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.                ~ Louise Erdrich, 1991

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.