early on,
she finds a replacement in the title character the antelope wife (known variably
as Sweetheart Calico and Aunty Klaus), who manifests a split between woman and
hooved one. Incipient twinhood, as in something that appears about to split
apart because of its physical traits (such as a cleft palate, cloven hooves,
etc.), plays as crucial a role as actual twins in representing inherent duality
typical of myth, according to Lévi-Strauss. Erdrich recognizes that the
significant feature of antelope and deer is their split hooves, as seen in her
frequent references to “hooved ones” rather than just deer or antelope.
Furthermore, when So Hungry takes a deer as husband, this communion links her
with all hooved ones.10
So it is acceptable when antelope (the hooved ones of the Plains where she is
trapped) take charge of Matilda, daughter of their cousin hooved ones, the deer,
and ancestor of the antelope wife. Incipient or actual twinhood always involves
and represents inherent dualities which must be symbolically resolved, or
mediated, says Lévi-Strauss (1958: 99). Many characters in The Antelope Wife
suffer crises which must be resolved or mediated. Such crises comprise climatic
moments of the novel.
Twins represent symbolically many other fundamental “splits” apparent
in Erdrich’s work. Seeing the world as “cracked apart” represents feelings
typical of people searching for identity and a culture undergoing a renaissance,
in a world they see as split inherently and which splinters their own sense of
identity. Depending on perceptual focus, one may dwell upon such dichotomies or
take up a challenge to find unity, to blend and make coherent various cultural
impulses. The following images represent duality throughout the novel: 1)
identical twins, 2) Native and non-Native cultures, bloodlines, and heritages,
3) past and present time frames, 4) male and female sexes,11
5) English and Ojibwe languages,12
6) human and animal nature (the “antelope wife”), 7) wilderness and urban
worlds,13
and 8) existential realities.14
PART
III
Plurality
of Interconnected Lives
In addition to focusing upon the splitting apart of lives and characters,
the novel as well emphasizes the interconnections between a plurality of lives
and cultures. Native and non-Native, human and inhuman (as in primordial beings
or animals), city and wilderness, past and present, all combine. Erdrich begins
the novel with a multiplicity of voices and points of view, but eventually
settles upon the voice of Cally as the principal actor (and I argue the hero).
Still, it is worth considering some of the many other voices to whom Erdrich
entrusts us, before allowing Cally’s voice predominance. Those voices become a
panorama of the various impacts and hopes of the multicultural world that Native
and non-Natives share today.
Scranton
Roy and “Matilda Roy”
The first human character to whom we are introduced – Scranton Roy –
represents the non-Native, dominant culture in historical encounters with
Indians. He experiences the conflicting emotions and responses which were
typical of whites and their relations with Indians for many years. Scranton
Roy’s parents were religious intellectuals (Quakers). His upbringing recalls
that of the idealized early American settler. Nevertheless, he leaves his
parents and the Quakers to go off on an adventure – another typical American
story. Spurned by the lover he follows, he joins the army, where he brutally
kills an innocent old Indian woman during a massacre. This undeniable and from a
Native American perspective, unforgettable part of our history strikes Scranton
and the reader very harshly in the image of the dying old woman, who speaks to
Scranton: “There was a word she uttered in her language. Daashkikaa.
Daashkikaa. A groan of heat and blood. He saw his mother, yanked the bayonet out
with a huge cry, and began to run” (4).15
The “cracking apart” (daashkikaa) the dying old woman foresees / predicts
refers not only to life and death, but also foretells other powerful dualities
of this story and of Native American life. These universal dualities of human
existence reveal a world apparently cracked apart, but not broken (i.e.,
functioning). Learning to see such a cracked apart reality as whole becomes the
central focus of characters, determining their ability to survive or flourish.
Scranton Roy is changed, “cracked,” by his murderous deed, but not
broken. Perhaps he sees his mother in this old woman simply because his mother
represents goodness to him, and so as he realizes the brutality of his deed, he
thinks of her. Perhaps too, Erdrich is evoking the “Old Indian Woman” as
mother to all Americans symbolically. This mother figure speaks to Scranton Roy
a word which is central to the novel, though he cannot understand it. She
recognizes that he, representative of all whites, is the means by which the
world is cracked apart. Literally his bloodline and culture will dilute or split
hers. Apparently only after this event do twins become part of the family line.
Simultaneously, the split also impacts his life and culture. Though Roy does not
understand the word “dashkikaa” and its significance, his descendants will.
American culture may be considered cracked apart by its deeds toward Native
Americans, but, like Roy’s descendants, capable of healing. Ultimately, all of
us are split or cracked apart, but not doomed to insanity and unhappiness as a
result (as the old woman will confirm to Roy in a vision).
Running from his own brutal deed in killing the woman and cracking apart
her world and his own, Scranton finds a lost Indian child strapped to a cradle
board, tied to a dog, which the mother, forewarned by deer, had sent to safety
away from the massacre (5, 57). Scranton must rid himself of the smell of his
world before the dog lets him approach. Symbolically, he baptizes / cleanses
himself by stripping and washing in a stream. He cannot feed the starving baby
until her persistent sucking on his breast (which he offers in a desperate
attempt to comfort her) draws milk from him, miraculously (5-8).16
This life-giving is a kind of salvation for Scranton Roy. After the flurry of
war and desertion, Scranton Roy lives deep in the wilderness, “bathes each
morning at the river, and keeps feeding the baby” (7). Seeking wilderness was
historically a typical response of many men whose lives interconnected with
Native Americans.
It is not only nature which heals Scranton Roy. His ultimate salvation
stems from taking charge of life.17
Though “the situation [of nursing her] was confusing” to him, “It occurred
to him one slow dusk as he looked down at her, upon his breast, that she was
teaching him something” (7). He interprets his lesson according to the
worldview in which he was raised, and sees that the baby has taught him the
meaning of faith (7-8). Symbolically, giving back life to Indians may be seen as
equally necessary for healing and salvation for America (at least by those of
Scranton Roy’s worldview).
Women – as Ancestors and Actors
So
Hungry = Blue Prairie Woman = Other Side Of The Earth
and
her daughter
Erdrich discusses the importance she places on women in her fiction and
poetry in an interview with Joseph Bruchac. She discusses strong women “who
become more than what they seem to be.” He says, “Transformations take place
– in some cases, mythic transformations.” Erdrich responds: “That is true
of women I have known. We are taught to present a demure face to the world and
yet there is a kind of wild energy behind it in many women that is transformational
energy, and not only transforming to them but to other people” (Bruchac 1987,
82). Erdrich makes explicit that she seeks to build images of women who are
“attuned to their power and their honest nature, not the socialized nature and
the embarrassed nature that says, ‘I can’t possibly accomplish this’” (Bruchac
1987, 82). It has been a theme throughout her writing to present women who
struggle with the socializing of this world and empower themselves.
In The Antelope Wife, the women of Cally’s world reveal
painfully complicated and extreme lives. The baby he “saves” becomes
Scranton Roy’s daughter – Matilda Roy – for whom he moves closer to
civilization after years of healing in the wilderness following the massacre.18
In the white world (the new culture) Matilda seems happy, with a school teacher
she loves as friend, then sister, and who would have been her step-mother.19
But her birth mother, Blue Prairie Woman, cannot accept losing this daughter,
seems to know she is in a foreign world, and longs to find her. After a period
with her husband of “such immoderation” that “twins are born” from it,
Blue Prairie Woman dreams of her lost baby and takes “leave of her mind” to
the point that she must be re-named (13).20
Because she looks for her daughter on the horizon day after day, she is renamed
“Other Side of the Earth,” which again conjures images of a split
world (the Earth having two sides).
In spite of her new name and twin babies whom she feels inside her,
“forming, creating themselves just as the first twin gods did at the
beginning,” her lost daughter’s fate torments her (15). Other Side of the
Earth cannot accept her daughter being on the “other side of the earth” she
gazes toward every evening. Even with the birth of her new children, she cannot
accept being split from her daughter, because she cannot accept losing her to
the other world. Her agony represents the emotions of many families whose
children were “lost” to the white world. From her perspective, Scranton has
not really “saved” the baby, but kidnaped her. This too represents typical
relations and misunderstandings between Indians and whites historically.21
As historian Debo notes in regard to such white adoptions and education of
Indian children: “No other tragedy of frontier life brought such anguish, no
other phase of Indian warfare aroused such hatred as this capture of children.
White men . . . never understood the desperation of the bereaved parents. Even
the Apache prisoners crowded within stockades found ways to hide some of their
children from the Carlisle kidnapers” (1970: 288).22
Like so many Indian parents, Other Side of the Earth is bereaved to have lost a
daughter to this alien culture of the whites. The loss of this daughter
“cracks apart” her world, so she leaves her twins and walks west until she
finds her first daughter.
Although she appears happy, Matilda Roy – 7 years old – recognizes
the pull of this other world.23
Even though she loves her “father” Roy and her teacher (who lives with them
and ultimately marries Scranton Roy), Matilda feels her mother’s presence, and
leaves with a “clatter of beads” and a brief note, “She came for me. I
went with her” (16). The blue beads were on Matilda’s cradle board when
Scranton rescued her, and she carries them away with her.24
The whole episode echoes the contradictory impulses many Indian children felt
when they were “saved” / kidnaped by the white world and put into boarding
schools or other white institutions as part of the general assimilation policy
in America. Matilda feels and responds to the pull of her mother and culture,
even though she doesn’t understand either. Here she literally cannot verbally
communicate with her mother because she can’t speak the language. Like
Matilda, many Indian children often came to appreciate, even love, aspects of or
people in the new world, but nevertheless they felt a strong pull for the
traditional world of their relatives, even if they didn’t understand it.25
Other Side of the Earth dies on the journey back, from a white disease
carried and transmitted by her daughter. Her death reveals the difficulty of
mixing two worlds (or rejoining two split halves) and is typical of another
devastating result of Indian and White relations: new diseases.26
Other Side of the Earth sings while dying, happy to have her daughter where she
belongs, though in fact she is in no human culture, caught on the journey back
in the world of the “hooved ones” – the antelope on the plains.27
While Scranton Roy mourns, Matilda flounders in between worlds, “nameless”
(19-20).28
Bearing only her white father’s name for her, Matilda observes the
antelope summoned by the mother’s death song, but “doesn’t know what they
are, the beings, dreamlike, summoned by her mother’s song, her dipping hand”
(20). Decimated by whites, who nonetheless also saved Matilda’s life, her
mother and culture were not able to give her a name nor the means of
understanding the antelope or the world of Indians.
Matilda is a lost soul, split, between worlds, yet symbolic of the beauty
and meaning of the joining of worlds: “Naked, graceful, the blue beads around
her neck” (20).29
The beads are her connection to the human world and a symbol of being bound (we
later see); she is neither completely animal nor human. She runs with the
antelope and is subsequently alluded to as having stayed and lived with the
antelope. One may infer that she is the ancestor of the antelope wife of the
title, which would be characteristic of her heritage, given that her mother,
Blue Prairie Woman, had a deer husband when she was young, who was probably
Matilda’s father (53-59).30
The theme of animal spouses is common in traditional Ojibwe and other
Native American literature. Although Matilda seems lost to both cultures, her mother’s final song
blessedly allows her to live intimately as part of the natural world (an ideal
conception of Indian culture). In this sense she survives and is restored to the
old ways.
Klaus
Shawano
and
The Antelope Wife (Sweetheart Calico)
As the novel jumps forward to the present time, the next significant
character introduced is Klaus Shawano, a trader (in and of itself a profession
which mediates between people and in some cases worlds).31
Shawano’s profession is held with some regard as a traditional role for Indian
people,32
yet Shawano represents many typical modern images of Natives as a
self-proclaimed “urban Indian,” whom we first see working at a powwow –
Crow Fair – in the Plains (21). He thus represents another mediation between
worlds: a trader (traditional and modern work) working at modern festival events
– powwows – that are generally seen as a way for Native people to connect
with their traditions.
Klaus is obsessed with the title character and gets medicine from Jimmy
Badger – an elder – to help him win “Sweetheart Calico” who is the
“Antelope Wife.”33
In a magical realistic stroke typical of Erdrich, Sweetheart Calico is literally
the antelope – incomprehensible, beautiful, graceful, and other worldly –
but also a woman, silent and aloof for the most part (and in all such respects
representative of the ideal Indian of the past). Although her exact lineage and
history are never clearly revealed, events and facts of the novel suggest that
her ancestor is Matilda Roy who was left to live among the antelope.
Numerous references to Sweetheart Calico reveal her antelope nature. She
and her daughters share some habits, grace, even mannerisms of antelopes. For
instance, when Klaus follows her to see where she and her daughters sleep he
loses them far into the woods / bush, where they apparently live. Even her
physical characteristics are described as antelope-like: “They float above
everyone else on springy, tireless legs. . . .with a gravity of sure grace . .
.their black, melting eyes never leave the crowd” (23-24). Whether objective
narration or Klaus’ love stricken viewpoint, such references reveal the
possibility and plant a seed of perceiving the antelope nature of this woman. In
another passage Klaus observes her as she sleeps: “Her lying next to me in
deepest night, breathing quiet in love, trust. Her hand in mine, her wicked
hoof” (33). Klaus is bewitched by her, but only half understands and accepts
her antelope nature. He most clearly catches glimpses of her antelope nature in
his dreams / visions: “he pictured his wife and twenty-six sisters and her
daughters in shawls of floating hair. Over and over again they sprang into his
dreams. Galloped at him. Brandished their hooves like polished nails” (93-94).
He realizes her nature subconsciously but cannot reconcile her with his reality.
As Badger predicts, Klaus therefore remains unsatisfied.
Klaus becomes a pathetic alcoholic with an overwhelming and unquenchable
thirst related to his relationship with his Antelope Wife. In a scene where
Klaus drinks from the river to quench his thirst, he has a vision of her in the
water: “she only looked back at him over her shoulder with her hungry black
eyes. Gave a flick of her white-flag tail” (98). Even when he first sees her
at a powwow, he notices clues to her nature. Her feather fan is made from birds
who “follow the antelope to fall on field mice the moving herd stirs up”
(24). Such clues reveal the blending of qualities that make her unique and
incomprehensible. It is not merely Klaus’ alcoholism that spurs such visions
of an antelope woman. Cally presents the story of Blue Prairie Woman / So
Hungry’s deer husband, and it is through the eyes of the narrator that we see
Matilda left alone as Other Side of the Earth calls the hooved ones to care for
her. Eventually others also receive clues to Sweetheart Calico’s connection to
Matilda and to her antelope nature. Most notably she carries the blue beads last
seen with Matilda.
Jimmy Badger, an elder from a Plains tribe whose advice Klaus seeks at
the powwow where he first encounters Sweetheart Calico, offers Shawano a warning
in regards to “antelope people”: “few men can handle their love ways.
Besides they’re ours. We need them and we take care of these women.
Descendants. Some men follow the antelope and lose their minds” (p. 29).
Sweetheart Calico, whose name comes from the bright trade cloth Klaus uses to
get her attention, and then to tie her to him, becomes a focal point of the
novel.34
She is a valued member of the Indian community, as Badger asserts. She is also
valuable to Klaus, who recognizes subconsciously who she is, knows she is
dangerous to him, but cannot resist her appeal. As Badger suggests will happen,
Klaus loses his mind. His unjust relations with her ultimately break them both.
During their relationship they undergo various transformations in which
they represent a variety of possible, typical Native American personas.
Sweetheart Calico (which is how she is most often referred to in her life with
Klaus) appears first as mother, dancing superbly with her daughters at the
powwow (through Shawano’s trickery she is separated quickly from her
daughters). She is also characterized as a beautiful lover, a lazy, fat wife,
and a sisterly in-law to the community. But she is never presented as having any
depth or clear presence as a character. In other words, she is characterized
only in relation to others, almost like an exchange item or a symbol. This too
harkens back to Native American twin myths, in which one of the twins is often a
less real, powerful, or human presence than the dominant actor twin. Ultimately
Sweetheart Calico serves as a carrier of the healing beads and thus a medium for
resolution of some major issues in the novel (26ff). Even then, she speaks a
strange pastiche of images and then disappears back to her world.35
The antelope wife is a symbol of what is needed and a carrier of dreams,
names, and messages, but not quite real. Thus she represents well the past and
its role for modern Indians. The fact that she represents the past is evident in
her lack of understanding of the phone system, which she uses to try to find her
daughters, but always to “out-of-service signals.”36
She does not use the phone successfully. Klaus remarks that, “she never
speaks, though sometimes I imagine I hear her whispering” (31). These imagined
whispers are never revealed to the reader. Sweetheart Calico’s inability to
speak and understand the modern world are evidence that she is not a modern
Indian. In addition, she thrashes wildly in the motel room when she wakes from
the drug-induced sleep Klaus used to kidnap her, “breaking her teeth on the
tub’s edge” (31). “Breaking [or cutting] one’s teeth” is a metaphor
for being initiated into or learning a new experience, culture, or base of
knowledge. She is obviously unfamiliar with this world and incapable of
negotiating it at first. While her actions make sense as a kidnap victim, she
settles into her routine of married life fairly placidly, suggesting it is not
the kidnaping into marriage, but into modern culture, which distresses her.37
In his person, relationships and encounters, Klaus Shawano (whose name
mixes German and Indian identities familiar to Erdrich) represents various
characteristics or stereotypes considered common among Indians:
~Indians
are respectful of elders (who are wise): Shawano shows this with Badger when
he approaches him in a correct, respectful manner to ask advice.
~Indians
are generous with what little they have: Shawano does not prosper as a
trader because he is too giving to his people.
~Indians
have a different worldview: Shawano’s connection to "medicine"
and to nature (being married to an antelope/woman) reveal this difference.
~Indians
live apart from western civilization and are more connected to tradition: He
prefers to hunt (i.e. hunting for animals to eat)
in “an open spot,” not near fences as others do to ensure success.
~Indians
have a great sense of humor: His humor is especially appreciated by women
(who laugh at his jokes behind their hands in a traditional manner). (p.28)
All
of these qualities are described as part of his previous life, but appear to
evaporate once Shawano kidnaps his antelope wife. She becomes his obsession. In
Native American myths, animal human interrelationships were typically the source
of good things, like food, medicine, values, etc. Even marriage by abduction was
a traditional way of life sometimes. But this is a mediation between past and
present, between worldviews of different cultures, which Klaus cannot manage.
Badger’s prophecy, revealing that this forced marriage is unnatural
and will harm Klaus, becomes reality. The only benefits from Sweetheart
Calico’s presence, come to other characters with whom Sweetheart Calico does
have a real relationship (i.e. her relatives through Blue Prairie Woman). If
even a trader, already skilled at bridging some aspects of traditional life into
modern life, cannot manage this marriage, then the message suggests that going
to extremes to force too much of the past ways into the present, is dangerous.
The relationship between Klaus and Sweetheart Calico is representative of
merging traditions and cultures.38
Although he is warned against it, this Woodlands Indian takes this treasured
“woman” of the plains only to encounter disaster.39
Klaus does not understand the wife for whom he so longs: “We’ll sit at night
watching television, touching our knees together while I check the next day’s
schedule. Her eyes speak. Her long complicated looks tell me stories – of the
old days, of her people. The antelope are the only creatures swift enough to
catch the distance, her sweeping looks say. We live there. We live there in
the place where sky meets earth” (32).40
The place where sky meets earth – the horizon – is clearly not
comprehensible or reachable, nor is the past for some of today’s Indians. Even
though it is literally a meeting place, the horizon is also elusive, the place
of dreams and longing. As a symbol of something longed for, the antelope wife
represents the Indians of the idealized past. She “tells” Klaus that the
place of dreams or ideals is in fact her home.41
b. The Antelope Wife’s elusiveness and desirability recall the Sidhe
fairies whom one longs for, but whose beauty and strangeness drive one mad if
one gets too close. In fact, when Erdrich later presents Klaus’ vision, which
ultimately leads him to free the antelope wife, he sees her as a fairy (see
discussion of this section later). The Antelope Wife,
clearly a representative of “the old days,” validates the idealized image of
the past. While she is with Klaus she does not, however, live where she belongs,
but literally in a confined space watching television. Her life in this world is
mundane and not admirable, yet she remains a center point and beacon of change
and hope to others. She is a surreal but overwhelming and overwhelmed presence,
as the past is to some Indians today.
Klaus cannot comprehend when he finds her: “Weeping, weeping, she cries
the whole day away. Sometimes I
find her in the corner, drunk . . . . I think I’ll find a mind doctor, things
cannot go on. She’s crazy” (31). She danced at the powwow with her
daughters, demonstrating some ability to get along in this world. Yet while with
Klaus in Minneapolis, she is uncomfortable in this world. Perhaps the message is
that expecting the old ways to work in the modern world is “crazy,” at least
in certain circumstances. Sweetheart Calico is torn between the rages just
described and behaving as, “the most loving companion” (32). She is lost, as
the old ways must be in today’s world, where the patterns (of beads or
cultural elements) are different.42
Here Sweetheart Calico shares some qualities with her ancestor Other Side of the
World, who also appeared insane to her contemporaries. Yet beads and culture are
resilient; you can put them into new patterns without changing of destroying
them, a fact Cally finally realizes. Modern patterns are not necessarily worse.
The failure to find a pattern may be the problem.
In the end, Sweetheart Calico’s love devastates Klaus. He cycles into
alcoholism, destructive relationships, and a lack of purpose clearly distinct
from his successful trader days. He obviously doesn’t understand his antelope
wife, or doesn’t listen to what he intuitively and sub-consciously
understands. His obsession leads him to keep her prisoner, though as such
she is like poison to him, and maybe to others in his community.43
Jimmy Badger told him the Plains people know how to understand and live with
her. Klaus proves that desire is not enough. Her presence leads to his
destruction.44
Sweetheart Calico quickly becomes less physically beautiful, fat and lazy
in Klaus’s (modern) world (32). She appears to succumb to two of the most
devastating diseases which commonly afflict Native Americans today: diabetes and
alcoholism. Klaus’ alcoholism is unambiguously destructive. In the meantime,
without her, Jimmy Badger's world is falling apart. Her absence causes plagues
in Biblical proportion. But Klaus
cannot make himself give her up, even though keeping her is also killing him
(33).45
She is a key, representative of a force of Nature, a way of life, a worldview.
Yet if she is representative of the old way of life, it is telling that those in
Klaus’ world struggle to figure her out (34). They don’t seem to know enough
(perhaps even who she is, which is kin in some cases) to deal with her properly.
At various points other characters lament the fact that they hadn’t
“noticed” her or taken her seriously enough.
The
Women Today
Roy
twins - Family Splitting Apart & Coming Together
This inability of her female relatives to recognize or comprehend the
antelope wife (at least until the end of the novel) may come from the fact that
the women with whom she resides are described as diluted. Erdrich presents the
Roy women thus: “daughters of the granddaughters of Blue Prairie Woman are
wavy haired and lightened by the Roy blood. We're twins of twins, going back
through the floating lines of time” (34). The twins were named Mary and Zosie
each generation until the generation of our focus, which comes to center on
Cally but begins with her mother Rozina (or Rozin or Roz) whose twin was Aurora.46
Rozin in turn names her daughters independent of the tradition as well: Cally
and Deanna. Both Aurora and Deanna die young. All these twin daughters descended
from the original twin daughters of Blue Prairie Woman / Other Side of the
Earth. These original twins mate with the grandson of Scranton Roy, Augustus,
thus highlighting the split as between not only twins but also between Indians
and Whites.47
The twins are the keys to the novel, struggling to strike the balance
represented in the opening image of the twins’ beadwork. They combine and
re-combine families and bloodlines, with some good, and some bad results.
Sweetheart Calico, descended from Matilda Roy and the deer, though not
split biologically as twins, is split between woman and “hooved ones” (deer
as father or antelope as relatives), and between ancient and modern worlds. For
her, the split seems dangerous (to her physical health at least). For the other
characters, lack of knowledge and understanding of these complex familial ties
also causes problems. In explaining the interconnections of her family, Cally
recognizes the complexity and delicacy of her family history: “Everything is
all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web
will tremble” (239). By invoking the image of delicate balance, here as a web,
in regard to these characters and their lives, Cally (and through her Erdrich)
emphasizes the complexity of all the splits and layers of the culture as a
whole. Her family and this novel stand for the Indian world today.
Rozina
Cally’s mother Rozina Roy (a.k.a. Roz or Rozin) marries Richard
Whiteheart Beads.48
Rozina is a member of the community to whom Klaus Shawano returns with
Sweetheart Calico. Like others in this community, she struggles to integrate and
understand her identity. Rozin’s discussion of her connection to
“continuity” (or tradition) reveals her struggle to find a balance between
old and new, between the dualities in her world:
I
named my girls Cally and Deanna. Bad choice. I broke more continuity, and they
suffered for it, too [as she and her sister suffered for their “new” names].
Should have kept the protection. Should have kept the names that gave the
protection. Should have kept the old ways just as much as I could, and the
tradition that guarded us. Should have rode horses. Kept dogs. Stayed away from
Richard Whiteheart Beads, Frank Shawano, or maybe Klaus’s woman with the
flashy walk and broken teeth.
I
would go back, if I could, unweave the pattern of destruction. Take it all apart
occurrence by slow event. But how can you pick out the strands of all you might
have changed and all you couldn’t? (35-36)
The
universal sentiment Rozina expresses here, of wanting to go back and change the
pattern of history, is impossible. She and other Native Americans must accept
that the pattern as it is now woven involves changes. Broken patterns and
consequences thereof cannot be re-made exactly as they were before: “how can
you pick out the strands of all you might have changed and all you
couldn’t?” New patterns are infinitely possible according to the nature of
culture and the human condition, but one senses that Rozina doesn’t know what
she should be doing, nor how she should be living. She struggles with her
choices and the pattern of her life. Women can only change the pattern of their
own lives to come, not the past, but Rozina dwells in regret. Her regret and
sorrow over Deanna’s death almost consume her. Cally ultimately draws her back
to the present when she grows so ill that she would die without care.
As a namer, Cally takes up the challenge of shaping the present and
changing patterns about which Roz is confused and worried. Cally shows no such
confusion, and as a result she manages to revive the names and culture of her
people. Notably, Rozina’s worry about her name stems from the fact that her
own name is a departure from a tradition of naming all the twin daughters in the
Roy family line Zosie and Mary. Rozina concludes that this departure from
tradition is dangerous because Rozina’s sister Aurora dies from diphtheria at
age five and her own daughter Deanna also dies young. Rozin sees the naming as
responsible for the bad luck, and so she wishes she had kept the traditions.
In reality Deanna dies because of a far more serious break with tradition
– her father Richard Whiteheart Beads’ alcoholism and suicidal tendencies.
Nonetheless, in considering the misfortune of breaking traditions, Rozina
ponders all breaks with tradition, echoing many of the concerns of Native people
I knew and interviewed. Her worries lead her to want to undo many of her
choices, but of course lives are complicated patterns, like the mythical
beadwork from the opening, and changing parts of the pattern cannot but upset
the balance of the whole. Considering different names and fates leads to
realization of the complicated nature of life and cultural patterns. In the end,
without Richard there would be no daughters, and without Frank, Rozina would
have no happiness.
Rozina completes her regretful thoughts in the earlier passage: “How
could I not have noticed Sweetheart Calico?” (36). Sweetheart Calico’s
centrality is obvious yet elusive. Rozina’s regret keeps her focused upon this
shadowy figure of past culture, so that she cannot embrace her present, until
the end when Sweetheart Calico leaves. Her lament, like her wish for keeping
other traditions, seems a cry of regret for all she has lost, including past
ways of living, which she apparently feels would be superior. Yet ironically
Sweetheart Calico, according to Rozina, set the steps in motion for this future
happiness. Rozina offers her assessment of Sweetheart Calico in her first words
(earlier in the chapter): “When she first came here with Klaus we all
wondered, couldn’t help it. Why she made so much sense and none at all. His
sweetheart calico. Why she seemed one of us and different, wholly other and yet
familiar”(34). Rozina sums up the sentiment toward Sweetheart Calico as
representative of the past astutely, “familiar” but “wholly other,”
“one of us and different,” like the world they are no longer part of, but
look to longingly for guidance. So though Rozin wants to hang onto the past, she
recognizes it as alien. Her torn impulses are representative of the struggle
between the twins to sew the pattern of life.
Questioning fate and history leads Rozina only to despair. Only when she
stops worrying about such things does she find happiness. Cally sees her mother
as untroubled by the tugs of gravity that would cause such concern. In fact,
later in the novel, after the tragedies she endured, Cally describes her mother
thus, “she has no seeming interest left” (143). Frank and Rozina ride the
“gravitron,” a carnival ride that spins very fast. This time the ride is
thrown out of control by a crazy operator. Once the ride is stopped, “each
rider, coming into focus, is the very picture of sick and dazzled terror except
for one. My mother. She steps out of her cage, doesn’t falter, not a single
misstep” (147). After this, she seems cured of her inability to embrace life
and be happy. Cally explains:
The way she acts is so different, so natural, so real, so warm and naked
that I suddenly have this picture of what has just happened to her.
My mother has been scaled. All the scales of convention and ironic
distance have been scuffed off her. All the boney armor she affects against the
world. She has been stripped by centrifugal force and jumbled up inside. The
wrench of gravity has undone all her strings. (147)
Without
the “strings” of other people’s and her own expectations and burdens,
Rozina is able to find her center. She is authentic, “so natural, so real, so
warm and naked.” After this, Rozina accepts the love between her and Frank,
and thus finds happiness. The existential message of the novel emerges in the
sense that only when characters act within their own world and according to
their own nature do they thrive.49
Richard
Whiteheart Beads
Cally’s father Richard Whiteheart Beads, another key character, is
dangerous and symbolic of those who cannot make a harmonious pattern from the
available elements. He is a lost soul and is mean, selfish, and destructive. He
is toxic like the garbage he illegally dumps: “Things get dumped, terrible
poisons in endless old wells. Nothing's endless, though. Every place has limits.
Everybody. Toxins. Resins. Old batteries. Lead. Mercury. And Whiteheart. And
Whiteheart” (50). His character is a representation of how ill equipped some
people are to succeed at blending cultures in today’s world. In the process of
living and blending or splitting cultures there will be “terrible poisons”
which must be dumped somewhere. Richard is the unfortunate representative of
such a repository. Richard’s inability to cope is partly due to his own
selfishness, and partly because he cannot use the tools he has. From the
beginning Richard’s selfish and foolish antics lead him down a poisonous path.
Since names are significant throughout the novel we may consider Richard’s
name – Whiteheart Beads – as evidence of his “White” heart, i.e. his
inability to embrace or carry out traditional ways. In fact, he destructively
manipulates the system. Although he has an Indian outer shell, the essence of
his being is bankrupt – White (at heart).
Rozina leaves Richard, but only after years of struggle, during which
Richard will go to almost any lengths to try to keep her to himself, and away
from others – including killing his daughter Deanna and finally killing
himself at Rozin’s wedding to Frank. Such obsessive, personal impulses are not
part of the ideal Indian value system, which stresses strong community life.
Richard’s obsessive love is similarly destructive to what Klaus feels for his
wife.50
Richard’s life is a mess. The government is after him for his illegal dumping
activities (though it is his friend Klaus whom the police hassle). Even before
Roz leaves him and he spirals into alcoholism, self-indulgent depression, and
very public, destructive suicide, he is described as a bad kind of Indian – a
tribal politician.51
Rozina first meets her true love and thus enables herself to leave
Richard through Sweetheart Calico’s presence and symbolic intervention: “I
entered [the bakery of Frank Shawano – her lover] for one reason and only this
– her. Sweetheart Calico sat on the sidewalk just outside the shop” (36).
She openly acknowledges the significance of Sweetheart Calico’s influence on
her life, even though Rozina does not consciously realize Sweetheart Calico’s
(Aunty Klaus’) identity. Why she should enter the shop because Sweetheart
Calico is sitting outside of it is not clarified. But symbolically, if the
antelope woman represents a pull to living more “traditionally,” or more
“authentically,” then she is an appropriate beacon. For through her
relationship with Frank, Rozina finds herself.
Rozina’s new relationship frees her from the “toxic” Richard with
whom she shares twins Cally and Deanna, even though she realizes presciently to
be “afraid for my daughters,” after starting the affair (38). These “twins
descended of twins for generations” see their mother Rozin (who had a twin
sister who died young) in her “other life” while they are out walking
with their father. While with Frank Shawano, who is the true,
sweet-like-the-baked-goods-he-makes love of her life,52
Rozina is so different from the person who is his wife when she is with Frank,
that Richard denies that it is her. Lorena Stookey notices the differences in
Rozina’s relationships:
Frank Shawano is the emblem of the nurturing lover, the man who relishes
“every hour. . . every solid, aching minute” (233) of his life with his
beloved. With Richard, Rozin was clumsy, somehow made inept by her constant
awareness of his hungry needs (even her beading went wrong, and he was not
pleased with the loomed watchband she made for him one Christmas). Rozin’s
marriages, then, offer a study in constrasts, for with Frank she always feels at
ease, even after he has unquestionably “lost his funny bone” (143). In this
partnership, where the lovers share their interests in family and cultural
tradition, each also pursues an independent interest. (1999, 136)
Cally
is so convinced that her mother is different with Frank, that after seeing them
in the park together, she decides to herself, “our father was right. We were
looking at some other woman whose face, alight and radiant and still with
anticipation, we had never seen before” (54). So Rozina is also a “split”
woman – daashkiika – not only
by virtue of being a twin, but by her choices and impulses. She longs for the
past, but is firmly in the present. The side of her life with Frank is a
“clear stream” she drinks from.53
The other side is less beautiful (55).
Part
IV
Hunger
and Thirst
There are two great stories of preternatural hunger and thirst woven into
the novel, both further deepening the novel’s mythical tendencies. Klaus
Shawano cannot quench his thirst until her drinks from the Mississippi. Blue
Prairie Woman’s hunger so overwhelms her that she is renamed “So Hungry.”
Each story of insatiability is symbolic of longings and impulses typical of humans. Blue Prairie Woman manages to find satisfaction for
her hunger. She does so by going into nature and finding beauty in the eyes of
the animal who becomes her husband. Klaus Shawano, who stole an animal wife from
its natural environment and brought her forcibly into his world, is perpetually
thirsty.
Cally retains and retells “The Deer Husband” story of Blue Prairie
Woman (her grandmother’s grandmother). As a young woman this ancestor goes
into the woods to cook herself a satisfying meal. Even after eating “the whole
rabbit. Ears too,” she wants more. “She wanted to eat her own arm. So
Hungry. That’s what they named her. So Hungry. Apijigo Bakaday” (56). When a
deer joins her she thinks of eating him and approaches with her hatchet. But
when she looks into his eyes she sees real hunger and qualities of peace and
contentment which she finds attractive. Instead of eating him, she shares her
stew with him. Afterward, she is finally:
Unafraid. She had this feeling. Full. So this was what other people felt.
She looked over at the deer. His eyes were steady and warm with a deep black
light. His heart shone right out of his eyes.
He loves me, she thought. He loves me and I love him back. Right down to
the ground. Who he is. No different. Of course, too bad that he’s a deer.
Still, she made a bed out of young hemlock branches and curled against his
short, stiff pelt. She began to live with him, stayed with him out in the woods,
and traveled with him on into the open spaces. Became beloved by his family,
too. Got so that she knew how to call the hooved ones toward her. They came when
she stood in the open. Her song was peculiar, soft, questing. (56)
So
Hungry finds satisfaction with her deer husband. She demonstrates a choice in
her kinship idiom with relationship to nature that was typical among Native
American myths. The structural relationship is based upon an affinal connection,
rather than consanguinity. This reflects the Native American cosmology of seeing
nature as a potential partner, a relationship of reciprocity. Hence she
recognizes the deer as “no different.” In fact, animal husband and wife
stories are abundant in traditional literature collections of Indians throughout
North America.54
It is an indication of a stronger and healthier relationship with nature than
that experienced by modern Americans, who like Richard are more likely to
pollute nature, or to kill and eat it, than to see its potential as a partner.
Of course, the traditional Native American relationship with nature was not all
nice. And So Hungry was quite willing to eat the deer before she saw his
potential as husband (similarly other characters in the novel are willing to eat
puppies in soup). Mythological stories of animal spouses do not idealize nature,
but rather represent it as a partner, one we have to work at getting along with
as we must with spouses. Even though her family intervenes, So Hungry succeeds
where Klaus and Richard fail in their respective quests.
In fact her family drags her away from this life (her brothers kill her
husband). But So Hungry “was not hungry anymore, and she was grown” (57).
She maintains good relations with “the hooved ones,” twice saviors of her
daughter. First they warn her of the attack so that she straps her daughter to a
dog’s back to save her. Later, upon her death, it is the hooved ones to whom
she commends Matilda. It is likely that Matilda is the daughter of the deer
husband, which would explain her ability to adapt to life with other hooved ones
and pass down a line of descendent “antelope women” like the title
character. Interestingly, this story, and the many traditional stories to which
it hearkens, reveal that mixed blood was not an unusual concept even to
traditional Natives. Thus her story confirms that mixing (bloods, cultures,
species) is okay. She too has a symbolic function much like a bricoleur.
So Hungry’s preternatural hunger is fulfilled by connecting intimately
with the natural world. She feeds her hunger with the help of her deer husband.
Stories of such preternatural urges among humans and seemingly impossible,
bizarre ways of satisfying them, often baffle modern readers of traditional
tales. Left in the past, this story might have found itself a lifeless and
obscure reference to another time, resurrected, but without power in this novel.
But its resurrection is more thorough and pervasive. So Hungry’s actions have
consequences and counterparts for her descendants in the present-day
Minneapolis. First there is Sweetheart Calico, the Antelope Wife, a product of
the affinal relationship between So Hungry and her deer spouse.
Furthermore, such overwhelming hunger finds its counterpart in Klaus’s
overwhelming thirst. He too finds a not quite human spouse, though his spouse is
less obviously or fully animal than So Hungry’s deer husband. Since Klaus’s
connection to the old ways and his blood line are diluted, it seems appropriate
that his animal spouse is also somewhat diluted (i.e. actually half human). It
is equally appropriate that his relationship with her, along with his thirst,
are as modern as he: an abduction in a van, a wedding night in a hotel, and
great thirst coming from alcohol-induced dehydration.
Klaus Shawano experiences tremendous thirst, paralleling So Hungry’s
insatiable hunger. While she fulfills cultural traditions, relating to nature
and finding satisfaction there, Klaus’s thirst seems unquenchable. His wife
also longs for something, freedom. Lorena Stookey discusses their longing:
“Both characters are trapped, immobilized by the spell of their unfulfilled
desires and thus live their days in a state of waiting” (1999, 135). Klaus and
Richard are on a drinking binge when Klaus begins to realize he is sick, though
Richard ignores his repeated pleas: “‘I’m sick,’ said Klaus.
‘Water’” (94). He cannot escape his obsession with Sweetheart Calico. This
is obviously the root cause of his malady of extreme thirst, as it is the cause
of his alcoholism (and hence of his dehydration).
As he thirsts, he sees an image representative of the strange and
detrimental attraction he feels for his antelope wife: “he couldn’t stop his
mind from turning his sweetheart into a Disney character. The Blue Fairy. Her
light increased. Her smile spread slowly into jag-toothed mercy and then her
voice flowed, the cool of a river” (94). He confuses his love for this
“magical” being who is split between antelope and woman with love he felt
for the magical fairies of childhood films.55
Just as Sweetheart Calico’s love overwhelms him, now this vision of her does
so. His needs overtake his senses, and he feels he cannot ignore his physical
need to drink. She torments his thirst in his vision:
His lady love was still there in the back of his mind, standing in a ball
of blue light.
“I’d like a drink of water,” he said to her. She had a glass of
water in her hand, too, Sweetheart Calico, but she poured it out in front of his
eyes. The molecules dissolved all around him and did nothing for his thirst.
(94)
His
Sweetheart remains confused in Klaus’s mind with the Disney fairy, “standing
in a ball of blue light.” But much as he needs and wants her to, Sweetheart
Calico cannot or will not quench his thirst. The sustenance she provides is as
elusive as the molecule-like dust from the fairy’s wand.
Still Klaus is thirsty. He and Richard wander through Minneapolis looking
for water. Klaus drinks from a sprinkler system at the museum but is chased off
by guards before he can really drink. Store keepers won’t serve these drunken
Indians. Pictures of water in businesses taunt him, as does the image of his
sweetheart:
“That’s all you need,” said the Blue Fairy, holding up the bottle
before his eyes. Twice, with her glass hoof, she struck the hollow ground.
“Let’s mogate.”
“To the big water. Mizi zipi.”
“Howah.”
They walked. Hotter. Hotter. A few times they took a drink from their
bottles, but mainly they wanted to get there, so they walked. Shaking a little,
hungry. Went around the back of a pizza place where the manager left unclaimed
orders every once in a while. Past the Deja Vue Showgirls. SexWorld. Fancy café
garbage Dumpster and outdoor bar. Nothing there. A woman exiting an antique
store held out a dollar and the moment Richard touched the bill she dropped it
like he’d run an electric wire up her arm. She darted away.
“It’s
that sex thing,” said Richard, his look sage. “I have that effect on
women.”
“They run like hell.”
Klaus laughed too hard, furious, thinking of how his antelope girl could
take off and sprint. (96-97)
Richard
and Klaus follow the vision Klaus receives from his antelope wife / blue fairy
and work their way toward the “Mizi zipi,” or Mississippi. This river is
significant as the major natural detail of the city, and was important in Ojibwe
culture. On their way there we see the city through the eyes of alcoholics, the
sleazy underclass side of the city. They are very much in and of this modern
world (they know where to get the free food and how to interpret the actions of
women they encounter on their way this day).56
These are two Indians following a vision to drink from an ancient and sacred
river, but also two sad, sick alcoholics stumbling dehydrated through the city,
pathetically in need of the simplest sustenance – water.