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NATIVE AMERICAN, CHICANO, AND WESTERN
AMERICAN LITERATURES: FINDING COMMON GROUND

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JOHN MlLLER-PURRENHAGE

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PhD. degree in ENGLISH

 

 

 

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—___ _ ._ _.__—_

NATIVE AMERICAN, CHICANO, AND WESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURES:
FINDING COMMON GROUND

By

John Philip Miller-Purrenhage

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2004

ABSTRACT

NATIVE AMERICAN, CHICANO, AND WESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURES:
FINDING COMMON GROUND

By
John Philip Miller-Purrenhage

This dissertation examines texts by authors of Native American, Chicano, and
white backgrounds written from the socio-political space of the contemporary American
West. The 1960s marked a renaissance in writing from all three groups, a rebirth and
outpouring of writing that helped found Native American, Chicano, and Western
American literatures as sub-disciplines of literary studies at large. Many writers and
critics from these groups sought to shore up a specific group identity against what they
saw as the encroachment of (white, eastern) American culture. They engaged in
polemics against the main thrust of American literature, including most prominently the
story of “the West as America,” the nationalist narrative underpinning much of American
culture that found the United States’ roots in the conquest of the West. Despite many
writers’ shared concern with resisting these narratives, most critics within these
disciplines treatthe literatures as separate, using rubrics developed within each discipline.
My ﬁrst chapter presents the concerns of these ﬁelds. I analyze major developments in
each ﬁeld and introduce my method, which might be called critical genealogy. A critical
genealogy (according to Russ Castronovo) disturbs the foundations of national legacies
like the story of the US. West and searches for signs of erasure. I argue that these fields
too often discard valuable contexts in favor of exclusionary identity formation.

In the other chapters, I both highlight the genealogical methods and themes of five

major authors from these groups and perform my own critical genealogy on their

constitution of group identities, legacies, and bloodlines. Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburguergue
promises to explore the legacy of inter-cultural contact between Native American,
Chicanos, and whites in New Mexico, particularly through its crossblood protagonist.
However, he avoids any real exploration of hybrid identity, retreating to an idyllic
Chicano identity that is essentially Native American. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove
performs both as stereotypical Western and as anti-Westem, questioning the project of
westward expansion. Most importantly, McMurtry troubles the very notion of a shared
American identity that might be gleaned from western literature.

In Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich features extended families separating and
reforming. Lipsha Morrissey’s archetypal quest for his father, like most searches for
origins, presents no easy versions of home, ethnic, or national identity. Nash Candelaria
presents in Memories of the Alhambra a misguided Chicano protagonist who searches for
his roots in Spain instead of the New World, suggesting the problems of establishing a
basis for any kind of identity. Finally, Leslie Marmon Silko in Gardens in the Dunes
presents a narrative of a different search for origins. Silko sends her Native American
protagonist to a 19m century Europe that is trying to erase or contain vestiges of old
religions that resemble those of her New Mexican Indians. Yet despite the cross-cultural
contact among her many ethnic and national groups, these groups ultimately retrench '
their identities.

In analyzing these novels and critical works, placing them on a common ground
so to speak, I show how the groups have isolated themselves within certain identities,
performing only partial genealogies on their own origins; I hope to suggest through this

project the value of questioning the foundations of identity and these disciplines.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude for the members of my doctoral
committee, Barry Gross, William J ohnsen, Scott Michaelsen, and Dean Rehberger, for
their steady support over a long process was essential to the success of my project. Barry
Gross was gracious enough to shepherd the project through the early stages when I had
not a clue as to what I was doing; without his assistance, I might never have gotten the
project off the ground. Scott Michaelsen joined the committee in the middle of my
preliminary work and then agreed to become my dissertation advisor. He inﬁised my
work with his great knowledge and enthusiasm, sharpening and strengthening my efforts
and providing a wonderful model of scholarship through his own work.

Funding for this dissertation was provided in part by the College of Arts and
Letters, the Departments of English and American Thought and Language, the Center for
Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, and Michigan State University Detroit
College of Law.

I have received a great deal of feedback and support from the Michigan State
community. This dissertation has been shaped in distinctive ways by many of the faculty
with whom I took courses, including Katherine F ishbum, Kenneth Harrow, Jim Seaton,
Steve Arch, Jim McClintock, Marcia Aldrich and Steve Rachman. I have learned a great
deal from many of my fellow students and would like to mention and thank Kerry Duff,
Frank Manista, Richard Manderﬁeld, Maher BenMoussa, Tom Bissell, Dan Nappo, and
Suzanne Rumsey for their input and support.

Even before graduate school, many wonderful teachers assisted my intellectual

journey; without them, I may never have even thought to pursue this path. I would

iv

therefore like to acknowledge Evo Alberti, Vicki Granger, Scott Friesner, Ellen Caldwell,
Gail Grifﬁn, Richard Stavig, and Paul Davis.

An additional support network of family and friends has kept me sane and
focused throughout the dissertation process. I wish to thank Patrick and Erin Ulano,
Pippin Brehler, John Peckham, and Paul Kaminski for their friendship. Pat, your insights
into the contingencies of Mexican-American identity meant more to me than you could
ever know. I also want to thank my extended family, my brothers, sister, and their
spouses, for their questions and encouragement. My father and mother-in—law, Jerry and
Frances Miller, have supported me in every way possible, particularly in the last two
years, and I owe them a major debt of gratitude. My mother, Ann Purrenhage, has
always emphasized the importance of education and is largely responsible for my choice
of career, even though she sometimes encouraged me to consider other careers. Thanks,
Morn. My father, Ralph Purrenhage, died in 1997 while my ideas for this project were
just taking shape. He was a fan of Zane Grey and the old Westerns they used to show on
television, and would probably consider my treatment of these topics strange, but would
support me as he always did. His steadfastness and selﬂessness provided me with the
strength I needed to complete this dissertation.

The most important thing in my life for the past seven years has been my family.
I wish to thank my children, John Paul, Katherine, and Emily, for their love, youthful
enthusiasm, and understanding or at least tolerance of why Daddy must spend so much

time writing.

 

 

I dedicate this dissertation to my wife Laura. Your devotion to your work has

guided and inspired me, and your love has given meaning to everything I do. Thank you

for everything.

vi

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
Finding Common Ground: Introduction .............................................................................. 1

CHAPTER 2
Critical Genealogy in Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburguergue ..................................................... 46

CHAPTER 3
‘Kin to nobody:’ The Disruption of Genealogy in Larry McMurtry’s
Lonesome Dove ................................................................................................................. 86

CHAPTER 4
Two Ways of Coming Home: The Value of Origins in Louise Erdrich’s
Love Medicine ................................................................................................................. 114

CHAPTER 5
The Father One Cannot Acknowledge: Genealogy and Identity in Nash Candelaria’s
Memories of the Alhambra .............................................................................................. 172

CHAPTER 6
The Politics of Origins in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Gardens in the Dunes ................ 198

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 243

vii

 

CHAPTER ONE
Finding Common Ground: Introduction
Lone Ranger: “Look out, Tonto! We ’re surrounded!”
Tonto: "What do you mean ‘we, ' white man? "
«Eddie Murphy

What do we mean when we say “we?” On what grounds do we attempt to group
ourselves With others, to the exclusion of still others, and for what reasons? What
afﬁliations, be they national, ﬁlial, or relational, do we claim as crucial to our identities?
And how have creative writers attempted to dramatize such struggles over national,
ethnic, and regional identiﬁcations in ways that illuminate the issues for readers? These
are among the central questions that motivate _N_ative American, Chicano, and Western
America‘n Literatures: Finding Common Ground. I hope to interrogate the ways in which
some rather recently constituted literary disciplines have formed their “we,” including
both those who practice literary scholarship and the inside group of primary authors they
study, and how they have excluded. I contend that while there have been reasons for the
ﬁelds of Native American, Chicano, and western American literatures to hold themselves

apart as discrete disciplines, there are also compelling reasons to read these literatures

together.

Why Study “The West”?
Why does the rubric of the “American West” continue to be useful and
compelling to writers and scholars, even in an age of globalization, interdisciplinarity,

and pan-American studies?

 

One approach to answering this question comes locally, one might say, by
examining the literature of the West closely for evidence that it is somehow exceptional
enough to merit its being singled out for study. I will delve into this explanation below,
but the opposite approach also bears fruit. I believe examining the West not just on the
local level, but also from the angle of its place in global or hemispheric studies (or
literatures of the Americas, etc.) shows it to be a deserving rubric for study. In a recent
collection on literature in an inter-American context, editors Monika Kaup and Debra J.
Rosenthal comment, “Our theme is framed within the method of hemispheric New World
Studies, which compares the treatment of racial and cultural mixture in distinct regional,
ethnic and national literatures of the Americas.”1 Far from eliminating the need for
regional studies, the recent move towards inter-American studies has re-energized
region—among other rubrics—as a productive context in which to compare different
literary works. Yet the American West is also more than just another region in the matrix
of possible comparisons.

The West and the mythology of the ‘Rvestern” continue to be very important for
public life in the United States and, inasmuch as US. policies and attitudes affect other
nations and peoples, the rest of the world, too. Patricia Nelson Limerick writes, “The
conquest of Western America shapes the present as dramatically—and sometimes as
perilously—as the old mines shape the mountainsides”(l 8). “We” have inherited The

Legacy of Conquest, as Limerick explains (without specifying what “American”

 

l Monika Kaup and Debra J. Rosenthal, Mixing Race, Mixing Culm: Inter-American Litergg Dialogues
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), xi; emphasis mine. See also Paul Jay’s attempt (which in many
ways parallels that of western critics) to emphasize location, especially transnational locations like border,
over abstract ideas like “nation,” in analyzing the literatures of America, “The Myth of ‘America’ and the
Politics of Location: Modernity, Border Studies, and the Literature of the Americas,” Arizona Merly
54.2 (Summer 1998), 165-92.

incorporates for her): “To live with that legacy, contemporary Americans ought to be
well informed and well warned about the connections between past and present”(18),
particularly since “conquest tested the ideals of the United States”(18). In his books,
Richard Slotkin traces the importance of western themes and imagery for US. political
leaders.2 John Cawelti has noted, “there has always been an observable similarity
between the pattern of justifying rhetoric used to defend American military policy and the
Western drama”(Cawelti 112).3

Though Cawelti and Slotkin ﬁrst drew these connections in the 1970s, seemingly
every generation of cultural studies scholars has drawn attention to the prevalence of
Western mythology in contemporary political rhetoric. President Ronald Reagan
declared genre western writer Louis L’Amour his favorite author. President George W.
Bush used the western cliche “wanted: dead or alive” to describe US. policy towards
terrorists in 2001. As the nation continues to base part of its identity on mistaken ideas
and imperfectly grounded ideals taken from the settling/conquest of the continent and
subsequent expansion of the American empire, critical analysis of the development and
deployment of western myth will continue to be crucial.

The history of the west and the genre of the western story have given many US.

citizens their most fundamental ideas about how the United States was founded and

 

2 Richard Slotkin traces the connections between the United States’s politics and western themes in three
books, with Gunﬁ ter Nation: The M of the Frontier in Twentieth-Gen America (New York:
Harper Perennial, 1993) perhaps the most explicit in arguing how US. leaders relied on citizen familiarity
with and acceptance of tropes of westward expansion in explaining foreign, domestic, and even extra-
planetary policies; see also Re eneration Throu Violence: The M 010 of the American Frontier
w (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973) and The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the
antier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985).

3 One could keep adding to the list, for instance citing Harold P. Simonson, who sees the theme of the
closed frontier as signaling “the kind of American tragedy that destroyed illusions fostered on the open

frontier and forced the nation to come of age” ($291151 the Frontier: Writers, Western Regiomlisrn, anda
mng—lagg (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989), 3.

developed and, therefore, what it must stand for. Like most nations, the United States
gloriﬁes its own past to itself, romanticizing individual leaders and types. Most
signiﬁcantly, in my view, the cowboy and the pioneer (with its somewhat less romantic
latter-day representative, the farmer) have been raised to the status of American heroes.
However, as studying the roles of cowboys and settlers in the context of the conquest and
displacement of Native Americans and Mexican-Americans shows, individuals from
these groups often acted in ways contrary to the ideals (such as rugged independence,
manly courage, or love of freedom) now ascribed to them. While pulp ﬁction westerns
have built up the romantic image of these forefathers, a counter-tradition in ﬁction and
history (called Variously the “New Western History,” “anti-westem,” “New West,” or just
revisionism) has challenged this hegemonic view. A better public understanding of the
use and abuse of western myths and images would kill “the West” as many Americans
know it, but perhaps would result in better policy and engagement with those groups on
the other side of the so-called frontier (and, indeed, a better understanding of the
ﬂexibility of US. borders and national identities).

Another recent example of a rhetoric-laden attempt to call on history to shore up
current identity and justify current US. actions gives one pause. In reaction to the
bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City in September 2001, the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni published a report—more a blacklist, really—of leﬁist
reactions to the attack. Because those named on the list failed to demonize broad groups
of people as terrorists, they were accused of being anti-American. Upon what basis does
this group decide what is properly American? Apparently, they base their understanding

of proper Americanism on history;at least, that is what the quotation on the cover of the

 

pamphlet implies. It comes from Lynne Cheney, Wyoming-bom literature Ph.D., cultural
commentator, and wife of current Vice President Dick Cheney:
At a time of national crisis, I think it is particularly apparent that we need to
encourage the study of our past. Our children and grandchildren—indeed, all of
us—need to know the idea and ideals on which our nation has been built. We
need to understand how fortunate we are to live in freedom. We need to
understand that living in liberty is such a precious thing that generations of men
and women have been willing to sacriﬁce everything for it. We need to know, in a
war, exactly what is at stake.4
I would argue that Cheney’s words invoke not just the “war on terror,” but also the
culture wars of the past three decades. Who is this “us” and who gets to decide? What
are these ideals? The appeal to family strikes a sentimental chord, but also implies that
inclusion in America is limited to its current families and their descendents (“our” past
and future belong only to them). Combined with the appeal to the past, the rhetoric of
family invokes a sense that America is a family affair, an organic unit that reproduces
itself biologically rather than a political confederation artiﬁcially constructed and
maintained.5
While the West as an object of study has informally been “raced” as White (or
Anglo), the conquest of the West was anything but. As Limerick explains, “Happily or

not, minorities and majorities occupied a common ground”(27). Though studying the

 

4 From Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal, “Defending civilization: How Our Universities are Failing
America and What Can Be Done About It," (Washington, DC: American Council of Trustees and Alumni,
2001), up

Michael Rogin has written of this connection between family ties and politics from a more Freudian
perspective than I will utilize. See Father: and QQI um: Andrew Jackson and the Suhjugation of the
W (New York: Knopf, 1975) andS Subversive Genealggy: The Politics and Art of Herman

 

West through Frederick Jackson Turner’s old rubric of the frontier may exclude those on
the other side of the frontier, as Limerick argues it does, conceiving of the West as a
place—“a common groun ”——emphasizes and preserves the struggle for and negotiation
over land, language, and liberties that took place there.6 It also prevents readers from
isolating white writing about the West from Chicano or Native writing treating similar
themes and geographies. Recent theorizing about borders and borderlands seems to
support Limerick’s point. As J esr'rs Benito and Ana Maria Manzanas explain, a
“borderlands approach” to literature and culture would be “a revisionist position which
sees literatures and cultures not as ﬁnished and self-contained projects isolated ﬁ'om other
inﬂuences, but as constructs based on interaction and dialogue, and which evolve and

unfold relative to each other.”7

Why Not “The West”?

What are the possible objections to considering alongside western American
literature (read for so long as “white” or Anglo) literatures of people of color (in this
case, Native Americans and Mexican-Americans) who were killed, displaced, cheated,
devalued, and defrauded during and alter the period of Manifest Destiny (Frederick

Jackson Turner’s period of the “open frontier”)?

 

Melu'lle (New York: Knopf, 1983). In addition, Russ Castronovo has worked on metaphors of genealogy
used politically, on which more below.

6 Though used to describe different geography, Richard White’s “the middle ground” (The Middle Ground:
Indians, EuQires and Republics in the Great Lakes Regiou, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991)) operates similarly to describe the give and take of groups meeting and identifying themselves
and the other in the context of the encounter: “the middle ground is the place in between: in between
cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages”(x). White’s rmin purpose is
very similar to mine: “a search for accommodation and common meaning”(ix).

7 Jesus Benito and Ana Maria Manzanas, “Border(lands) and Border Writing: Introductory Essay," from

Literaturg ans! EQQ'cig in thg Cultural Borderlands, Eds. Jesus Benito and Ana Maria Manzanas
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 2-3.

 

Like ethnic descriptors, the term “the West” does not travel well. Conceivably, as
the weStem United States continues to change, it may be difﬁcult to ﬁx the identity of
bOOKS, authors, or citizens as “western.” Competing discourses of Native American and

McKiCari—American literature and culture would claim either the irrelevance or even the
offensiveness of such a rubric as a means of studying the works of their ethnically
grouped constituents. Indeed, Mexican-Americans have seen the western United States
as 61 norte, positioned opposite Mexico on a north-south axis rather than recapitulating
Anglo east-west ﬁgurations.8 In this sense, the US. West doubles as e1 norte, and one
might most accurately, if clumsily, refer to this geopolitical space as the west/north.9
Since this study attempts to point out that the West has never been and cannot now be
considered a term only important to Anglo Americans, to capitulate the term and use
another in its place would be to give up the point before even arguing it, on one hand, and
on me other to lose the residual linguistic suggestiveness of “the West.” The West has
been used to name a historical place from the vantage point of white settlers; for better
and worse, it names the place where Native Americans lost so much, where Spanish-
SPCaking colonists fought, won, and lost a series of imperial wars of positioning both with
various Native Americans and with English-speaking counterparts.
'The rise to prominence in the 19903 of a border studies centered on Mexican-
American identity has to some extent displaced the region of the West as an important

analytical category, but the use of “border” and its many connotations continues to re-

 

 

3 Sec Richard Rodriguez, “Go North, Young Man,” Mother Jones July/August 1995, 31-35. .

9 To use an alternate term like North America, by which scholars usually attempt to designate non-Latin
America (i-C- Canada and the United States), would be both to elide differences between Canada and the
U.S- (since I don ’t discuss Canadian works, I do not wish to suggest that I am speaking for North America)
and ‘0 “33°“ (erroneously) that the Latin inﬂuence had been less signiﬁcant in those more northerly
60mm“: Given the My 0f Mexican-American literature, to draw such an absolute distinction between

 

emphaSi 2e the tropes of previous studies of the West as border country, common ground,
and the meeting place for the major groups that have contributed to the formation of
United States identity. ‘0 Combining study of the border with that of the west forces us to
remember that neither frontier nor border (neither in their historical manifestations nor
their theoretical reﬁgurings) have ever been so airtight as their common usage suggests.
As Edward Watts and David Rachels suggest, “the study of twentieth-century borders has
shown that an identiﬁable ‘line’ between one culture and another oversimpliﬁes the
complexities of frontier and border experiences. On the one hand, it connotes an intrinsic
asyrnmetry between the conquering culture and the conquered and assumes that, east of
the frontier, indigenous culture is erased.”” The continuing work of Chicano and Native
scholars, particularly during the respective literary renaissances of these groups which
forrn the historical parameters of this study, testiﬁes that indigenous culture has not been
erased, east or west, even if that work tends to overemphasize the purity of groups on
both sides of the border.

Finally, if preconceived ideas of the West—stereotypes about cowboy life,
rhetoric about the American character as found in the (conquering) pioneers, the lingering
American belief in Manifest Destiny—have served as a useful “straw man” for groups
critiquing U.S. triumphalism, including those on both sides of the border (as I will
suggeSt below), a continued (and preferably more accurate) examination of the West as

the region where these groups clash will sharpen that critique more than shoring up ethnic

 

 

North and South America would be to deny that the US. West has been a distinct meeting place for
multiple racial-national-ethnic groups over the last 500+ years. _
‘° I am referring t0 Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Anglo-Americans, the subjects of this _
study. bl“ much the same could be said of Asian-Americans as a broadly CODCCiVCd group, though there ‘5
not space here to discuss the latter group’s interaction with the West. ,
" Edward Wm and David Rachels, “Introduction,” W
M Edwal‘d Watts and David Rachels, eds. (New York: Oxford UniVCYSity Press, 2002), xw.

 

or regional identity will. For literary ﬁelds, centering so narrowly on chosen ethnic
sublects (including the case of white writing from the West) not only delimits the
pOSS'lb ilities of those subjects, but also threatens to ignore historical conﬂict in the interest
0f eStablishing zones of purity around the subjects. When confronted by a privileged
White, male subject who deterministically forswears the very possibility of speaking on
the Other, Gayatri Spivak suggests, “Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the
history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?”12 The
a1 temative involves not just remaining silent on issues related to Other groups but which
affect one’s own group, but remaining willfully ignorant of how “cultures” are formed in
con ﬂict among different groups.

The advice works for Chicano/a, Anglo and Native American writers alike
because they share the common ground of the frontier (in its geopolitical sense). As
Spivak writes, “I say that you have to take a certain risk: to say ‘I won’t criticize’ is
salving your conscience. . .. [It] you criticize having earned the right to do so, then you
are indeed taking a risk and you will probably be made welcome, and can hope to be
judged with respect”(62-3). In Spivak’s scenario, then, one earns the right to speak
through “speciﬁc programmes of study” (including learning the language of the other)
and “a historical critique of your position as the investigating person”(62), and thereby
earns the respect of members of the other group. Furthermore, while scholars of ethnic

literature have done well to criticize the racism inherent in US. imperialism, there is also

 

 

‘2 Gayau'i Spivak, from The Post-Cglonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, Ed. Sarah Harasyrn
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 62. Spivak goes on to argue that even when faced with the group 000 ‘USCd

to dominate," one must take risks in learning about the other rather than “not doing your homewot1f"(62)- 1
w0|11d argue that a lack of risk has characterized U.S. consideration of its colonial past. including literary

u-catrncnts, and add that in a critical atmosphere where ethnic minority issues are no longer “Pd“ erasure,
Chicano and Natl-W American writers and critics can risk placing their ﬁelds in western contexts “mm“
threat of assimilation.

 

merit for scholars and teachers in recognizing that white allies writing about the west

have cI‘iticized it as well, creating a body of white western literature that resists the same
inﬂuences as, say, Chicano or Native American literature do.'3 So while the “west” as a
r881011211 descriptor may carry a lot of cultural baggage anathema to non-Anglos, I
enViSion that the comparative study undertaken in this dissertation, with the West as the
ground common to the groups to be studied, will lead to the mutual respect Spivak

advocates; it may be idealistic or even unrealistic, but it is a worthy goal of scholarship.

Genealogy and Origins
One common strain of these literatures, which can perhaps be found in all

literatures, is the theme of the establishment of myths of origins or beginnings. Origins
seem to bolster the establishment of a “tradition” which is usually seen as ﬁrndamental to
proving that any ﬁeld is, in fact, an object of study. The search for a lost origin oﬁen
bolsters the identity of a nation or people even when the cohesiveness of these groups is
questionable, transitory or illusory. Benedict Anderson has famously called nations
“Imagined communities” (I think the term can easily include Chicanos) to stress that
p60ple in these communities can only imagine they have identity in common.”
Nationalists like to imagine their communities are ancient, with distant origins, though
the concept of “nation” is relatively young: “the new imagined communities... always
regarded themselves as somehow ancient”(Anderson 109). Once imagined, narratives

’

‘3 In his book on how high school history textbooks under-represent white antiracism, James Loewen
makes a parallel POint: “In this struggle, our history textbooks offer little help. . . . [T]hey neglect racral
idealism. In 50 doing, they deprive students of potential role models to call upon as they try to bridge the
new fault lines that will Spread out in the future from the great rift in our past.” Loewen, L____j___,__ies M Teacher
Tol : ve

. ' Your American Histo Textbook ot Wron (New York: Tombstone, 1995), 172.
14 Benedict Anders“, Imagineg gomuuities (New York: Verso, 1991). 5-

10

 

about genealogy help cement the community’s togetherness and conceal the contingency
of the nation’s formation.” I have chosen several novels that feature either centrally or
peripherally a search for origins similar (and in some cases identical) to that described by
Anda‘son, whether they be family or personal origins, large regional or ethnic group
origins, or more broadly, “American” origins.
I critique these authors’ depiction of the establishment of and/or the search for
origins under the rubric of “genealogy.” Genealogy works for my purposes for two main
rcasons: one, a genealogy is the study of the descent of a person, family or group, and my
OWn study features novels concerned with these kinds of descent; and two, as a critical
method, genealogy “opposes itself to the search for ‘origins,”’ as Michel Foucault writes
in his description of the method (Foucault 77), and thus provides a useful hermeneutic for
analyzing any search for origins. In the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 19905,
proponents of identity concepts organized around “culture” (including Hispanic, Native
American, and (Anglo) American) perpetuated their respective groups’ myths of origins
as a means of shoring up identity. As J osé Aranda has argued of this period, formerly
culturally invisible groups had to identify their differences from the larger (white) culture
as the very grounds for constituting their groups. As a result, “true literary integration”
and “renarration of American literature” were postponed: “The governing literary

metanarrative of Plymouth Rock, and Puritan immigration to the New World, thus

 

 

‘5 Don Pease sees national formations as the operations of states, not peoples, and therefore political
creations. not mythical or natural ones. For him, national narratives of the type I will analyze below hide
the operations of states exercising power. While I don’t analyze my chosen texts in quite the same way.
Peasc’s description of how narratives mystify a true genealogy (as described by Foucault, be1ow) Of a
people is apt: “national narratives established their narrativity at the site where the state concealed the
sovereign Power in between itself and the “national people.” Recharacterizing this display of State POW“
as the national PeOple’s desire to recover a lost origin, national narratives have enchained a series 0‘ "ems

as the unfglding Of this collectively shared desire." Donald E. Pease, “National Narratives, Posmational
”Wm": W 43.1 (1997), 7.

ll

 

remained unchanged... the Puritan mythology of a Christian brave new world found new
life as the Cold War came to an end.”16 In such a context, minority groups searched for
various origins myths divergent ﬁom the dominant Anglo/Puritan ones.

The search for origins in narratives of family and communal life can represent a
nation or group’s attempt to legitimize, glorify and defend itself. Doris Sommer explains
that while such allegories of family for nation can be misleading, their power is

undeniable: “Allcgory is a vexed term, but unavoidable to describe how one discourse

Consistently represents the other and invites a double reading of narrative
events”(Sommer 41). William Handley links western stories in particular to the narrating
of nation, noting the troubled relationship between childless American Adams and the

need to generate American identity: “the American was ‘made’ out West, both satisfying
. a nati on’s sense of its exceptionalist difference from the inherited history of the Old
World and simultaneously generating anxiety about how this exceptionalism might be
perpetuated through a continuing national genealogy”(Handley 25). Handley analyzes
important white western writers like Wallace Stegner and Willa Cather, showing the
difﬁculty their characters have in generating and sustaining a family that can do the work
of national allegory in the uncertain century following the close of the frontier.17 My

chapter on Larry McMurtry follows along these lines, but I ﬁnd signiﬁcantly less anxiety

 

 

‘6 José F. Aranda, Jr., ﬂhgg We Ag‘ve: A New Litemy History of Mexican America (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 2003), 45.

‘7 William Handley, MarriageI Vioche and The Nation in the American Litm West (Cambridge: U of
Cambridge Press, 2002). Handley’s effort parallels my own attempt to read twentieth century western
literature, particularly works other than genre westerns, as allegorical of national struggles over identity.
Bonnie TuSmith has used the genealogical metaphor in a different way to apply to similarities among
multiCI-IIMI works, I am sympathetic to her use of the symbol and her integrationist stance: “if we .
continue to overlook the relationships and connections among American cultures and 995i“ “.mnm
we 5911013“ .3" guilty ofpelpetuating misunderstandings that even now have serious repem1lSSl9ns m
educational munitions and in the larger society”(ix). rusinith. W
9W (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1993)

12

 

abo“t generating or perpetuating tradition in the Chicano and Native American authors I
conSlder, even though the cause for such misgivings may exist. In their cases, the attempt
to depict family cohesion performs the work of national narrative to the extent that their
genealogies allegorically prop up a vision of the ethnic group that can then be used as the
b21518 for ethnic pride, self-determination, and resistance to assimilation and oppression.
AS I Will attempt to prove in the chapters that follow, however, their allegories of family
and race are also shot through with ambiguity and uncertainty. I argue that the very
Contingency or inconsistency of national/ethnic groups and narrative genealogies of them
Open up the ﬁelds of Native American, Chicano and western literatures to analysis by and

of one another because these groupings are not so natural, ancient, or inevitable as oﬁen

supposed by critics in these ﬁelds.

The methodology of this dissertation is ﬁrst to provide a general introduction to
the three literary ﬁelds under consideration and then to analyze some representative
works. from each ﬁeld. The remainder of this chapter analyzes some of the assumptions
and gestures of literary criticism from each ﬁeld. Of necessity, I do not provide a
complete history of any one ﬁeld, each of which could supply material enough for several
books- While this is not a forrnalist study, each of the other chapters gives an extended
close reading of one novel, with special attention given to how the quest to establish or
discover the genealogical origins of individuals or families serves to deﬁne the larger

ethnic group or nation. I have chosen novels that can be said without controversy to
represent each of the three ﬁelds to the extent that no one would deny, for example, that

Lonesome Dove is an example of western literature, or that Memories of the Alhambra is

M

 

13

 

 

a Chicano novel. Their relative representative quality is not meant to exclude other texts
that help deﬁne these ﬁelds, but rather to establish how works that deﬁnitely belong in
each ﬁeld work to deﬁne that ﬁeld. Their failures to contain all that is “Chicano,” for

ex ample, about “Chicano literature” or culture are taken as a given, for representation is

never so absolute as literary critics too often treat it.

it * 1k

The bodies of literature designated Native American, Chicano, and Western
Literature have featured some of the most compelling and important works of ﬁction
since the 1960s. The works in these ﬁelds have taken on the task of revising American
history and mythology, particularly the history and mythology of Westward Expansion,
and of opening up American culture to long neglected experiences. Despite their shared
interests, not to mention their shared geographical space, few comparisons have been
made among them. Instead of focusing on their common ground—not simply shared
Values or history, but the place where the ﬁelds can be identiﬁed one against the other—
the critics within these ﬁelds have maintained disciplinary boundaries and ignored a
r 511111 of possibilities.18 While one cannot deny that important differences exist, this

disSertation will unearth a network of commonalities among Chicano, Native American,

and Western American literatures.

 

“\i‘
Books that do attempt this exist, but differ ﬁom my project in their focus. Robert Gish’s Beyond

Mo?!“ : Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American India, and Chicano Literathm. (Albuquerque:

L:tllvel’sity of New Mexico Press, 1996) and Krista Comer’s work on feminist regionalist writers,

\Uni (18an of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Chapel Hill:
versity of North Carolina Press, 1999), both combine study of white and non-white (Native, Mexican-

(mgﬁcan, African-American) authors. Gish seems to position his works as already on a common ground

re on a level playing ﬁeld, we might add) with too little attention paid to the critical debates over their

1: [3 active literary traditions; in other words, he compares the works as if the debates I discuss had already

base I‘esolved. Comer’s focus is on re-establishing a politically progressive feminist literary criticism

On new regional women’s writing that questions old ideas of region, gender, and nation. I share her

14

 

 

   

Given that the three ﬁelds share so much history, it is surprising that so little

comparative work has been done among them. Each ﬁeld has developed and maintained
certain critical boundaries that exclude the other, though these boundaries, it has become
increasingly clear, have always been permeable. This dissertation will explore those
areas where the ﬁelds overlap, particularly as relates to how depictions of genealogy—
the search for family ties—relate allegorically to depictions of the larger national or
ethnic group. That the ﬁelds of Chicano and Native American literature have ignored or
dismissed the possibility of commonalities with the other ﬁeld (Western American
literature, though the same holds true for Anglo-American literature in general) is partly
explained by the logic underlying each ﬁeld, by what Donald Pease might call their
“field-Imaginary,” the “common sense”(“New Americanists”15) underlying their
organization. Pease writes that the ﬁeld-Imaginary contains “the ﬁeld’s fundamental
Syntax—its tacit assumptions, convictions, primal words, and the charged relations
bitlding them together”(“New Americanists” 11). In the case of the ethnic literatures
u"(let consideration, one of many tacit assumptions is that the ﬁelds include works based
on the authors’ descent (some combination of blood and culture, over which there is
url<1€31‘standable'debate). Critics in these ﬁelds organize a canon of works based on

idel'iltity, and the aim of the ﬁelds would seem to be the elucidation of that identity.

Thus, to begin with one of the three ﬁelds, Chicano critics study “Chicano
litel‘ature,” centering their attention on some fact of identity, whether it be an author’s

tre’atrnent of Chicano families or individuals, or Chicano society’s relationship to Anglo

\
mace“ with changing the ﬁeld of western literature, but also wish to shed light on the ﬁelds of ethnic
eratlnc; I do not attempt a feminist analysis like hers.

15

 

 

society, or to the environment.19 Since Chicano Studies is founded on a primal scene of
resistance to the dominant Anglo-American paradigm, the ﬁeld has tended to exclude
study of non-Chicano authors whose work, while by deﬁnition not springing from some
primal Chicano identity, bears on Chicano interests. The resistance paradigm underlying
C Ilicano Studies since the late 1960s reﬂects years of Anglo dominance in academia and
in society in general and promotes ﬁlrther resistance to the damaging effects of that
dominance.

In “Canon Formation and Chicano Literature,” Maria Herrera-Sobek illustrates
some of the challenges of constructing Chicano Studies as a discipline when she details
the ongoing repositioning of the start of the ﬁeld. She writes that it was once thought
Cl'licano Studies became legitimate in the 1960s (a parallel to Native American and
Western literary studies), then scholars traced the tradition back to 1848, the end of the
M exican—American War, then argued that the tradition must have already been in place
by 1 848, leading to the inclusion in the Chicano canon of works less “Mexican-
American” than “imperialist and Spanish”(211). Spanish imperialist works are included
bec ause while they would seem to resemble more the exclusionary Anglo imperialist
cmon than most Mexican-American textual productions, the aim of a Chicano canon is
not to exclude: “The task of reconstructing the Chicanos/as’ literary heritage and the

establishment of an inclusive as opposed to an exclusive canon is important because the

w

Sp $11 is the additional analytic category of the “Hispanic,” meaning texts written partly or wholly in

I hinlslr within a North or South American context, and Chicano literature belongs to that grouping as well.

hav v.3 chosen to focus on Mexican-American literature largely because Chicano claims to US. citizenship
e placed them squarely at odds with whites and Native Americans of the United States.

 

l6

 

 

 

 

literary history (and indeed social and political status) of Mexican Americans in the
United States has been one of marginalization and outright exclusion”(211).20
Here, Herrera-Sobek encounters (but does not resolve) one of the central

paradoxes of creating an enclosed ﬁeld called Chicano literature: to oppose the
exclusionary and marginalizing tendencies of the mainstream, which in this context is the
Anglo-American literary establishment, the ﬁeld must not only exclude works somehow
de ﬁned as non-Chicano, it must also include works from the Spanish imperialist past
wljich are themselves exclusionary and marginalizing. She tries to argue that Chicano
literature will not use Euro-American practices because Chicano literature must resist the
mainstream: “The Chicanos/as’ literary voice will be different from and value a different
set of aesthetic parameters than that of the hegemonic voice”(216). Yet how different is
that voice from the Spanish imperialist tradition on which it is founded (as Herrera-Sobek
argues earlier)? And what literary connections between Chicano and Anglo or Native
Arrherican authors are jettisoned in the exclusionary practice of canon formation? Of
Cour-53, all canons are exclusionary by deﬁnition, so Herrera-Sobek’s attempts to make an
exc l nsionary practice into an inclusionary one are mere obfuscation, designed to hide
cﬁti Cal sameness (for example, the “American” qualities of Chicano writing) and gloss

over inconsistency within the ﬁeld.21 In the name of “cultural recovery” (the vexing

P

A111? a similar exercise from the same volume of essays, Raymund Paredes points out a trend of Mexican-

c erican authors trying “to establish a distinctly Mexican-American mode of expression whose dominant

Lit: acteristic would seem to be the rejection of Anglo inﬂuences.” Paredes, “Mexican—American

Ge rature: An Overview,” Recovering the US. Hispanic Litem Heritage, Eds. Ramon Gutierriez and

to gate Padilla (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1993), 34. Like Herrera-Sobek, he traces the tradition back

a pifnish colonial days, though he seems to emphasize its hybrid character more openly: “Mexican-

c“vir1TICan literature took shape in the context of a hybrid (Spanish, Mexican, Indian and Anglo) frontier

21 I0 ‘fnment marked by episodes of intense cultural conﬂict”(3l).

Bmse Aranda addresses these in his article revising criticism of Chicana forebear Maria Amparo Ruiz de
on. “Contradictory Impulses: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Resistance Theory, and the Politics of

Ch‘cano/a Studies,” W 70.3: 551-79.

17

 

question of what constitutes that culture seems to have been solved here), she states, “We

need to rescue those texts that have been marginalized, neglected or disdained by
previous literary canons”(218). She calls for a narrow focus on uncovering and
establishing “Chicano culture” without addressing the porous boundaries of all cultures ,
or the common ground where those groups meet.

Such close attention to the threads of tradition as Herrera-Sobek’s has prOduced
important work, and without it, American and Western literature would be much poorer.
As Raymund Paredes reports in the Literary History of the West, “Mexican-American
literature grew dramatically in the 19605, fueled largely by an unprecedented surge of
ethnic pride and a renewed awareness that literary works could be political and cultural
instruments of great power.” This ﬁeld has been conceived of as a useful way of
organizing, critiquing, and preserving the experience of millions of Mexican-Americans
(mostly in the borderlands), often with political goals in mind (like Herrera-Sobek’s

“cu ltural recovery,” as if cultures became lost or disabled).22 Although most critics have
recognized that the primal site of Chicano literature is the borderlands and that the very
foundation of Border literature is the mixed or “hybrid” identity of these border subjects,
Cl1i<2arro literature has been studied as a coherent ﬁeld rather than as the meeting place of
mu ltiple ﬁelds. The ways in which its own disciplinary borders are of necessity

diSSOIVing will become apparent below. First, I will compare the possible beneﬁts of
Cl'liCano literature as a separate, coherent ﬁeld of study to the loss of potentially
luteresting comparisons this separation entails.

I \
MOO: the slippery elision of cultures and pe0ples, see Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, .

W (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), especially 181 n. 242.

18

 

 

Gloria Anzaldua has become one of the most cited writers on the topic of Chicano
identity, with some critics noting that she has opened up the possibilities of Chicano/a
identity with her “New Mestiza” concept. Alfred Arteaga has tried to shore up a reading
0 f Anzaldua that emphasizes openness over the limitations of a racially based identity.
He writes that her Borderlands/La Frontera is concerned “with producing new
consciousness” more than with “reproducing the body’ ’(34). Arteaga attempts to
distinguish Anzaldr’ra’s language from the merely biological in an attempt to broaden its
political effectiveness, to make it more than a way of describing Chicano genealogy.
Disassociating her language of the body from her creation of a new consciousness, he
notes, “It [consciousness] is not inherited ﬁ'om sexual intercourse like race but is taken on
in response to the ambient forces of repression. When she considers the scope of that
repression Anzaldua embraces nearly everyone as potential subject of the new
C0nsciousness”(35). Nearly everyone, but not everyone: Arteaga offers a quick gloss on
Anzaldua’s programmatic exclusion: “Not quite everyone is included, however; she
r ej ects the purest incarnation of patriarchy, the white male heterosexual”(35). Since
AI'teaga’s Chica_no Poetich centers on the title subject, he does not offer any comparative
atlEllysis of this exclusion. The ﬁeld-Irnaginary of Chicano literature, we might say,
pl‘e‘r'oents him from questioning the problems inherent in this exclusion; thereby he limits
the utility of his and Anzaldua’s analyses to Chicano writing, however deﬁned. His use
of the word “quite” here is particularly curious, as if ‘Vvhite male heterosexuals” weren’t
act“ally a rather large grouping, as if Anzaldua came really close to including everyone,
but “not quite everyone,” when clearly she does not. Arteaga tries to twist Anzaldr’ra’s

cr- . . . . . . . .
eEltlon of a new consciousness in the direction of symbolic inclusron, and away from an

19

 

   

identity that excludes others on the basis of race. His failure to do so illustrates a
structural problem with the ﬁeld.23
In their discussion of border discourses like Anzaldua’s, Scott Michaelsen and
David Johnson ask, “Of what use, ﬁnally, are concepts like ‘culture’ and ‘identity’ if their
invocation, even in so-called multicultural contexts, is also exclusive, colonial,
intolerant?”(Border Theory 29) We might suggest, with Avery Gordon and Christopher
Newﬁeld, that forming such an identity would ensure “communities of color a position of
independence and strength” since “white preeminence” could no longer be presumed
(Mapping Multiculturalism 4). We might invoke Gayatri Spivak, who has argued in
favor of essentialized identity as “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a
scrupulously visible political interest”( In Other Worlds 205).24 Clearly Spivak focuses
more attention on her own ﬁnessing of the issue than Anzaldua or Arteaga do, despite
Arteaga’s insistence that Anzaldua knows her moves are political: “What marks [her]
Work is that [her] building of texts and subjectivity is always self-conscious and not
IIlerely ironic; it is dialogic”(153).

Yet two important tensions in her work remain unresolved (by Anzaldua or
Arteaga): the tension between inclusion and exclusion (which for Michaelsen and
Johnson makes the creation of a usable cultural identity suspicious at best), and between
the Hispanic (white) and Indian portions of Chicano identity. By insisting that the New
IVIeStiza is truly new, Anzaldua runs into a problem. Ifher formulation is largely one of

\

23

w one might read Arteaga differently were he not trying to claim a broader usefulness for Anzaldua’s

071‘. were he not trying to recast the world with the new mestiza at its center and others pushed to the

pgnphery, but that is precisely how his reading of Anzaldua functions. I will analyze Jose Aranda’s

24 me what different tactical use of Anzaldua in my discussion ofhis book, below.

cal_ll.3ivalt’s position, as usual given her concerns with positionality, is a complicated one. As I noted
let, Spivak also argues that everyone is concerned with group inter-relations, so the majority and

 

20

 

   

consciousness, not race (Arteaga’s reading), the new consciousness depends on free will:

“the new consciousness is elected by choice”(Arteaga 35); there is no guarantee anyone

vvill make the choice, nor any grounds for making it”. If her formulation is ultimately

racial, she errs in ignoring the importance of that whiteness (ﬁgured as the conquistador
father), of removing it as constituent element of Chicano identity. Arteaga is correct
about her self-consciousness only superﬁcially; she traces a sort of history of colonial
relations, but only to create mestiza consciousness as an indigenous one, innocent of the
taint of Spanish colonialism. (Michaelsen and Johnson have handled this territory, as has
Krista Comer with reference to the poetry invAnzaldua’s book: “The ﬁnal investment
here is in universalist and feminist mysticism, in the power of revolutionary praxis and
insurrection, and in—yes, here it comes—Indianness”(Comer 223)). This is not to say
that Chicano identity should be open to all, but that further attention to the Spanish or
White elements of that identity, in addition to escaping the traps of indigenism, would
Open up Chicano studies to the broader stories of southwestern conﬂict (such will the
thetne of my chapters on books by Rudolfo Anaya and Nash Candelaria). The “dream of
Purity,” as David Johnson and Scott Michaelsen term the separation of indigenous
e1 eInterns from colonial ones (Border Theog 18), must be abandoned in favor of more

bal anced contextual study, including studying how Chicano literature may ﬁt into the

 

\
Ority alike must concern thermelves with their “others.” See Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic:

min

%‘ews, Strategies, Dialogug, Ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 62 3 especially.

t: I Will address what I see as a parallel situation, in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine rn my chapter on that

toXt; in brief, some readers of that book have assumed that her characters will beneﬁt from returning home

su the reservation and re-establishing family and tribal ties when there rs nothing in the book to suggest that

bye 11 homecomings guarantee success. In the case of the new mestiza, making identity a choice opens up
dc frnition the possibility that the chooser will choose other than to be the new mestiza. What happens

em Can a Chicana become un-Chicana or inauthentic by virtue of her choices? See Michaelsen and

180°11‘18“! on Richard Rodriguez as a test case of a similar refusal, in “Border Secrets: An Introduction,”
1- er L' ltural Politi Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, eds. (Minneapolis:

21

 

 

   

story of the American West. The genealogy of Chicano literature is not so streamlined as
Anzaldua and Arteaga present it.

Two attempts to refrarne the study of Chicano/a literature shed ﬁrrther light on the
shortcomings of a racial-ethnic approach like Anzaldua’si J osé Aranda’s When We
Arrive positions Mexican-American literature as a participant in an American literature
profoundly inﬂuenced by Puritanism. Aranda also attempts to reclaim Chicano/a studies
from the less political leanings of recent border theorists by appealing to a Chicano/a
tradition of “social and political dissent”(xvii). Rather than trace strands of Chicano/a

literature through history (like Herrera-Sobek) and establish an insular tradition, he looks
“to integrate Chicano/a literature with mainstream writers in a single but complex and
ﬂuid narrative”(x). Most importantly, then, he places Chicano/a inside the literature of
the Americas and of the United States, arguing not just about resistance evinced by
Chi canola authors, but by a network of commonalities. For example, he claims Tomas
Rivera’s classic And the Earth Did Not Devour Him demonstrates that the future is full of
Promises that come “from a spirituality that Rivera would later identify as the basis for all
migrant narratives in the Americas”(xv), seeing Rivera as within a larger tradition, not

J“St resisting outside inﬂuence.

Like myself, Aranda considers the separation between Chicano and Anglo groups
(“I‘d their respective studies and interests) a “paradoxical distance”(xvi) given their
geo graphical and historical shared ground. He accounts for the difference by appealing
to “the complicated roles played by origins myths in the evolution of both Chicano/a and

Anglo American cultural and literary histories”(xvi). Aranda argues for seeing different

 

P
mversity of Minnesota Press, 1997.), 18. I will also apply Walter Benn Michaels’ analysis of this issue in
“wrist, Nativism, Modemism, and Pluralism in some of the chapters to follow.

22

groups as creating shared contexts through origins stories, and thus he avoids what he
calls “the romanticizing of mythologies that pit the unjustly persecuted against the unholy
persecutor”(xvii). Aranda thus sees a common ground for potential analysis of Chicano/a
and Anglo works between the extremes of the Puritan myth of origins ‘With a literary
history in which American literature is heralded as the product and producer of social and
political dissent”(xvii) and scholars advocating a “separatist literary history”(xix) with its
own, unrelated tradition of dissent.26

Aranda compares Chicano works to eastern Anglo texts, but as I have argued
above, much western literature also has contributed to the tradition of dissent in
American letters and could strengthen his argument.27 Aranda makes an important and '
convincing point that much of Chicano criticism has been blind to similarities between
Chicano and Anglo cultural production. The separatist approach fails to recover a
Chicano tradition correctly because “it relies on a myth of origins that narrowly frames
Mexican descendants in the United States as the ideal inheritors of Aztlan but also as the
colonized subjects of Anglo ‘manifest destiny’ and racism” while ignoring “writers and
histories that portray Spanish and Mexican people as colonizers, imperialists, and
elitists”(xxiv). On the charge of this willful ignorance, one thinks again of Arteaga’s
gloss on Anzaldr'ra’s attitude towards white male heterosexuals: “Not quite everyone is

includ ”(Arteaga 35), indeed. Aranda thus performs a genealogy similar to that offered

 

2‘ He goes so far as to say that “scholarship with a political cause in mind”(xxiv) tends to produce “an
untenable orthodoxy of ideas that forecloses scholarship”(xxiv).

27 Aranda relates stories of his time studying in the East (at Yale and Brown Universities), which
experience lead him to view all of American culture as still deeply affected by Puritan culture (his best
examples are Thanksgiving and Fourth of July) and thus to compare Puritan and Chicano cultural
production. I grant that this inﬂuence has been important and still is to some degree, but can't help but.
wonder whether he would have drawn the same conclusions had he gone to college in the Midwest.

23

in my subsequent chapters, not searching for a myth of pure origins, but uncovering the
accidents of history.28

Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez suggests a less traditionally literary-historical
approach to Chicano literature, one based on readership as much as textual production of
Chicano works. He begins “A Net Made of Holes: Toward a Cultural History of Chicano
Literature” by analyzing how shortcomings in literary history as a methodology have
mis-served Chicanocultural studies.29 For example, while theoreticians debated the
value of a chronological ordering of authors, ethnic minorities were calling “for rewriting
traditional literary histories by including previously ignored or silenced voices in the
canon”(Martin—Rodriguez 1). He sees in Chicano/a literary critics’ revisionist use of
traditional materials30 a paradox, for how can one change the canon by using the canon’s
familiar ordering techniques? He offers instead “parameters beyond chronology” to
“reconstruct the history of Chicano letters as a borderlands, (trans)national, multilingual
ﬁeld”(2). Yet Martin-Rodriguez’s own work does not stray far from chronological
ordering, even if he does prefer to focus on comparing key moments in Chicano cultural
history (1998, 1848, 1898) instead of tracing lines between dates. His attempt to
differentiate chronological history from “a cultural, nonchronological history”(4) is

compelling if at times inconsistent. He argues that Chicano culture is characterized by

 

2' If one could wish for improvement or extension of Aranda’s excellent work, it would be for him to take
up the comparative task of treating Chicano and Anglo visions of the conquest/settling of the West, not just
notions of the barrio/city on a hill.

29 His comments on the recent critiquing of literary history apply to all literatures, but they also force the
question of the effectiveness of that critique. He states, “reception theorist, among others, have questioned
the conventional approach to the subject (i.e., the chronological listing of authors, movements, and works)
for over three decades”(1). Why then has traditional literary history persisted in the face of 30 years of
such questioning? Martin-Rodriguez doesn’t have an answer, but one would venture to guess that the
cause-and-eﬂ‘ect logic underlying literary history is still compelling to many readers.

3° Here one thinks of the efforts of the Recovering the US. Hispanic Literary Heritage project, now helmed
by Jose Aranda, from which the articles by Paredes and Herrera-Sobek cited above come.

24

“continuity and disappearance, permanence and erasure”(6), like a “net-made-of-
holes”(6). Unlike the history of the victors (Spanish over the Aztecs, Americans over the
Mexicans), which might be called continuous, the history of Mexican-Americans is
fraught with abrupt upheavals and discontinuities, he argues. For example, though recent
attempts to reconstruct a Hispanic literary history (he references the Recovering the US.
Hispanic Literary Heritage project, to which he has contributed) recover and make
connections to 19th century writing, these attempts also appeal to a desire for completion
and integrity to literary history that, he argues, are not there. Southwest intellectuals
knew of Mexican and Hispanic literature from outside the US, but “seemed unaware of
the creative contributions of Mexican American intellectuals beyond their immediate
communities”(9). Treating this body of works as uniﬁed—the literary historical
approach he challenges—misses the details in the name of a bigger picture (presumably
of ethnic-racial unity).

F urtherrnore, one must not study the aggregate output of Chicano/a writers and
label it a tradition; one must study readership and audiences as well. Martin-Rodriguez
considers the case of Maria Amparao Ruiz de Burton, whose novel The Sturatterand the
129;; (1885), about a rich Californian who loses her land, was “written in English and
addressed to a potentially sympathetic Anglo readership”(l 1). Her authorship is
unquestionably Chicana (or Califomiana, as she is also called), but her reception by
readers sympathetic to her claims of land dispossession shows that Ruiz de Burton can
not easily be made to serve the interests of a resistance model of Chicano/a literature.31
Rather, as Martin-Rodriguez advocates, we must look at her “internal differences”(1 l) to

see that she spoke from both a “historically situated hegemonic class position” and “the

25

contestatory space opened up by her recent social displacement”(11). This comparative
approach to texts should avoid the traps of “cultural essentialism”(12) by complicating
how they are produced and received. Another useful contribution Martin-Rodriguez
makes is in noting how the concepts of “national unity and the rather novel idea of a
national literature”(15) for Mexican-Americans had to develop over time out of and in
response to historical events. His approach constantly reminds us of the traps of criticism
that treats Chicano/a identity a priori as a known and stable referent (even an essence).
Now that “a booming literary movement since the l960s”(16) has made the denial of
Chicano/a tradition impossible, we can perform a critical genealogy of the ﬁeld,
including placing it in the context of other, competing canons without the danger of
undoing it.32 Martin-Rodriguez makes gestures towards a comparative approach without
mentioning speciﬁcs: “Chicano literary history must be informed by knowledge of
Chicano literature’s ties with other literary traditions”(l 8); I would argue that Native
American and white western writers conﬁont the same issues of positionality and
complicated reception as his authors and would be ideal beneﬁciaries of his approach.

In his attempts to open up the ﬁeld of American Studies, J osé David Saldivar has
addressed the place of “Border Studies” vis-a-vis American Studies that have been
ﬁgured as white, with Chicanos and Native Americans the voiceless Other. However, he
still focuses on establishing the shape of Chicano identity more than indicating its
relationship to other identities (as Martin-Rodriguez suggests, albeit without doing it).

An important aim of Saldivar’s Border Matters is to enlarge the ﬁeld of American

 

3' Aranda has handled the challenge of how to place Ruiz de Burton as well; see note above.
32 His language sounds much like Foucault’s on the true purpose of genealogy in avoiding the search for
pure origins, though he doesn’t cite Foucault, but rather Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand

26

Studies, as in the subtitle, “remapping American cultural studies.” Saldivar seeks to
inform the general ﬁeld of American Studies with perspectives on the borderlands
(Border Matters ix) without replacing one dominant, central paradigm with another.
Writing from the opposite perspective (from the old “center” of American Studies),
Janice Radway wants to broaden the ﬁeld of study without ignoring local speciﬁcities or
work done by groups with a marked difference from “American” culture; she writes,
“such a gesture could easily be seen as another imperial act of containment, erasure, or
even co-optation”(Radway 22). Arguably, Saldivar ms the same risk. Because he is
writing to revise American Studies from the vantage point of Border Studies, Saldivar’s
work (in Border Matters and The Dialectics of Our America) has emphasized Chicano
works, not Anglo ones.

Saldivar places his work in the context of the American West: “Border Matters
begins by mapping a discourse about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that has emerged from
the historical experience of the American West”(xiii). Since Anglo voices have
dominated the discourse of the West, he argues, creating an “uneven discursive terrain of
the border in the American western ﬁeld—Imaginary of the American West”(xiii-xiv), a
focus on the borderlands will provide a needed deconstruction. In part, his project
contributes to the growing critical work on western history (the new western history of
White, Slotkin and Limerick), which includes new voices. At least in academic terms,
the literature of the American West, while never the subject of much academic attention,
has long since been surpassed by Chicano and Border literature as a subjects of critical

inquiry. However much one may agree with Saldivar’s call for a remapping of this

 

BMW; trans. Brian Massurni (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987) and their concept of the rhizomatic.

27

territory, though, given the paucity of attention to Western literature, one might have
expected something more from him in that regard. Signiﬁcantly, in charting out who will
help his project, he mentions “new western American historians, new Americanists, and
cultural studies workers”(xiv), but not experts on Western literature. In theory, Western
literature written by people of all ethnicities should ﬁgure centrally in his project; in
practice, his remapping mainly focuses on Chicano singers, anthropologists, and creative
writers. To account for the western white writers who must stand in for “the American
western ﬁeld-Imaginary of the American West” we get only John Gregory Bourke, a
soldier and sometime anthropologist whose contributions to the ﬁeld-Imaginary are
hardly commensurate to the weight he must bear in Saldivar’s analysis, and hardly
representative of the ﬁeld.33

Again, we see that this remapping of American studies, while bringing welcome
insights from Chicano artists of the borderlands, fails to see the promise in aligning the
Chicano artists with white artists who have tackled the same issues. Despite his
superﬁcial gestures towards analyzing the West, we are forced to assume that Saldivar
has left one part of the old fashioned American Studies program he learned in Eastern
schools unscathed: its contempt for (or ignorance of) a tradition of western writing as

highly critical of American Empire as Chicano literature has been.“ His mapping of

 

33 Nonetheless, the writings of Bourke, a serni-educated soldier/anthropologist, have received major
attention from critics doing contextual analysis of authors writing on the U.S.-Mexico border; see Maria-
Eugenia Cotera, “Reﬁguring ‘The American Congo’: Jovita Gonzalez, John Gregory Bourke, and the
Battle over Ethno-Historical Representations of the Texas Mexican Border,” Western American Literature
35.1: 75-94 and José Limon’s chapter on Bourke in Dancing With the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics
in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). Both authors have
presented their work on Bourke at meetings of the Western Literature Association.

Jose Aranda presents a similar story about heading East (in his case, to Brown University) and learning
about the West.

28

what critics of the west should be interested in erases valuable contributions already
made by western creative writers.

This criticism is not intended to deny the importance or undo the
accomplishments of thirty years of Chicano scholarship. It is not intended to say
somehow that the ﬁeld has acted in bad faith, when the ﬁeld has fed off an
understandable logic, insuring that the people upon whose identity it is founded can speak
(and creating some much needed positions in the academy and culture industry for the
historically under-represented). However, this scholarship has not developed in isolation
any more than Chicano/as themselves have (for better and worse), and this dissertation
argues that it is time for those with an interest in Chicano/a works to broaden the scope of
their inquiry to include their ﬁeld’s relationship to Western writing in general. Both

ﬁelds can lend insight to each other.

In a speech given at Michigan State University on February 26, 1999, Brian
Swarm told an anecdote relating that when he told someone he was working on Native
American literature, the listener asked, “Oh, you mean Western Literature?” Swann went
on to sort out the confusion, which results ﬁ'om the perspective of some that the ﬁelds of
Western American literature and Native American literature constitute each other, that
one equals the other, whether one believes all Western literature is by Native Americans
or all Native American literature is western. A more common, opposite perspective
places these ﬁelds in deep contention: Western literature tells the story of white settlers’
westward expansion and conquering of native peoples, while Native American literature

largely tells the story of native resistance to Anglo encroachment. Given this history,

29

critics of Native American literature have understandably paid more attention to colonial
history—the big picture of the conquest of America—and almost no attention to white
western writers who criticize Anglo‘history in much the same way as Native Americans
themselves. Like Chicano scholars, Native American scholars have concerned
themselves with establishing the very fact of a literary tradition, elucidating differing
Native identities, and combining academics with political activism. As with ChiCano
literature, I take no issue with the gains made; this dissertation will advocate, rather, that
linking the three literatures will produce better understandings of the three groups and
their works.

As I have indicated, Native American literature as a discipline has tried to
distinguish itself from Euro-American literature, and as the Swann anecdote indicates, to
separate itself from any idea of “the West.” In her contribution to the Literary History of

the West 35 Paula Gunn Allen differentiates Native American literature from Euro-

 

American: “Essentially, Indians don't think the way non-Indians do: this distinction is
partly one of tribal consciousness as opposed to the consciousness of urbanized,
industrial cultures, but it is also a distinction between new world and old world thought,
between systems based on wholeness and those based on division and separation.”
Clearly Gunn Allen ﬁnds it useful to establish and study a core and essential
“Indianness” to help understand Native American literature. White readers might
understand this difference from reading Gunn Allen, her words imply, but are essentially

prevented from understanding it alone. Furthermore, this reserving the right to deﬁne

 

3’ The Western Literature Association’s broad literary histories, the Litem Histog of the West and
Uﬂting the Litm West, are at least attempts, albeit incomplete ones, to achieve the cross-ﬁeld
comparisons I’m suggesting.

30

one’s group works, like Chicano literature, to overcome centuries of white stereotyping
of Indians.

In her reading of M. Scott Momaday, Gunn Allen polices the borders of her
discipline, acknowledging that there are Native and White readings of Momaday and
insisting on seemingly non-negotiable differences. She writes that House Made of Dawn
can be read as a late modernist novel of social problems by white readers, while most
Native American readers read it (because of their training and understanding of the
culture) much differently. Indeed, while we should ask whether Gunn Allen’s insistence
on this difference betrays her anxiety about Momaday’s appropriation, given the history
of colonialism, we can’t doubt that she seeks to retain something of Momaday’s
production just for Indians. She writes, “Contemporary American Indian ﬁction usually
gives attention to cultural conﬂict, but every novel and short story deals with Indian-
white relations only in addition to other [readz Indian] themes.” To state that Indians
write for Indians ﬁrst and only secondarily for whites is to establish boundaries; in this
disciplinary mode of thinking, intercultural conﬂict will always come second to issues
within Indian life.

M. Annette J aimes Guerrero has addressed the issue of whether Native American
cultural production should be placed in a “multicultural” context (to read it for the inter-
cultural themes Gunn Allen sees as secondary). Like Vine Deloria, she fears that
multiculturalism (and perhaps the inter-cultural type of studies this dissertation proposes)
will re-enact cultural imperialism; she demands a de-colonization ﬁrst. She believes that .
the creation of ethnic studies disciplines (“ethnocentrism”) has turned into “a form of

academic apartheid that marginalizes”( Mapping Multiculturalism 58) those programs.

31

While I agree with her diagnoses of “apartheid” and “cultural imperialism,” her solutions
are puzzling. She calls for an interdisciplinarity and a “global reconceptualization”(59)
of the discipline of American Indian Studies, but also appeals to an essential Indianness
to be found in the movement of Indigenism (60). While seeming to call for a type of
global and postcolonial studies that would not depend on the idea of individual cultures
or disciplines, she continues to insist, with Deloria, on the need for “not merely the
inclusion of Indians and Indian programs in academia, but a fully interdisciplinary
approach to American Indian studies as a discipline”(60). If we are to make this
“discipline” interdisciplinary, the discipline should by deﬁnition practically disappear. It
is difﬁcult to imagine the shape her discipline would have. Her call for a global
understanding of other indigenous peoples that “respects our differences”(6l) still
contains the desire to keep what is unique about Native Americans (including “our
universal holism”(6l)), a move that seeks to cement essential differences among groups
permanently.

A related example of Native American literary nationalism comes from the oft-
cited Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and her Why I Can’t Read Walice Sﬁgn_er_and Other EsgLs.
In the collection’s title essay, she makes the case that in far too many works, one of the
leading Anglo western writers writes as if Indians were extinct. Worse, she ﬁnds in his
work a willingness to claim indigenousness in the West for himself, a move copied by
other whites.“S She writes, “In his misunderstanding and dismissal of indigenousness and
his belief in the theory that American Indians were ‘vanishing’ he was much like writers

everywhere who offer only a narrowness of vision and a confused history’ ’(32). In this

32

much, her critique foreshadows my own critiques of these ﬁelds, that they are too
narrowly constructed to see truly. When critics of authors like Stegner restrict their
purview to westem stories by whites, their critical faculties are dulled, and in this
instance, “the American Indian’s literary, historical, and cultural presence in America is
repeatedly falsiﬁed or denied”(38). The problems with Cook-Lynn’s analysis—her own
short sightedness and willful misreadings, in effect—have been handled elsewhere.37 I
will instead turn to the way her essay on Native writers and nationalism virtually
precludes the possibility or value of the comparative perspective she offers in “Why I
. Can’t Read Wallace Stegner.”

In “The American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the
Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty,” Cook-Lynn criticizes the pressure on Third
World writers to appeal to audiences outside their group in order to be published. She
quotes editors’ suggestions to Indian writers that “suggest that there is, in reality, an
existing methodology which imposes a Euro-American cast upon the literary works of
American Indian writers”(80). In light of this colonial silencing of postcolonial or
obscure native expression, performed in the name of enabling “cross-cultural
dialogue”(80), Cook-Lynn wonders whether successful Indian writers like Erdrich,
Welch and Silko “have moved away from nationalistic concerns in order to gain the

interest of mainstream reade'rs”(80). For Cook-Lynn, the confusion over whether the

 

3‘ The move is made in a diﬂ‘erent manner by Chicano writers like Anaya and Candelaria, on whom more
below. On the fetishizing of being from a place as part of western studies, see Matt Herman, “Literature,
Growth, and Criticism in the New West,” Western American Literature 38.1, 49—76.

37 Though they did not constitute one of his main interests in his novels, Stegner was not unaware of the
continued existence or condition of Native Americans. In a tribute to Stegner, Patricia Limerick writes of
his dedication to anti-racism, arguing that his work on the book One Natiog, a multicultural portrait of the
United States ﬁ'om 1945, shows him to be “remarkable and inspirational”(22) on the issue; “He is, in fact,”
Limerick writes, “still ahead of our time, in l993”(25). Limerick, “Precedents to Wisdom,” m

33

popular American Indian authors speak in a nationalistic voice, or in a more generalized
cosmopolitan one has detrimental effects, such as obscuring the need for decolonization
(based on the idea that the tribes represented by these authors are nations).

Thus she advocates more clearly nationalistic writing and continued discussion in
literary studies of nationalistic and postcolonial elements, and the ways in which these
can be obscured in the global marketplace. She worries that “American Indian writers
will accept the notion that they can, and perhaps should, with impunity become
cosmopolitans, serving as translators of materials into an already existing mode, or that
they can and should legitimize ‘hybridity,’ or that they can and should transcend national
afﬁliations, or that they can and should simply serve as ‘exotica”’(83). She posits that
native writers have their own “set of unique aims,” including “establishing the myths and
metaphors of sovereign nationalism”(84) and the like. Cook-Lynn’s call for more
signiﬁcant nationalistic work from American Indian writers is not shared by all critics in
Native American literature, but does reveal a willingness by some in the ﬁeld to jettison
comparative work (Cook-Lynn questions the value of even including Native Americans
in multicultural anthologies (84)).

Connecting American Indian nationalism to nationalist movements in eastern
Europe and the Third World, she calls for “modern thinkers and critics to ﬁnd out what
these nativist ideals mean in terms of the function of literature”(87). I believe this
concern forces the question of whether nations can ﬁnd satisfactory answers to questions
about native ideals without the input (and even occasionally challenges) of other

“national” groups (or groups otherwise deﬁned as different). Clearly, creative and

 

Geography 9f Hm: A Tributg to Wallace Stegrier, ed. Page Stegner and Mary Stegner (San Francisco:
Sierra Club Books, 1996), 21-8.

34

critical work in Native American literatures has performed this function in challenging
nationalist narratives of the U.S.A., many of them dealing with the West. The usual
assumption in the ﬁelds of ethnic literatures, one Cook-Lynn almost takes beyond the
level of assumption and stereotype in her chapter on Stegner, is that when white majority
literature speaks to minority audiences, it does so from a position of hegemony, and
therefore must be challenged (as when the “empire writes back”) or ignored (the“why I
can’t read X” strategy). For her, a nationalism derived from “the indigenous view of the
world,” including the idea that peoples are “rooted in a speciﬁc geography”(88) allows
Native people the ﬁrrnest foundation to wrestle with domination.38 Weakening the
absolutist position she takes, she ignores the question of tribes removed ﬁ'om that speciﬁc
geography—and here one could question the rootedness of many of the Native American
groups living in Oklahoma and compare it to that of Chicanos in the Southwest or Anglos
anywhere in the hemisphere.

I am certainly not denying Indian nations the right to political self-deﬁnition, and
where insisting on nationhood will help Indians materially, it seems cruel to criticize
Cook-Lynn for not advocating a postmodern, postnational status for American Indians. 1
am also not claiming that the nationalist narratives of Indian nations have been fully
explored, for as Donald Pease has argued, “antinational nationalism,” that type which
opposes the dominant national story from within an emergent “Third World” nation, can

be “a strategic weapon in the struggle against cultural imperialisrn”(“National Narratives,

 

38 Chadwick Allen has written on the issue of geography, combined with blood, as a basis for Native power
to resist ongoing colonization; adapting N. Scott Momaday’s “blood memory,” he focuses on the
“blood/land/rnemory” trope. Though he admits there is some danger in discussing “indigenous ‘blood’”
and “indigenous ‘land”’(15) because of the specter of racial essentialism in the former and the potential for
colonial appropriation of the latter, he argues that we must “contextualize the discursive appeal and

35

Postnational Narration” 12).39 I am arguing for a form of contextualcriticism which
compares (for example) Native American writers—nationalists and those with “little use
for nationalistic/tribal resistance”(Cook-Lynn 85)——to those writers working within but
often also challenging the dominant discourse, in this case the “national meta-narrative of
westering”( Other Destinies 17), to use mixedblood Native writer Louis Owens’ words.
In addition, analysis even of those majority works that are not subversive can be
productive in illuminating discourses of race and nation, for example, issues also
important to ethnic minority literatures.

Craig Womack invites similar criticisms for his book Red on Red: Native

Ameﬁcan Literary Separatism which advocates a very tribally speciﬁc approach to

 

Creek cultural production at the expense of comparing Creek literature to literatures
handling similar issues from different perspectives. His goals in calling for “American
Indian Literary Self-Determination” (the title of his Introduction) include fostering “an
increasingly important role in evaluating tribal literatures”(l); indeed, he calls it his
“responsibility” as a Creek-Cherokee to help garner more determination over tribal
literature for tribal readers, “especially given the wealth of Creek wisdom on the
subject”(1). In using vocabulary like “wisdom,” Womack can seem close to fetishizing
the native, to over-emphasize given, blooded identity at the expense of factors like
education or outside perspectives. Womack rebuffs such skeptical challenges to the
integrity of Native identity by declaring it ‘Vvay too premature for Native scholars to
deconstruct history when we haven’t yet constructed it”(3). Rather than take up the issue .

of Native identity critically, then, he assumes Native identity as a given, a starting point:

 

symbolic power of these emblematic ﬁgures’ ’.(16) Allen,B Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in
Aggigg Indian gd Maori Litgm and Activist Texts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

36

“I do not subscribe, in other words, to the notion that a Native perspective is, at best,
problematic, if not impossible”(4). He acknowledges that the past several decades of
interest in Native writing and simultaneous explosion of Native writing (both new and
recovered), much of it fostered by the non-Native academy, has helped establish and
stabilize the ﬁeld, “legitimizing tribal experience as an appropriate subject for writing”
and making it clear that “tribal life will continue in the future”(6). The uncertainty of
previous generations with regard to the status of Native writing (which he considers
parallel to the “ambiguity” and “tendency to decenter everything” of our current
postmodern moment) has resolved into new certitude for Womack. Thus, he feels it
necessary to emphasize Native political goals, including Native literary self-
determination, instead of continuing to analyze Native works from within the framework
of recent non-Native literary theory: “No matter how slick the literary strategy that gets
us there, this seems the wrong political move to me”(6).

Throughout his Introduction, Womack makes a case not just for taking politically
pragmatic positions on literature (in his case, anti-colonial, sovereignty afﬁrming ones),
but also for asserting the primacy of Native American literature as the sine qua non of
American literature. Strangely, given his literary separatist politics (“I see them as two
separate canons”(7), he says), he gestures towards afﬁrming a vital connection between
the Native American and the American: “We are the canon. . .. Without Native American
literature, there is no American canon”(7). This implies a common, “American” ground
for comparison of the two literatures (granting for the moment that they may be
considered separate); indeed, it invites the kind of criticism I am attempting: how do the

origins of a body of literature affect our readings? How do competing ideas of

 

39 Craig Womack, discussed below, will make a similar point.
37

homeland, family and heritage complicate our understanding of the relationships among
Native, Mexican-American and white American literatures? The connector “American”
might be seen as the larger instance of my use of the West as the contested meeting place
of these literatures. And Womack makes other gestures towards the interconnectedness
of all writing that would seem to encourage this approach. He defends the speciﬁcity of
Indian writing by comparing it to regional writing: “Does a description of Faulkner as a
Southern writer make him any less an important ﬁgure?”(7) He even invokes Flannery
O’Connor’s “well-known argument that the deeper an author delves into her own home
country, the more universal and powerful her writing becomes”(7).

All of this wrangling over making Native writing the basis, even the necessary
ﬁrst element for an American canon seems to invite critical arguments over how these
bodies of literature are constituted (including what makes Native literature “Native,” a
vexed question in the hands of some critics). However, because his political aim is to
combat the “colonized” state of Native literature"0 by establishing some distance between
Native writing and non-Native criticism, Womack does not take his interest in the
universal (much less regionally signiﬁcant) qualities of writing any further.41 Rather, he

highlights differences and even makes aggressive claims against comparative literature

 

40 One example of this is the fact that canonizers try to make Native literature a minor part of a larger
American canon; another is the existence of “ethnic literature” positions at universities. He also
complains about “the way Native literary specialists must present their work at Modern Language
Association conferences”(7), though it is unclear why this should be so.

" He thus seems to be closer to Gayatri Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” than to the Vine Deloria of
Custer. He doesn’t so much claim that Native knowledge is inaccessible to non-Natives as privilege insider
knowledge, granting tribal wisdom a key role in treating literature about Natives as a political tool. His
political-cultural aims also seem ill-deﬁned in places, as when he writes, “I reject... the supremacist notion
that assimilation can only go in one direction”( 12). Richard White’s notion of the middle ground also takes
in this idea, but while Europeans in America have been dramatically affected by the encounter with Native
Americans, politically, their structures have dominated Native Americans. Indeed, this is one of Womack’s
complaints; his feisty insistence on the power of Native culture to assimilate European culture thus seems
politically min.

38

and multiculturalism. Unimaginatively, he argues that hiring ethnic literature
comparatists and reading non-white authors within the English department “is demeaning
and destructive to Asian American studies, Aﬁican American studies, Native American
studies”(8). For Womack, despite his belief in universals that writing can evoke, there
can be no experts in “multicultural literature” since these topics are both limitlessly broad
and irreducibly different from each other. While I would not argue that “a core program
of Indian literature courses” with an expert who teaches only Native literature may
indeed be a good thing, precluding that person from having critical conversations about
commonalities between Native literature and (to use his examples) Asian American or
Aﬁican American literature is retrograde and even “destructive” of potential alliances
and productive debates. His insistence on Native criticism that bolsters the health of the
tribe (focusing on works that “argue that Native cultures continue to survive and
evolve”(10) serves a dual cause of preserving identities imagined as original and timeless
(remember that Womack rejects all “postmodern” skepticism questioning the Nativeness
of Native Americans) and tribal nationhood."2 Finally, while his critical focus on Creek
culture (again, the nomenclature is problematic for everyone but Womack) generates a
better picture of one tribal group’s self-imaginings and illustrates the value of asking
“how do Indians view Indians”(13), what is lost (even with his chapter on one Muskogee
poet who deals with Creek and “national, and international, indigenous

perspectives”(l9)) is any sense of the location of that culture in a useful context. Though

 

’2 He refers to pre-contact notions of tribal “nationhood” that “are not European constructs”( l 7), but his
deﬁnitions seem straight out of Benedict Anderson: “a key component of nationhood is a people’s ideas of
themselves, their imaginings of who they are”(14). While one can still grant Womack that this may be a
Native concept of nation, it is also European, and insisting on its native origins when the similarities could
generate useful discussion of how historical contact with the other may have changed each group’s
deﬁnitions seems foolish.

39

Womack may gesture towards the value of “beginning global alliances and awareness
among indigenous populations worldwide”(l8), including pan-tribalism, his methodology

works to preclude this at every step.

The ﬁeld of Western Literature, while founded to highlight western writers
neglected by the Eastern establishment, has only recently begun to challenge its Own
disciplinary boundaries by examining the work of Chicano and Native American writers
as “western.” There are early examples of this crossover, such as western novelist and
critic Gerald Haslam’s 1970 multicultural anthology Forgotten Pages of American
Literature and, in a different vein, Wallace Stegner’s multicultural project One Nation. ‘
However, from its beginnings the ﬁeld has purposefully focused on what has until
recently been considered “western literature,” namely the works of Euro-Americans
(mostly men, though more articles on Willa Cather have appeared in Western American
Literature than on any other writer). This exclusion was largely based on identity: the
ﬁeld was created in 1966 by white, western, mostly male professors and writers, and was
belligerent towards the Eastern establishment, but more importantly, was proudly self-
protective. Its earliest critics, like those working separately in Chicano and Native
American literatures, were focused on creating a canon based on standards they were best
suited to judge (including, in all three ﬁelds, standards of authenticity). They
programmatically devoted themselves to one idea of western literature. J. Golden Taylor,
as the ﬁrst editor of the ﬁeld’s journal, exclaimed, “While appreciating a wide variety of

world literatures, we may with good-humored inﬂexibility insist upon the legitimacy of

40

studying our own.”43 Others in the ﬁeld have alternated between seeking to amend the
“eastern” canon, ignoring it altogether, and questioning the standards of canonization.

Many attempts to establish the ﬁeld of western literature have indeed set up
narrow parameters for its study. Too many studies have focused on the genre western
rather than less generic texts, devaluing all things western in minds of readers.44 In part
because of its own marginal status as a ﬁeld (Comer writes that “Before the 19705
western literature has no reputation”(2), and arguably it still has a very low proﬁle),
Western Literature begins to realize in the 19805 and 905 that minority discourses
including Chicano and Native American are also challenging the national myths
associated with the West—that these other bodies of literature generate unique
perspectives not available in white discourses. Much about the ﬁeld changed between
1987’s The Literature of the American West, in which Native American and Chicano
authors are mentioned, but scarcely integrated into general essays on the ﬁeld, and 1997’s
Uﬂating the Literary West. with more essays devoted to minority writers, and self-
critical essays on the ﬁeld like Robert Gish’s “Reperceiving Ethnicity in Western
American Literature.”

Individual authors of full-length studies have also drawn attention to Western
Literature’s closed borders, with differing results. In Ten Most Wanted: The New

Western Literature Blake Allrnendinger tries to enlarge the comparatively small canon of

 

 

’3 Taylor wrote this in the ﬁrst issue of Western American Literature; quoted in Kathleen Boardrnan,
“Western American Literature and the Canon,” Upgting the Literag West, The Western Literature
Association (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1997), 50.

’4 Major exarrrples are two books which garnered greater attention than almost any books on literary
western writing from the past twenty years, Lee Clark Mitchell’s Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and
Fi__l_r__n (Chicago. University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Jane Tompkins’ West of Evemhing: The Inner
L__i________fe of Westerns (New York. Oxford University Press, 1992). Jeffrey Wallman’ s The Western: Pa_r___ables of
the Me eggan Dream (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999) similarly focuses on the genre

41

Western Literature. Allmendinger’s “Introduction” displays a self-conscious anxiety
about the fact that these ﬁelds have isolated themselves previously, and the difﬁculty of
claiming connections between western and ethnic literatures, the latter of which have
“developed into their own separate ﬁelds in the last several decades, having outgrown
western literature”(Allmendinger 4). Yet “growth” in the other ﬁelds hardly precludes
the appropriateness of the comparisons I am suggesting; rather, it contributes to the
ﬁelds’ continued isolation since Chicano and Native American literature scholars can
hardly be said to “need” to study Western literature.

Allmendinger achieves mixed results in his attempt to enlarge what people think
of as western studies. He calls for Westernists to resist the “temptation” to leave ethnic
literatures to specialists (Womack’s wish), since it is necessary to attempt “to understand
the complex interactive roles ethnic traditions have played within a larger group western
historf’(4). Yet he analyzes no Chicano authors, just one Native American (John Rollin
Ridge writing on the Chicano Joaquin Murietta), and does not theorize the choices he
includes, so there is little sense of what Chicano and Native American authors can offer
to Western literature, or vice-versa. His enlargement of the ﬁeld extends to the work of
Mormons (Chapter 3) and continues the tradition in Western Studies of attention to the
environment (Chapter 10) (even while he mocks western literature stalwart Edward
Abbey). He seeks “to cover as much ground as possible”(l3), but does not go so far as to
analyze comparatively the ﬁelds of Chicano and Native American literature and their

respective texts.

 

western, though from a more theoretically conservative viewpoint that argues westerns reflect the times in
which they were written.

42

In his Marriage, Violence and The Nation in the American LitCLELLWest, William

Handley reads a series of mostly twentieth century western works about family as
allegories of the nation complicated by internal violence."5 The concern with family and
marriage in western writing, Handley argues, derives from the way it can symbolize the
West’s “national signiﬁcance”(2), i.e. the part the West plays in deﬁning the United
States. And because “the nation we ﬁnd epitomized in so much literature of the West
resembles what we might call (to put it mildly) a dysﬁinctional family”(2), this body of
literature steers away from the triumphalist myth of the West and towards trenchant
social and political criticism (like that demanded by many non-white critics). Though his
claims about family allegories could have great traction in handling non-Anglo authors
such as those in my study, he chooses not to discuss them. Handley argues that western
stories about family and marriage have special signiﬁcance for deﬁning white America:
“In literature of the American West, the preoccupation with marriage is especially fraught
with questions about the identity of American whiteness and the meaning of western
history”(4). He seems to take for granted that this literature is white literature. His
concentration on this group produces some excellent work by Handley on a very
traditional grouping of western authors (Frederick Jackson Turner, Owen Wister, Willa
Cather, Zane Grey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner). Yet it also
disables his work to the extent that his attempts to deﬁne “America” and to criticize the

racial insularity of previous such attempts seem quite one-sided.“5 When he speaks of

 

’5 Handley’s other main goal, about which I will say little, is to connect literary and historical readings of
the West by reading the literary in the historical and vice-versa. His desire to bridge those disciplines by
enrphasizing their common ground parallels my attempt to draw together literature about the west from
different ethnic groups.

’6 His ﬁrst chapter, “Western Unions,” talks about Native Americans but only in their relationship to how
Manifest Destiny and imperialism affected white American identity. Like Allmendinger, Handley seems
aware of the potential signiﬁcance of comparative study of western literature, but does nothing about it.

43

supporting “progressive politics”(6), one expects that he will open up his critique to non-
white texts rather than imply by their exclusion that white western texts alone depict
“violent relationships that carry the burden of the western past”(7). As I will argue in the
chapters to follow, family relationships and genealogies inform the national and ethnic
identities of multiple groups as well as how those groups wrangle over the varying
legacies of migration and colonization.

Krista Comer’s Lagdgapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in
ContemporaryWomen’s Writing seeks to expand notions of what constitutes regional
(speciﬁcally western) writing and why we should care. She sees a shift in western
writing by all groups during the Vietnam War era, when western and other regional
literatures would no longer perform the “traditional cultural task” of shoring up national
ideals: “It will not symbolically clean up the mess of Watergate, of Cambodia, of a new
globalizing economy that restructures and disempowers the workplace at home”(Comer
6). Her argument differs from mine in its focus (she claims that new female regionalists,
including women of color, revitalize regionalism as a mode of writing), but she asks
many of the questions central to this dissertation. Like Janice Radway, she confronts the
issue of whether including Chicano and Native American writers (among the other
groups she studies) in western literature “constitutes a kind of colonizing act,” especially
given the prevailing attitude that “western regionalism is a ‘white thing’” that “offers
little relevance to the literature and concerns of contemporary people of color”(Comer 9).
Her response helps undergird my argument: “Exposing the racial and gendered
assumptions that comprise the discourse [of western regionalism] and make it politically

meaningful and oppressive may be relevant not least, but rather most of all, to women

and/or peoples of color”(9). Her work on the importance of Indian myths in Gloria

Anzaldr’ra’s reformulation of Chicana identity in La Frontera/Borderlands, in particular,

 

 

illustrates the potential for comparative study of western writing.

Like the broader ﬁeld of American literature, Western literature has changed, as
even a brief genealogy shows. However, there is still much to be done to analyze the
ways in which peoples of all ethnic, national, and racial backgrounds met, fought, joined,
and described their conﬂicts on the common ground or contact zone of what is now the
United States. In this dissertation, I argue that an examination of the concerns of the
three ﬁelds in question and their respective literatures will contribute to all three ﬁelds.
The chapters that follow will explore challenges to and afﬁrrnations of group identity
formation, the role of genealogy, and their contribution to the Chicano, Native American
and western literary traditions. To the extent that it succeeds, a comparison of these
writers in this light will reveal their common project of critiquing past group relations

(including the legacy of conquest) while imagining a more perfect future.

45

CHAPTER 2
Critical Genealogy in Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburguergue

From the very beginning of Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque (indeed, even from
the very spelling of its title), Anaya evinces his interest in performing what Russ
Castronovo has called (using Michel Foucault) “critical genealogy.” Opposite his novel’s
copyright information, Anaya tells the story of the renaming of the village of
Albuquerque: “In April of 1880 the railroad reached la Villa de Alburquerque in New
Mexico. Legend says the Anglo stationmaster couldn ’t pronounce the ﬁrst ‘r’ in
“Albur, ” so he dropped it as he painted the station sign for the city. This novel restores
the original spelling, Alburquerque” Albur uer ue up). In this short proclamation,
Anaya attempts the extraordinary act of correcting an historical misunderstanding
through ﬁction. He forces his novel into the discourse of history, placing it side by side
with the politicized language act of the 1880 Albuquerque stationmaster and with the
historical naming conventions that have prevailed in New Mexico since then. This
preface suggests that the novel itself will perform an act of historical recovery, bringing
back the Hispanic inﬂuence over the region and resisting one hundred years of Anglo
inﬂuence.

Anaya thus begins his critical genealogy of America, which method Castronovo
describes: “In its search for what has been repressed, a genealogy of America returns to
the site of national legacies and asks what has been erased in the writing of national
narrative”(Castronovo 9). As I have argued in the Introduction, Chicano and Native
American literatures have troubled the well-known national narratives of the western

United States which themselves have often stood in for the nation’s narrative at large.

46

Narratives like Alburquerque not only help describe and perpetuate a Chicano literary
tradition, but also explicitly question a larger tradition—Castronovo’s “site of national
legacies”—-which has traditionally elided the presence and inﬂuence of Chicanos (and
Native Americans). In his short preface, Anaya points to a literal erasure of Hispanic
inﬂuence as the Anglo stationmaster changes a city’s sign—one need hardly add that he
thereby changes history—to erase the inﬂuence of the Spanish language and by extension
its speakers and to establish the authority of English and Anglo-Americans. When his
readers see Albuquerque both in this novel and in real life, Anaya wants them to see his
Alburquerque and all its elision contains, too. There is another history, however, not told
in this novel, though Anaya leaves himself some openings through which he could have
addressed it: namely, the history of Native American New Mexico before the arrival of
Spanish-speaking peoples who named this city for the Duke of Alburquerque. In the first
part of this chapter, I will analyze Anaya’s use and thematization of genealogy through
his characters’ search for their bloodlines and traditions; in the second part, I will perform
my own critical genealogy on Anaya’s erasures, gaps, and elisions, for despite the plot
line of the Native American character Joe Calabasa, Anaya’s genealogy limits itself
greatly and stops short of analyzing its own limits. An analysis of the bounds of Anaya’s
genealogy will reveal much about his politics and the politics of the three literary fields

under consideration.

Bloodlines

Anaya makes Abran’s search for his bloodlines central to the plot of

Albumuegue. He also makes bloodlines different from mere tradition, environment, or

47

upbringing, since Abran does not consider himself to be an orphan or without an identity.
Abran has been raised by adoptive parents Sara and the late Ramiro Gonzalez. Having
had no reason to think otherwise, he has always considered himself to be of Mexican-
American heritage. Then he receives a letter from his birth mother, Cynthia Johnson,
who is Anglo-American. Now Anaya places bloodlines next to upbringing, forcing
Abran to wonder how his actual genealogy might compare to the way the Gonzalez
family raised him, and allowing Anaya to ask the same questions: what is the value of
actual blood or genetic connections? How do these connections stack up against years of
ingrained traditions, lessons, values, and other environmental factors? In answering some
of these questions, we begin to compare a literary critical approach based on
commonality of blood with one based on commonality of environment or political
geographi-

Since Abran’s bloodlines remain a mystery that he unravels for most of the
novel’s duration, I will begin by considering the value Anaya assigns to Abran’s adoptive
culture. In an early scene where Abran considers the death of his friend Junior and of his
(adoptive) father Ramiro, he recalls, “He was six when the old man died, and that
memory was not as poignant. Yet there were times when he remembered things Ramiro
had told him, and the warmth and earth smell of the old man”(Albuiyuegue 15). Anaya
introduces two factors here: one, as adoptive father Ramiro educated his son (a teacher
and student-like relationship that could obtain between any two unrelated people); and
two, Ramiro had a connection to the earth that implies humanity’s vital connection to a

living planet (but does not necessarily imply a genetic connection to Abran).

48

His adoptive mother Sara has raised Abran as her own, and they are very close
(she is the only person he has any contact with when he leaves Albuquerque after
Junior’s death). But Anaya implies that her lack of physical connection to him—their
lack of blood ties—matters. When the letter from his birth mother arrives, her thoughts
betray the fragility of their connection: “He was looking for himself in her. She felt her
heart skip a beat, and the fear she had lived with since Abran became her son surfaced. It
had come. The letter she had feared for so long had come”(l7). His look of recognition
while reading the letter declaring that he is Cynthia Johnson’s son (we might better call
of a lack of recognition) begins the collapse of his natural, organic relationship with Sara.
An artiﬁcial agent—a letter—proves the lack of natural connection between them. And
while their relationship will continue to be strong (it helps no doubt that Anaya removes
Abran’s birth mother from the novel very shortly), the fact that Sara feels a letter could
harm their relationship—so much so that she has always feared it—reveals its
tenuousness. Furthermore, the evidence of the letter, as ﬂimsy as Anaya could have
made it given that Abran has known no other mother than Sara, sufﬁces to make Abran
distance himself from Sara: “He had looked at her and did not recognize himself”(l7).

Sara’s declarations of love and devotion matter, but still lack the weight of
blood’s physical connection. After afﬁrming his adoption, she restates her love, but he
does not react convincingly: “’I know that,’ Abran answered, feeling empty inside”(18).
In fact, the letter seems only to prove something to Abran that he already knew:
“Perhaps he had always known this, but had never faced it”(18). How does he know?
What lack was there in his relationship with Sara that now manifests itself in this empty

feeling? Anaya’s answer is blood; Abran knows physically that he is not Sara’s son.

49

Sara tries to make up for this lack of blood by substituting soul: “She did not want to let
him go. She had raised him, she knew his soul, but he was not of her blood”(l9). But if
“soul” as Sara understands it were a true substitute for “blood,” Sara would never have
had cause to fear the letter. As if to convince Abran that this letter is not a joke, she
reiterates his relation to Cynthia Johnson, again using the language of blood: “But
Cynthia is your mother. Your blood”(20). Clearly, blood matters.

Abran and Sara conﬁrm their relationship (“You are still my son,” “I always will
be”(21)), but the promise of discovering his blood relations lures Abran so strongly that
he leaves immediately. The revelation makes him reflect on everything he thought he
knew about his heritage. As a light skinned Chicano, he was called guero by the “dark--
skinned Mexican kids” and told “You’re not Mexican, guero”(21). Their teasing fostered
his toughness. Rejected by his birth mother’s white family, he was raised by a darker-
skinned Chicano family, but still had to ﬁght to prove he belonged to his adopted group:
“‘I’ll show you I’m Mexican,’ was his battle cry”(21) as a youth. He uses his fighting
skill to claim a Mexican heritage: “He had become intensely proud of his Mexicanness by
having to prove it”(21). Anaya thereby suggests a fundamental difference between an
inherited, genetic identity and a claimed one. Abran’s boyhood torrnentors are not
convinced of the reality of his Mexicanness, only afraid of his physical prowess. Despite
Anaya’s emphasis on the importance of blood, he does open up the possibility that one
can “earn” one’s heritage if one has not inherited it, but like Sara’s deeply felt connection
to Abran, that earned Mexicanness is called into doubt by the revelation of his birth
mother’s identity. Where Anaya juxtaposes socialized identity and biological identity, he

tends to place greater importance on the biological—the blood element.

50

Anaya next introduces yet another element to identity—the metaphysical. As
Abran drives to the hospital to meet Cynthia, he nearly hits a woman resembling “La
Llorona... the wailing woman of the barrio”(22). He soon ascertains that this is no figure
of mythology, but doﬁa Tules, who “really was a Llorona, but a ﬂesh-and-blood
one”(22). Doiia Tules impresses Abran with her pretematural knowledge of the changes
occurring in his life: “Your mother is dying, and you are being bom”(23), she tells him.
Like the reader of the text, she reads Abran symbolically. She gives Abran the
metaphysical riddle, “Tt’i eres til” (“you are you”), which solves nothing since the term
“you” has become so inchoate for Abran. He may find his birth mother and the facts of
how his physical birth came about (and therefore discover more about his blood heritage,
his racial make-up), but still not discover the “truth” dor'ia Tules promises. As with other
layering devices Anaya uses (especially Ben Chavez as author within the text writing a
poem whose themes run parallel to this novel), this nod towards a metaphysical riddle
adds another element to Abran’s search for his identity.

Abram meets his mother, who thinks (not surprisingly), “My son, my blood,
forgive me”(26). Though Cynthia Johnson has not known Abran as a mother in the
active sense (unlike Sara, she has not “mothered” Abran, only birthed him), she does hold
onto that vital connection between their bodies: blood, genes, that which she passes on to
him physically and which will outlast her. For Anaya has no intention of introducing an
Anglo inﬂuence at the level of environment (or culture). The dying Cynthia will not take
over for Sara, nor affect Abran’s character in any way except to leave him on her death
with another mystery: his father’s identity. Anaya clumsily foreshadows Abran’s

eventual discovery: “She coughed... Abran instinctively reached for his handkerchief and

51

touched it to her lips. Only after he dabbed the blood at the edge of her lips did he realize
the handkerchief was spotted with the writer’s blood”(26-7). Cynthia’s nurse, Lucinda,
who will become Abran’s lover, helps shift our attention away from the potential mystery
of what inﬂuence Cynthia or her family could have on Abran and onto his father’s
identity: “Cynthia was Anglo, but Abran wasn’t, Lucinda thought as she looked at the
features of the young man. Maybe half Anglo, but his father had to be Mexican”(29).

Within two pages, Anaya has disposed of the Anglo mother and almost any
potential effect she could have had on Abran. At this point, the novel tips its hand.
Anaya will not have his Chicano main character investigating the twin inﬂuences on his
physical body nor allow the Anglo mother any cultural or environmental inﬂuence.l
Abran will look into his mother’s life and her family, but they will not change him. And
since he was brought up Chicano (his father’s “dark skin”(29) driving the point home
about his non-Anglo-ness) and discovers his mystery birth father is Mexican-American,
he will undergo almost no change as a result of his detective work. His genealogical
inquiry will be incomplete at best, misguided at worst in its narrow focus on ﬁnding the
father.

This incomplete representation of solving a genealogical mystery causes serious
repercussions for our reading of Anaya’s novel. Our attempts to see in this novel by the
“father of Chicano storytelling in English” (as the back of the Warner Books edition calls

him) an investigation of the meaning of cultural and racial hybridity will constantly be

 

' The Anglo element of the city and novel of Albuquerque is not presented as entirely negative; Abran’s
mother, unlike the villainous Frank Dominic, offers the potential of a redemptive, non-imperialist. racist
Anglo ﬁgure. Anaya simply chooses not to utilize her inﬂuence in this way. Robert Gish says of the novel
that “Much of the plot of Alburquerggg is driven by that urge to know and preserve the true past as the
growing city faces the struggle and the promise of its multicultural heritage”(Gish 140); however. Abran
seems only driven to know the part of his true past, his Chicano heritage, that he is already most familiar
with. Gish’s “multicultural heritage” is reduced to the monocultural.

52

thwarted, turned aside, and re-routed to a meditation on the metaphysical aspects of a
Chicano’s soul, which by the end of the novel become unambiguously Indian. Like
Gloria Anzaldua retreating from the potentialities of the hybrid she discusses in La
Frontega/Borderlands towards the pure Indian (see Introduction, above, and Corner 223),
Anaya avoids making Abran Anglo in any way except the least meaningful (his physical
appearance). In a broader sense, he thus makes pure Indians (“puro Indio”) of his
Chicano characters and makes the Mexican-American an indigenous presence. He works
backwards towards an imagined Edenic time throughout the novel, with Abran eventually
ending up a doctor in a pastoral mountain community that seems removed from the
complications of Albuquerque, Anglos, and the West in general.

Anaya makes gestures towards Abran’s investigation of both sides of his heritage,
and I would now like to explore this task in all its incompleteness. For as I have
suggested above, the incomplete reading of the Mexican-American’s dual heritage is
essential to the “field-Imaginary” of Chicano literary studies. At the moment he
discovers he adopted, Abran gives only temporary thought to his dual heritage. Even
before posing the question of his new identity (“What was he now? Half Anglo, half
Mexican”(30)),'he thinks of his adoptive father’s heritage as his own: “How much more
did the man have to teach him about the ways of his ancestors?”(30). The “his ancestors”
refers to adoptive father Ramiro, certainly, but Abran shows interest in Ramiro’s past
because he takes it, even now, as his own. Furthermore, his adoptive family doesn’t

think of itself as “hybrid,” “crossblood,” or of dual heritage: “Ramiro and Sara were

proud people, a pride they instilled in him. ‘Puro indio,’ Ramiro used to say”(30).

53

At least part of the crisis Anaya poses, then, should be that a young man who,
despite evidence to the contrary (his skin color), formerly believed that he was “puro
indio” now discovers he is part Anglo, part Mexican. The category “Mexican” could be,
in another author’s or protagonist’s hands, a hybrid term, further complicating Abran’s
sense of his genealogy. But Anaya’s formulation emphasizes purity, not mixing; he
chooses not to make the Gonzalez family part Spanish, part Indian (at most, they are
proudly unaware of this possibility). Whatever the Gonzalezes’ heritage, Abran
discovers he has no blood connection with them. Anaya has Abran make only the
feeblest gestures towards caring about his mother’s Anglo identity, or about the duality of
his heritage (indeed, as we will see below, Anaya will emphasize the Anglo mother’s
afﬁnity for Chicanos and Indians). Instead, he makes a crisis of Abran not knowing who
his (presumably Mexican) father is. And so Abran promises God, “He would find his
father”(34).

Anaya crafts 3 mystery plot that will reveal very little about what should appear a
mystery to Abran: namely, what it might mean to possess a dual heritage. Abran knows
from his childhood that Chicanos in Albuquerque can act callously towards “a child of
the border”: “la raza called people like him ‘coyote”’(38). He accepts the fact that he
now is truly a “coyote,” though the novel attaches little signiﬁcance to this acceptance.
After brieﬂy thinking of how seldom Chicanos and Anglos crossed the borders between
them, Abran doesn’t start to wonder what it’s like to be half Anglo; he starts to look for
the Mexican father who has supplanted his adoptive Mexican father: “Okay, if I’m going

to be a coyote at least I’m going to know my father”(38). Such a search promises to

54

solve very little of the mystery of his identity, since he has always thought his father was
Mexican anyway.

I’ve suggested above that Anaya makes Abran strangely uncurious about his
Anglo heritage because Anaya views New Mexican Chicanos as basically indigenous and
unambiguously Indian in the final accounting. If his Chicano characters are uncurious
about any European (Anglo or Spanish) roots they might have, his Anglo characters
(other than Cynthia) are downright hostile about Chicanos and Indians. Herein lies
Anaya’s socio—political critique of Albuquerque society and, more broadly, Western
United States history. The “recent” arrival of Anglos to the area—from the Mexican-
American War, through the Anglo stationmaster in 1880, to the time of the novel—has
upset traditional Chicano and Indian life patterns and, more importantly, dispossessed
and discredited these groups. It wouldn’t matter, Anaya makes clear, whether Chicanos
wanted to cross the town’s internal borders to mix with Anglos; Anglos possess the lion’s
share of money and power in Albuquerque, and so their desire to keep non-Anglos out
matters. 80 while the “Chicano” might be viewed as a potentially liberating hybrid
(whatever that term’s pitfalls) of Spaniard and Indian in the crucible of America, Anaya
employs the rhetoric of cultural resistance. As the latest arrivals to New Mexico, his
Anglos are usurpers. His Chicanos have been there long enough to have right of place (to
become indigenous even); that right and much of their property taken away, Chicanos are
now the downtrodden. In Anaya’s world, we must read their reluctance to acknowledge
their European genealogy in context of their resistance to Anglo-Americans. For la raza
in Albuquerque, a simple dialectic obtains: “they” (Anglos) have the power; “we”

(Chicanos) have none and aren’t at all European, either, since the European is the

55

conqueror~thief and “we” are not “they.” (I will discuss Anaya’s depiction of Native
Americans later in this chapter.)

Anaya’s moral plotting of his two white villains supports this schema. He
depicts Walter Johnson’s dream of purity for his family and business ventures as
enabling/forcing the Chicano refusal to dwell on any non-Indian elements in its make-up.
In other words, Chicano “indigenousness” only matters to Anaya after the usurper comes
(a relationship he doesn’t depict between Native Americans and Spanish/Mexican
usurpers, at least not in Alburquergue). Johnson’s dreams of purity are those of a man
who has already conquered, albeit incompletely, and now wants complete control over
his world, down to the last details of who sleeps with his daughter. Anaya doesn’t skimp
on making Johnson powerful, and his biographical details make him a Horatio Alger-like
success story:

He had come from the Midwest during the depression, a lunger dying of

tuberculosis. He recovered, bought land on the East Mesa, and sold it after the

war. He had then built a bank and became the richest man in the state, a man

whose holding company controlled 3 good part of the region. (38)

It’s not enough for Anaya to make Abran’s grandfather an average white businessman
with modest goals. Johnson must stand in for the white conqueror in mid- to late-20th
century terms for Anaya’s broad social critique to gain purchase.

Walter Johnson’s contrast with Abran is striking. Whereas Abran thinks
sentimentally of learning about his “puro Indio” heritage from his deceased adoptive
father, Johnson sees his living grandson “not [as] a grandchild returning home,” but as “a
ghost from the past”(39). Like many (Anglo) Americans who want to leave the past

buried in order to maintain their innocence and purity, Johnson strives to escape the past:

“To succeed in business Walter Johnson had had to bury many ghosts. The formula was

56

simple: He used money to bury them, and they stayed put”(39). In his desire to forget the
past, and his power to erase the past to enable that forgetting, he resembles not just the
Anglo stationmaster of 1880, but also R.W.B. Lewis’s American Adam. The American
Adam is “the hero of the new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily
bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race;
an individual standing alone”(Lewis 5). In the cases Lewis studies from the 19th century,
the Adamic ﬁgure forgets a European past; here, the American figure is forgetting the
United States’s past sins. His is no mere forgetting, either, but a systematic blotting out,
a “formula.”

Johnson’s goals fit in with the genealogical themes of the book. He interests
himself not in mere control over assets (his banking and real estate) and over his
daughter’s body, but also in extending his domination beyond his death. He does not
focus on whether his daughter’s teenaged dalliance with a Mexican-American corrupts
her body, though the ﬁnality with which he treats the affair (as if she could not later get
married and bear him grandchildren within a marriage?) and his chilly relations with
Cynthia throughout her adult life imply that he ﬁnds her corrupt, ruined by the affair.
More strangely, he imagines himself as sexually victimized by her actions: “in the act of
becoming pregnant she had defiled his dreams. She had destroyed the dynasty he
envisioned”(39).

Thus are we introduced to another version of genealogy in the novel (we will see
another with the introduction of the novel’s other white villain, Frank Dominic).
Johnson’s American Dream (which he views heroically, in the vein of an American

Adam, and not ironically as we are invited to do) is predicated on forgetting the past for

57

the future. In Anaya’s social critique, however, he can’t let Johnson forget the
circumstances of his daughter’s affair (not even to make her the heir of his business
empire). There is no room in his Alburquerque for Walter Johnson to forgive his
daughter and accept his grandson into the family; if Cynthia once crossed a well-policed
sexual border imagined by the townspeople, Walter will not allow another crossing.

We can gauge the degree of Johnson’s villainy in rejecting Cynthia’s child, then
and now, by examining the J ohnsons’ genealogy and previous treatment of family.
Walter has chosen to reject his own family, a father in the Stockyards and a laundress
mother: “I survived by leaving. I never looked back, and I never thought about my
family again”(43). His wife Vera is an orphan, though not without a family history: “she
is a Jew, from the old Jews who came with the Spaniards. Los marranos”(42). In this
much, Walter reads Vera and himself as “both outcasts. She because she had Jewish
blood, and I because I claimed no bloodline”(43). These romantic outcasts also form his
typical American family, the kind one would find if the country as a whole could trace its
genealogy to one source: “Right there was the history of the Americas. A man who gave
up everything to start a new life”(43).

Johnson views his history as romantic and exemplary, but Anaya hardly makes
the Johnsons’ struggles to ﬁt in pitiable. Anaya depicts Johnson’s rejection of family
against a backdrop of loving family relationships, one of which literally saves his life.
For Vera Johnson was adopted by a Mexican family (despite her being Jewish, a fact
whispered along the bar run by her adoptive parents). Walter thinks of this act in
stereotypical language: “The Mexicans have a great love for children, he thought. If they

take somebody in, he becomes family”(42). The love extends to him; when Walter steps

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off a train in Albuquerque, ready to die, Vera takes him into her family just as don
Manuel took her in. Anaya gives Walter such obviously stereotypical views about family
to make a point, to suggest an alternative (and superior) way of viewing family ties. Set
against the backdrop of modern Albuquerque, with its sharp division of successful Anglo
businesspeople and struggling Chicanos in the barrios, Walter’s view of America as
experienced through his genealogy becomes the history of the conquest of America writ
small. If Walter thinks of America as made up of (romantic) outcasts starting a new life
with no taint of the past upon them, Anaya shows a trail of blood and disloyalty, ghosts
of a past that should not be forgotten. Johnson’s rejection of family (his parents, Vera’s
Jewish roots, his grandson) has made him rich, but culturally and spiritually
impoverished.

While Johnson once dreamed of his daughter continuing his legacy, he envisions
his United States as sprouting from people who reject their own past, who blot out the un-
presentable or unpronounceable. Anaya uses him to show the importance of the past in
two key ways: first, he suggests that individuals need to know their genealogy to know
their own identity, and secondly, Johnson’s villainy in rejecting his daughter and her love
child evoke the American forgetting of its own past.

In the book’s other white villain, Frank Dominic, Anaya offers yet another view
of genealogy. Whereas Johnson makes the mistake of erasing his past and valorizing that
erasure, Dominic tries to construct an artiﬁcial past. Like Johnson, Dominic is a very
powerful businessman, interested in making Albuquerque a gambling mecca. Unlike the
lily-white Johnson, Dominic has strong ties to Albuquerque’s Chicano community,

having been friends with the writer Ben Chavez. He grew up in the barrio with an Italian

59

mother and a father of unknown heritage (he’s ambiguously either Hispanic or Italian);
he claims some afﬁnity with Chavez’s background.

Set against the backdrop of a rapidly growing Albuquerque, with “Too many new
people in the city, immigrants who didn’t know the history of the place, new people who
knew nothing of the values of the traditional communities”(66), Dominic’s knowledge of
history makes him comparable to other long time residents who do know the place. He
speaks knowledgeably about the Spanish expansion into New Mexico, but glosses over
the violence, focusing instead on a story of colonizing heroes. Chavez sees Dominic as a
social climber, ignorant of the conﬂict between Chicano and Spanish identity: “Ben knew
Dominic yearned to be a scion of the Spanish conquistadors. Frank grew up with the
Mexican kids, learned the language, and fell into the dream that he really was a
descendant of one of the old Spanish families”(68). Dominic’s childhood yearning to
belong (which parallels Abran’s) becomes the desire to master, not to be merely long
established in New Mexico, but to be descended from its conquerors.

Dominic shares his fascination with creating a royal, masterly genealogy with
many others: “Those who sought the Spanish in their genealogy never ceased to amaze
Ben. . . . [Mlany a nut in New Mexico had spent his life’s earnings trying to ﬁnd his link
to a Spanish family crest”(72). Chavez sees politics as motivating Dominic’s interest in
genealogy: “[Wlas this royalty bit part of the political package? Use it in the
campaign—it would look good on TV and go down well with his North Valley
friends”(72). For wealthy whites in Albuquerque, mostly bereft of history or any sense of
belonging to the place they now control, Dominic can somehow represent their right of

place. If Walter Johnson erases his genealogy in order to craft himself as an “American

60

Adam,” Dominic traces his bloodlines for the same reason as the DAR or Boston
Brahrnins: to make himself indigenous without the sheen of failure he implicitly
associates with Indian and Mexican settlers in New Mexico.

He is not one of those outsiders Ben Chavez excoriates, but his desire for mastery
makes his interest in history problematic. Chavez almost feels sympathy for Dominic
after his scheme to make Albuquerque a gambling center is washed up by a disastrous
public event. He treats Dominic’s genealogical interests as a personal pathology: “Good
old Frank. He just tried too hard. That obsession he has with being a blue-blooded
Spaniard is dangerous. . . . The theme of being sons and daughters of those ﬁrst Spaniards
has persisted in our miserable kingdom. It is Dominic’s ﬂaw”(290). Though he does .
refer to New Mexico as a “miserable kingdom,” Chavez doesn’t use this occasion to
criticize the Spanish for the conquest itself, but to put forth his theory of why tracing
one’s genealogy back to the Spanish conquistadors doesn’t work: “We all make history to
serve our needs . . . . He has the sympathetic ear of those nuts who still think that after
four hundred years in this land they’re still Spanish blue bloods”(29l). While I would
argue that Anaya uses Dominic’s politicizing of his artiﬁcial genealogy to criticize the
politics of racism, Chavez refers to the fact that centuries of intermarriage have
eliminated the likelihood of pure Spanish descent for anyone. Furthermore, he implies
the land itself has contributed to the loss of purity, as he cites “four hundred years in this
land” and not some more speciﬁc cause.

What is at stake in Johnson’s erasing of his past and Dominic’s politically
motivated, botched genealogy? Anaya makes both men well-known, ﬁnancially

successful larger-than-life ﬁgures. For Anaya, they symbolize two false paths American

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genealogies can take; their stories represent ways Anglo-Americans think about
American history down to the most localized level of the self. His critical genealogy of
nationalist narrative uses Johnson and Dominic as counter examples to Abran. All of
them reﬂect on their past, but only Abran succeeds in making the past usable in a positive
way. Anaya presents Abran’s search for identity as so idealized and mystical as to seem
apolitical, even in a novel about a political battle. What Anaya said of Antonio Marez in
(the far less obviously political) Bless Me, Ultima applies to Abran: “When you find who
you really are, you become a person of incredible power”(Dick and Sirias 134). Johnson
bases his power on a lack of personal history. Dominic tries to legitimize his power with
a faux genealogy. Abran’s quest to find his father and thus his own identity promises to
make him powerful—as ﬁghter, lover, healer, leader.

Walter Johnson presents Abran with the ﬁrst hurdle, turning him away out of a
desire to forget the past (and out of actual ignorance of Abran’s father’s identity). Abran
turns for help ﬁrst to Joe Calabasa (on whom more below), then to Lucinda. Considered
alongside the plot of discovering his father’s identity, Abran’s growing love for Lucinda
functions to conﬁrm his organic connection—his belonging—to the New Mexico
landscape. The new friends take a peaceful drive to Sandia Crest that preﬁgures their
later trip to her idyllic, ancestral home in Cordova. This side trip allows Abran to work
through his feelings about the changes in his life and to provide back story (his accidental
killing of Junior in a boxing match and subsequent escape to Los Angeles).

Lucinda offers Abran the possibility of future healing through her vision of
becoming a curandera in the mountains: “[S]omething else is calling me. . . . My dream is

to set up a clinic in C6rdova”(56)., Unlike Abran’s escape from Albuquerque after killing

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Junior, which brings him no peace, her vision promotes healing. Though Lucinda and
Abran have just met, Anaya creates a mystical connection between them. Abran’s desire
to become a doctor complements her dream of a clinic in the mountains. The landscape
energizes Lucinda and Abran, its physical presence also having metaphysical effects: “
‘The mountain is alive,’ she said and drew closer to him. . . . The power and kinship
Lucinda felt with the mountain were enhanced by Abran’s presence”(57). She even feels
she has dreamed about Abran before meeting him.

I have argued above that Abran’s quest for his own identity avoids potentially
troubling questions about any Anglo inﬂuence on him; whether or not the “mystery” of
his identity is actually mysterious, Anaya juxtaposes this mystery with Lucinda’s more
grounded, ﬁxed identity. Her metaphysical descriptions of herself shore up Anaya’s
depiction of Chicano/a indigenism: “The energy and beauty of the mountain satisﬁed her
soul; it was something inbred from her childhood in the northern Sangre de Cristo”(57-8).
“Inbred” here means that her organic appreciation of this particular landscape is so rooted
as to be hereditary. By implication, Abran’s joining with her (ﬁrst in friendship, then
sexually, later in marriage and the healing professions) will lend him this inbred
connection to the land; as if Anaya hadn’t emphasized it enough, marrying Lucinda will
conﬁrm and even sanctify Abran’s indigenism.

Anaya strengthens Abran’s “inbred” ties to the land in the scene where they bury
Cynthia’s ashes. Though he has never visited the place, he intuits its importance for the
mother he never knew: “A place she knew”(79). Anaya’s description of the placement of

ashes beneath a cottonwood tree suggests a belief in what we might call “the circle of

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life,”2 as a being who lived now returns to the earth, carried by the child she generated on
that earth: “If [the tree] could talk It would whisper to them of the autumn day twenty-
one years ago when she came as a young girl to this bower and lay with the boy who was
Abran’s father. This resting place for her ashes was also the place of conception”(79).
Abran’s coming to the location of his physical origins has metaphysical implications.
Not only does he sense the place’s importance for his mother, but he also knows she and
his father conceived him there: “[H]e felt the presence of his father. ‘They were here,’ he
said and looked at Lucinda. Lucinda understood”(80). Anaya suggests that people
develop afﬁnities for the land, connections that are inbred and ahistorical. In other
words, Anaya shows that even outsiders can cherish and grow into the land; this suggests
a mobility that transcends bloodline and tradition.

Anaya ﬁnalizes Abran’s becoming indigenous through the “romance” plot.
Abran and Lucinda grow close through ushering his mother into the afterlife, suggesting
that both are connected to the land and each other. Then Abran has a brief affair with the
mayor, Marisa Martinez. Anaya paints the ﬂing as political and therefore not organic or
natural; it reveals nothing of Abran’s actual character: “The desire he had felt for Marisa
was real, but it was for the moment. He did not regret the passion between them, it had
united them against a formidable foe [Dominic]”(l47). Through physical love, Marisa
teaches him “that the ﬂesh can provide insight into the soul”(l47),- though she does not
provide him with any other insight. Rather, the affair turns him back to Lucinda, and
Anaya emphasizes that a union with Lucinda will connect Abran (in a very mystical

sense) to the earth and the people: “he had to ﬁnd his spiritual center, something

 

2 And the idea of the circularity of life is far from being the province of any one cultural group or ethnicity
or nation. As Michaelsen puts it in The Limits of Multiculturalism, such ideas are “never not already

64

grounded in the values of Sara, something that came from the earth and the rhythms of
the people, something he sensed Lucinda offered”(l47).

Their trip to Lucinda’s mountain home in northern New Mexico allows Anaya to
make even closer connections between the couple and the land, though the effort
ultimately removes them from the politics of Albuquerque and dulls the impact of
Anaya’s social critique. As they grow closer, Abran and Lucinda form a partnership both
“grounded” (as she shares her connection to the earth) and “spiritual” (as they become so
close as to communicate without the physical senses). Lucinda’s senses reach to the
metaphysical, as when she learns of Abran’s affair through a nightmare: “She knew. The
images of her dream had divulged his secret”(155). However, the closer she gets to her
home, the stronger her spirit grows. Lucinda allows “herself to be cleansed by the
land”(155), cleansed even of the sin of Abran’s affair. Abran ponders the source of her
intuition and healing power: “he guessed the gift came from [her father.] Or was it a gift
that came from being raised in the mountains, in a land Lucinda described as
timeless?”(155) As Anaya will show, this distinction is not one, as her father is so
connected to the land to make his gift the land’s gift.

Heading into the northern mountains, the couple even sees Catholic penitents
beneﬁting from the land: “For these faithful believers, the earth of the valley was capable
of curing the most severe illness”(l61). Catholicism has long been practiced in New
Mexico, Anaya suggests, and despite not being indigenous has become grounded.
Anaya’s narration even comments on the “local color” aspects of the penitents’ Good
Friday walk, making their actions less part of a universal (“catholic”) religion than a local

practice worthy of gawking by outsiders: “watch out for the tourists, they stop you to take

 

internal to the traditions of the West”(32).

65

pictures... Pobrecitos, they think it’s a show, they don’t know what it means to us”( 162).
Again, he contrasts their authenticity with the tourists, those who don’t belong
(presumably Anglos, since they are unfamiliar with Mexican Catholic practices). Abran
himself does not practice his religion, but the conﬂuence of the land and the faithful
affects him: “Abran felt the faith of the straggling penitents he and Lucinda passed on the
road. His mother, Sara, believed in the journey of faith and prayed daily to her ’
santos”(l63). Apparently, performing a religion matters less than having close ties to the
tradition (by visiting the land or being related to a practitioner). Abran just needs to
“double” his Chicano birth by doing Chicano things, to paraphrase Walter Benn Michaels
(Our America 126). -
By joining with Lucinda, Abran will conﬁrm his authentic Chicanoness (just as
she promises him earlier: “’Will they accept me? I’m only half Chicano.’ ‘You’re
Chicano,’ she said conﬁdently”(153)). Of course, Abran’s doubts about his authenticity
are brought about by the revelation of his birth mother’s identity, but Anaya never
problematizes Abran’s identity; Lucinda only helps the inevitable reconﬁrmation of his
Chicano-ness. During their visit to a country church, “[t]hey stood and embraced, the
bond of faith and earth uniting them”(l64). Abran even admits, “I felt my feet were
rooted in the earth... Good medicine”(l64). Abran easily overcomes his lack of
knowledge about Lucinda’s way of life and becomes comfortable. Lucinda’s family lives
in such a way (i.e. “close” to the earth and not in the city) as to make them authentic
Chicanos regardless of their practices. Furthermore, they have become indigenous, as I
have argued Anaya makes Abran. Lucinda’s father, Juan Oso, spins tales of ﬁghting with

bear-men that depict him as “natural” and unspoiled by civilization. Though Anaya has

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Juan tell “family histories”(l70) and a partial history of Keamey’s occupation of northern
New Mexico, Lucinda’s family (and the family she and Abran will start) now lives apart
from time and history. They live by natural rhythms Abran (and Anaya) approves of: “It
was clear they led a harmonious life”(166).

Though Abran did have an adoptive father, Anaya quickly moves to make Juan
050 a new father ﬁgure, emphasizing Abran’s lack of ties to what we are led to believe is
his own heritage. Far from the problems of Albuquerque, where prejudices kept Abran’s
parents apart, Juan Oso helps Abran “feel complete”(l70) and educates him on how to
become reintegrated with the natural world. Juan Oso tells of ﬁghting a bear-man (after
getting his bear-woman daughter pregnant) and entering the bears’ world: “I felt good. I
belonged. I had entered their world, hombre. I was one of them”(l69). At ﬁrst, Abran
envies Juan and Esperanza’s groundedness: the “roots that went deep into the soil and the
spirit of the people, he did not have”(l7l). But Juan promises that Abran can join this
world easily: “A man can put roots wherever he ﬁnds a good woman”(l7l). Despite
having their land taken over by the Maxwells and Catrons (as Juan reveals “as if he were
lecturing in a classroom”(l73)), the Chicanos of northern New Mexico still have their
essence: “they stripped it away, layer by layer. They can’t strip the heart, it’s all we
have left”(l73). As with the anecdote about the Anglo stationmaster, Anaya makes
Anglo conquerors the villains in a history that only goes back as far as Mexican
settlement in what is now New Mexico (and does not editorialize on prior conquests, as I
will show in part II). Though all of the pieces are in place to craft a picture of a people
molded by history, Anaya emphasizes the timeless, essential heart maintained eternally

by the land itself: “The entire valley and the mountain slept in the enduring peace of

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spring. That core of the onion, [Abran] thought, you can’t strip that away. It will endure
forever”(l74). Abran possesses that essence, Anaya argues, even without knowing the
history or his own parentage. He may need to “put roots” where Lucinda comes from,
but his essence (detectable in his “natural ease”(17l) with Lucinda, his feeling of
completeness with her family, feeling the faith of the local penitents, and feeling “rooted
in the earth”(l64)) makes him already indigenous.

Anaya doubles Abran’s indigeneity by extending the affinity for New Mexico’s
land (and by extension its people) even to Anglos like Cynthia and her mother Vera, who
recalls (re)visiting the barrio with her daughter: “We danced and enjoyed ourselves as we
never had before”(80). While Cynthia’s mother had grown up in the barrio (making her
return less of a border crossing), Cynthia went there because she felt an afﬁnity for the
people of the barrio that crossed her own upbringing. Vera goes so far as to say of
Cynthia’s painting of “the people from the pueblo, the old people” that “she was trying to
ﬁnd the parents she never ha ”(81). Here, Anaya’s genealogy of Abran’s Anglo
grandparents comes more in line with his indigenizing of Abran. As we have seen,
Walter Johnson is an American Adam type, trying to erase his history; his wife Vera has
Hispanic origins as a child of the barrio, though ethnically she is Jewish. Anaya removes
even these tenuous barriers to Abran’s indigeneity as Vera posits that Cynthia sought out
parents to whom she could have some connection beyond blood. Of course, Abran’s
Chicano (and “puro Indio”) adoptive parents raise him to have the connection his birth
mother Cynthia had to seek artiﬁcially; now Abran seeks his “real” or birth parents, in an

ironic reversal of Cynthia’s quest.

68

Or is it ironic? In both cases, characters expect genealogy to tell them who they
are. In Cynthia’s case, she seeks out spiritual ancestors because she feels no kinship with
her birth parents. Abran has always felt that kinship with Sara and Ramiro, but upon
discovering they have no blood connection to him, feels “empty inside”(18). The more
Abran investigates his genealogy, the more indigenous Anaya makes him, for even
Abran’s Anglo mother sought Indian origins in the old people of New Mexico’s pueblos.
She did not “belong” with the Anglos, Anaya suggests, but with the indigenous
population (and Mexicans, inasmuch as Anaya indigenizes them as well). So Anaya does
not make Abran’s search for real parents ironically opposed to Cynthia’s search for
spiritual or metaphysical ancestors; in both cases, the characters move away from their
non-indigenous, settler genealogy towards indigeneity and organic connection to the land.

In her artist’s journal, Cynthia describes a “la matanza” in terms that effectively
root Mexicans in New Mexico and reconnect her to Vera’s lost Mexican heritage: “It was
in the ﬁestas of the people that I discovered the essence of my people, the Mexican
heritage of my mother”(94). Interestingly, Cynthia already fashions herself as one of the
Mexican “people,” a word that even without her use of “essence” would imply an
ahistorical, organic, even racial collective. As much as her words seem like wishful
thinking (recalling Vine Deloria’s description of Anglo America’s fascination with Indian
spirituality; see Cusgr Died for Your Sins 3-4), Anaya treats them without irony. Her
longing resembles Abran’s too much for Anaya to subvert it; to ironize her belief in an
“essence” of the Mexicans (including her Jewish mother) would be to criticize Abran’s
own attempts at genealogy. But in a critical genealogy, we must ask the questions Anaya

does not have his characters ask: is the “essence” of an orphaned Mexican Jew (Vera) the

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same as that of other Mexicans? Since Cynthia has an Anglo father (Walter), does she
have half the essence of her “people”? If this essence is truly essential, why does Cynthia
see it ﬁrst in la matanza (and not, to choose the most obvious example, in her mother)?
How could her mother’s essence ever have been hidden, only to reveal itself when the
daughter observed la matanza?

Anaya’s answer seems to be that the Johnsons, even Vera, have become “puro
Anglo” in a cruel example of the kind of acculturation that Anaya writes against. Cynthia
writes, “I painted the ﬁestas of the Rio Grande, the ﬁestas of your people, mi amor, the
ﬁestas my mother used to tell me about when I was a child, because if life had not been
so cruel, we would have shared these ﬁestas”(95). She does not quite make the ﬁestas
hers, though she calls the Mexicanos “my people”(94). She imagines instead a degree of
alterity between her Anglo culture and the culture (represented by the ﬁestas) of the
Mexicanos. While she sees in the ﬁestas something of a birthright (as opposed to a
cultural product that can be consumed no matter what one’s own culture is), she also
posits them as utopian, ahistorical, and timeless (like the future life Abran envisions with
Lucinda). They represent a world that she could have inhabited were the border between
the city’s Anglos and Chicanos not so stringently patrolled.

In making Cynthia Anglo, as I’ve suggested above, Anaya introduces the
possibility of investigation into cultural and racial hybridity, only to sabotage that
possibility. Here again, he suggests that crossing borders is not so easy when “essences”
and “blood” matter so much. Though Walter Johnson’s prejudice and desire to get ahead
in Anglo society separate Cynthia from “her people,” her blood connection allows her to

rejoin them, even if she needs a kind of “native guide” ﬁgure in “mi amor” (Abran’s

7O

father). Not surprisingly, then, Cynthia’s account of la matanza lends metaphysical reach
to the physical underpinnings of blood; she rediscovers a sort of lost identity, something
beyond the physical (we might call it cultural) that she nonetheless knew before in her
blood. Why else does she feel the need to search for parents when she has them? In
Anaya’s accounting. blood or race ultimately take the place of culture, anyway, as
practices alone are not sufﬁcient to confer cultural identity. Cynthia writes of the. passing
down of the rituals of la matanza, “It was the call to the matanza, an old calling,
something they knew in their blood, something they had done surely and swiftly all their
lives”(103). Why should the young men at the fiesta care about carrying on this ritual?
Through physical actions—linked inextricably with the physicality of blood and race— .
the old men prove their old ways are superior, with the grandfather killing a pig not with
pistol, but with a hammer in the old style. The old men complain that their ways will
pass away, and Cynthia writes, “That is why I had to paint. I wanted to preserve the
beauty of those moments”(106). But since the men know this calling “in their blood,”
nothing that we might call “the essence of my people”(94) could ever disappear. The
speciﬁc (if superﬁcial) practices of la matanza do not constitute that essence, so they can
die away with the younger generation without actual identity being lost; even Cynthia can

rediscover this essence.3

 

3 Walter Benn Michaels makes a supporting argument at great length in W93. Michaels argues of
French-speaking in Quebec, “without some way of explaining how what people used to do but no longer do
constitutes their real identity, while what they actually do does not, it cannot be said that what the former
French-speakers, current English-speakers have lost is their identity. My point, then, is not that nothing of
value is ever lost but that identity is never lost”( 198 n.242). In the present case, Anaya seems to support
Cynthia’s depiction of la matanza as something the younger Mexican-Americans should regret losing (for
its “beauty”), but makes no argument that the practice is useful in and of itself. Cynthia and Anaya argue
for a link between this practice and authentic Mexican-American identity, but Anaya’s language (“the
essence,” “in their blood”) dissolves the need for such a link. The younger generation need not practice la
matanza to preserve their identity, since the calling to practice it is in their blood. The only reason for the
young people to continue la matanza is that it signiﬁes what they are (their essence) without actually

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Cynthia’s paintings conﬁrm her ability to understand a people, at least in Anaya’s
terms, for in them she uses “pure light,” as Lucinda calls it, “the primeval light of New
Mexico... Pure light, as it must have been at the beginning of time”(154). This
description makes Cynthia’s paintings of the old people of the pueblos a type of origins
myth, for she removes them from history through her use of light. Lucinda continues:
“she could see their auras. The people she paints are real, but they have the glow of life.
In her pure light there is no deception”(154). Anaya makes Cynthia an “authentic” artist,
her work hearkening back to the “primeval” and capturing the essence of the people as it
relates to the land. In effect, her writings and paintings attempt to show what is
indigenous about a people without any appeal to history (which is anything but “pure” or
without “deception”).

Clearly, Anaya imagines tradition or culture almost purely in terms of blood or
race, and he does so in a fashion that recalls Walter Benn Michaels’ arguments about
modern (and contemporary) concepts of culture and their connection to race. Abran
seeks his father’s identity because he wants to know who he is (as if identity could not
have been conferred to him by his adoptive parents, though conveniently Abran’s
Chicano identity is never really challenged); he believes biology will help him decide his
identity. But discovering an Anglo mother doesn’t make him Anglo (and her own

discovery of an “essence” that is actually Mexican helps conﬁrm this). So what is at

 

constituting that essence. If la matanza is felt in the blood, it will be practiced (in some form) by whoever
feels the calling. In the case of la matanza, it is difﬁcult to argue that its loss would contribute to an
identity loss for Mexican-Americans since the only reason they have to continue this practice is that they
are already irreducibly Mexican-American. What I’m suggesting with this reference (and in what follows)
is that Anaya’s appeal to something essential and physical (and metaphysical) in his Chicano characters'
constitution—his use of a very limited genealogy—undercuts his own political commentary on the
Southwest. His genealogy of America is thus quite critical when it comes to Anglo settlement in New
Mexico and its effect on local inhabitants, less critical when it comes to the composed character of

72

stake in Abran’s genealogical inquiry is rather less than the possibility of taking on new
traditions; his quest hews more closely to discovering what in his past will conﬁrm who
he already is.

We might say of Abran (and by extension other Chicanos arguably represented by
“the father of Chicano storytelling”) what Michaels says of all Americans with respect to
their history: “[W]hy does it matter who we are? [. . .] It must be [. . .] the ontological
claim that we need to know who we are in order to know which past is ours”(Q_r;§
Ma 128). Anaya invests in this kind of genealogy, but consistently hedges his bets,
confirming which past is Abran’s and therefore making his identity rather simple: “tu
eres tu.” In other words, Abran’s identity supposedly matters because discovering his
“real” father helps him ﬁnd an “actual” or real or physical reason for considering himself
a Chicano (or coyote, or any other term), but nothing changes in the novel. Instead of
Abran uncovering a complicated network of relationships among Spanish, Anglo and
Indian ancestors, he only ﬁnds grounds (the ground of northern New Mexico serves this
purpose literally) for his being Chicano. Here Anaya leaves off performing genealogy in
favor of a metaphysical search for origins. As Michel Foucault writes, whereas a
metaphysician Will seek the “soul” of history (not its “body”) “in the distant ideality of
the origin”(Foucault 80), genealogy “opposes itself to the search for origins”(Foucault
77). In the ﬁnal accounting, identity in Albgguergue is fundamentally racial and
essentialist, as Abran discovers through his mother’s rediscovery of “her people” and her
racializing of their traditions. Abran claims a past based on race or blood, but ignores

“the details and accidents that accompany every beginning”(Foucault 80). When he and

 

Mexican-Americans. whom he sees as having an essence tied to the land they have inhabited for slightly
more time than the Anglos.

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Lucinda commit themselves to return to her idyllic, timeless mountain village. they are
reclaiming a lifestyle—what might appear to be practices or “culture”—which only
belongs to them because of race. Like Cynthia, who in her paintings captured “the soul
of the people... the soul of this land”(157), they (re-)discover the “soul” (in Foucault’s
sense) of their people. They do not look beyond the origin of Mexican-Americans.
They belong to the land (and vice-versa) because of a racial identity that belies New
Mexican history. In the cause of exploring Chicano identity (and, more politically
speaking, its relationship to Anglo-American identity), much of Alburquercgie grounds
“which past is ours” in racial terms, indigenizing Mexican-Americans and creating a
myth of their origin (in the story of Abran’s parentage, but also in the renaming act of the
Anglo stationmaster). This causes problems for the book’s political dimensions-what
I’ve been calling Anaya’s critical genealogy of America—when we take into account
Anaya’s treatment of Native American characters and themes. Indeed, though Anaya’s
depiction of conﬂicts between Anglos and Chicanos works as a critical genealogy by
opening up the story of the western frontier, his handling of Indian themes undermines

this project.

Part II: Erasures

Anaya emphasizes healing and wholeness, taking them to utopian, metaphysical
extremes. By the novel’s ending, Abran has “defeated” both Johnson (by discovering his
father’s identity) and Dominic (who both loses a bet when Abran wins the boxing match
and loses any chance of getting his casino plans approved). Anaya neatly contrasts the

genealogical investigation of Abran with that of Frank Dominic (and with Walter

74

Johnson’s disregard for family history). Indeed, when asked by Laura Chavkjn in 1995,
“What common themes or concerns do you think unite Chicano writers”(Dick and Sirias
172), Anaya answered in part, “the relationship that we have to Anglo-America, the
encounter with Anglo-America that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, the
continuing sense of tension between the two communities”(Dick and Sirias 172-3). He
plots that tension in Alburquerque. However, when Anaya addressed Native America (as
opposed to Anglo-America) in a 1985 interview with Paul Vassallo, he emphasized not
tension or encounter, but shared heritage: “that image [of the Chicano] has to do with our
commitment to understanding ourselves not only as Hispanics—as people of Spanish and
Mexican origins—but as people who also share in the Native American origin and the
Native American heritage. Our history is part Indian”(Dick and Sirias 99). Anaya
continuously places his work in both Mexican-American and Native American traditions.
Instead of drawing connections between Spanish/Mexican and Anglo colonial
enterprises, he differentiates Chicano literature from Anglo literature based on Indian
elements: “We are historically tied to Mexico [. . .]. [Alnd with that context of the
Mexican experience is the experience of the Native American, whether that experience be
in Mexico or here in the Southwest”(Dick and Sirias 100).

Anaya’s explanation leaves much to be desired, his “with that context [. . .] is the
experience” doing little to provide the context in which Native Mexicans, some with
Spanish blood ties, some without, came to a Southwest occupied by Native Americans
(inhabitants of the what is now the United States Southwest, as distinguished from
Mexican-Americans). In setting Abran’s dream of becoming whole despite his mixed

heritage against the plot line of Joe Calabasa’s struggle to retum to the reservation,

75

Anaya leaves too much history unexamined. If Anaya leads us to read Abran’s
genealogical inquiry and eventual settlement as a means to becoming indigenous, how
are we to read Joe and his family? How can Anaya criticize Anglo colonization (through
the ﬁgure of Walter Johnson) and not the Spanish colonization that preceded it?

On the level of narrative, Joe’s quest parallels Abran’s, as Joe struggles to return
to the pueblo after Vietnam and its after-effects have torn him away.4 In the end,he too
will gain wholeness and healing. But Joe’s pueblo also gives the lie to Anaya’s
indigenizing of Abran and Lucinda. Joe’s people (the Santo Domingo people) were there
when “the Spaniards came, and later the Anglos”(48). When Lucinda takes Abran to one
of her favorite spots, she comments, “before there was raza here, the Indians used to i
come to this place... They used earth for healing”(l48). Now, of course, la raza do
occupy that land, but Anaya emphasizes healing rather than this earlier displacement.
Anaya makes just slight references to the history of Spanish occupation of this Indian
land, instead focusing on its “timeless”(156) nature. As we saw above, when Juan Oso
recalls a displacement of peoples, he recalls Kearney’s claiming of New Mexico for the
United States, not Juan de Oﬁate’s earlier conquest.5 In a novel so predicated on
exposing historical erasures and contesting the national narrative, Anaya’s choice not to
present any conﬂict in Abran over his mixed heritage (Anglo/white and Chicano, i.e.
Spanish and Indian), or between Spanish/Mexican settlers and Native Americans seems

odd. In performing a critical genealogy as outlined by Russ Castronovo, one would seek

 

’ One sees the plot of the soldier returning to the reservation after war in several well-known Native
American novels. including Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremggy and N. Scott Momaday’s Hot_i§§_ Made of
Dawn. Including this theme allows Anaya to allude to these other texts (which are by authors who self-
identify as Native American), thus bolstering the authenticity of the plot; it also lets the plot serve as
shorthand for Native American alienation from the United States and tribal life, since readers may have
knowledge of this familiar theme. '

76

out and reinstate “what has been erased in the writing of national narrative”(Castronovo
9); what is missing from Anaya’s narrative of Mexican-Americans in New Mexico is
precisely the encounter with Native Americans that occurred prior to Anglos settling New
Mexico.

Anaya lays Joe’s plotline next to Abran’s. The two help each other resolve their
respective conﬂicts, and their friendship serves as an antidote for the political ﬁghting in
the novel. Anaya provides no hint that either man recognizes any conﬂict from their
ethnic groups’ past histories. Indeed, Joe and Abran ﬁght together in the ﬁrst chapter,
intervening in a ﬁght between Ben Chavez and a man he defeats at pool. Joe helps
introduce one of Anaya’s central themes, the connection of people to their land, when he
shows concern for the Chicanos of the city: “If they build the big aquatic park the city is
planning, la raza gets pushed out My grandfather used to tell me the city was going to
grow. ‘Just don’t let them get the pueblo land,’ he said. If you give up your land, you
die”(l3). Joe alludes to his people’s own history of survival without referencing whether
his people have ever lost pueblo land.6

Despite Joe’s alienation from his home, Anaya paints him and his pueblo as
sources of wisdom for Abran and his people, suggesting more strategies of survival in the
present than past conﬂicts. Joe becomes one of many father ﬁgures for Abran: “Joe was
older; he knew the world. He became, in a sense, the father Abran didn’t have”(16). As
we saw in my previous discussion, however, Abran is anything but fatherless. He loses

his adoptive father Ramiro at a young age, but remembers him nonetheless; of course,

 

5 A brief account of this conquest is given in ngigan Amgricang Amgrican Mexigaga: Frgm
anguiatadgrs tg thcang§ by Matt 8. Meier and Feliciano Ribera. pp. 20-21.

77

Abran searches for his biological father (Ben Chavez) even after Chavez enters his life
and becomes another sort of father ﬁgure. Anaya seems to be using these father ﬁgures
to suggest the array of inﬂuences not just on Abran, but also on Chicanos as a group: the
“puro indio” Mexican father (Ramiro), the Native American father from the pueblo
(Joe)7, the Chicano activist father (Chavez).8 Viewed allegorically, Chicanos become the
inheritors of a Native American tradition, not the usurpers.

As Abrén searches for his father to determine his own identity, Joe seeks to
overcome the distance between him and his father. Again Anaya shows that genealogy
reveals personal identity; he suggests that Joe has not been himself since Vietnam, that a
return to the pueblo will restore and regenerate this truer self. Joe sees that Abran’s
discovery of his birth mother’s identity creates a “new reality”(46) for Abran, but wants
to change his own new reality, which is unpleasant: “Nam had separated him from his
own father and from the old men of the pueblo”(47). Like Juan Oso, Joe’s father
represents the value of maintaining close ties to the land, making J oe’s separation from
the land of his people doubly regrettable: “[His father] was strict in the old ways, he sat
on the pueblo council, and he farmed. . .. Squash and summer, that was his identity”(47).
Though Joe is a “coyote” like Abran (his mother is “a Mexican woman”(47)), both seem
to belong only to one group. Like Abran, Joe is teased when young, since “Nobody likes
a coyote”(47). Peers may make fun of and ﬁght these protagonists, questioning their

authenticity, but Anaya assures that these “coyotes” represent just one side of their hybrid

 

6 The pueblos of what is now northern New Mexico underwent generations of give-and-take in the “contact
zones” they shared with invading armies of Mexico (which included Spaniards. Nahua Indians. and
crossbloods) and other Native Americans (Apache. Navajo. Comanche). See Meier and Ribera. pp. 20-23.
7 Joe is also part Mexican through his mother; see p. 47.

8 As I argued above, the Anglo (or Spanish) inﬂuence exists biologically, but is hard to discern in plot or
character.

78

identities. There is no mention of Joe returning to the old Mexican ways of his mother,
just as there is no chance that having an Anglo mother will make Abran at all Anglo:
“’Half-and-half, damn!’ Abran cleared his throat. He didn’t want to be half Anglo”(47).
Yet again, Anaya presents the chance to depict the conﬂict between Native American and
Mexican-Americans, but dissolves the conflict by founding the identities of his characters
in one or the other.

Anaya invests both men with authenticity. down to Joe’s conception of his
people’s place in the universe, a conception that deﬁes any appeal to history9: “The
Calabasa family” -note that Joe un-self-consciously only considers his father’s lineage,
not his mother’s Mexican heritage, having already claimed that her transplantation has
made her native—“had been Santo Domingo people since the beginning of the world.
They lived at the center of the earth, according to their legends. That was stability”(47-
8). Of course, this appeal is literally metaphysical: Joe appeals beyond the bounds of
human knowledge and the history of human dwelling (he has no need to appeal to history
or anthropology) to assert primeval origins for his people. They are the ﬁrst people and
occupy the earth’s center. Anaya no doubt means for readers to take this claim seriously;
though the understatement of “That was stability” reads like a joke, Joe’s thoughts reveal
both ironic distance from and envy of his elders’ world views.

Through his grandfather, Joe has learned the ways and history of his people. In

Joe’s accounting, pueblo areas were invaded by Spanish and Anglos.lo As a way to

 

9 Michel Foucault notes that because history “is the concrete body of a development,” “only a
metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the origin”(80). The Calabasa family’s sense of
itself is not at all genealogical in Foucault’s sense of the term, but rather an ahistorical idealization.

'° Though the conquest was carried out in the name of imperial Spain. the forces included “Spaniards,
mestizos. Indians. and afromestizos"(Menchaca 67). Anaya has Joe ﬁgure both groups of invaders as
white.

79

counter and compromise with these invaders, Joe’s people have had to “learn the white
man’s way”(48). Now, however, Joe is estranged from the tribe; despite the strength and
“stability” that should inhere in Joe because of his genealogy and upbringing, “Now, he
couldn’t return to the pueblo of his grandfather. He had learned too much of the white
man’s way”(48). In his own mind, Joe has become less authentically Indian based on his
experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. As a young man, he dreamed of being a Marine and
even tried to pretend he was hunting deer back home when he was scouting Vietnamese.
But Joe can’t make killing Vietnamese like killing deer, and soon he ﬁnds himself in a
position like that of soldiers and settlers who conquered the Indians of the United States
West: “I could imagine the women in the village hiding the minute they heard the shot,
grabbing their bambinos and holding them close to quiet them, like the Indians did long
ago when the US. Cavalry came down to skirmish”(50). He comes upon an old
Vietnamese and recalls his old “chant for the deer”(51), a song meant to put the intended
shooting victim at peace: “Come, brother deer, give your life to my people. Let me take
your breath of life so my village can live”(51). The Vietnamese counters with his own
song, and Joe thinks, “In his wrinkled face I saw the face of my grandfather. In his
face I saw the face of my people”(51). Joe feels solidarity with this man and thereafter
divests himself of the war: “I was done with it”(52).ll

By itself, his breaking away from his old self (which sought to kill in the name of

the United States) does not purge him of learning “too much of the white man’s

 

” This passage features prominently in Margarite Fernandez Olmos’ postcolonial reading of Alburquerque
in Rudolfo Anaya: A Qritigal Companign (Westport. CT: Greenwood Press. 1999). Indeed. many texts by
non-white North American authors ﬁt into postcolonial readings (as do some white texts from the early
days of United States independence) that connect colonialism in North America to colonialism elsewhere.
While such a critique is implicit in my reading of Anaya, I also question the colonial relationship between
ancestors of present-day Mexican-Americans and Native Americans of the Southwest; as I’ve been arguing

80

way”(48). Serving in Vietnam makes him a conqueror; in Joe’s and his people’s self-
conception, they are the victims, not the invaders, and so Joe’s actions make him less
authentic. Anaya thus suggests that actions can determine one’s ethnic make-up: one can
become less Indian, but then return to Indian ways (after a cleansing). What seems to be
most important is presence on the pueblo land. Other young Indians leave and become
the attorneys who support Dominic’s plan to buy pueblo water; though they bring with
them outsiders’ ways, they are welcomed back into the community. Upon his eventual
return to the pueblo to protest this plan, his outsider status matters again for Joe. The
community sees that he brings with him impurities of the war: “Joe had been to a place of
war, the place called Nam. They knew he was troubled. He was not yet cleansed of the
evil spirits of Nam”(185). The in-group will let Joe back in, but slowly: “it would take
time before he reentered the circle of the pueblo”(186).

Joe’s late return to pueblo politics robs him of any credibility with the tribal
council, and he begins to doubt his own identity. His dreams of Vietnam frighten him,
but more importantly, his reﬂections on being mixed-blood remind him of his actions in
the war. Whereas Anaya’s Chicano characters don’t reﬂect on the taking of New Mexico
by Spanish forces (which included Spaniards, mestizos, Indians), Joe does: “Spanish
blood and Indian blood mixed in Joe, as it had in people for hundreds of years along the
Rio Grande. He was a Santo Domingo man, but in him ran the blood of the
conquistadors, the old Spanish blood of the conquerors of his people”(187). Joe’s
language consistently positions him as the Indian despite his mother’s bloodlines: “They

took our food and women”(l87; emphasis mine). Being mixed-blood does not make it

 

throughout this chapter. Anaya gives evidence of this relationship without analyzing how it might affect‘his
political message. Fernandez Olmos’ interpretation is also watered down by this omission.

81

possible (or perhaps necessary) for Joe to consider himself more than Indian. And like
Abran in his defensiveness of his Chicano identity, Joe has always had to endure barbs
for being Indian, even from Mexican children to whom he was related: “why did it matter
that he had Spanish blood in him? [T]he Mexican kids used to tease him and he would
ﬁght.... [H]is mother would clean him up and say, ‘Don’t fight, Remember. they are your

9”

cousins (188). Joe’s mother imagines the kind of solidarity Joe later feels with the
Vietnamese man, and her idealism certainly undergirds Joe’s friendship with Abran.
Still, Joe seems ill-equipped to accept the significance of her genealogy of the Calabasa
family; he sticks to his Indian identity instead of seeing himself as hybrid in any
important way: “They took our food and women.”

At best, Joe’s Vietnam experience gives him insight into “conquering” (detached
from any speciﬁc historical or cultural identity, such as Spaniard or American) as the
abstract force responsible for waste and pestilence: “But what the hell, isn’t that what all
conquerors do? Didn’t we take the women of our Nam brothers?”(187) He identiﬁes
with the conquerors not because he considers himself part Spanish (though that would
complicate Anaya’s depiction of Chicano presence in New Mexico), but because he has
experienced conquest himself. The experience jolts him out of his desire to be a US.
Marine, but he also disassociates himself from his pueblo. For much of Alburquerque,
then, Joe drifts about detached from his roots (which should help shape his identity), and
the novel leads us to pity this unnatural position. Eventually, of course, Joe reintegrates
himself with his home, though his insights into conquest advance no further. As Indian,

Mexican, citizen, soldier and postmodern drifter, Joe Calabasa could potentially offer a

historical perspective the novel lacks. Instead, Anaya relegates him to the role of proving

82

platitudes about the value of returning to one’s own home and re-connecting to one’s
land. Joe promises his friends, “I’m going to pay attention to the old men. get back to the
ceremonies and dances”(292). The writer Ben Chavez, ever Anaya’s surrogate, thinks
“Joe was ﬁnding his way back to the circle of his people just as Abran and Lucinda
had found each other again”(292).l2 In other words, even in this occasionally very
political novel, the main Indian character (Joe) performs much the same function as its
Chicano protagonist. In a novel so concerned with correcting past erasures through a
new genealogy of the Southwest, we might expect the ﬁgure of the Native American
(Pueblo in this case) to offer some perspective. The Indians of New Mexico have their
own history of settlement, displacement, retrenchment and survival, a history full of
conﬂicts with Spanish, Mexican and Anglo groups. How is it, then, that we get so little
sense of this through Joe Calabasa? Or rather, what is the payoff for Anaya in not
pursuing this path?

The point in highlighting Anaya’s incomplete genealogy in Alburguergue is not to
wish his book were a different book, not to assert that all texts must be about certain
issues and themes, and certainly not to scold the book for not offering a certain kind of
critique. It is, hewever, to trace out the very selective genealogy performed by a modern
Chicano forefather, to evaluate what Chicano writers and their readers have wanted to
remember and forget.13 As an object of textual study, Albumuemue belongs not just with

other Chicano works so that one might study “Chicano” cultural issues, but with other

 

’2 Here again. Anaya uses the ﬁgure of the circle to establish integrity and wholeness for his Indians and
Chicanos. which his Anglos lack.

'3 I use the word “modern” here to indicate Anaya belongs to the generation of Chicano activists and
writers who have become active since the 19605. For a reevaluation of a Chicana literary ancestor from
the 19‘” century. see Jose F. Aranda. Jr.. “Contradictory Impulses: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton.
Resistance Theory. and the Politics of Chicano/a Studies.” Amerigan Litgratm 70.3, 551-579.

83

texts of Westward and Northward expansion, imperialism, and the postcolonial world.
With his strong focus on historical losses suffered by Mexican-Americans and relatively
light coverage of Anglo and (non-Mexican) Indian identities, Anaya attempts to root
Abran Gonzalez in the New Mexican ground. To indigenize is to assert not merely a
prior claim. After all, Joe’s Indian ancestors also have a claim (prior to his Mexican
ancestors). With his personal genealogy, Frank Dominic tries to assert a very old claim to
the land based on the actions of the Spanish conquistadors, but claims deriving from
conquest are precisely what Alburquerqu_e’s political content criticizes. The Spanish
presence is invalidated on moral, ethical, and spiritual grounds. Beyond the claims of
occupying a place ﬁrst, Anaya posits indigeneity as both a proper way of holding land (to
possess and practice a spiritual connection to it) and as a form of guilt-free subjectivity.

Ultimately, there may be no satisfactory alternative to Anaya’s depiction of
Abran, which relies on mythologizing Indian presence, both in establishing Abran’s
blood—based historical priority and the importance of place. As a form of critical
resistance to Anglo donrination, Anaya’s critical genealogy reveals just part of the
intricate pattern of inter-group relations in New Mexico. Perhaps some part of the
narrative will always be missing, some part of identity always shifting. Critical
genealogy as described by Castronovo and practiced by Anaya can go only so far, for as
soon as a narrative of exclusion is told, it hardens with its own exclusions in place and
must be ﬁactured again. Castronovo says of African American writings, “these elided
and dispossessed accents reverberate throughout the structure of national narrative,
casting doubts on whether that narrative can be told ever again in coherent

fashion”(Castronovo 30). The imagery of reverberation suggests a shaking of

84

foundations, a perpetual tearing apart of stories and monuments, a call for principled
incoherence that will never settle. Inasmuch as Anaya’s Alburquerque is a ﬁnished
product, a published novel, it ultimately coheres around a blooded and ﬁxed notion of
Chicano identity. I would suggest, however, that reading this and other novels together

continually shifts and destabilizes those national and “elided” narratives.

85

CHAPTER 3

‘Kin to nobody:’ The Disruption of Genealogy in Larry McMurtry’s
Lonesome Dove

Like the beginning of Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque, the epigraph to Larry
McMurtry’s 1985 novel Lonesome Dove is symptomatic of the intriguing challenges to
interpretation this book offers. McMurtry follows the dedication page with a quotation
from T.K. Whipple’s Study Out the Lagd: “All America lies at the end of the wilderness
road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization
inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us
the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we

”I

dream. Right away, McMurtry wants us to know his novel concerns America writ
large. He indicates that his individuals, groups, and families will stand in for the nation,
or at least a certain conception of that nation. In a way, this move is too predictable to be
as bold as the opening “All America” might imply. After all, the reader of westerns may
be familiar with their status in United States culture as the repositories of the myth of the
frontier, one of our oldest origins myths, and therefore may expect that any novel set in
the west, especially the “old west” (of the late 19th century), will somehow be “about”
America. An academic reader might think of Richard Slotkin’s work on how important
frontier narratives including “western” novels and ﬁlms have reﬂected and helped shape
the nation’s consciousness.2

However, someone reading with a more critical eye—someone skeptical that the

McMurtry who wrote the bitter Horseman, Pass By could be writing a typical western,

 

‘ Larry McMurtry. W (New York: Pocket Books. 1985) up.

86

perhaps, or someone familiar with minority discourse analysis—will ask the contentious
but nonetheless pertinent question, “Who is this we?”3 Does this “we” include Native
Americans, for example, or even women, or anyone else who might be considered
beyond the pale of the “civilization” spoken of? McMurtry does not accept the statement
at face value and expects his readers to find it troubling. Given Lonesome Dove’s
depiction of multiple groups and families which disintegrate rather than cohere, I would
argue that McMurtry thematizes the failure of any sort of “we” to hold together and thus
criticizes the very possibility of any novel, western or otherwise, to narrate a coherent
version of the nation. Rather than offering a genealogy by which readers might trace
their heritage back through their nation’s history, McMurtry disrupts and confounds
genealogy. Russ Castronovo makes a similar argument in describing the dissonance
between national history and citizens’ disruptive memories:
National narrative, once assumed as the site of cohesion, can be seen to fissure
into sites of contestation, exclusion and repression. “Adding story to story” leads
not to one larger story, but to dispersed histories that stand in uneasy relation to
one another. As Homi Bhabha argues, “national memory is always the site of
hybridity of histories and the displacement of narratives.” (6)
Lonesome Dove is far from a “site of cohesion,” depicting instead the attempt to narrate a
nation (to create a community with the name of “America”) as fraught not only with the

exclusion of various “others,” but also with confusion about the value of community

 

2 See particularly Richard Slotkin, ngﬁghter Natien: The Mﬁh of me Fregtie; m jlfwentiem-Qentury
America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993) and Regeneratien ThreugLi Violence (1973; New York:

Harper Perennial, 1996).

3 This moment should recall the by-now familiar scene in our culture of the destruction of our assumptions
about minority acquiescence to the totality of American culture, the moment captured when Eddie
Murphy’s Tonto replies to the Lone Ranger’s desperate. “we’re surrounded” with “what do you mean,
‘we,’ kemosabe?”

87

itself. McMurtry’s version of the western also implicitly criticizes Western narratives
whose versions of America are not so critically self-aware of their own exclusions or the
limits of their possibility.

As I argued in Chapter one, Western Literature as a ﬁeld has never simply
supported the ideology of imperialism nor blindly underwritten the legacy of conquest, to
use Patricia Limerick’s phrase. The ﬁeld, including exemplary authors like McMurtry,
has never accepted the simple “West as America” equation found in popular thought and
in some genre westerns. By examining McMurtry’s critique of how groups, particularly
families, try to organize and maintain their identities, I hope to show that he invalidates
the possibility that any coherent “we” that might represent America has inherited the
legacy of the pioneers, or even their dreams. He uses the elements of western myth and
the familiar “trail-drive” structure,‘ but only to critique the romantic viewpoint of those
western stories that unproblematieally present a homogeneous version of American
history, where gender roles are constant, and after the “forefathers” found America by
eliminating “the Other, there are no more crises of national identity, for the borders have
been ﬁxed. -'

In Longme Qeve, McMurtry shares the concerns of minority writers like
Rudolfo Anaya and Leslie Silko with questioning the narration of the nation. Homi
Bhabha writes that “minority discourse” “contests genealogies of ‘origin’ that lead to
claims for cultural supremacy and historical priority. Minority discourse acknowledges

the status of national culture—and the people—as a contentious, perfonnative

 

‘ According to Frank Gruber’s identiﬁcation of typical western plots, W includes elements of
the Ranch story (of which the trail—drive is a variation), Empire story (due to its scope), Outlaw story (the
Blue Dick and Jake Spoon sub-plots), and the Marshall story (though this is view only nostalgically). See
Cawelti, 61-2.

88

space”(Bhabha 157). A critical genealogy of America (as deﬁned by Castronovo 9)
should not only examine the challenges posed by minority discourse, but also analyze the
performance of cultural supremacy implied by Bhabha’s words. While some of the
characters in Lonesome Dove may appeal to a superiority of culture (at least Call believes
he is superior), and the Hat Creek outﬁt certainly thinks of itself as attaining a symbolic
“historical priority” by driving the ﬁrst cattle into Montana, McMurtry uses the failure to
cohere of groups and families to reveal fault lines in the national myth of origins that is
the western. Of course, McMurtry is not a minority, nor are most of his characters, but
his novel nonetheless fulﬁlls Bhabha’s description of “postcolonial perspectives,” which
“intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic
‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories
of nations, races, communities, peoples”(Bhabha 171).5 McMurtry’s narration of the
disruptions of group and family structure de-naturalizes the “we” of the book’s epigram;
if that “we” represents anything in the context of McMurtry’s narrative, its identity is
difﬁcult to ascertain. If any readers see themselves and their own view of nation or
people in Lonesome Dove, they are likely mistaken.

Lonesome Dove represents a sort of turning point in McMurtry’s career,
belonging as it does to a genre whose conventions he fought against in his earlier ﬁction
and non-ﬁction. Unlike his ﬁrst novel, mm, which sought to expose the
folly of clinging to old ideas of the West based on inaccurate mythologies, m
I_)o_ve_ focuses on the stereotypical “Old West” itself. In writing a novel that hews so

closely to the genre western as practiced by Max Brand, Zane Grey, and Louis L’Amour,

 

5 As I attempt to show in Chapter 2 on Anaya, Russ Castronovo makes many of the same points; not
coincidentally, he relies heavily on the work of Bhabha but applies his critical genealogy to different

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McMurtry takes the great risk of becoming that which he despises.6 McMurtry has clung
steadfastly to the notion that little quality ﬁction has come out of the western United
States, and his enmity for the popular writers of generic westerns remains strong: “The
overwhelming popularity of utterly ridiculous pulp ﬁction is a matter to give one

pause”(Sacagawea’s Nickname 109). Indeed, the influence of genre westerns is such that

 

they dominate popular conceptions of both the history of the Old West and the literature
of the western United States. That is, the imagined West they present, with images of
manly heroes, sometimes savage, sometimes noble, but always vanishing Indians, and
few women, blocks not just popular understanding of the history of the settling of the
United States, but also the ability of serious ﬁction to communicate any other view of the
West. To attempt to reiterate the themes of Horsemen, Pa_ss By via the form of the
western itself would prove daunting, but McMurtry adapts a popular form in order to
address its internal contradictions and ridiculousness.

Arguably, Lonesome Dove fails to work as McMurtry would wish, which only
proves his contention that the “West that was and the land that is” pale in the nation’s
imagination next to “the West that even the most accurate scholarship can’t do a thing
about”(Sacagawea’s Nickname 13), the west of popular mythology, advertising, political
rhetoric, and pulp ﬁction. Instead of reading his novel as ironically commandeering the
genre’s stale formulae, many readers (and the 1989 made-for-TV adaptation of the novel
garnered McMurtry even more readers) embraced a successful writer’s giving in to the

power of the old stories. As McMurtry would later write,

 

national narratives. See Castronovo, 6-9.
6 One thinks of Meg’s Dr. Spock (speaking from within the space version of horse opera) commenting.
“Only Nixon could go to China.”

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I thought of Lonesome Dove as demythicizing, but instead it became a kind of
American Arthuriad. Readers don’t want to know and can’t be made to see how
difﬁcult and destructive life in the Old West really was. Lies about the West are
more important to them than truths, which is why the popularity of the pulpers—

Louis L’Amour particularly—has never dimmed. (Walter Benjamin 55)7
Clearly, “accurate scholarship” on McMurtry’s own work should illustrate how he
ironizes and demythicizes “lies” from the old west. More importantly, though, the highly
romantic popular reception of Lonesome Dove reveals what is at stake in it or any novel
that confronts a nation’s most powerful myths: the underpinnings of American (U.S.)
identity and all that attends it (including domestic and foreign policy and the export of
US. culture).

In this chapter, then, I seek to show how one well-known white western writer has
used icon and genre to destabilize the meaning of words like “us” and “them” when used
to describe the people of the United States; read in the context of non-white writing from
the US. West, McMurtry’s work contributes to the re-writing of our nation’s narrative of
itself. I argue that we can not use Lonesome Dove—or, given its lessons, any other
western story—as support for reading the larger narrative of the conquest of America as
the United States’ myth of origins. I read the disruption of genealogy in Lonesome
Ere—4m pointlessness and even inability to maintain or trace family, national, or ethnic

ties—as a purposeful disruption of the nation’s ability to narrate a coherent story of itself.

 

7 Mark Busby comments on McMurtry’s reaction to the reception: “McMurtry was surprised by the
powerful romantic reaction to Loneseme mve. While he had set out to debunk the myth, he discovered
instead that many readers ﬁltered out the anti-mythic material and responded only to the powerful romance
of the western legends”(Lg1y McMMy and the Weet 237). Michael Kowalewski blames the ﬁlm
adaptation for much of the romanticizing: “Though McMurtry refused to glorify the West... his antimythic
efforts served only to reinforce the legendary aspects of the ﬁlm. The more credible his characters were,
the more they seemed larger than life”(“Introduction” 3).

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The introduction of the Hat Creek outﬁt in Chapter One presents us with many of
the vexing problems of the epi graph, problems I take to signify McMurtry’s interest in
troubling group identity formation. Gus McCrae is a former Texas Ranger, now largely
retired, who served Texas most of his adult life. Yet when McMurtry introduces him, the
state of his birth is mentioned ﬁrst and placed in the context of how inhospitable the
Lonesome Dove sun can be: “a hell for pigs and Tennesseans”(3). After describing Gus
as the half-owner of the cattle company, McMurtry further cements Gus’s place of birth
as determinative of his identity when he calls Dillard Brawley “a fellow Tennessean”(5).
The description makes it seem that Gus would prefer to think of himself this way; he
claims kinship (“fellow”) with another man based on state of birth. When Gus drinks, his
pleasant feelings are “foggy and cool as a morning in the Tennessee hills”(7). The
characterization of Gus as a Tennessean makes us wonder how long one needs to live in
Texas to become a Texan, or how much service to the state one must perform to become
“naturalized.” Additionally, McMurtry presents Gus as someone for whom origins-
even those based simply on state of birth—matter to the exclusion of experiences.
Readers will ﬁnd very little in the book to help them explain what a Tennessean is or how
one acts, but will ﬁnd Gus as Texan as anyone.

McMurtry depicts the setting in racialistic and nationalistic terms, adding to the
troubling difﬁculty of becoming naturalized. All Lonesome Dove citizens know the
border between Texas and Mexico demarcates national identity; moreover, they evidently
are prepared to police that identity in case of threat. When Gus considers shooting a
snake, he reconsiders due to its potential effect on the community: “Everybody in town

would hear it and conclude either that the Comanches were down from the plains or the

92

 

—— ~.,—.-w —'vr'~ .- - -‘ L-.. ._ .: ‘

Mexicans up from the river,” and if they were drunk or unhappy, “they would probably
run out into the street and shoot a Mexican or two”(4). While Gus remains a Tennessean,
the more obvious markers of race allow him to be included among the (white) citizens of
the town, who can tell (simplistically speaking) who does not belong.

McMurtry tells another story to establish racial and national borders, this time
regarding the “one white barber in Lonesome Dove,” Dillard Brawley. Brawley is shot
by an unhappy vaquero he was trying to help; the subsequent amputation of his leg
causes him to lose his voice, then his customers. McMurtry writes, “in time many of his
customers drifted off to the Mexican barber”(6). Presumably, they have previously gone
to Brawley under the presumption that the Anglo barber is superior to the Mexican one,
or that it is proper that Anglos give their patronage to other Anglos. McMurtry ﬁnishes
the episode with a telling joke that establishes Call as intolerant, but more importantly
sets up further racial divisions: “Call even used the Mexican, and Call didn’t trust
Mexicans or barbers”(6). We must infer a stereotype of Mexicans as untrustworthy as
the necessary anchor of this joke that also takes in barbers. Racial and national
characteristics clearly form a large part of identity for Call and other characters.

A ﬁnal example of the shaky ground on which McMurtry establishes the cohesion
of his Hat Creek outﬁt comes in Bolivar, the Mexican cook (who, unlike the Mexican
barber, at least is humanized with a name). McMurtry establishes Bol as a cantankerous
former bandit who rudely and loudly rings the dinner bell at the ranch, causing Gus to
quip, “I ﬁgure he’s calling bandits”(12). Like the joke about the Mexican barber, this one
depends for its humor on the character of B01 himself; were he not actually a former

bandit, it would make no sense. While joking, Gus establishes the possibility of Bol’s

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treachery (as in the case of the barber) and describes his old gang in derogatory racial
terms that compound the quality of slipperiness or trickery: “Why, you remember that
greasy bunch he had”(12).

Yet, as so often is the case with stereotyping, the joke reveals more about Gus and
the outﬁt than it does about Bolivar. If the story of the town’s uniﬁed reaction to
Comanches or Mexicans invading (4) introduces a form of group cohesion, that cohesion
doesn’t always hold. The international border is quite permeable in Lonesome Dove,
with Mexicans raiding north and white Americans raiding south, and both groups
ignoring the laws of both countries.8 The identity established by Gus, Call, and the
groups they represent (Lonesome Dove, Hat Creek, the Rangers, Texas) must be called
into question when the former lawmen break the law so frequently and as a matter of
course. Gus goes so far as to base Bolivar’s very presence and utility at the ranch on his
questionable ethics: “In the business we’re in, it don’t hurt to know a few horsethieves, as
long as they’re Mexicans”(l2). The “foreign” identity of the other horse thieves enables
the relationship to work. Far from being innocent of Bol’s previous lawlessness (which
should cause them to act as they do when they catch Jake Spoon with horse thieves), they
proﬁt by it, using the convenience of the nearby border to hide not only from their own
country’s laws, but also from their own consciences. The lawmen in Lonesome Dove are

far more slippery or “greasy” than any Mexican bandits. Their lawlessness calls into

 

8 James F. Brooks has argued that the process of stealing cattle across the U.S.-Mexico border helped
capitalism ﬂower and new inter-ethnic communities form. His key literary examples are Corrnac
McCarthy’s western novels; McMurtry does not much develop the Mexican side of this relationship. See
Brooks, “Served Well by Plunder: Le Cgan Ladroneria and Producers of History Astride the Rio Grande,”

W 52.1 (March 2000), 23-58.

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question their very identity, and if famous Texas Rangers don’t exemplify the values of
the “civilization” they fought to protect, how can anyone?9

One of the United States’s treasured stories about its national character involves
the naturalization of citizens from all over the world—one can become American (even if
there are actually a lot of stipulations on that identity based on color, religion, time spent
in the country, etc.). But in Lonesome Dove, as I argue above, Gus is not even a
naturalized Texan; in his mind, he remains a Tennessean. In one further troubling
episode from the early, establishing chapters of the novel, McMurtry further
denaturalizes the narrative of how one becomes American. As much as Gus may cross
the nation’s borders to engage in activity his nation forbids, when it comes to establishing
national identity, Gus is a stickler for origins. When Bolivar wants to show his
independence, he confusedly comments that “Gen-era] Lee freed the slaves”(l7), thus
launching Gus’s strange comments on nationality. First Gus corrects Bol (skipping over
the fact that Bol’s comment not only compares himself to a freed slave, despite Gus’s
attempts to “master” him, but also ﬁguratively makes him an American, subject to such
emancipations). Pea Eye tries to point out how the emancipation didn’t apply to B0]: “He
just freed Americans”(l7); his comment shows that Pea Eye sees Deets and other freed
slaves as Americans. Pea Eye sees Mexicans as needing freedom, but as ineligible for it
as non-Americans. The dominance of Anglos over Mexicans in Texas since the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo (a theme in some Mexican-American literature) is implicit here, but

the men’s confusion over how a historical act might affect or be affected by nationality

 

9 McMutry’s thematization of the conﬂict between those who bring civilization and those who come after
recalls classic formulations of the frontier going back to Hector St. John de Crevecoeur: the ﬁrst wave is
often unﬁt (too violent and uncouth) to live with those who come after. While McMurtry has Call and Gus
reﬂect on this familiar paradox, I think it adds to rather than resolves the complications of who belongs.

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gives one little faith in the clarity of national identities or the standards that determine
them.

Gus snorts, “Who Abe Lincoln freed was a bunch of Africans, no more American
than Call here”(l7). To paraphrase my earlier questions about Gus’s Texanness, if Call
and the African-American Deets are not American, who is? Call defends himself: “I’m
as American as the next”(l7), a claim Gus shoots down based on Call’s birth in Scotland.
Apparently, in his view, being born in Tennessee or Scotland, or being descended from
those who were born in Africa prevents one from ever obtaining another identity. One’s
origin determines one’s fate to Gus. Of course, Gus’s words are hogwash (and only half-
jokingly offered, though since most of the jokes in the book anchor themselves to some
stereotype, I think it accurate to call these Gus’s actual thoughts), but they ﬁt into a long
line of national narratives that establish a national “we” based on lineage, or race, or on
some other artiﬁcially drawn border. Gus does not analyze how the migration of
populations might affect issues of nationality, thus ignoring a major factor in North and
South American history. Even though he is generally sympathetic to Deets and Call, if
not to Bolivar, Gus’s comments constitute in-group snobbery, a fetishization of origins
that allows no change or escape. Gus effectively narrates a story about an America
whose citizens are deﬁned by their birth and whose borders are permanently closed to
outsiders. As he did with the too-bold—and-romantic-to-be-true epi graph about a “we”
who dream of a homogeneous past, McMurtry makes Gus’s arguments boldly ridiculous.
Gus’s arguments are analogous to Call’s stature, bold and imposing beyond their true

measure.

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Given these fractious negotiations, we must hesitate to treat the Hat Creek
Outﬁt’s adventures as an “American” story as both the definition of American and the
cohesiveness of the outﬁt are unsettled. After establishing uncertain group relationships,
McMurtry launches into his trail-drive plot. Before setting out and along the way, the
outﬁt picks up new members, often constituting itself by disintegrating other families.
The O’Brien brothers have left Ireland to ﬁnd their fortunes, but end up lost in Mexico,
where Call and Gus rescue them during a cattle-stealing expedition. Far from being
recruited for the trail drive, the brothers basically just tag along until they are accepted:
“It seemed the Irishmen were part of the outﬁt, though”(l94). McMurtry’s emphasis on
“were” highlights the outﬁt’s shaky grasp on who belongs. Jasper Fant gets hired simply
by wandering through Lonesome Dove at the right time. Call visits neighboring farms to
ﬁnd young boys interested in working for him, like the Spettle boys: “So desperate were
their family circumstances that Call was almost hesitant to take them... the family was
about to starve out”(176). J immy and Ben Rainey join despite their mother’s hating to
part with them: “I’d rather sell pigs than hire out boys”(180). While it might seem that
Call is making the Hat Creek Outﬁt into a new family for these young men, his own
detachment from his son Newt (about which more below) makes this unlikely.

The Hat Creek Outﬁt also loses members along the way. Sean O’Brien’s death
by snakebite early in the drive establishes the seriousness of the enterprise. Jake Spoon
abandons Lorena and the drive to gamble; Call and Gus end up hanging their old friend
as a horse thief. Most importantly, Bolivar the cook grows homesick and resigns after an
accident he causes while daydreaming of home ruins the outﬁt’s wagon. Bol’s departure,

like the outﬁt’s earlier discourse on Americanness, provides another occasion for

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McMurtry to sketch the tenuous connections people have for family and community. On
the one hand, Bol misses his daughters and his country: “The fall convinced him he had
lived long enough with Americans. They were not his compaﬁeros. Most of his
compaﬁeros were dead, but his country wasn’t dead, and in his village there were a few
men who liked to talk about the old days when they had spent all their time stealing
Texas cattle”(345). McMurtry seems to appeal to Bol’s nationalism and nostalgia for his
country’s past, but Bol’s actions reveals the limits of national feeling. Bol has been
living in Texas with the Americans for a long time and not visited his wife and daughters
very frequently. Riding away, he feels foolish for letting a mistake drive him back home:
“He didn’t miss his wife that much. . .. He felt a little bitter as he rode away. The Capitcin
should not have let him go”(347). Bol’s own interest in returning to his homeland (the
kind of homecoming Anaya romanticizes in Alburquerque) pales next to being
comfortable: “He didn’t really like the Americanos, but he was used to them”(347).
Though the Americans and Bol mark him as different for being Mexican, ignoring the
permeability of the border, habit has inured him to Lonesome Dove; Mexico now means
mostly memories to Bol. In the end, his “return to Mexico had been a trial and a
disappointment”(943). His family has dispersed, and his wife drives him away, so he
returns to where he felt comfortable, even though he no longer has the cowboys to cook
for. By the time Call returns, Bol scarcely remembers himself: “He grew lonely, and
could not remember who he had been”(943). McMurtry uses Bol’s wanderings (and
what we might call his incomplete assimilation into the US.) not as a gauge of the

relative strengths of Mexican or US. nationalism, but as testament to the slipperiness of

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national narrative’s grasp. Bol has fond nostalgia for Mexico and loathing for life in the
United States, but he returns to Lonesome Dove anyway.

McMurtry presents other disconnected families through the plot lines of July
Johnson and Clara Allen. July’s wife Elmira leaves him for a previous lover while July
chases Gus and Call’s old friend Jake Spoon. A former prostitute, Elmira loathes her
settled married life down to the most basic rituals: “She seldom did eat with them. It
bothered July a good deal”(253). Instead, she sits above them on the loft swinging her
legs, an activity that reveals her ﬂightiness and ﬂouts the conventions that order July’s
life: “It was a thing out of the ordinary, and July didn’t like for things to be out of the
ordinary. [H]e looked upon common practices as rules that should be obeyed”(253).
Elmira disregards common practices and lacks what July would consider common moral
principles like affection for her family; their relationship casts further doubts on the
cohesion of family: “She had just married out of fright—she didn’t want him or the child
either”(258). Almost as soon as McMurtry introduces the Johnsons, he splits them up,
with July heading to Texas with stepson Joe Boot to chase Jake, Elmira leaving for
Kansas to ﬁnd Dee Boot, and Roscoe the deputy subsequently chasing July to tell him his
wife has left.

July’s plot line is best characterized as a dispersal or dissemination. His family is
introduced together in Fort Smith, Arkansas and quickly disperses. Elmira joins up with
two rough buffalo hunters, gives birth to July’s baby at Clara Allen’s, abandons the baby,
and ﬁnally dies on the plains, presumably from an Indian attack. Joe Boot travels with
July to ﬁnd Jake at his mother’s urging (she doesn’t want him or her newborn). After

passing up the chance to join Wilbarger’s crew, Joe dies at the hands of Blue Duck.

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Roscoe chases after July in a vain attempt to preserve the Johnson family, nearly ﬁnds a
wife (Chapter 37), and picks up a surrogate daughter by rescuing Janey from an abusive
older man. Not surprisingly, Janey lacks a stable family. She remembers her name
because her mother called her Janey, but now lives with “old Sam,” who, she says, “give
Bill some skunk pelts for me”(364). Family is practically an alien concept to Janey; she
claims “I ain’t really his anyway”(364), questioning Sam’s bartering for her, but seeming
by this denial to legitimize her relationship with Bill. Sam abuses her sexually, a
perversion of order that confuses Roscoe (whose idea of normal family relations derives
from July) as he listens: “July had always cautioned him about interfering in family
disputes. Roscoe didn’t know if it was even a family dispute that he was hearing”(362).
Janey seems to be Sam’s slave, “though of course slavery had been over for years, and in
any case the girl was white”(362). Janey kills Sam and joins Roscoe, forming another
unorthodox family. July and Roscoe later try to leave Janey in Fort Worth, but she
follows them: “it was clear to everyone that Janey was along for the trip”(456). This
reconstituted family holds no more promise than July’s old family; all of them but July
are murdered by Blue Duck. Elmira and Dec Boot fare no better.

One can attempt to read the failure of this grouping to cohere as a lesson about the
hardships of the West, and it tells us at least that much. McMurtry makes July too naive
to recognize what Elmira is, but also idealistic to abandon his belief in the standards his
family should conform to. The inexperienced Joe and Roscoe are incompetent to manage
a family group or survive when faced with difﬁculties like Blue Duck. Elmira is too
stubborn to stay with her family, and Dec Boot too selﬁsh even to belong to a family.

Their group misfortunes clearly make Lonesome Dove an “anti-westem.” More

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importantly, I would argue that the dispersal of July’s friends and family members
compounds McMurtry’s disavowal of the unifying power of genealogy (and the less
familial connections that form communities).

In the end, McMurtry makes July and Clara (and July’s newborn son Martin) the
closest thing to a working, generative family in the novel. July ends up living and
working with Clara Allen while she raises Martin, yet even their makeshift family has a
shaky foundation. McMurtry portrays their many hardships not merely as illustrative of
the pioneer’s hard life, but as inhibitive of life itself. Clara has been married to Bob, an
unimaginative man with conventional beliefs (like July) and few talents. McMurtry gives
Clara some unconventional attitudes to match her with her old lover, Gus. For instance,
Clara and Gus both express an afﬁnity for Indian ways of life that shock Bob and Call,
respectively: “[Bob] could not believe he had married a woman who wanted to live like
an Indian. He had worked hard to give her a respectable life, and yet she said things like
that”(651). Bob has proven to be an ineffectual horse trader and trainer, and a horse’s
kick incapacitates him. Now Clara mourns the loss of her three sons, her husband’s
injury, the misjudgrnents of her past, and her family’s bleak future.

The loss of the boys hurts particularly since the Allens expected them to grow into
young men to help on the farm. Clara may love her two girls, but boys would make the
farm more successful and carry on the family name (Bob’s last name, that is). She
imagines Bob’s desire for male offspring even transcends his injury, as she watches the
paralyzed man’s penis become erect: “He couldn’t talk or turn himself, and he would
never beat another horse, most likely, but he still wanted a boy. The stem let her know it,

night after night”(655). This one sign of life in Bob provokes and taunts Clara, who

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imagines conceiving another child with him: “I could go through it one more time... and
maybe it would be a boy. Though she had borne five children, she sometimes felt
barren”(655). For a moment, Clara’s need to generate new life, coupled with her sadness
over the loss of the boys, overwhelms her understanding of what she still has. She is not
barren, of course, but McMurtry’s characterization emphasizes her sense of her failure to
produce an heir and, on the broad level of the novel’s epigraph, the impossibility Of her
life and story to generate any symbolic descendents. Despite raising two girls (and, soon,
July’s son) and displaying an admirable vitality, Clara serves not as exemplar of the
“pioneer spirit” but of “how difﬁcult and destructive life in the Old West really
was”(Walter Benjamin 55) (though as suggested above, many readers have admired her .
and the novel without seeing McMurtry’s demystiﬁcation).

When Elmira arrives at Clara’s and gives birth to July’s son, she is far from her
husband and still ﬂeeing: “It was July’s and she didn’t want to have anything to do with
anything of J uly’s”(668). She bases her loathing on July’s part in fathering the boy,
disregarding her own genetic contribution. Her buffalo hunter companion Zwey (who is
addled) wonders at the abandonment: “’I wisht she’d brought the baby,’ Zwey said. ‘I
always wanted us to have one.’ The way he said it struck Luke as curious. It was almost
as if Zwey thought the baby was his”(671). So Elmira leaves the Allens with a man who
thinks he is her husband and the baby’s father, in search of ex-husband Dee Boot, with
Zwey insisting they are married. When Elmira discovers Dee is in jail and about to be
executed, she leaves town with the buffalo hunters; another family fails to be united.

Unlike Elmira, Clara reacts to the birth with love and concern, but her taking

Martin in creates another mixed family. Because of her need to feel productive (though

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she has not created Martin), she shares Martin with Bob: “I guess we got us a boy,
Bob”(669). As when she saw Bob’s erection, she imagines this baby will reverse their
familial losses and Bob’s injury: “the thought was in her head that if he saw her with a
child it might make a difference. Bob might see it, think it was theirs”(669). Yet even as
she shares “their” baby with her husband, Clara must depend for assistance on her
employee Cholo: “’If you see any goats next time you go to town, let’s buy a couple.’
Then she grew a little embarrassed. Sometimes she talked to Cholo as if her were her
husband, and not Bob”(668).

The arrival of new life on the Allen farm brings a measure of joy to Clara, but a
joy muted by her past disappointments and the circumstances of Martin’s birth: “It was
unnatural, she knew, for a mother to leave her child a day after it was bom”(669). Clara
will raise Martin as her own child, but always know the artiﬁciality of the arrangement.
When July arrives, he ﬁrst attempts to rejoin Elmira. Her rejection of him further
cements McMurtry’s confounding of family cohesion: “’I guess we got our own family
now,’ July added. His heart was sinking so that his voice almost failed, for Ellie had not
turned her head or given much more than a momentary sign of recognition”(702). Their
family relations are so skewed that Clara must tell July about his own wife: “I don’t think
that woman wants you or the baby either”(709). She must also help the father-son
relationship along: “I think it’s time you took a look at him. He’s your boy”(715).

McMurtry slowly establishes the potential romance between July and Clara, but
bases it less on passionate attraction (something we might read as organic) than on good
sense. For example, Clara tries to use logic to claim Martin from July, knowing her

relationship to the child is artiﬁcial: “I’m getting attached to Martin. . .. He ain’t mine, but

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he ain’t your wife’s anymore, either. Young things mainly belong to themselves”(710).
I—Iaving been frustrated as wife and mother, she hesitates to get close to July, but by the
time Gus and Call visit, July and Clara have something like a common law marriage:
‘ "So do you aim to marry him?’ ‘No, that’s one of the things I’m through with,” Clara
said. Augustus chuckled. ‘I hope you ain’t contemplating an irregular situation”(769).
July remains merely boarder and employee for a while, but slowly grows to love Clara.
NcMurtry gives this love subplot a stuttering pace. Just when July becomes ready to ask
Clara about marriage (and he couches it in the conditional: “would you ever marry
tire?”(900)), she has grown ready to take another husband. Yet nothing ﬂows naturally
between them. Clara hates July’s insensitivity and inarticulateness. July’s romantic
notions of love prevent him from managing the affair successfully. When Martin falls
sick and Clara stays up all night in the sick room, July misses his chance to establish the
i ntimacy of husband and wife. She scolds him: “I sat there all night in that room with
your baby. Where were you?”(903) Though they seem destined for each other by the
l ogic of the plot (because each has lost a spouse and would be better off married than
alone), McMurtry defers their formally becoming a family. Clara promises an answer to
July’s proposal, but only after he suffers for a year (ostensibly for his insensitivity): “I’m
not about to say now. . .. Ask me in a year”(904). Arguably, they already form a
makeshift family just by living together, but it is difﬁcult to imagine them as “our
forefathers,” or the family they create as bequeathing any legacy.
When readers of Lonesome Dove are tempted to see July and Clara’s pulling
together (or the Hat Creek Outﬁt’s) through adversity as symbolic of “our” forefathers’

struggles, or of “us” as a nation, they must remember the disruptions in family and group

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structure as well. Call pulls young men from their families. Elmira leaves July Johnson
in search of a previous lover, abandoning her son. July leaves his wife to track Jake
Spoon and eventually loses his step-son, deputy, and wife (not to mention severing
himself from his home and career). Clara loses her sons and husband and rejects July
until a later date. If anything, the restlessness that drives the Hat Creek Outﬁt north (for
no apparent reason, Gus argues) only uniﬁes an unsettled group, in two senses: ﬁrst, in
that they are moving north (and losing members along the way at a regular pace), and
second, in that their identity will not settle, will not become ﬁxed, will not cohere into a
“we” that Americans might ﬁnd representative.

The supposed heroism of Gus and Call forms the basis for most “heroic” readings
of Loneeome Dove. The epi graph from T.K. Whipple refers most directly to their
actions: ﬁrst as Texas Rangers who made Texas safe for Anglo settlers, second as
ranchers who drove the ﬁrst cattle to Montana. I’ve argued throughout this chapter that

McMurtry’s dissolution of families and groups distances readers from his characters and
their potential legacy. As the main protagonists, Gus and Call are most likely to provide
readers with their surrogate ancestors. However, McMurtry’s depiction of these “heroes”
debunks not only the transmissibility of their legacy (emphasizing dispersal of family
over regeneration), but also the desirability of transmitting it.l0 Further, in setting Call’s
unwillingness to question his ideals and actions against Gus’s consistent doubts about

their past and present enterprises, McMurtry makes the pair too inconsistent to follow.

 

' ° Lonesome mve does not give us much detail about how Call and Gus performed as Texas Rangers,
except to make clear that their actions were applauded by the Anglo politicians and settlers. There is not
much grist for a reading that emphasizes the Rangers’ role in expanding the American Empire. At the same
time, McMurtry acknowledges the racial politics of the Rangers’ legacy (that Mexicans like Bol are still
Outsiders in Lonesome Dove) and. more importantly. demystiﬁes these Rangers’ heroic status, albeit in
their capacity as ranchers. For a reading of a novel more attuned to the Rangers’ role in empire. see Jose

105

Rather than depicting two possible models of heroism for the reader in search of national

 

origins, he presents a complex relationship that cannot be comprehended by a simple
narrative like Whipple’s epigraph.

McMurtry establishes Call and Gus as the arbiters of law and order in their part of
Texas. As larger than life ﬁgures within the world of the novel, they stand for more than
themselves, but McMurtry consistently destabilizes their authority through Call’s
hypocrisy and Gus’s philosophical self-doubt. After Gus, Call, and company rob their
Mexican nemesis Pedro Flores, Jasper remarks, “If the Mexicans knew the Captain was
gone they’d come and take back Texas”(175). McMurtry consistently makes characters
like Jasper view the Texas Rangers’ and later the Hat Creek Outﬁt’s routing of Mexicans
in Texas (formerly part of Mexico) a personal matter rather than a broad political one.
The migration of Anglos into Texas and repulsion of Mexicans from it is presented not as
the movement of empire (with the philosophy of Manifest Destiny and the strength of the
US. military behind it), but as the work of individual men like Call and Gus. The skill
and command of the Rangers combined with the completeness of their victory in Texas
makes people on both sides of the border perceive individuals like Captain Call as heroic.
Call himself views his life’s battles (against various Native Americans and Mexicans)
this way. Flores’s death reminds him of his last victory as a Ranger: “Kicking Wolf had
kept two companies of Rangers busy for twenty years. . .. [T]he death of Kicking Wolf
meant the end of the Comanches, and thus the end of their real job”(183). Similarly, the

loss of fellow rancher Flores, with whom he has illegally “exchanged” cattle and horses

 

David Saldivar on Américo Paredes’s r e Washin ton Gomez in Bgrder Magere: Remapping
American Qultgal Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 36-56.

106

across the border for years, means the end of life on the border for Call: “We might as
well go on to Montana. . .. The fun’s over around here”(183).

Call and Gus have conﬂicting ideas about what they accomplished and what their
legacy should be. Again, they tend to view their contribution to the nation in terms of
individuals. When Call and Gus reﬂect on making Texas safe for bankers and other
settlers, Gus emphasizes the ironies, putting distance between himself and his
accomplishments as if he didn’t mean to do what he did. The settled life makes Call
similarly uncomfortable and bored, but he sticks close to the ideals behind his actions.

“It’s a funny life,” Augustus said. “All these cattle and nine-tenths of the
horses is stolen, and yet we was once respected lawmen. If we get to
Montana we’ll have to go into politics. You’ll wind up governor if the
dem place ever gets to be a state. And you’ll spend all your time passing
laws against cattle thieves.”
“I wish I could pass a law against you,” Call said. (238)
Gus tries to analyze (in its sense of “to take apart”) their role, pointing out the
contradiction between their thievery and law enforcement. As always, Call relies on the
strength of his convictions instead of questioning them; he tries to bully Gus into silence.
The exchange is played for humor, but adds to McMurtry’s critique of the transmissibility
of this legacy.

McMurtry also uses the partners’ exchanges about ﬁghting Indians this way. Call
believes in the reasons for his life’s work, but McMurtry critiques the one-sidedness of
Call’s ideals and all that has derived from them. Before setting out on the drive to

Montana, Call has a brief moment of self-doubt before deciding his actions are justiﬁed:

107

“He had quickly convinced himself it was necessary, this drive. Fighting the Indians had
been necessary, if Texas was to be settled. Protecting the border was necessary, else the
Mexicans would have taken south Texas back”(242). He doesn’t know the reasons this
drive is necessary, but hopes his “old sense of adventure” will return, “once they got
beyond the settled country”(242). His thoughts suggest adventure itself—the feeling of a
solitary individual—justiﬁes all his actions and that socio-political reasons (protecting
settlers in Texas) come later. Here again, McMurtry seems to perform what Homi
Bhabha calls “minority discourse,” for in dramatizing encounters that would be turned
into national narrative by generations of writers and readers, he “contests genealogies of
‘origin’ that lead to claims for cultural supremacy and historical priority”(Bhabha 157).
Though Call does not analyze other historical possibilities (his justiﬁcations make his
actions seem inevitable), McMurtry’s words at least provoke readers to consider that the
Indians themselves had priority in Texas, that Texas had been part of the Mexican empire
before the American one, that the conﬂicts at the heart of our myths of origins about the
West were not historically inevitable but willed and performed.

During a visit to San Antonio, Call tries to absolve himself of responsibility for
settlers’ founding towns all over Texas. This is a strange move, since Call does take
pride in his work and (as seen above) considers it to have been necessary precisely so
settlers could live there. Even though both men display anxiety about their legacy during
a bar ﬁght with young men who don’t recognize them, Gus still critiques their role in
aiding the beginnings of Anglo settlement:

“The dem people are making towns everywhere. It’s our fault, you

know.”

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“It ain’t our fault and it ain’t our business, either,” Call said. “People can

do what they want.”

“Why, naturally, since we chased out the Indians and hung all the good

bandits,” Augustus said. “Does it ever occur to you that everything we

done was probably a mistake?” (349)
Call certainly respects himself and considers the Indians and presumably Mexican
bandits beneath his notice as beyond the borders of civilization: “Nobody in their right
mind would want the Indians back, or the bandits either”(349). Through it all, McMurtry
makes clear that both men are racing civilization as white, yet if Gus cannot conceive of
what Texas would be like were Indians or Mexicans still in control (he doesn’t know how
to name what he supposes to be alternative to civilization), he does convincingly argue
against the form of civilization Anglos have established in San Antonio: “1 think we spent
our best years ﬁghting on the wrong side”(358).

Interestingly, McMurtry couches part of their discussion in this chapter not just in
terms of historical legacy, but familial heritage. As he imagines himself pushed out like
the Indians (a historical irony since he is responsible for removing the Indians), Gus
states, “If I can ﬁnd a squaw I like, I’m apt to marry her. The thing is, if I’m going to be
treated like an Indian, I might as well act like one”(358). Ultimately, of course, Gus ends
up dead in Montana and fathers no children. While arguing with Call about their
responsibility for bringing civilization, Gus switches to the idea of Call’s starting a
family: “’Call, you ought to have married and had six or eight kids,’ Augustus remarked.
If he couldn’t get anywhere with one subject he liked to move on to another”(350).

Given McMurtry’s concern with genealogy, Gus’s new subject seems not “another” but

109

the same. Just as Call is reticent about begetting Anglo life on the plains, he shows no
interest in starting a family or acknowledging his son Newt. Because Call considers his
own sexuality a failing, admitting he visited Newt’s prostitute mother Maggie would
debase him. When the boy is born, Call stays with the Rangers (in which capacity he has
not betrayed any of his ideals) rather than marrying Maggie. Her death completes his
failure: “He knew at once that he had forever lost the chance to right himself, that he
would never again be able to feel that he was the man he had wanted to be”(394).
Through Call’s heroic stature and hidden contradictions, McMurtry suggests failures in
the United States’s accounting of itself.

I ﬁnd Newt signiﬁcant in this regard. On one level, Newt is the ever-present
reminder of Captain Call’s fallibility: “The boy, growing up in the village, ﬁrst with a
Mexican family and later with the Hat Creek outﬁt, was a living reminder of his
failure”(395). He serves a demystifying function. But in a novel so concerned with
group identities, with creating a “we,”‘Newt and his father also present the possibility of
a family coming together. The mystery of Newt’s father slowly unravels for him and the
reader. Yet while the main plot threads are wrapped up—the cattle drive reaches
Montana, though Call returns to Texas—the family will not cohere. Call’s shame over
visiting Newt’s prostitute mother, combined with 17 years of neglecting his duty to Newt,
prevent Call from telling Newt he is his father. Ken Davis has shown that the young
protagonists of McMurtry’s earliest novels W, W, and
The Last Picture Show) are initiates poised on the threshold of maturity, ready for

initiation into the adult world.ll While Newt proves himself as a cowboy and makes

 

” Kenneth W. Davis, “Initiation Themes in McMurtry’s Cowboy Trilogy,” in Taking Stock: A my
McMm gasemok, Ed. Clay Reynolds, (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 174-180.

110

headway towards being accepted by the men, McMurtry does not go the ﬁnal yard and
reintegrate the Call family as a family. Like July and Elmira and then Clara, they miss
the connection, and Newt goes on without a father or his last name. If the Hat Creek
outﬁt is somewhat more integrated after their acceptance of Newt’s maturity, the ﬁnal
disavowal of familiar bonds between Call and Newt diminishes this unity.

Call makes but a few gestures towards admitting he fathered Newt. In one crucial
episode, Call rescues Newt from a whipping by an Army ofﬁcer. Call beats the man to a
pulp as the rest look on, stunned: “Newt felt he might get sick just seeing the way the
Captain punished the man”(739). On the one hand, it might appear that Call’s
overreaction shows his affection for his son, and Newt does ask, “Was it me?”(742),
suspecting Call’s protective feelings. Furthermore, if we read Call as heroic, this episode
merely shows the limits to which Call will push himself and reasserts his “greatness.” On
the other hand, Call does not acknowledge that fatherly affection for Newt underlies the
severity of his reaction to the whipping. In fact, he retreats behind his reserved facade by
reasoning, “I hate a man that talks rude”(741). Either Call hides behind a false reason, or
he acts openly to protect his son but cannot acknowledge their relationship with anything
but inappropriate violence. In either case, Call does not form a familial bond with Newt.
One can more convincingly claim the opposite, that Call’s violence in service of his
ideals prevents him from getting close to his son.

The episode would seem at least to bring Call and Newt closer. We might argue
that receiving Call’s horse, gun, and watch symbolically makes Newt his son (and New
does know the truth by the end). Call certainly expects this effect, telling Clara, “1 give

him my horse”(931) and “I put more value on the horse”(93l). Newt accepts the gifts,

lll

but rejects any connection with the Captain or anyone. Since Newt will not accept the
legacy of Call’s violence and misplaced idealism, his legacy will instead be fatherless-
ness. When Pea Eye notes, “He acts like you’re his kin,” Newt replies, “No, I ain’t kin to
nobody in this world... I don’t want to be. I’won’t be”(922). In direct contrast to the
epigraph from Whipple, Newt declares a break from the past, a refusal of fathers and
forefathers similar to that at the end of William Faulkner’s Aﬂom, Absalom. His
refusal obviates any genealogy, whether of one’s own family or one’s nation.

The book ends instead with a focus on death (including Wanz’s suicide), not the
future (the old, not the “New(t)”), with the Captain stubbornly leaving his son in Montana
to travel back to Texas in order to fulﬁll his promise to bury Gus there. Knowing the
stakes of his refusal to acknowledge his son (and receiving a rebuke from Clara), Call
comes close to establishing the ironic distance between himself and his past that Gus (and
McMurtry) maintain. When a reporter tries to get a reaction for a story about Call’s
triumphant cattle drive (“They say you’re a many of vision”), he reacts with weariness
and sarcasm: “Yes, a hell of a vision”(939). After all the work he did in service of Texas
and to establish a new life in Montana, he now thinks, “He had never felt that he had any
home on the earth anyway. He remembered riding to Texas in a wagon when just a
boy—his parents were already dead. Since them it had been mostly roaming”(942).

In the end, neither Gus nor Call has any recognized descendants. If these are
meant to be “our” forefathers in a non-ironic sense, why does McMurtry leave them
without children? But that is what McMurtry gives us in Lonesome Dove: an ironic
epigraph about a uniﬁed “we” standing for America leading to a father’s refusal to give

his name to his son, and the son’s absolute refusal to be kin to anyone. In his assault on

112

the romantic myths of the West, McMurtry forces us to reject those myths as our origins.
Somewhat like Rudolfo Anaya, McMurtry critiques origins myths; both authors call for
closer analysis of received wisdom about our national narratives. Where Anaya concerns
himself with a reconnection to the earth that ends up reifying such myths, McMurtry
deracinates his characters, leaving no recourse to a homelands or biological inheritance.
Far from reifying the myth of the West, he attempts to assault its narratives and its very
transmission. Taken together, the novels suggest not only the fragile grounds on which
national (including ethnic) identities are founded, but also the ongoing contest over how

those stories will be told.

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CHAPTER 4
Two Ways of Coming Home: The Value of Origins in Louise Erdrich’s Lye
Medicine

In their novels Lonesome Dove and Love Medicine, Larry McMurtry and Louise
Erdrich criticize the United States’ legacy of conquest and its attendant myths.
McMurtry focuses his critique on the old frontier myths and their transmission through
generations of Americans; he suggests a break with genealogy, with tracing U.S. origins
to the cowboys romanticized in so many western stories. Erdrich’s work criticizes this
legacy from the point of view of Ojibwa Indians living in North Dakota and Minnesota.
As many critics have pointed out, she seems to advocate the value of family and

community, at least for her Native American characters.l From the point of view of

 

I A great deal of work has been done on Erdrich and especially Love Medicine. Most analysis of the

novel takes notice of important themes like love, family, and Native American cultural survival. 1 will
analyze some of this work in the context of my own concerns below, but as there is no space to address all
the critics’ articles in such depth, here I offer a brief survey of work devoted to Love Medicine. An early
special issue of Studies in American Indian Literature features positive, brief responses to the novel that lay
out many of its central themes and methods. Editor Karl Kroeber mentions the book’s diverse narrative
voices and realistic depiction of Chippewa Indians engaged in creating their identities through contact with
others (“Introduction,” Studies in American Indian Literature 9.1 (Winter 1985), 1-4). Dee Brown
congratulates Erdrich for depicting for American readers little known lives as they change over time (no
title, Studies in American Indian Literature 9.1 (Winter 1985), 4-5). Ursula LeGuin praises the many
voices and highlights the theme of “who belongs” (no title, Stediee in meriean Indian Literature 9.1
(Winter 1985), 5-6). Scott Sanders goes against the grain of many critics in that he praises Erdrich’s
celebration of Native life, but sees her characters as becoming less Indian (no title, Studies in Amerjceg
Indian Litegatere 9.1 (Winter 1985), 6-11). A few critics do not really focus on the themes of home and
family. Robert Silberman reads Leve Mﬂiejne in light of Native American literary tradition and
contemporary critical theory (“Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American I
Woman,” Leei§e Erdrich’g Love Medicine: A Casebook, Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 136-154). Lee Schweninger links feminist and environmental issues (“A Skin of
Lakeweed: An Ecofeminist Approach to Erdrich and Silko,” Multicultural Literaturee threugh
Feminieyljostsglreturalist Lenses, Ed. Barbara Frey Waxman (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1993), 37-56). Jason P. Mitchell reads Igve Medicine along with Blood Meridian as debunking American
myths (“Louise Erdrich’s Love Mediein , Cormac McCarthy’s Bleed Meridian, and the
(De)Mythologizing of the American West,” Critique: Studies in Contemmrgry Fietieg 41.3 (2000): 290-
304); his comparative approach resembles that of my project, but doesn’t afford him much depth on Lem
Mgicige. Marianne Barnett reacts to her personal experience of reading the novel and focuses on themes
of love and redemption (“Dreamstuffz Erdrich’s Love Medicig ,” W 56.1 (1988): 82-
93). Thomas Matchie compares the book to Moby-Diek and sees it as “not polemic” like “so much of
Native American literature”(Matchie 478) (“Eve Medicine: A Female Moby-Djek,” Mum

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30.4 (1989): 478-491). Julie Maristuen-Radokowski provides historical and anthropological background
for the people depicted; Maristuen-Radokowski also argues the novel depicts a changing sense of
Indianness (“The Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota: Its History as Depicted in Louise Erdrich’s
Love Medicine and The Beet Queen.” Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook. Ed. Hertha D. Sweet
Wong. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 13-26). Marvin Magalaner treats her use of
symbolism, especially water (“Louise Erdrich: Of Cars, Time, and the River,”American Women Writing
Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Spac , Ed. Mickey Pearlman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.
1989), 95-108). Loiuse Mengelkoch argues that Native American writers including Erdrich are in a unique
position to portray the paradoxes of the human experience; she speciﬁcally mentions Erdrich’s concern
with mixed-blood characters (“Rejection and Renewal: The Theme of Alienation in the Writings of Five
Mixedblood Word Warriors,” Entering the Nineties: The North American Exmrience, Ed. Thomas Schirer
(Sault Ste. Marie: Lake Superior State University Press, 1991), 134-148). In an article that usefully
compares Erdrich and Leslie Silko’s different depictions of ethnicity, Susan Perez Castillo argues that
Erdrich skewers the “banalization of ethnicity in the stereotype of ‘heritage”’(233). Few critics other than
Perez Castillo see Lipsha as not saved by traditional Ojibwa culture (“The Construction of Gender and
Ethnicity in the Texts of Leslie Silko and Louise Erdrich,” Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994), 228-
36). She also wrote a useful analysis of the so-called controversy over Silko’s negative review of The Beet
Queen (based on the misunderstanding that German characters in were supposed to be Native American);
in it, she notes that Erdrich works differently, but is as politically committed to extra-textual reality as the
more obviously polemical Silko (“PoStmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-
Erdrich Controversy,” Massachusetts Review 32.1 (1991), 285-94). A. Robert Lee places Erdrich in the
context of other ethnic writers; he writes of her circular style in Love Medicine and the clash of white and
Ojibwa values, though without much analysis of these (“Ethnic Renaissance: Rudolfo Anaya, Louise
Erdrich, and Maxine Hong Kingston,” The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature Since
ﬁ7_0, Ed. Graham Clarke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 139-164).

Other critics have discussed the important themes of family, home, and Native cultural survival in more
depth. Jill R. Deans sees the many informal adoptions in Erdrich’s work as potentially subversive of
discourses of legitimacy; an analysis of Lipsha in various Erdrich novels is prominent (“File Under ‘L’ for
‘Love Child’: Adoptive Policies and Practices in the Erdrich Tetralogy,” Imagining Adoption: Essays on
Literature and Culture, Ed. Maryanne Novy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 231-249).
Claire Crabtree reads the novel as formally designed to reﬂect Native American belief and to show Native
collisions with patriarchal white society (“Salviﬁc Oneness and the Fragmented Self in Louise Erdrich’s
Love Medicine ” Contemmrgy Native American Issues, Ed. Thomas E. Schirer (Sault Ste. Marie: Lake
Superior State University Press, 1988), 49-56). Debra C. Holt argues that Erdrich shows how her
characters need to continue tribal traditions in order to maintain their identity ("Transformation and
Continuance: Native American Tradition in the Novels of Louise Erdrich,” Entering the Nineties The
North Argeg’eap Exmrienee, Ed. Thomas Schirer (Sault Ste. Marie: Lake Superior State University Press.
1991), 149-161). David Mitchell sees Erdrich’s main concern as ﬁnding something valuable (by looking to
the past) in contemporary Native American experience despite Native victimization at the hands of a hostile
dominant ideology (“A Bridge to the Past: Cultural Hegemony and the Native American Past in Louise
Erdrich’s Lgve Mgﬁcipe,” Entering the Ninep'ee: The Neg]! ﬂeg'eap Experience, Ed. Thomas Schirer
(Sault Ste. Marie: Lake Superior State University Press, 1991), 162-170). E. Shelley Reid places Erdrich’s
writing in the context of other American stories about identity; she uses the tropes of middle ground and
mediation to describe how Erdrich depicts Native Americans to a non-native audience. Reid also argues
that Erdrich revises earlier, non-native tropes for depicting identity (“The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s
Identity Narratives,” m 25.3-4 (2000), 65-86). Using the newer version of the novel, Margie Towery
discusses Erdrich’s emphasis on survival and cultural continuity. She notes that leaving home is as
important as coming home (109) for some of Erdrich’s characters, an assertion that tempers the arguments
of many readers who see Erdrich’s work as about “homing in.” Finally, while Towery makes gestures to
Erdrich’s sharper politics in the 1993 edition, she reads the novel as working towards a balance (the
balance Lipsha supposedly ﬁnds at the end) that makes it hard to see whether anything has been
accomplished; in other words. Towery de-emphasizes culture as a site of struggle (“Continuity and
Connection: Characters in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction,” W 16.4
(1992), 99-122). Susan Farrell reads Lipsha as bridging cultures at the end of the novel, thus avoiding the
trap of assimilation that traps June (“Erdrich’s We,” M 56.2 (1998), 109-112). Hans

 

115'

genealogy, then, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine operates in opposite fashion from
Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove ends with a son rejecting all ties to “kin” by way of
rejecting his father’s belated attempts to make them a family; through this plot,
McMurtry suggests a way of rejecting the US. legacy of conquest. Love Medicine ends
with Lipsha Morrissey ﬁnally meeting and deciding to help his father, who like Call is a
hero ﬁgure despite frequently breaking the law. Lipsha embraces his father even though
Gerry Nanapush has never been involved in his life as any kind of relative, let alone a
father ﬁgure. Lipsha’s dramatic encounter with the biological father he never knew leads
to him driving his father to the safety of the Canadian border before returning,
_ momentously, to the reservation he has recently forsaken. While Erdrich’s novel features
plenty of missed familial connections like those in Lonesome Dove, Love Medicine
ultimately endorses the value of home and origins.

The many critics who have written on Erdrich’s best-known novel have generally

emphasized this celebration of home and family as a step towards shoring up Native

 

Bak also cites the importance of bridging two cultures, viewing intercultural conﬂict “as an ambiguous
source of both strength and powerlessness”( 146); Bak also discusses the balance between magical and
realist elements in her novels (“Towards a Native American ‘Realism’: The Amphibious Fiction of Louise
Erdrich,” QRealisrn in Contemmrm Meﬁcan Fietion, Ed. Kristiaan Versluys (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1992), 145-170). Helen J askoski details the interplay between Indian and white elements of culture in
“Saint Marie,” showing how Erdrich uses Ojibwa “windigo” stories and Euro-American Christianity (in the
form in which reservation Indians encountered it); her analysis deftly notes that Native American identity is
constructed across various borders, but she doesn’t delve into how Erdrich constructs differences and
similarities (“From the Time Immemorial: Native American Traditions in Contemporary Short Fiction,”
Lnuise Erdricn’e Love Medicine: A Caeebook, Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 27-34). Lissa Schneider discusses storytelling itself as a healing medicine (“Eve Medicine:
A Metaphor for Forgiveness,” Studiee in Ameriean Indian Literature 4.1 (1992), 1-13). James Stripes
considers the problems in treating the relationship of Erdrich’s avant-garde ﬁctional forms and their
relationship to history, mostly in Tracks. He falsely claims that only Gerry Nanapush becomes an activist
(even in the 1984 edition, there are several characters of whom this can be said) and implicitly argues for
anthropological readings of Erdrich’s ﬁction (which would teach non-Indian readers about tribal peoples)
(“The Problems of (Anishinaabe) History in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich: Voices and Contexts,” Wicazo
sa Review 7.2 (1991), 26-33).

 

 

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American, or more specifically Ojibwa,2 identity (a key element to cultural survival).
Yet within Love Medicine, one ﬁnds a telling slippage between a valuation of family and
home in general and any endorsement of speciﬁc Ojibwa values that would preserve
them. In other words, I would argue that while Erdrich certainly highlights the
importance of home and familial connections for survival, she does not so surely mark
these survival techniques as important speciﬁcally for Ojibwa (or Native Americans in
general) as against non-Ojibwa. At stake in determining whether Erdrich’s treatment of
these themes (we might say, using the central metaphor and title, her love medicine)
applies universally or only to (some) Native Americans is the way we read and evaluate
any text. As I have argued previously, the creation of disciplines like Native American
studies (including corollaries like Native American Literature within the discipline of
literary or cultural studies) has had beneﬁts and drawbacks. The fetishization of cultural
authenticity encouraged by the growth in Native American literature, whatever its
beneﬁts, has tended to reify something we might provisionally call “Native American
culture” and in so doing has ﬁxed differences between Native and non-Native.3

In the present case, the interest in Native American ﬁction might be considered to
have beneﬁted Louise Erdrich herself (though again, the personal tragedy of her life—
lawsuits and allegations of abuse against her by some of her adopted children and the
suicide of husband Michael Dorris—mitigates her success). Inasmuch as the critical and

ﬁnancial success of Native writers can be seen to beneﬁt society—perhaps most notably

 

2 I will mostly use the spelling “Ojibwa” throughout my discussion of Erdrich’s work, as she seems to favor
it. See Hertha D. Sweet Wong’s explanation in her “Introduction” to Louig Ernn'eh’e Love Medicine:_A
Caselznk, Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9 n.1. Alternative
spellings include “Chippewa” (which Erdrich uses in Igve Medieine), “Ojibway,” “Ojibwe,” and
“Anishinaabe.”

3 For more on the exclusions inherent in classiﬁcations. see Scott Michaelsen, The Lirnite ef
WWW (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1999); the “Prolegomenon” (1-32) particularly has inspired this discussion.

117

by instructing the general public that Native Americans are not the Vanishing Americans
and therefore cannot be counted out politically, economically, etc.——consolidating gains
by Native writers under the rubric of Native American literature is beneﬁcial. I would
argue, however, that the separation and classiﬁcation of cultural artifacts according to
such anthropological deﬁnitions reiﬁes and ﬁxes competing identities, creating perpetual
conﬂict and exclusion of various others; at its limit, this sort of classiﬁcation can achieve
quite the opposite result its advocates usually imagine. To interpret Erdrich’s “love
medicine” (to use a short example I will analyze further below) as deriving from a
uniquely Native American perspective (or even to appeal to Erdrich’s mixed German-
Ojibwa heritage) is, at its limit, to claim that something essentially Native or Ojibwa has
inspired our insight (that is, whatever we might value in our reading experience); it is to
claim an alterity for Ojibwa knowledge that should preclude non-Ojibwa from
understanding Love Medicine at all—or at least limit us from learning anything about
how these Ojibwa use these Native values, lessons, or strategies to survive. The
classiﬁcation of different stories and practices by race (disguised as culture) also violates
the mixed-blood logic of the novel and would make it impossible (again, at the limits) for
the mixed-blood characters themselves to utilize these strategies.

The reader’s difﬁculty in comprehending the Native American content of the
book has in fact attracted comment from critics including Catherine Rainwater and Karah

Stokes.4 Rainwater sees Love Meﬁdicine as creating epistemological difﬁculty for its

 

’ Catherine Rainwater, “Reading Between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich,” Lou'se
Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Qasebwk, Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 163-178 and Karah Stokes, “What about the sweetheart?: The ‘Different Shape’ of Anishinabe Two
Sister Stories in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tales of Bugging vae,” MELUS 24.2 (1999), 89-
105. I will discuss Rainwater below; Stokes notes that unless readers are familiar with Anishinabe folklore.
they will necessarily misunderstand much of Leve Medieine. While she acknowledges that the novel
includes “elements of Anishinabe as well as of German-American, Catholic, and Midwestern

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readers by using two different cultural codes (Native American and Christian) but
favoring neither: “a herrneneutical impasse confronts the reader as he or she attempts to
follow diverse interpretive avenues that refuse to converge at a crossroads”(“Reading
Between Worlds” 167). Ultimately, the novel marginalizes readers in order to teach them
to revise their expectations of narrative: “This primary value—epistemological insight—
which Erdrich’s text associates with marginality might then be adopted through a revision
of narrativity”(“Reading Between Worlds” 176). Rainwater interprets the reader’s
newfound confusion or “disempowerment” as productive of a new perspective on the
world, particularly the insight that “the world takes on the shape of the stories we
tell”(“Reading Between Worlds” 177). Rainwater’s analysis displays a deep investment

6"

in the logic of multiculturalism, in which, as Scott Michaelsen puts it, we’ are still too
much like ourselves” and “have a need or a duty to hear the voices of those ‘other’ than
ourselves who share this world with ‘us”’( Limits of Multiculturalism ix). An analysis
critically informed by semiotics, reader-response theory and Native American cultural
criticism, Rainwater’s article nonetheless fails to make much of Love Medicine as a
speciﬁcally Native American artifact. A great deal of ﬁction (indeed, of creative writing
in general, including biography, poetry, ﬁlm and creative non-ﬁction) performs just as
Rainwater argues Love Medicine does—to give us a temporarily destabilizing new

perspective on the world, but also to reassure us that our telling of stories can shape our

interaction with that world.5 In the context of North American history (including literary

 

cultures”(Stokes 89), Anishinabe are implicity ﬁgured in her article as universal translators. That is, they
can understand the German-American elements, for example, but the Anishinabe elements “tantalize non-
Anishinabe readers by lending a different shape to her ﬁction, a shape that they can sense but cannot fully
distinguish”(89).

5 I would argue that one could appeal to many eras and traditions here, from the experiments of modernism
and postmodernism (Joyce, Dos Passos, numerous non-Native American postrnodemists like John Barth,
Abdelkebir Khatibi, or Robert Coover) to the world-creating works of Shakespeare and Milton.

119

history), one can see a Native American voice as potentially destabilizing, but Rainwater
makes no claims that one could not also make for other ﬁction; it is difﬁcult to
understand from her analysis how Erdrich’s book will make us less like ourselves.
Furthermore, the political effect of Love Medicine on readers—what we might
potentially see as the payoff of the novel—is implied rather than argued by Rainwater.6
Her arguments tend more towards explaining the function of ﬁction in general rather than
showing how speciﬁc Native American narration technologies help Native Americans.7
Rainwater’s attempt to distinguish between Ojibwa and non-Ojibwa knowledge in
Love Medicine typiﬁes much of the criticism on the novel. Before turning to my own
discussion of how Erdrich values ideals like “home” and “community” in Love Medicine,
especially through the two versions of homecoming (June and Lipsha’s) that bookend the
novel, I will explore the work of some previous critics who argue that Erdrich offers a
celebration of these values in Native American life and that there is something inherently

or essentially Native American about her depiction of them.8 For example, Louis Owens

 

6 Rainwater uses the 1984 edition of the novel, which has been seen as more politically subtle. See note on
my use of the 1993 edition.

7 Rainwater and Stokes’ arguments might also be more persuasive were they clearer about what disables
non-Indian readers from understanding Indian elements of Erdrich’s ﬁction; though Erdrich herself is far
from pure-blooded German or Indian. Rainwater and Stokes imply something biological (i.e. something
stronger than just being an outsider to a social group or tribe) enables some readers and not others for
understanding. An attempt to ﬁll in the gaps in their arguments is implicit rn this chapter.

8 Others could have been chosen, and some of their insights will enter my analysis. I will mention a few
critics in brief here rn addition to the extended analysis that follows. Jeanne Smith analyzes Erdrich’ s
depiction of ways extra-corporeal bodies inﬂuence identity; for Smith, needing others translates into
harmony with others (“Transpersonal Selfhood: The Boundaries of Identity in Louise Erdrich’s Lo_ve
Mgicine,” Studies; in ﬁngjean Indian Literath 3.4 (1991), 13-26. Ann Rayson points out how
characters in different Erdrich and Dorris books construct identity from a variety of cultural sources
(though there rs little analysis of Erdrich’ s contradictions rn Lov___e__ Medicine (“Shifting Identity in the Work
of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, ” Stnniee rn American Indian Literature 3 .4 (1991), 27- 36) Dennis
Walsh argues that previous critics have focused too much on Native American spirituality in the book and
ignored important Catholic elements. His argument notes that while Erdrich is familiar with religious
incorporation or syncretism, this “seems impossible”(109) in the 1993 edition of Eve Menjeine because
the anger versus Catholicism and the favoring of Chippewa codes is so strong (“Catholicism in Louise
Erdrich’s mm and jlfraeks,” eric d' n n Researc a1 25.2 (2001), 107-
127). Louise Flavin argues, contra many other critics, that many markers of “Indian cultural identity have

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(himself a crossblood critic and novelist) joins Erdrich’s concern with genealogy to her
depiction of characters’ ties to the earth. He notes that she uses both Indian and non-
Indian elements, but has little to say of what might constitute the non-Indian parts of
Love Medicine; he concentrates on the mixed-blood as marginal character within US.
society. He argues for the importance of staying close to the geographies that inform
Indian group identities; those characters who lose a “close relationship with the earth—

and speciﬁcally with that particular geography that informs a tribal identity—are the ones

 

disappeared”(64) and that Erdrich’s novel presents Ojibwa lives with realism. Hers is one of several
accounts that view the book with some pessimism; strangely she appeals (like Schultz, below) to the Indian
American as an American, though she does not explicitly show the book’s connections to a broader
“American” literature (“Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Loving Over Time and Distance,” Critigue:
Studies in Contemmrgy Fiction 31.1 (1989), 55-64). Karen Janet McKinney treats the destruction of
Ojibwa culture as a foregone conclusion (laying much of the blame on Catholicism) and reads the ending
with a mixture of how (that Erdrich’s readers will reject sentimentalism over what is lost) and pessimism
(because Erdrich portrays the survival only of individuals, not the whole culture) (“False Miracles and
Failed Vision in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,” Critigue: Studies in Contempprary Fiction 40.2
(1999),152-l60). James McKenzie’s early article contradicts some of the early, negative reviews of the
book which treated it as a sociological tract; since 1986, however, many other critics have chosen to treat
the novel in just that way, usually considering Erdrich’s own appeal to cultural continuity as her main
concern. McKenzie agrees that Love Medicine celebrates and protects a core Ojibwa culture. even
clairrring that it does this “thereby, for American culture as a whole”(56). While projecting a faith that the
novel encourages a renewal of Ojibwa culture. he astutely comments, “What precise forms such a renewal
rrright take the novel does not explore”(6l) (“Lipsha’s Good Road Home: The Revival of Chippewa
Culture in Love Medi ine ” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 10.3 (1986), 53-63). William
Gleason focuses on the subversive value of humor, but also links story telling in the novel to the survival of
Ojibwa culture; he sees the several homecorrrings as survival itself without saying much about failed
homecomings or successful leavings (“’Her Laugh an Ace’: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich’s
ane Medicine,” Lpuise Ergin'en’s Love Medicine: A Casebmk, Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000). 115-135). Unlike McKenzie and Gleason, Greg Sarris is not optimistic
about the ending, wondering, “is ﬁnding our fathers and knowing our families love us as much as they can
medicine enough?”(204) He shares his personal reactions to the book, but also to critics who rely on their
ﬁxed notions of Indianness to understand the text; he calls for readings that open dialogues between readers
and texts to “expose the intermingling of the multiple voices within”(193) (“Reading Louise Erdrich: m
m as Home Medicine,” Lenise Erdijen’s Love Medicineﬂgmek, Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 179-210). James Ruppert discusses Erdrich’s mediation of
two cultures (something critics like Owens and Schultz consistently show is happening but do not
acknowledge), noting the epistemological doubts created in the novel by juxtaposing two cultural codes;
like Rainwater and Sanis, he emphasizes that the reader of ane Medicine undergoes a jolt in reading that
can change their social and political beliefs. His reading is steeped in the multicultural logic of needing the
other to complete us (Mediation in Contemmrary Native American Fiction (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1995), especially chapters 1. 2 and 8). Nora Barry and Mary Prescott use Ojibwa stories
and rituals to frame their reading of Love Medicine, arguing that male characters particularly suffer from
the loss of traditional outlets. They read the novel as presenting spiritual values as the key to survival
(melding cultural and physical survival) (“The Triumph of the Brave: Love Medicine’s Holistic Vision,”
iti u : tudi i r Fi i 30.2 (1989), 123-138).

121

who are lost”.9 Like many critics, he lauds her treatment of “those who survive in a

difﬁcult world”(54), but for those who get lost, he can offer only the comforts of home:
“They are the Ishmaels of the Indian world, waiting like June Kashpaw to be brought
home”(54). For Owens, “the inevitable search for identity”(55) important to any Native
American novelist leads home, away from the mainstream which he (and Erdrich”)
deﬁne as against Indian culture. He reads June’s death in the snow as providing the
novel with a “mythic catalyst”(57). He combines her suicide (“June deliberately chooses
death”(56)) with the function she performs as a literary ﬁgure (“the feminine Christ-
ﬁgure resurrected as trickster”(56)). Owens uses references to Native American belief to
bolster his argument that in failing to live, or even to return home safely, June can
become a “fragmented culture hero made whole within memory and story”(56). He
argues that while in a “Euramerican context,” June’s “loss of a centered identity” kills her
and is cause for concern, in a Native context, loss of self “preﬁgures healing and
wholeness and a return to the tribal community often takes the form of physical
fragmentation”(56).

What interests me about Owens’s argument, other than the fact that he refers to a
“Native American mythology” that revels in fragmentation and sounds curiously like
postmodernism, is the difﬁculty it and other readings like it present a reader who wonders

at their political consequences for other characters like June. In a novel that seems to

 

9 Louis Owens, “Erdrich and Dorris’s Mixed-bloods and Multiple Narratives,” guise Erdrieh’s Love
Medicinenﬁgnsem, Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54.
Subsequent references to this article will be noted by page number in the text.

'0 He quotes Erdrich as feeling a kind of “dual citizenship,” ill at ease in the mainstream culture. but
nonetheless able to “take in non-Indian culture and be comfortable in both worlds.” From Joseph Bruchac,
ed., Snaivni This Way: integviewe witn American Indian Egg (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
1987), 77, 79, 83; cited in Owens, “Erdrich and Dorris’s,” 55. Signiﬁcantly, Owens does not really explore
how Erdrich’s comfort with the non-Indian world might inform different readings of Love Medieine,
readings that de-emphasize the differentiation between Indian and non-Indian sense of home and
community, though he has explored these issues in Mixedblm Messagee.

122

celebrate survivors, one must wonder, as Lipsha Morrissey does when viewing the
burned out veterans he deems “yesterday’s Action Army,” what to make of the failures.
June does not survive; Owens treats her as a literary device, a catalyst. Others make her
whole; she doesn’t do it herself. She is a catalyst because the reactions of others tell us
about their characters, including their “potential for survival”(57); in Owens’s reading,
some are lost, some are saved. His view on failures—that they serve the greater good—
seems harsher than Erdrich intends, though it resonates with the combination of Christ
and trickster imagery used throughout the book (as Owens rightly claims).ll June is a
sort of trickster for him, but clearly not one who escapes. In describing her effect on
other characters’ enhanced well-being (required because “historical time has eroded a
Chippewa sense of identity”(56)), he elides the fact of her loss: “When, at the end of the
novel, Lipsha Morrissey crosses the water to ‘bring her home,’ we know that Lipsha has
ﬁnally arrived at a coherent sense of his place within the community (including the land
itself) from which identity springs”(57). Leaving aside for now the fact that Erdrich
leaves Lipsha’s “sense of his place” very much ambiguous, Owens’s reading makes June
a crude sort of object or literary device.

Granted, Love Medicine is a literary text, and one must allow Owens to view a
character—a simulation of a person—as simultaneously a symbol. But given Erdrich’s
political aims, June’s fate should attract more commentary lest community in 2Y2
Medicine devolve into a mere exclusionary tactic, a way of marking “good” Ojibwa (the

survivors) off from the “bad” ones. Such a reading can make Love Medicine into a

 

" Kathleen Sands’s reading agrees with Owens’s on many of these issues. She reads the ending as happy
and triumphant and June as a catalyst whose failure heals others, though she is “beyond the healing
embrace of family love”(Sands 40). Like Owens, Sands doesn’t analyze the political implications of June’s
failure for the tribe’s survival (Sands, “mm: Voices and Margins,” Whve
Medicinem Ed. Hertha D. Sweet Wong, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35-42.

123

morality tale (and it reads as one, at least on the level of the literary) but only by
neglecting the political consequences implied. Many critics, like Owens, choose to
emphasize the literary and cultural without attention to the political.'2

Erdrich’s text does invite literary readings, but in the years since the first version
of Love Medicine was published, Erdrich has defended her work’s apparent apolitical
subtlety by afﬁrming her political motivations.l3 In an article for the New York Times
Book Review, Erdrich stated, “Contemporary Native American writers have therefore a
task quite different from that of other writers I’ve mentioned. In the light of enormous
loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating
the cores of culture left in the wake of the catastrophe”(“Where I Ought to Be” 23).
Critics have frequently treated this as a declaration of Erdrich’s political sensibility as a
writer.14 As Chavkin glosses it, “This is an eloquent expression of her purpose in Ignite
Medicine, and it is likely that in the 1993 expanded version of the novel Erdrich, not
happy how this task was accomplished in the original Love Medicine, intends to add to

and to clarify the stories of her contemporary survivors so that readers will respond more

 

'2 These elements do overlap, of course; for example, many critics see the circularity of the narrative and its
emphasis on orality as subversive of the dominant U.S. ideology. In my use of “political” here, I’m trying
to highlight the difference between using a character as a symbol or catalyst (literary technique) and the
potential for ﬁctional characters to represent or simulate real-world peoples and for authors to use them to
comment on conﬂicts and effect political changes (though Erdrich stays away from policy discussions, she
does discuss matters like partitioning of Ojibwa land and the building of casinos on tribal land).

’3 Some explanation of the choice of edition is called for in the case of igve Medieine. As Allan Chavkin
has pointed out. many of the additions made after the 1984 edition make the 1993 edition much more
obviously political. He writes of her “need for a Love Mgiicine that is more effective than the 1984 book
in conveying its political ideology." Chavkin, “Vision and Revision in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,”
The Chippewa Landecag pi Lenise Ernn'eh, Ed. Allan Chavkin (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1999), 90. Other readers still prefer the earlier edition. I am using the 1993 edition because of its
more explicit (and in many ways fuller and more interesting) politics, but most of my analysis will focus on
elements that appear in both editions. 1 will refer in the text to the 1993 edition of the novel by page
number.

1’ As even a cursory review of scholarship on Erdrich reveals, this single statement constitutes one of the
more important tools critics have for interpreting Erdrich. This passage is quoted in Owens, Chavkin
(“Vision”), Wong (“Introduction” and “Narrative Communities”), Maristuen-Radokowski, Gleason,
McKenzie, and Reid, to name a few.

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sympathetically to them”(“Vision” 94). Owens comments (using the earlier edition) that
“the non-Indian reader is not made to feel acutely, as he or she is in other Indian novels, a
sense of responsibility for the conditions portrayed”(“Erdrich and Dorris’s” 64); this
supplements Chavkin’s assertion about Erdrich looking for sympathetic readers, but even
in the later edition, Erdrich creates sympathy without sacriﬁcing her politics.

Chavkin sees in Erdrich’s presentation of the survivors’ stories “[t]he theme of
preserving and celebrating the core of Chippewa culture that has survived historical and
contemporary oppression”(94); indeed, Chavkin sees Erdrich as linking survival to the
celebration of culture. That is, he argues Erdrich uses Love Medicine to show that
Ojibwa must practice their culture to keep themselves alive.l5 Chavkin relies on the logic
of a multiculturalism that elides differences between people and culture. As Walter Benn
Michaels writes in critiquing Charles Taylor’s multiculturalism: “The idea is that if their
distinct culture disappears, if, say, French Canadians stop speaking French, then their
identity will have been lost, the people will not have survived”(181 n.242). Like Taylor,
Owens makes the past crucial for the creation of the self: “As nearly every Native
American author has sought to demonstrate, the loss of the past means a loss of self, a
loss of order and meaning in the present moment, and an inability to contemplate a future
that is part of that moment”(59). While Erdrich certainly cares about the survival of her
characters, she does not so closely link actual survival of people to their survival as

Ojibwa. She does not suggest that Ojibwa will die if they stop certain cultural practices.

 

'5 In another permutation, the culture of the threatened minority is treated as a balm to the majority. David
Johnson and Scott Michaelsen’s reading of American Indian College Fund advertising resonates with
Chavkin’s reading: “Indians need Anglos... in order to be themselves, which allows Indians to shore ‘us’
up, take care of ‘our’ culture”(Johnson and Michaelsen, “Border Secrets: An Introduction,” Borne; Theniy:
The Limits p1 intgel Polin'es, Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, eds. (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), 7).

125

But while Owens’s reading of June’s failure (based on her abandonment ‘of her
home) and the beneﬁt it provides others (inasmuch as they come together to shore up
their own identity in the wake of her death) is supported to some extent by events in the
novel, her death does not logically mean that any Ojibwa who leaves the reservation will
die, nor can the “potential for survival”(“Erdrich and Dorris’s” 57) of the others depend
merely on whatever Owens takes to be Ojibwa cultural practices in Love Medicine.
Owens implicitly argues (using the same logic as Chavkin) that adherence to Ojibwa
culture will save Erdrich’s characters and prevent that “loss of order and meaning in the
present moment”(59), though Owens probably means only that they would cease to be
Ojibwa were they to abandon Ojibwa ways. Yet in Owens’s analysis of Erdrich’s mixed-
bloods, it can too often be impossible to pin down what he thinks Erdrich thinks has been
lost, or how prior losses have affected (even impoverished) contemporary identity. In
reference to other plots in the novel, Owens stresses how the formal construction of m
Medicine helps Erdrich address cultural loss:

Formally, the novel’s fragmented narrative underscores the fragmentation
of the Indian community and of the identity that begins with community
and place; and the fragmentation of this community, the rootlessness that
results in an accumulation of often mundane tragedies among the assorted
characters, subtly underscores the enormity of what has been lost. (64)
Owens later makes confusing and contradictory claims to both the universality and
speciﬁcity of Erdrich’s characters. He believes Erdrich makes “the universality of Indian
lives and tragedies easily accessible to non-Indian readers”(65), and certainly non-Indians
(like those in the other novels under consideration) also experience the tension between

“rootlessness” and “community and place.” But Owens later adds that while this

rootlessness may be shared with non-Indian characters, “no reader can come away from

126

Love Medicine without recognizing the essential Indianness of Erdrich’s cast and
concems”(65). Since Owens believes that Erdrich’s characters need their past (especially
given “the enormity of what has been lost”) to understand themselves, the question of
what makes these characters and their problems essentially Indian should be the key to
ﬁguring out what they need to do to survive.

Owens offers but a few comments on what constitutes Ojibwa identity in'L_ov_e
Medicine, and most of these only implicate Indian belief rather than explaining it
substantively. For instance, he contrasts “linear, Western time”(56) with
“cyclic/accretive time”(55). As Scott Michaelsen has noted, the ﬁgure of the circle
Owens posits as essentially Indian is “reminiscent of both old and new Western traditions
of thinking... never alterior to the West”(The gains of Mﬁulticultunalism 32). He offers
“the land itself”(54) as central to Indian identity, though this is never untrue of non-
Indians, either."5 He reads June as a trickster ﬁgure, but again, the trickster is common to
most world mythologies. He notes that Eli has “lived closer to the traditional Chippewa
ways”(63), including old ways of hunting and wilderness survival quite familiar to
generations of non-Indians living in rural woodlands around the globe.17 Eli may be
Owens’s best example of traditional Ojibwa living, but Owens can say little more of him

than to echo Albertine in saying that Eli keeps his wits while his more assimilated brother

 

'6 And, curiously given Owens’s assertions that Indian characters need to be tied to the land to preserve
their identity, Erdrich seems less concerned with her characters’ relationship with the earth or non-human
environment than with interpersonal relationships. As Owens points out, some characters do criticize the
negative effects of land allotment, but Erdrich makes this concern more political than spiritual. Lee
Schweninger tries to read Erdrich’s interest in the environment, but succeeds mostly in explaining general
eco-feminist theory and not the speciﬁcs of Erdrich’s text (Schweninger, “A Skin of Lakeweed: An
Ecofeminist Approach to Erdrich and Silko,” Muitienitgel Literatures tinengh Eenn‘niggﬁeststruetmlist
Lem, Ed. Barbara Frey Waxman (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1993). 37-56).

'7 And familiar in literature as well, for example in that minor ﬁgure of American literature, the rustic Who
leads the city folk on hunting and ﬁshing expeditions (e.g. in Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy).

127

Nector becomes senile.18 In Love Medicine, at least, Erdrich does not focus on her most
traditional character, nor make the survival of others depend on the maintenance of Eli’s
lifestyle, which might be called extremely Ojibwa. Despite Owens’s insistence on‘ her
portraying some “essential Indianness,” he also acknowledges that the central image of
Indianness Erdrich builds up derives from many disparate Ojibwa voices, as Erdrich’s
seven narrators “weave their many stories into a single cloth that becomes, very
gradually, a coherent fabric of community—a recovered center”(55). Yet to admit that
the “essential Indianness” and “recovered center” will derive from so many stories rather
from just Eli’s most authentic Indianness, for example, begs the question of how
contemporary Ojibwa identity is composed.19 While searching for a “recovered center”
acknowledges very real losses, it places undue emphasis on an unattainable goal and re-
marginalizes some of Erdrich’s characters (like June). Owens praises the book for “the
heroic efforts of a fragmented community to hold on to what is left”(55) and its
“illumination of liminality”(55), but his own concern for recovering an essential Indian
center leaves behind too many characters and ignores how identity is negotiated in 1.1.1.6.
Medicine.20 His language emphasizes drawing lines to keep outsiders out based on their
inauthenticity, while Erdrich’s own language is much more forgiving and ambivalent.
Perhaps a better clue in Owen’s reading of how Erdrich constructs her characters’
negotiations between traditional Ojibwa views and contemporary non-Native American

values can be gleaned from his reading of Albertine Johnson. Erdrich makes Albertine

 

'8 Not that senility kills Nector (i.e. Nector’s deﬁciency in Ojibwa ways does not kill him); he dies as a
result of Lipsha’s botched attempt to incorporate Ojibwa love medicine and the modern convenience of
frozen turkey, on which more below.

‘9 I am avoiding adding here, “from Ojibwa and non-Ojibwa elements alike” because the very problem I
have with Owens’s analysis is his artiﬁcial identiﬁcation and separation of these elements, as if their pure
and authentic essences could ever be recovered to shore up either Ojibwa or white identity.

2° That is, identity is negotiated rather than springing from some inner essence.

128

important by making her the narrator of most of the ﬁrst chapter; like Lipsha, she is
marginal to the community of the identity and so has a different perspective on the
novel’s events than Nector, Lulu, or Marie have. Owens quotes her views on other
characters extensively (June, Eli, Nector, Lipsha). He notes Albertine’s mixed racial
background; she calls her Swedish father “doomed to wander,” and Owens adds, “(the
quintessential Euramerican condition of eternal mi gration)”(58), fixing migration as a
European value (so that rootedness can be seen as only an Ojibwa value). Albertine’s
grandmother Marie was also very white, only marginally Ojibwa in her own mind and
considered “white trash” by Indians (at least as a young woman; her transformation into
an Indian activist is a major plot development): “I don’t have that much Indian blood.”
Albertine therefore stands out from many of her cousins superﬁcially, but as Owens
notes, “she identiﬁes herself as an Indian”(58). Owens explains that while “Albertine has
run away in the past”(58)21 and behaved self-destructively like June before, “she is the
character in the novel who, among those of her generation, is most secure in her
identity”(58). Owens says nothing to dispute Albertine’s Indianness, so we must infer
that she has that “essential Indianness” he sees as required of survivors in Love Medicine.
Her sureness of identity, in Owens’s reading, would ostensibly make her centered and
stable, and therefore a survivor capable of helping the community ﬁnd its “recovered
center.”

Yet Albertine’s rnixed-race background causes problems for Owens’s reading of
which he seems unaware. He argues that her certainty is “provided, ironically, by her

mother, who says deﬁantly, ‘I raised her an Indian, and that’s what she is’”(“Erdrich and

 

2' Under Owens’s racial logic, June and Albemne’s roaming must derive from their Euramerican parts: he
has no counter explanation about why more Indian characters (like King or Gerry) would roam.

129

Dorris’s 58). Owens reads the continued survival of Erdrich’s Ojibwa as based on
recovering a lost center, a primordial Indianness that has been lost due to Euramerican
colonial violence, so he must say of Albertine’s stability that it comes “ironically” from
her mother Zelda, who has married two Scandinavian men and whose own mother has
little Indian blood. The stability can only be ironic for Owens because he claims that
Erdrich’s characters survive by reaching for an essentially Indian past identity. Owens
would expect someone who was less marginal to be as stable as Albertine, but Erdrich’s
novel works differently. Albertine’s stability comes from a combination of her
wandering between the two worlds that produced her (the Ojibwa reservation and the
white city) and her mother’s insistence on raising her Indian, whatever her blood
quantum. Zelda consciously makes Indian identity important to Albertine; Albertine’s
“essence” alone does not.22

In addition, Albertine’s cements on others foreground her marginality and the
efforts she must maintain to remain Ojibwa (when Erdrich implies that Albertine could
easily slip away to the city forever, like Henry Lamartine). Owens can make little of
Albertine’s perspective because of his emphasis on recovering lost essences; he can only
observe, “It is Albertine who understands the motivation of her great-grandmother, old
Rushes Bear, in keeping Eli at home while allowing Nector to be educated at the
government school”(59). Reading Rushes Bear’s decision and Albertine’s understanding

of it could be crucial to Owens’s reading, yet he does little with this observation except to

 

22 It should be noted. though, that Albertine’s Indian blood gives her a reason to claim this past as hers, and
Owens clearly depends on this. See Walter Benn Michaels’s discussion of heritage in Our Amegica, pp.
126-129, including footnote 224. He argues of Slim Girl in Laughing Bey that “she can make herself a
Navajo only by doubling Navajo birth with the doing of Navajo things”(Michaels 126); without the warrant
of race, there is no reason for Slim Girl (or Albertine) to claim Indian identity. By the same token, this
identity must be kept up by “lining up her practices with her genealogy”(Michaels 127); Owens seems to
rely overmuch on what the grounds of race (“essential Indianness”) can provide, thus his need to see
Albertine’s stability as ironic.

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comment (along with Albertine) that Nector loses his mind, “a victim of mechanical,
entr0pic, historic time, while his brother has remained alert to the reality of his more
traditional life”(59). Given the negative consequences of. Rushes Bear’s choice, what
does Albertine understand? Why did she want to gain “a son on either side of the
line”(Love Medicine 19)? Owens’s logic implies that Albertine comes to an
understanding of the value of traditional Ojibwa ways (again, this understanding must
come “ironically” given how little Indian blood Albertine has), but then she would also
need to realize that letting Nector go to the government school was a mistake since
nothing is gained by it; instead, Albertine understands that Rushes Bear ﬁgured that
balancing her son between the two societies was best. Owens wants to blame Nector’s
later senility on an encounter with a time system he can’t understand, but Albertine has
also gone away to school and work in the city and withstood the “kind of disastrous life
that killed June”(“Erdrich and Donis’s” 58). She has survived to be the most stable
member of her generation, “most secure in her identity”(58). What Erdrich demonstrates
through Rushes Bear’s decision and Albertine’s later understanding of it can not be
merely Albertine’s appreciation for traditional Ojibwa ways and for the destructive power
of government schools and “historic time,” for Albertine demonstrates that one can
survive by living on both sides of “the line” and remain “essentially Indian” while doing
so (as even Owens would agree).

Lydia A. Schultz demonstrates similar difﬁculty in reconciling Erdrich’s
treatment of characters marginal to Ojibwa and Euro-American cultures, while

simultaneously arguing that Erdrich emphasizes and preserves Ojibwa community and

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contributes to the deﬁnition of “American.”23 Schultz shares my concern with analyzing
whether community values can “travel,” or rather whether the survival of Ojibwa culture
as practiced by characters many of whom are also Euro-American holds any promise for
people in general. Schultz concludes that Erdrich succeeds in making the local and
particular apply to the universal. Like Chavkin above, she uses the logic of
multiculturalism, trying to balance Erdrich’s presentation of the particular and universally
human: “By bringing a marginalized culture to a mainstream audience, Erdrich Opens up
the possibility of greater understanding”(93). By using fragments of Ojibwa stories in the
more familiar novel form, Erdrich “enables peOple to see their shared humanity” and
makes “dorrrinant culture more inclusive by redeﬁning what it means to be
American”(94). Like Owens, Schultz displays concern over Ojibwa as a real tribe
(politically deﬁned) but must mix this concern with readings of Erdrich’s use of symbol
and appeals to the spiritual, placing in doubt any political reformation Love Medicine
might accomplish. That is, Schultz mutes the value of her appeal to a more inclusive
dominant culture by also valuing a spiritual and metaphoric survival. Finally, Schultz
uses and abuses notions of heritage and culture in such a way as to forestall the
inclusiveness she sees in the novel, at times implying unbridgeable differences between
Ojibwa and Western cultures.“

Schultz begins by contrasting Erdrich’s use of multiperspectivity with the
modernists’, pointing out that Erdrich ultimately creates a community with many voices

rather than chaos. She initially over-emphasizes the disorganization of Love Medicine’s

 

23 Lydia A Schultz, “Fragments and Ojibwe Stories: Narrative Strategies in Louise Erdrich’s Love

M2113” WM: 18-3 (1991). 80-95.
2’ It need hardly be added that her appeal to the notion of culture enables much of this difﬁculty, in
particular her appeal to Ojibwa folk stories collected by difference-seeking anthropologists.

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multiple narrative voices: “Love Medicine appears to depict the world as a chaotic place
beyond any communal organization”(Schultz 80); then Schultz claims Erdrich formally
subverts modernist use of multiperspectivity by making readers unify the text. Through
this process, Native American and non-Native readers alike examine their attitudes
towards Native Americans, leading up to the ultimate redeﬁnition of “American.”25
Schultz addresses the problems of treating Erdich as “ethnic,” since this othering process
can make her characters inscrutable. She concludes that “Erdrich attempts to avoid being
exoticized by making her characters recognizably human above all else”(82), but her
article focuses more on precisely those elements in Erdrich’s writing most likely to seem
exotic: “Erdrich’s heritage as a Native American provides her with a world view that
differs substantially from mainstream American, or European-inherited, views”(82). She
mentions the emphasis on orality, community, and the interconnectedness of all things
(features which are not unfamiliar to the Western tradition, either). Her language and use
of Paula Gunn Allen’s description of the “sacred hoop” (while ironically showing the
inter-connectedness of all things) set up Indian and non-Indian as absolute opposites. For
example, she reads the deaths of Henry Lamartine, Henry, J r., and June as giving “an
ambiguous vision of the world” in the “dominant culture,” but as something else within
“an Ojibwe world view”: “These deaths serve merely as the physical conclusions to lives
that are already spiritually dea ”(84). Schultz does not discuss whether this same
conclusion about the three tragic lives could be reached using the dominant culture’s

world view (which, if truly ambiguous, would at least consider this possibility in addition -

to another one); despite her using the label “ambiguous” for the dominant culture, then,

 

2’ In the emphasis on narrative strategy, Schultz’s argument parallels Catherine Rainwater’s (see above),
but Rainwater makes no appeals to general American culture.

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she opposes two fixed cultures which must read these events a certain way rather than
emphasize the play of meaning available to both.

Her reading of Lulu’s reaction to her husband and son’s suicides takes this further
(and takes her further from the ultimate goal of making these stories ﬁt into a deﬁnition
of “American” which she paints along the way as absolute and unchanging). She sees
Lulu’s lies about the deaths (her public claims that they are accidents, not suicides) as
maintaining “the sense of communal harmony”(84). Lulu and the community do not
want to focus on the Henrys “inability to cope”(84), even though they all share it to some
degree; Schultz takes this decision to extremes, making the entire community’s survival
dependent on it: “At this point she chooses to preserve what community remains on the
reservation rather than to risk its loss by exposing how it has been corrupted by the
dominant culture’s values”(84). Of course, the reservation has long been affected, if not
“corrupted,” by non-Ojibwa values—indeed, its very existence as a reservation is a
United States imposition—so the need to lie about the community’s very identity seems
odd. Like Owens, Schultz has difﬁculty reconciling the failures with the survivors. If
two men kill themselves (thus failing to survive the imposition of a foreign culture), the
rest of the comrtrunity will die unless it lies about its own composition, according to this
logic. She also treats June’s failure as does Owens: “she has achieved a metaphorical
homecoming when thoughts of her bring together the community she sought”(85).
Schultz seems to think Ojibwa readers will be more satisﬁed with this homecoming since
it uniﬁes them while reducing their numbers; she appeals implicitly to an Ojibwa identity
where spiritual survival trumps physical. If J une “failed in her physical attempt to return

home”(85), the logic goes, at least her homecoming has metaphorical value to others.

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This reading may be based on accurate understanding of Ojibwa religion (Schultz appeals
to several anthropological writings; Schultz 94-95), but it sets up a false opposition
between the two cultures. Arguing that Ojibwa will be satisﬁed to read June’s failure as
some kind of victory makes the political necessity of improving Ojibwa lives less urgent;
on the opposite side, the arugment de-emphasizes the Christian (ostensibly Western,
though of course in this context it is foolish to see it as alterior to contemporary Ojibwa
life) component, making it seem as if western and/or Christian readers will miss out on
June’s transcendence.

Schultz further cements the differences between Ojibwa and non-Ojibwa cultures
by citing Barbara Johnson: “Difference is a misreading of sameness, but it must be
represented in order to be erased.”2‘5 I would argue the representation of boundaries
between cultures solidiﬁes rather than erasing difference, especially in its reliance on the
culture concept, wherein increasingly complex permutations of identity create more
boundaries. Furthermore, the quotation from Johnson does not describe what happens in
Love Medicine (or, I would argue, in the disciplines of Native American or western
American literature, taken as disciplines). Schultz argues (like Rainwater) that “getting
us to employ various Ojibwe points of view” makes readers “perceive how the members
of that culture have been marginalized by dominant American culture”(93), but
identifying (erroneously) perspectives and values which are shared by many groups
(orality, importance of community, the unity of all things) as belonging to one group

ﬁxes that relation of domination rather than relaxing or remedying it.

 

2" Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” “Race,” Writing, and
Differenc , Ed. Henry Louis Gates. Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 323; quoted in
Schultz 93.

135

Adding to the confusion of her reading, Schultz acknowledges that there can be
multiple deﬁnitions of Native American, though her classiﬁcations do not allow for the
signiﬁcant overlap that inheres in the relations between Ojibwa and non-Ojibwa in the
book. Hearkening back to her unease with treating Erdrich as “ethnic,” she writes,
“Erdrich answers our implicit question of ‘What is it like to be Native American?’ by
debunking the idea that there is such a thing as a Native American view, by helping us to
acknowledge that there is not even a single Chippewa view”(92). This analysis ﬁts the
novel and Schultz’s descriptions of its multiperspectivity well, but begs the question of
how one can separate and classify Native and non-Native knowledges within the book
without recourse to “such a thing as a Native American view.” An incomplete hint
comes from her treatment of the effect of Western religion, where she distinguishes
between wholesale and partial acceptance of the other: “Western religion only harms
those Native Americans who choose to embrace it wholesale” while those “who accept
only the aspects of the religion that reinforce their world view... manage to coexist with
Catholicism”(88). Here, Schultz seems to claim that despite the dominance of western
culture, Ojibwa can still pick and choose which aspects of it to believe “without being
absorbed or rejected by it”(88); this would seem to indicate that there is no such thing as
a western view either (given how easy it is to “choose” not to buy into it “wholesale”),
but would therefore de-emphasize the power of the dominant culture.

Schultz’s absolute delineation of differences (including religious ones) forces her
into some ridiculous readings; for example, she ﬁrst argues that Marie manages to coexist
with Catholisicm, but then blames “Western religious and cultural constructs”(88) like

“ﬁdelity and monogamy” for harming Nector, Lulu and Marie’s friendship and courtship.

136

 

For Schultz to build up the importance and value of Lulu and Marie’s friendship, she
must overstate the barriers to it, including the western concept of monogamy that
prevents Nector from marrying both women: “The friendship that develops after Nector’s
death allows us to see what might have happened if Nector had been able to marry both
women, as Ojibwe culture condoned”(88). So conﬁning are the “labels of Western
culture”(88) that they prevent two women from becoming “allies who work together to
build a community”(88).27 Curiously, Schultz invests western morality with a shocking
power to inﬂuence behavior; just as surely as western religion and culture has rules, it has
rule breakers, adulterers in this case, and the same can be said for Native American
culture (even if ﬁdelity and monogamy seem foreign to it). Given her belief that Marie is
not absorbed by her Catholicism, Schultz’s argument that Catholicism prevents Marie
from having a friend is illogical at best, though it feeds into her reading of Erdrich’s view
on assimilation.

Those “characters who try to assimilate, such as King and Beverly, are failures in
the views of both cultures”(88), she writes, though it is not clear that either man is
completely assimilated. The main evidence for their assimilation into western culture
seems to be that neither cares enough about the community (both are selﬁsh). Beverly
and King both try to succeed off the reservation (we do also see King on the reservation)
and become “misﬁts, not because they are American Indians, but because they attempt to
deny that heritage”(89). This denial is true of Beverly, but less convincingly so of King.

Schultz contrasts their rejection with acceptance: “those who accept their heritage while

 

27 The reading is ridiculous on many levels, too many to mention above. Part of the plot between Nector.
Marie and Lulu hinges on their changing over time and maturing. The friendship between the two women
is enabled by Nector’s death because of their shared life experiences, not disabled because of Nector’s
earlier inability to marry both women. This emphasis on what Lulu and Marie can now do “to build a
community” also posits that there was no community before Nector’s death.

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still participating in the modern world, like Gerry and Lipsha, become almost militantly
heroic”(89); they “adapt without assimilating.” By choosing to follow only parts of
western religion that ﬁt with their worldview, Aurelia and Marie adapt and so survive.
Adaptation would seem to include some acceptance of the other culture and some denial
of one’s own culture, calling into question the value of acceptance. Schultz sets up ’
acceptance/denial of heritage as binary opposites: King is a rrrisﬁt because he assimilates,
Lipsha a hero because he does not. However, Erdrich’s characters usually ﬁnd
themselves somewhere in the middle. Albertine goes to a non-tribal school and works in
the city, yet she is stable and proud enough of her minimal Indian heritage to insist on it
as her primary identity. For most of the novel, Lipsha is torn between two worlds, and
his coming home at the end cannot guarantee his future stability.28 Finally, sticking to
Ojibwa traditions, as June does in her early life under Eli’s tutelage, guarantees nothing.
Perhaps acceptance goes beyond admitting that one is Ojibwa and the behavior that
would show this, but I would argue that merely ending his ﬂight to the city and returning
to the reservation, though they may constitute Lipsha accepting his heritage, can not
guarantee future success or failure for him, much less indicate the survival of Ojibwa
culture. As Karen McKinney puts it, “It seems likely that he has achieved his own
survival, but the survival of his people as a viable society is still in doubt”(159).
Ultimately, readers who treat the ending as positive and hopeful (inasmuch as it seems to

promise the survival of a culture) connect Lipsha’s survival to group survival, while those

 

28 In addition, Schultz’s argument that Erdrich debunks “the idea that there is such a thing as a Native
American view”(92) is disingenuous in light of her assertion that Lipsha accepts his identity. If it is
difﬁcult to pin down Ojibwa identity (and I think Schultz is correct in arguing this and in clarning Erdrich
shows it), how exactly does Lipsha know he is accepting Ojibwa identity and not something else? The
broader the “collection of Ojibwe eyes”(92) that make up the communal perspective, the further from any
kind of centered identity that might be called by one name; given the long Ojibwa encounter with various
whites, the more likely that a broadly deﬁned Ojibwa identity will cease to be Ojibwa at all at its borders or
contact zones.

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who (like McKinney) read the ending with more skepticism point out the distinction
between individuals and whole societies.

As I stated above, what is at stake in deciding such questions is our way of
interpreting other texts, Native American, Chicano, or white. Much of what happens in
Love Medicine would seem to support a “Native American reading” of this text by a
mixed-blood German-Ojibwa. Indeed, as a review of the criticism shows, many critics
have focused on elements in the novel which seem Ojibwa or generally “native” and
combined Erdrich’s use of these elements (including oral storytelling, the interconnection
of all things, and the value of family) with research into other Native American stories
and rituals (both from Ojibwa sources and non-Ojibwa writers like Paula Gunn Allen) to
present a reading that shows how Ojibwa culture has survived and can continue to
survive. Yet as seen in the discussion of Louis Owens’s reading of Love Medicine, 3
reader could glean such an interpretation without the beneﬁt (or impediment) of
culturally speciﬁc markers and, furthermore, apply the book’s lessons to non-Ojibwa
lives. Erdrich’s main theme (what we might call the book’s payoff or primary value,
other than the surface attractions of its accomplished, poetic use of English) is that love
heals. To credit this message to “the essential Indianness of Erdrich’s cast and
concems”(Owens 65) is to circumscribe harsh limits indeed for the novel. The origins of
Erdrich’s characters matter to them not because of their Indianness, but more simply
because their origins provide security, even if some characters miss out on it.

Erdrich plots out the theme of love’s reconstructive power through family
relationships, but not all of these are healthy or productive. A comparison of the

characters of June and Lipsha, especially through their “homecomings” in the ﬁrst and

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last chapters, will reveal that conring home, whether to the reservation or elsewhere,
offers hope but no guarantees for cultural or personal survival and success. June fails to
get home, and her “death haunts the novel”(McKenzie 58), exerting an inﬂuence on the
rest of the book beyond what Lipsha’s homecoming in the last chapter promises for the
future. Her failure to ﬁnd a good road home to the reservation represents the
impossibility of total survival for Ojibwa or any people. Communities will always leave
some people behind, Erdrich suggests. June is important to the other characters, and her
death not only sets the tone for the novel, but also sets in motion the remembrances that
form it. Louise Flavin makes June’s very marginality thematically important, calling her
“a ﬁgure more often on the perimeter of others’ lives than clearly a center of
focus”(Flavin 62). And as Louis Owens argues, June is a catalyst who makes things
happen for others but cannot save herself. The central ﬁgures of this group of Ojibwa are
easy to identify—Lulu, Marie, Eli, Nector—but Erdrich concerns herself equally with
marginal ﬁgures like June and Lipsha, thereby questioning how the group both coheres
and excludes.

June is the ﬁrst piece of the genealogical mystery that Lipsha decodes throughout
the book. Since she has been away from the reservation for most of his life, Lipsha has
not been able to conﬁrm rumors that she is his mother; furthermore, her absence has
forced Lipsha to look outside the reservation for his origins, thus destabilizing his
identity. Surrounded by relatives with established family ties living in the place of their
origin, Lipsha becomes marginalized as tribal members mark off the “blood children and
the took-ins, like me”(253). June’s return does not publicly resolve Lipsha’s dilemma,

though it does set off the events that lead to him conﬁrming his father’s identity.

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The opening of Love Medicine, however, provides even less resolution, throwing
into contrast life on and away from the reservation and forcing readers to ponder whether
June’s Ojibwa origins matter. The ﬁrst chapter is titled, “The World’s Greatest
Fishermen,” a reference to a hat that King, Jr. wears and which his uncle Eli claims as the
greater ﬁsherman. The hat’s wording is not pluralized, but Erdrich makes the title
“Fishermen” to contrast two sets of identities: King’s false or ironic one and Eli’s'true
identity as the greatest ﬁsherman. The title also refers to Jesus Christ’s Biblical metaphor
linking ﬁshers of ﬁsh to ﬁshers of men. Since water imagery appears throughout the
book, a reader sees immediately that June is drowning and needs rescue (either/both
physical aid and spiritual salvation). Erdrich sprinkles in signs to highlight June’s past
and present paths. She ﬁnds herself in “oil boomtown Williston” on the “morning before
Easter Sunday,” “killing time” before a bus can “take her home”(1). June is not from this
oil boomtown, implicitly marked as a Euro-American place and not June’s home,
especially since Erdrich calls June “a long-legged Chippewa woman”; even though she
has spent most of her time away from the reservation, Erdrich suggests, the home where
she could never rest is still her home. Other signs mark the familiarity of the oil town for
June, such as the man who signals to her from a bar: “He looked familiar, like a lot of
people looked familiar to her. She had seen so many come and go”(1). Yet this
familiarity does not stabilize the setting, since so many of the people live transient lives.

June has passed through the lives of many men, yet sits down with this one, too,
hoping he will be different. Like the others, he has cash (from oil rig work) and notices
her physical appearance, making suggestive jokes and buying her drinks. While June has

made preparations to go home (“Her hair was rolled carefully, sprayed for the bus

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trip”(2), she has bought her ticket already), her eagerness to return dissipates with the
chance of a good party: “They weren’t expecting her up home on the reservation. She
didn’t even have a man there, except the one she’d divorced. Gordie”(3). Elsewhere in
the novel, Erdrich will present Lulu’s similar willingness to change male partners with
loving forgiveness, in “The Good Tears.” Here, however, she presents June’s
promiscuity as a false attempt at reinvention and rebirth. Beyond the opening sentence’s
reference to Easter Sunday, Erdrich uses egg imagery to suggest rebirth, ﬁrst applied to
eggs June shares with her next male companion, then applied to June herself (her top is a
pink shell which she peels off). After some form of intercourse with the oil worker, June
shoves herself out from beneath his body into the cold outside the car: “It was a shock
like being bom”(6).

June does undergo a kind of metamorphosis here, with ambiguous results. As she
gets dressed in the winter cold, she realizes “it was unclear whether she was more drunk
or more sober than she’d ever been in her life”(6). She ﬁnds herself far from the oil
town, but further from home when she decides “to walk home instead of going back
there”(6). As one knowledgeable about the outdoors (a legacy from her uncle Eli, who
raised her), June can recognize that the “Chinook wind”(6) coming over the plains could
kill her, but she continues on “even when her heart clenched and her skin turned
crackling cold”(7). Some inner part of her already transcends her earthly body: “the pure
and naked part of her went on”(7). Erdrich contrasts the physical impediments and
spiritual transcendence: “The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but
June walked over it like water and came home”(7). She presents two possibilities (both

of which can be simultaneously right): June is choosing death to end her miserable life, or

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June is simply choosing to become immortal, to transcend her physical body. Catherine
Rainwater argues that these two elements provide an “Encoded
‘undecidability’”(“Reading Between Worlds” 165) that marginalizes readers and makes
them more accepting of alternative epistemologies, namely, American Indian
knowledges. She notes (with rather too great an emphasis on the non-Indian reader’s
naivete’), “In Love Medicine, June’s ‘home’ might not be a Christian heaven but instead
the reservation, where her spirit, according to Native American beliefs, mingles with the
living and carries out unfinished business”(l65).

Rainwater’s reading resonates well with later parts of Love Medicine. especially
“Crown of Thorns,” in which Gordie thinks he sees June’s spirit (though here, too,
Christian imagery complicates a Native American reading); it also treats the ambiguity of
the language appropriately. Upon further analysis, though, what reader lOoking for
Christian signs and themes will think that a woman who has just had intercourse with a
stranger (and not for the ﬁrst time) is going to heaven when the word “home” is written?
I am not presenting a straight reading of the chapter based on Christian dogma, but rather
complicating Rainwater’s reading, which oversimpliﬁes “home” into “a Christian
heaven,” when Erdrich more likely (given June’s past) means only to indicate a general
transcendence of the earthly, fallen body. Also, while Rainwater suggests otherwise,
western Europeans also have a tradition of ghosts or spirits walking the earth, troubling
the living; to read June as returning home to the reservation as a spirit to haunt Gordie is
not necessarily to read the book based solely on Native American codes. I grant that the
ambiguity of Erdrich’s language enables both readings and leads to Rainwater’s

“herrneneutical impasse”(“Reading Between Worlds” 167), but wish to turn the reading

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of June’s homecoming towards political ends. While deciding which code ultimately
rules June’s death is political, Erdrich’s language makes this decision impossible and
therefore makes the process fruitless. In other words, what happens to June’s spirit, were
it possible to determine it to be in a Christian heaven or on the reservation, matters less
than what her failed homecoming means for the cultural survival of Erdrich’s characters.

Erdrich herself has made cultural survival of the greatest importance, and June’s
failure makes this survival less complete. Readers like Owens and Rainwater attempt to
make June’s death less of a failure, Owens by arguing that June’s death catalyzes more
positive actions in the book, and Rainwater by arguing that Erdrich uses June’s
transcendence and the Native American values it represents to marginalize non-Indian
readers into a position more accepting of Native beliefs. None of this helps June survive
or reintegrate with the group she has forsaken during her exile in the white world of
North Dakota oil towns. June’s homecoming reads like a miracle spiritually and
symbolically (recasting Christ’s walking on water and resurrection), but literally like a
pathetic tragedy. Whatever we make of her homecoming ﬁguratively, it sets a somber
tone for the rest of “The World’s Greatest Fishermen” and starts a chaotic series of events
among her family back home. Just as June’s origin on the reservation fail to help her
come home,29 so too does the rest of the family have difﬁculty cohering despite their
common origins and family ties.

Albertine Johnson narrates the rest of the chapter, which concerns the aftermath

of June’s death. She learns from her mother (Zelda) that “June was gone—not only dead

 

2” That is, the fact that the reservation is her home cannot guarantee her survival. Of course, she fails
herself as well by staying away so long. Her separation from the reservation and Ojibwa values is usually
seen as the reason for her failure. I don’t deny this, but am more interested in what this indicates about how
groups cohere around supposedly ﬁxed notions of group identity and origins.

144

but suddenly buried, vanished off the land”(7). Albertine’s reﬂections blame the “false
spring”.(7), with its sudden snow, for June’s death; this theme of falseness comes
immediately after June’s walking on water and casts aspersions on the possibility of
June’s transcendence. Albertine has her own difﬁculties with coming home. She lives
“far from home... in a white woman’s basement”(7), and news of June’s death makes her
“feel buried, too”(7). Albertine marks the difference between herself and her landlady
pointedly, placing herself beneath the white woman (buried in the basement) and in a
poor position to help her family. Albertine displays some self-consciousness about her
Indian identity, though she is probably just one-quarter Ojibwa. She also has differences
with her own mother, again showing that family ties and shared origins guarantee
nothing. She jokes about reading up on “Patient Abuse” in her nursing textbook that
“[b]etween my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods
of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis”(7). She likens their quarrels to a genetic
or natural condition.

Soon her thoughts turn to June and June’s struggle to ﬁt in with the rest of the
inter-connected families of the reservation. June’s mother dies and her father runs off to
the city. She marries Gordie though “they had to run away to do it. They were cousins,
but almost like brother and sister”(8). Here, Albertine implies that too close a family
connection is damaging (which helps explain her distance from her mother). June
“wasn’t much as a mother”(8) and runs off, “leaving her son King”(9). What makes June
incapable of staying home? Albertine mentions her propensity for fun and her beauty,
but nothing beyond June’s singularity seems to explain her inability to ﬁt in. On one

hand, her beauty is so representative of her group that Grandpa calls her “Miss Indian

145

America”(9); on the other hand, she is “’like a no-good Morrissey”’(9), like her father,
and genetically doomed to wander. (As I discussed above, this is not unique to Indians or
Caucasians in the novel, as Albertine’s father Swede Johnson is also “doomed to
wander”(10).) She promises to succeed in the white world and send for King, but it never
happens; thus King is also doomed to alienation from the group. Albertine sees June’s
death as no accident, but the inevitable result of her failure to succeed in various oil-
boom towns. ,While it might seem that June’s abandonment of Ojibwa ways causes her
failure and thus her death, Albertine’s analysis resists this explanation. Even far from
home, June’s origins remain strong, as if embedded in. her very body: “She’d have known
by the heaviness in the air, the smell in the clouds. She’d have gotten that animal sinking
in her bones”(lO). Here, Erdrich posits a value to origins (for example, June’s
upbringing) that cannot be destroyed (even by the destruction imposed by the non-Indian
world). June has been away from home most of her adult life, but still retains the sense
of nature her uncle Eli taught her. So too can Albertine detect the reservation from afar
despite her long absences in the city: “I always knew it was coming a long way oft”(l 1).
This retention of key cultural values (in this case, a close connection to the natural world)
problematizes the discourse of cultural survival surrounding the book and its
interpretations.3o Lydia Schultz claims that June’s (and Henry’s) deaths “serve merely as
the physical conclusions to lives that are already spiritually dea ”(84), but this does not
account for or examine the incongruities between June’s desire to die and her continued

connection to the earth. Barry and Prescott refer to June as “trapped between the rituals

 

3° I call them “cultural values” here in keeping with other critics of the book; I have tried to suggest that
such knowledges are not inherently, essentially, or uniquely Ojibwa or Indian at all, and that separating '
them off as “cultural” only preserves damaging differences.

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of two genders”(l32), as if June’s problem were not a disconnection from her native
culture but a confusing overabundance of it.

Without explicitly saying so, Albertine compares herself to June. After hearing
the news, she ﬁnds a place to lie and “thought of Aunt June until I felt the right way for
her”(10); she immediately follows this “right way” with “I was so mad at my mother,
Zelda”(lO). Albertine’s anger, connected her to thoughts of June, stems from her
mother’s careless (or perhaps intentionally harmful?) failure to tell her earlier of her
aunt’s death, but it also goes far back to her mother’s past. Unlike June, who abandons
her son, Zelda works hard to raise Albertine, but also blames Albertine: “I’d been the one
who’d really blocked my mother’s plans for being pure”(10). She refers to Zelda’s long-
ago desire to join the Catholic convent, itself likely representing a desire to join
something powerful and above reproach (at least from the perspective of a young Ojibwa
girl; Erdrich critiques Catholicism’s negative effect on the Ojibwa), far different from the
impurity of Zelda’s mixed-blood family. Zelda and Albertine are both mixed-bloods, and
Zelda makes her daughter resolutely proud of her Indian heritage. Albertine’s knowledge
of the land, made parallel to June’s, does not disappear even though she removes herself
from home to study nursing. Yet it is Albertine’s desire to be and to act Indian which
most mark her as different from June. Though June was physically representative enough
to be called “Miss Indian America” and knew a great deal of woods lore—indeed,
Erdrich marks June as unambiguously Indian—her refusal to acknowledge this seems to
separate her from the group. Albertine and Zelda behave in many ways that are un-
Indian, including their devotion to Catholicism and Zelda’s marrying several Swedish

husbands. However, their political investment in Indian identity keeps them solidly

I47

within the group. Zelda and Albertine both seem to realize that Ojibwa identity is a
political construction more than a blood quantum or even a kind of knowledge. They
may lack June’s woods lore, but they know Indian politics and consider themselves
absolutely Indian. “The policy of allotment was a joke... I saw as usual how much of the
reservation was sold to whites and lost forever”(12), Albertine comments, without any
sense of irony over her and her ancestors’ whiteness. When King arrives with his wife
Lynette, Zelda comments (again without irony), “There’s that white girl,” to which her
sister Aurelia replies, “What about your Swedish boy?”(15) The desire for purity of
Zelda’s youth is not quite gone, only now she seeks to keep her family purely Indian, a
foolish dream considering her own previous racial and cultural boundary crossings.
Erdrich combines the plot of family discord with commentary on how groups
separate insiders and outsiders. Aurelia continues to juxtapose Zelda’s racism towards
Lynette with Zelda’s own crossings: “Jeez, Zelda! Why can’t you just leave it be? So
she’s white. What about the Swede? How do you think Albertine feels hearing you talk
like this when her Dad was white?”(24) Zelda’s racist insults mark off Lynette as a
perpetual outsider, even though she belongs to the family. Her former husband is also an
outsider, and Albertine distances herself from her father: “I feel ﬁne. . .. I never knew
him”(24). Aurelia does not object when Zelda insists, “My girl’s an Indian. . .. I raised
her an Indian, and that’s what she is”(24); she accepts the composite nature of Indian
identity, but criticizes Zelda’s racism both on general principles and because Albertine
should (though she happens not to) feel some part of her is being insulted by her mother’s
jibes. Of course, Erdrich’s own formulations of character are not racist; as I argued

above in my critique of Louis Owens, Albertine is stable because she bridges white and

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Indian, not despite her part-white blood. Rather, Erdrich portrays how her characters
struggle to identify what and who is and is not Ojibwa, and thereby what would be
considered the survival of Ojibwa culture. Her Indian characters continue to inter-marry
with whites, making their racial identity more indeterminate, even as they continue to
assume and attempt to ﬁx the differences between white and Indian (as when King
cements on his wife, “She don’t ﬁt in”(26), ignoring that he and his wife fail to ﬁt in
because of their personalities, not race).

As the family gathers to remember June, Albertine continues to reﬂect on the
family’s history, including how the family retained land during periods of allotment and
termination. Her grandfather, Nector, was sent to government schools and so learned
enough to understand politics: “He’d been an astute political dealer”(l9). His brother,
Eli, was kept home by Rushes Bear to learn traditional Indian lore. While Louis Owens
sees Nector, now a senile old man, as a victim of western time (“Erdrich’s and Dorris’s”
59), Nector has in fact done much to preserve the family’s Indian identity, if more
politically than culturally: “he’d kept the land from losing its special Indian status under
that policy called termination”(l9). At worst, Rushes Bear’s decision to raise one son
“on either side of the line”(19) supplies balance to the group, with Nector preserving their
political rights and Eli their cultural practices. At most, perhaps Nector’s contribution ,
outweighs Eli’s, for it keeps the families Ojibwa and not something else, while Eli, who
“raised June like his own daughter”(23) seems to have had less success preserving
Ojibwa lives. And without the political designation of Indianness, there would be no
reason to group these characters together at all (given that so many of them are half or

more white and do not engage in Indian practices as Eli does). Given Erdrich’s concern

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for cultural survival, it is easy to understand why Owens values Eli and devalues (and
even pities) Nector, but the logic of Erdrich’s own concerns makes Nector’s political
maneuvers essential to preserving the Ojibwa as Ojibwa. ‘

These differences also play out in the debate over King’s “World’s Greatest
Fisherman” hat. King alienates himself from the other Ojibwa inasmuch as he attempts
to associate himself with power (resembling Marie and Zelda’s desires to obtain the
power Catholicism promises), whether that of imperialistic United States ventures
overseas (the Vietnam War), or that brought by killing animals. When asked the ﬁrst
thing he “ever got,” he tries to impress Albertine by replying, “A gook. . .. I was in the
Marines”(30). King has ignored the craft of hunting in favor of the mere thrill of killing,
so he must demur questions about how he skins a skunk, for example. He tries to
reconcile his uncle Eli’s actual skill with his own attempts to bolster his image: “You’re
the greatest hunter. But I’m the World’s Greatest Fisherman”(33). Eli calmly calls his
boast, and King hands over the hat, infuriating Lynette. Erdrich marks both King and
Lynette as disingenuous about their heritage. King gives the hat to Eli because he knows
his uncle is the better ﬁsherman and lacks the courage to continue his lies. Lynette gives
the hat less signiﬁcance and merely wants her husband’s material possession back. Her
view of heritage is rather simple, though there is something of the truth in her comment
to Eli, “They’ve got to learn their own heritage! When you go it will all be gone!”(32)
She takes pride in calling herself “full-blooded Norwegian” even though this is an empty
signiﬁer to her: “I don’t know nothing about my family”(34). Like Lynette, King knows
little of his family, but he is less open about claiming his Indianness. Lynette insists King

is known in the Cities by his hat, an empty signiﬁer (purchased rather than earned) that

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helps contrast the city (where recognition is contingent on performance of identity or at
least the appearance of it) with King’s home (where his Indianness is a given,
independent of performance or open claims). Lynette ends up asking for the hat back,
thinking that King needs it to anchor his fragile identity.

By the end of the story, King and Lynette’s violent relationship turns into
attempted murder; Albertine and Lipsha return to the house to ﬁnd King drowning his
wife. When Albertine interrupts the ﬁght, however, King and Lynette leave together.
Lynette feeds King’s ego (and preserves their outsider status) by blaming his family for
his violence towards her: “It’s them. You always get so crazy when you’re home. We’ll
get the baby. We’ll go off. We’ll go back to the Cities, go home”(42). On his way out, ‘
King stomps on his special hat, and Albertine hides it beneath King, Jr.’s mattress, as if
the hat itself represented King’s violence and needed to be hidden. The family conﬂicts
are mirrored with the smashed up pics. Albertine “worked carefully for over an hour” to
ﬁx them, but “once they smash there is no way to put them right”(42). In a smaller way
than June and Lipsha, King and Albertine also represent two ways of coming home.
Both are outsiders after a fashion, but King’s superﬁcial attachment to his relatives and
their values prevents him from being at home there. Albertine has disagreements with
her mother and pursues an education in the white world, but she makes some attempt to
heal rifts rather than running from them. At the extreme limits of what their different
homecomings represent, we can see King as the Native American whose only tie to that
identity is biological; this keeps him coming home, but promises little for the future
survival of Ojibwa. Even though Lynette claims to be committed to heritage (hers and

King’s), her understanding of heritage is too superﬁcial to make it matter. Still, as

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Lipsha’s eventual homecoming attests, King’s son might overcome his father’s
indifference and claim his Indian heritage as Albertine does. Albertine preserves her
Indianness through continued commitment (both the declaration of Indianness and the
attempt to learn about Ojibwa history and culture through Eli and others). Biology
neither helps nor hinders her, though at the limits, Albertine’s potential descendents could
have so little Indian blood as to make them outsiders under political deﬁnitions of Indian
identity (including those that take blood quantum into consideration).

Albertine’s discussions with Lipsha begin the slow resolution of the book’s
genealogical mystery. Unlike King, who was the product of June and Gordie Kashpaw’s
marriage from which he should have garnered some stability, Lipsha is fathered by Gerry
Nanapush, born of June, but not claimed by either. Whereas Albertine has plunged into
her Indian identity based on her mother’s encouragement and her complete estrangement
from her Swedish father, Lipsha has less reason for such certainty. Adopted informally
by Nector and Marie Kashpaw, he goes by his mother’s maiden name (Morrissey) though
no one admits openly that June is his mother. If at times Lipsha is made to feel an
outsider (especially by King, who is jealous of sharing his mother and strangely proud of
being “legitimate”), he never actually doubts his Indianness. Erdrich makes his self-
doubts independent of ethnic identity politics; Lipsha is no more or less than a confused
adolescent.

Albertine ﬁnds herself drawn to Lipsha, which may indicate that she identiﬁes
with his confusion (perhaps her political sentiments have not entirely outweighed her
interest in knowing something about the unknown Swedish part of her). She follows

Lipsha away from the house, knowing he has gone to his favorite place to escape the

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family’s ﬁghting; that he has a known refuge indicates how frequently Lipsha has needed
to escape his family! She joins him, and they gain respite from all conﬂict in the beauty

of nature: “I tipped the bottle, looked up at the sky, and nearly fell over, in amazement

 

and too much beer, at the drenching beauty”(37). Whereas in Anaya’s Alburquerque
communing with nature functions to remind Mexican-Americans that they belong to New
Mexico’s earth (and vice-versa), thus tying them together as a group, here nature works
to connect Albertine and Lipsha to the universe despite the difﬁculty of staying
connected to their families. The ﬁghts brought on over the memory of June, old
jealousies, and simple racial and group prejudice pale next to the northern lights, which
help them to transcend earthly trouble. “Everything seemed to be one piece,” she thinks,
“All of a piece. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all”(37). Albertine
tries to puzzle out messages in the sky, including her feelings about June, producing
images touching on memory, but beyond reason: “I thought of June. . .. Her amusement at
both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons”(37). Albertine
joins the two perspectives on June’s death encouraged by Erdrich’s depiction of (death
but also transcendence), simultaneously linking her sons King and Lipsha to defeat and
victory, the bad and the good. Albertine accepts the irresolvable contradictions of June’s
character; she achieves the “right way” to feel about her.

Lipsha, on the other hand, still feels unbalanced and blames June. He tries to
ﬁgure out why King, who is mentally unstable (“I’m scared of his mind. You can’t never
predict when he’ll tum”(38)), should have so much self-conﬁdence while he, Lipsha,
doubts himself. Yet even here, Erdrich depicts Lipsha as a stabilizing, healing inﬂuence,

as Albertine thinks, “Lipsha’s voice was a steady bridge over a deep black space of

153

sickness I was crossing”(38). Lipsha bridges different inﬂuences and is characterized by
his duality, a combination of surprising intelligence and nonsense: “I loved him for being
both ways”(39). She means to reveal that June was his mother as she hopes this will help
him. She recoils from telling Lipsha who his mother was after his diatribe against her:
“even if she came back right now, this rrrinute, and got down on her knees and said, ‘Son,
I am sorry for what I done to you,’ I would not relent on her”(39). Lipsha remembers
only the (false) rumors that his mother tried to kill him: “She would have drowned
me”(40). He rejects her for Grandma Kashpaw (who raises him), but keeps open the
possibility of getting to know his father. Thus Erdrich hints at how she will unravel the
mystery around his parentage. The uncertainty around his status at home (i.e. the
question of whether he even belongs there), coupled with new information about his
parents, drives him away, but knowledge eventually brings him a kind of security in his
identity.

Despite the voyage of Lipsha that culminates in the ﬁnal chapter’s reunion with
his father (which also refers to him symbolically bringing June home), Erdrich presents
little to make June’s homecoming redemptive. June dies, and her death aids no one.
King buys a fancy car with the money she leaves him, but this only conﬁrms his
shallowness (which the last chapter deepens). The car also sets off the squabbles that '
result in Lynette nearly being drowned and the pies being ruined. Lipsha’s reunion with
his father beneﬁts both of them (as I will discuss below), but taking King’s car (and by
association, June’s favor) does not make up for years of neglect. June’s spirit (in the
form of a deer) haunts her ex-husband Gordie in “Crown of Thorns,” suggesting both that

she is not at rest and preventing him from healing. Gordie ends up lost in the woods,

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where “they heard him crying like a drowned person, howling in the open ﬁelds”(229).
Even relying on Ojibwa interpretive codes to read “Crown of Thorns,” we can scarcely
see Gordie as engendering cultural survival.

Marie’s reﬂections on her niece’s upbringing offer no solace to a reader looking
for reasons why June should have failed to thrive (but which would leave hope for the
survival of others). In “The Beads,” Marie begins, “I didn’t want J une Morrissey when
they ﬁrst brought her to my house”(85) and then takes her in like the others she adopts
(including Lipsha). Readers will not ﬁnd, however, that this act of love gives June what
she needs to survive. Though Marie takes in June out of love for her dead sister Lucille
Lazarre, her dissociation from the rest of the Lazarres devalues any sentiments about
farrrily. Marie refers to her non-Indian mother as “the old drunk woman who I didn’t
claim as my mother anymore”(85), and that appellation is all we learn of mother
Lazarre.31 June’s father is “the Morrissey, the whining no-good who had not church-
married my sister”(86); of course, her sister hadn’t married Morrissey in a church either,
but Marie lays the blame on the man and forgives her dead sister. Elsewhere in _L_oye_
Medicine, lovers beget children out of wedlock and thereby aid Ojibwa survival (Lulu’s
account of parenting hero-son Gerry with Moses Pillager stands out), but here Marie uses
her relatively staunch Catholicism to scorn and sever ties with her white relations. Marie
does feel a sentimental attachment to June (“it scared me, the feeling I might have for this
one”(86), but June’s wildness separates her from the other children and Marie. June
curses Marie for stopping the children from “hanging” her as a horse thief, and even

deﬁes Marie’s attempted punishment: “Brave as me, that was J une”(9l). Marie gladly

 

3' In fact, “old drunk woman” is how scholars refer to her; see Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton, A Reader's
Guide tn the Novel§ of Lguise Erdrieh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). P. 182.

155

hands June over to Eli to live in the woods. Her justiﬁcation hints at the unstable value
of family in Love Medicine: “It was a mother she couldn’t trust after what had happened
in the woods”(92). Besides, Marie notices, “she was more like Eli. The woods were in
June, after all, just like in him, and maybe more”(87). Marie even muses that June’s
origins are not with Morrissey or Lazarre, but with “what the old people called Manitous,
invisible ones who live in the woods”(87). Whether a reader believes this about June’s
origins or not, her special connection to the earth does not help her survive. We are left
with two possible explanations: either June fails because some of her family are
worthless (i.e. the Morrisseys) and some of the others reject her (as Marie’s other
children do)—i.e. the very concept of family, Ojibwa or otherwise, fails June—or she
fails because her origins in and traditional knowledge of the forest cannot avail her.32 To
revisit Erdrich’s charge for Native American writers is to foreground how complete is the
tragic failure of June: “they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while
protecting and celebrating the cores of culture left in the wake of the
catastrophe”(“Where I Ought to Be” 23). June does not survive, despite venturing
between Indian and White worlds, and the failure of the book’s most woods-savvy
character says little about the value of a core Ojibwa belief in the connection to place and

nature.”

 

32 Barry and Prescott argue, “Because June tries early to adopt a woodlands tradition that is no longer
workable in most cases—Eli is an exception—she cannot carry into her adult present the life that made her
childhood secure”(130). However, they do not explain the reasons why this tradition is no longer
workable, nor analyze the many insecurities of her childhood that invalidate their argument.

33 As I have attempted to show above in my review of criticism, for many critics the novel enacts the
preservation of core cultural beliefs. There are notable exceptions, including Louise Flavin, who writes,
“she depicts a cultural milieu where the sacred ceremonies, tribal rituals, and Indian cultural identity have
disappeared”(64). Flavin’s view is rather more extreme than my own, probably owing to a different
understanding and usage of the culture concept. It should be clear from Qve Medieine that ceremonies ,
and rituals have not disappeared, and the ﬁercely proud claim to Indian identity of many characters ensures
that it, too, remains. What I am questioning is the viability of the author’s and critics’ prescriptions for

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Most of the h0pe that attends June’s homecoming must be deferred onto her son
Lipsha, since she does not survive the ﬁrst chapter. Mixed though it be with other stories
(those of Marie, Lulu, and Nector, mostly, with Albertine another important ﬁgure),
Lipsha’s journey towards self-knowledge becomes the book’s keystone (to apply
Erdrich’s bridge metaphor). Before Lipsha conﬁrms his father’s identity in the last
chapter, he teeters between self-pity (as seen in his diatribe about his missing, abusive
mother, but also when Grandma Kashpaw calls him “the biggest waste on the
reservation”(230)) and self-conﬁdence about his unique abilities, including “the touch.”
His touch makes people feel better, and some even pay him for it, but while it appears to
be only a kind of massage, he invests his gift with mystical power: “It’s a thing you got to
be born with. I got secrets in my hands that nobody ever knew to ask”(231). Here,
Erdrich foretells the biological connection to Lipsha’s trickster ﬁgure father, Gerry
Nanapush, for both men possess traditional Native American powers. But in the story
“Love Medicine,” Lipsha’s attempt to use traditional Ojibwa healing medicine goes
terribly wrong; the episode shows the difﬁculty Erdrich’s characters have in surviving
and in surviving as Ojibwa, for their old means of living often conﬂict with modern ones.

Lipsha attributes this conﬂict, half-corrrically, half-seriously, to a lost
understanding of how to appeal to Ojibwa gods: “Even now, I have to wonder if Higher
Power turned it back, if we got to yell, or if we just don’t speak its language”(236). He
mixes historical perspective and religious belief (implicitly satirizing white attempts to do
likewise), applying his Grandpa’s theory that God was going deaf to the negative events

in Love Medicine and Ojibwa history in general: “How else to explain the times my

 

continued survival (cultural or otherwise); Flavin wraps the book rather too easily into the context of
America at large.

157

touch don’t work, and farther back, to the old-time Indians who was swept away in the
outright germ warfare and dirty-dog killing of the whites”(236). Lipsha’s epistemology
(handed down implicitly to him by his Grandpa) can be considered an Ojibwa or Native
one, despite the humor in Erdrich’s description of it. It serves Lipsha inasmuch as it
emboldens him for potential political struggle in addition to providing a divine
explanation for the shocking downfall of his people due to white, western conquest: “Oh
yes, I’m bitter as an old cutworrn just thinking of how they done to us and doing still. So
Grandpa Kashpaw just opened my eyes a little there”(237). He resolves not to rely on
God or government because of their previous failures: “maybe we got nothing but
ourselves”(237).

This decision leaves Lipsha with the desire to use his “touch” (a 'special Ojibwa
gift not tainted by the powers he rejects) to help others, especially Grandma and Grandpa,
whose long marriage has been haunted by Nector’s affair with Lulu Lamartine. His
worldview causes Lipsha to view Grandma’s own gift of intuition as particularly Indian,
despite intuition being a general phenomenon: “She knows things. Although she will not
admit she has a scrap of Indian blood in her, there’s no doubt in my mind she’s got some
Chippewa. . .. Someplace in the blood Grandma Kashpaw knows things”(240). He argues
that love medicine, like Grandma’s intuition, is a Chippewa gift: “These love medicines
is something of an old Chippewa specialty. No other tribe has got them down so
well”(241). The appeal to genetic knowledge (Grandma’s blood) is unusual for Erdrich,
whose characters usually appeal to “cultur ” explanations (like love medicine being
handed down through generations, like Grandpa’s view of God and government being

passed on to Lipsha). Lipsha, as is typical for such a divided character, ﬁnds himself torn

158

between the two explanations. In this case, he turns away from an elder’s potential
advice (“I knew the best thing was to go ask a specialist like Old Lady Pillager”(24l))
because of his fear: “I was afraid of her, like everyone else. She was known for putting
the twisted mouth on people, seizing up their hearts”(24l). Clearly, old time traditions
come in helpful and harmful varieties, making it difficult to know when to celebrate them
and when to let them die}4 Here, Lipsha’s fear of traditional powers leads him to fall
back on himself.

While much of the community’s knowledge of each other comes from gossip in
Love Medicine, “things I’d heard gossiped over”(24l) do not equate to helpful traditional
knowledge for Lipsha. He loosely assembles bits and rumors he has heard about
medicines, uses his own rather immature understanding of love, and makes a plan
involving goose hearts. In an irony characteristic of Love Medicine’s black humor,
Lipsha forecasts the results of his mixture of self-reliance and misunderstood traditions:
“If it’s true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say,
then we’d be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn’t harm nobody anyway”(242).
Erdrich reinforces the value of relying on others—the very love medicine Lipsha applies
incompletely to his Grandpa—by emphasizing Lipsha’s failing to follow what he knows
of traditional wisdom: “I told myself the old superstitions was just that—strange
beliefs”(245). This leads to his fateful decision to feed his Grandpa store—bought frozen
turkey hearts; Nector Kashpaw eats the heart, though he mistrusts his wife’s reasons for

serving it, practically to spite her: “She knew that he knew that she was working

 

3" The appeal to tradition as a solution for contemporary problems generally includes only positive
traditions (i.e. love medicine but not spousal abuse or hexing). The appeal to family as a positive value
correlates to this. Lipsha has some very negative experiences with family (especially King), making it
difﬁcult for a reader to embrace family as a concept.

159

medicine... ‘All right, skinny white girl!’ She had got Grandpa mad. Oopsy-daisy, he
popped the heart into his mouth”(249). He taunts her with the fake love medicine, and
she slaps him on the back; Nector chokes and dies. While. the interplay of Grandpa and
Grandma Kashpaw is partly responsible for the death (which has its own logic given the
wayward direction Nector’s life takes in old age), Lipsha’s narration makes evident that
he blames himself. When Grandpa seems to come back to visit Grandma, Lipsha
attributes this not to his own doing (positive or negative), but to the sheer power of love:
“Love medicine ain’t what brings him back to you, Grandma. . .. He loved you over time
and distance. . .. It’s true feeling, not no magic”(257).

It would be just as inaccurate to say that Nector dies because Lipsha failed to
follow traditional rules for love medicine as to claim his spirit returns for that reason. His
“true feeling” transcends any tribally based solution. Such a reading would also ignore
Lipsha’s own insight into the potential for harm in tribal cures he gains from his
knowledge of the old Pillager woman. Nor does Lipsha’s failure diminish Erdrich’s
depiction of him as one who forms bridges between people and traditions (though she
doesn’t complete this depiction until the last chapter). Instead, Erdrich makes clear his
failure comes from his arrogant belief in the rectitude of his knowledge. Lipsha fears and
mistrusts both traditional Ojibwa medicine and non-Ojibwa forces like religion and
government. His grandfather’s death drastically alters his worldview, as his
grandfather’s view of religion previously had: “You see how instantly the ground can
shift you thought was solid. You see the stop signs and the yellow dividing markers of
roads you traveled and all the instructions you had played according to vanish. I was

scot-free now, whistling through space”(252). But Lipsha doesn’t experience anomie

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only. The safeness of his old knowledge is gone, replaced by the certainty of death: “It
struck me how strong and reliable grief was and death. Until the end of time, death
would be our rock”(253). This new realization (really just a negative perspective brought
on by his Grandpa’s death), combined with the arrival of his Kashpaw relatives, makes
Lipsha want to give up on family altogether.

Though “Love Medicine” emphasizes failure and death, there are some signs of
the recovery he will eventually make in the ﬁnal chapter, including his Grandma’s
acceptance of his failure (she tells him, “you was always my favorite”(257)) and
Erdrich’s foreshadowing of later road imagery (the road markers disappear when
Grandpa dies, but Lipsha will ﬁnd good roads after ﬁnding his father). Tonally, the
combination of conﬁdence and grief Lipsha feels in “Love Medicine” sets up a balance
between the death of June and family squabbles in “The World’s Greatest Fishermen,”
which highlight failure more than celebrate culture, and Lipsha’s homecoming in
“Crossing the Water.” What is less evident is whether Erdrich preserves or celebrates
anything speciﬁcally Ojibwa in “Love Medicine” that might be the core of future
attempts to preserve Ojibwa people. As in the ﬁrst chapter, someone dies: June despite
her woods lore, Nector because of an unhappy convergence of events. June’s death
brings together family members, but King and Lynette ﬁght with the others and ruin the
pies, shedding a negative light on family. Nector’s death brings home all of the cousins
who teased and devalued Lipsha, souring him on family, even as the return of Nector’s
spirit seems to prove to Marie that he loved her. Similarly, Marie’s love for her adopted
grandson reassures Lipsha of the power of love, but this power does not extend to hold

the whole family together, leaving their survival in doubt.

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In the 1993 edition of Love Medicine, “Crossing the Water” follows two new
chapters, "Lyman’s Luck" and "The Tomahawk Factory," stories which develop the
character of Lyman Lamartine, advance the friendship of Lulu and Marie, and look
forward to events in other Erdrich novels (most notably The Bingo Palace). Like his
younger cousin Lipsha in "Love Medicine," Lyman becomes a resistance ﬁgure in
"Lyman's Luck," but he presents a much different view on the celebration and survival of
culture. Erdrich strengthens the political content of the novel by having Lyman fail at
running a factory (when the tribal members revolt against making cheap knock—offs of
Indian artifacts), then lash out against a "they" (whites generally, the federal government
more speciﬁcally) that hinders Ojibwa chances for success. He joins federal law that
allows Indians to run casinos with a new perspective on gambling as something that ”ﬁt
into the old traditions"(326). Lyman himself seems scarcely to believe this interpretation,
which ﬁts his needs rather too conveniently. The potential boon to the Ojibwa from
Lyman's dream originates not from cores of Ojibwa culture, but from peculiar historical
happenstance. Through ”one of history’s small ironies"(327), he envisions a chance for
economic survival for his people by taking advantage of "retired white people who had
farmed Indian hunting grounds"(327). Erdrich's water imagery, used primarily to posit a
circularity or ﬂow between life and death (especially in the depiction of J une's last day
and Henry Lamartine Jr.‘s death), takes a surprising turn at the end of "Lyman’s Luck" as
Lyman dreams of the ﬂow of cash to Indian coffers: "He watched them picking up their
markers, heard the numbers rolling off the announcer’s tongue, saw the revenue trickling
and then rolling and ﬂooding into the tribal bank accounts. He saw the future, and it. was

based on greed and luck"(328; emphasis added). Ojibwa survival will depend on a

162

combination of "old traditions" of games of chance that are not uniquely Ojibwa at all
and, in an irony Lyman relishes, the greed of whites to obtain even more. Lyman himself
transforms from an idiosyncratic individualist to a political ﬁgure looking out for the
good of others, suggesting a bridge between the Lipshas of "Love Medicine" and
"Crossing the Water."

“Crossing the Water" contrasts two sets of fathers and sons and brings full circle,
albeit with mixed results, Erdrich’s meditation on the value of home and origins for
Ojibwa survival. First seen on the reservation at the time of J une’s death, King Howard
Kashpaw, Jr. now hides in his own home, avoiding his father and focusing on a bathroom
border decoration depicting women carrying jars: "always they came out in single ﬁle
again. They never stumbled. They never had to steady their jars. Their tread calmed
him. Below the cracked tiles they walked in seamless gowns”(329). The decoration
represents an order and steadiness Howard’s life with King, Sr. and Lynette lacks. His
father moans about Gerry N anapush breaking out of prison and hunting him down, while
Lynette scolds him: "She said his father could only think about himself. She screamed
until the women on the wall trembled"(330). While Erdrich does not quite claim
anywhere that a Solid family life guarantees success, happiness, or survival, she does
condemn selﬁshness in many places. Lynette and King’s inability to help each other or
even be willing to try forecasts their failure; at the same time, Erdrich holds out hope to
the reader in the form of the women on the wall, who keep carrying their burdens despite
the family argument: “The miracle was that they stayed put together, ﬂowing forward,

moving around him in a circle”(330).

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Howard will get no help from his home life, so he starts to distance himself from
it. Hiding in the bathroom with the alternate family represented by the jar-carriers is one
step, but more importantly, Howard chooses to dissociate himself from his father’s
name. He chooses to go by his middle name at school and delights in writing his new
name and thus ﬁxing his new identity: “the children went up to his desk and used his
Magic Marker to write their names in the center of their hearts. . .. PERMANENT, it said
on the marker’s label. ‘That means forever,’ said the teacher when Howard asked. ‘It
won’t erase.’ ‘Good,’ said Howard”(330). In the story of Howard’s name change,
Erdrich melds the theme of family’s failure with the importance of being sure in one’s
identity, which sets up Lipsha’s quest in this chapter. Howard looks at his new name on
the paper heart: “something moved inside of him. He felt a jolt of strangeness. For a
moment he was heavy, full of meaning. Howard was sitting there. Howard was both
familiar and different”(33 1). Howard feels his new identity biologically, suggesting a
greater importance for Lipsha’s search for his father.

Lulu tells Lipsha that her son Gerry Nanapush is his father, motivated by a desire
to do right by Lipsha and her desire to “gain a grandson”(336). That she and others have
withheld the information for all of Lipsha’s life sends a mixed message about the
importance of family and origins. On one hand, Lipsha has developed into a smart,
helpful, sensitive (if odd) young man without knowing his real origins, thanks to the love
of Grandma and Grandpa Kashpaw, who try to raise him as family. For one so young, he
has lived a full life (as he describes himself, “Lipsha Morrissey, who’d learned so much
in his short life”(337)). On the other hand, Lipsha’s extended family (and the larger tribe

as well) has created a discourse of illegitimacy around Lipsha that undermines his

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identity and thus robs him of the vitality Howard gains from his identity. He responds to
Lulu with the knowledge he has gained about himself from others: “my blood mother
wanted to tie a rock around my neck and throw me in the slough”(335). Lulu begins the '
unraveling of discourse around Lipsha’s genealogy: “That’s what you always been
told”(335). To regain a more stable identity, Lipsha must confront others’ conceptions of
him, even those whose opinions he doesn’t value, like “King who had hounded me with
dim conceptions”(343).

Lipsha chooses to listen to Lulu because he believes the information might help
him, but again Erdrich shows that knowledge of origins can guarantee nothing: “Lipsha
Morrissey who was now on the verge of knowing who he was. I was confused”(337).
Despite his being scared of Lulu, he listens and learns Gerry is his father; the scene
contrasts pointedly with Lipsha’s refusal in “Love Medicine” to learn from the equally
scary Pillager woman. The new knowledge, which “could make or break”(337) Lipsha,
ﬁrst scares him away from the rest of his family; he thinks, “More than anything, I
resented how they all had known”(339). He blames “mass confusion”(338) for his theft
of money that will send him to the Twin Cities. His confusion even leads him to join an
alternate family, the Army. A recruiting poster of “two grinning boys”(339) attracts him
like Howard’s bathroom decoration family. A short time hanging out with grizzled
Native American Vietnam and World War II veterans forecasts his bleak future: “I would
be a veteran like these guys. . .. Not much in that, less than nothing”(340). The
conclusion that “This here was yesterday’s action army”(340) sends him on a quest to

ﬁnd his father.

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In this episode, Erdrich points to a disparity between the govemment-imposed
order of the Army’s artiﬁcial family and the potential in knowing one’s authentic family,
though she does not dilute in any way the strength of Lipsha’s extended farrrilial bond
with his grandparents. Lipsha has no guarantee his father will offer him anything, and
the reader must wonder what potential value the quest for the father holds. Lipsha will
not replace his grandparents with his father, and Gerry’s incarceration puts a damper on
the possibility of them starting a fruitful relationship. Yet the very chance of adding
another piece to his identity, which should be daunting given the confusing array of
identities Lipsha has had to juggle already, excites him. He even spends time being
pleasant with his half-brother King in order to locate Gerry. Now that he knows his
parents’ identities, Lipsha is at ease with the once-intimidating King: “I didn’t even care
to ﬂaunt that I belonged. Belonging was a matter of deciding to. I decided I belonged. . ..
I was a real kid now, or halfway real”(348). Still, these decisions only make sense given
the biological warrant for Lipsha’s belonging.” His sense of authenticity supports a new
conﬁdence. Lipsha even begins to tie his knowledge of cards to his newly discovered
genealogy: “I learned to crimp from [Lulu] before I ever knew she was my
grandmother. . .. The blood tells. I suppose there is a gene for crimping in your string of
cells”(349). He questions King about Gerry’s personality, as if the shape of his father’s
life will genetically determine his own future: “I wanted to know what kind of seed I had

sprung from”(350).

 

35 As Walter Benn Michaels argues in linking cultural identity to racial identity, for cultural practices to
belong to a group to the extent they have a right to it (he uses the example of African-Americans having a
right to black music, but Lipsha’s sense of belonging ﬁts too), “there must be some special relation between
race and culture such that racial identity counts as importantly determining cultural identity”(Michaels
129). Lipsha has always performed the same practices as the rest of his extended family, only without a
known genealogy; now he can make himself belong by doubling Ojibwa practices with veriﬁable Ojibwa
birth (to paraphrase Michaels’ description of Slim Girl in Laughing Boy, 126).

166

When Gerry arrives, ﬂeeing the law, the long-missing father quickly assesses the
situation without letting King in on the familial secret. This helps Lipsha and Gerry to
work together at cards to win back the car bought with June’s insurance money.

Fittingly, Lipsha wins by dealing himself “a perfect family. A royal ﬂush”(358). Lipsha
is now the son of Miss Indian America and a Chippewa hero; iconically, at least, they are
the perfect family, thought practically speaking they do not really form one. Howard aids
Gerry’s escape from the police. Just as Lipsha gains the chance to grow close to his
father, Howard tries to turn his in. As the police call at the door, Howard runs out
yelling, “He’s here.” But Howard does not mean Gerry, and Lipsha gets a chill when he
sees this: “that was what scared me most. Him screaming his own dad’s name. ‘King’s
here! King’s here!”’(359) Howard ends up playing dead when the police fail to take his
father away, as if he cannot abide living with King any more. Meanwhile, the trickster
ﬁgure Gerry has disappeared.

Lipsha ends up in a better position than King, taking the car to go look for his
father. The car’s resemblance to June (“nicks and dents in the beautiful ﬁnished skin,” the
“racy invert line of the hood”(360)) embodies the strange family reunion that closes L_ov_e_
Medicine. Without really knowing where he is going, Lipsha begins driving “the tangled
hi ghways”(360), which represent the twisted skeins of genealogy, in a “general
homeward direction”(361). Gerry’s surprising emergence from the trunk sends the family
not home (though their reunion implies the togetherness of home) but to Canada, where
Gerry can elude police. There is promise in the reunion and even the Suggestion that
knowing one’s origins can be empowering. Gerry helps Lipsha, for instance, by telling

him a genetic ﬂaw in their hearts will get him out of the Army: “You’re a Nanapush

167

man. . .. We all have this odd thing with our hearts”(366). However, the Army would

 

have discovered this much during a routine physical, reducing the signiﬁcance of Gerry’s
information from something that saves his life to mere fatherly sharing. Since Gerry has
been absent from Lipsha’s life, these shared moments do matter, but they do not generate
the will or the means for Lipsha (or anyone) to survive. Because the father-son reunion
works well structurally to close up loose ends in the book, it is too easy to read the ending
as redemptive or celebratory. In a novel where long periods of time spent loving others
(loving “over time and distance”(257) as Lipsha characterizes Nector’s love for Marie)
constitute the power of family, Gerry and Lipsha’s brief time together does not create
farrrily.36 Only biology links them.

David Murray reads Gerry’s involvement approvingly within the context of other
Native American novels, where positive father-ﬁgures are in short supply: “Louise
Erdrich’s concern for the ambiguous legacy of Indianness is powerfully addressed in
generational and farrrily terms, notably in Love Medicine, where the father, unlike the
failed ﬁgures of so many novels, actually himself represents a positive blending of past
and present which can help his son”(Murray 96). This reading resonates with the style of
Love Medicine, in that Erdrich uses blending and bridging metaphors to suggest ways for

modern Ojibwa to continue being Ojibwa in a hostile world; however, the novel’s

 

3‘ An interesting corollary is Gerry’s relationship with his wife, Dot Adare. In “Scales,” Gerry impregnates
her through jail bars and pantyhose and later escapes prison to see baby Shawn. Critics have pointed out
quite rightly that Erdrich uses these scenes to make Gerry a trickster ﬁgure like his namesake Nanabozho;
for example, Catherine Catt (“Ancient Myth in Modern America: The Trickster in the Fiction of Louise
Erdrich,” The Blane Valley Review 19 (1991), 71-81) argues that his exploits give “hope to those who
know about him”(77) and tries to link Lipsha’s fate to Gerry’s trickster abilities: “As Lipsha’s meditations
end the novel, it appeals likely that Gerry’s ability to survive will be carried into the future”(77). Less
emphasis has been placed on how little time Gerry spends with any of his family (and Catt does note that
the Trickster is traditionally “lawless and anti-social”(75)). At best, his political battles redeem his
absenteeism. At worst, his actions paint him as irresponsible. Gerry’s primary value derives from his
symbolism, not actual deeds, making it hard to believe that he increases anyone’s chance of survival but his
own.

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concern with genealogy and family life demand more actual fathering from father ﬁgures
like Gerry. Clearly, Howard’s rejection of King indicates King is a poor father,
consistent with his generally poor character, but what does Gerry do to make him any
better? Like Lipsha’s mother June, Gerry works one way as a literary device and another
as a political symbol. June’s death is a catalyst for the stories in the novel, but it also
shows the failure of Erdrich’s cores of culture to sustain Ojibwa life. Similarly, Gerry’s
reunion with his son wraps up the story line of Lipsha’s confusion, conferring
genealogical legitimacy and making it easier for Lipsha to return to the reservation.
Lipsha thinks, “To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if
the world was branching out in shoots. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my
shoulders with his hand”(366). Erdrich appeals to a vaguely Native American belief in
the connection to the universe in describing Lipsha’s feeling of completion and
expansion, and his return home complements this. The novel ends with Lipsha’s
thoughts on driving back to the reservation. He remembers that an ocean once covered
the Dakotas “and solved all our problems”(367), but concludes, “the truth is we live on
dry land”(367). His words would seem to imply that henceforth Lipsha will confront the
. realities of life instead of daydreaming, but the language of home is laden with
sentimentalism nonetheless: “A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross
the water, and bring her home”(367). The reference to him ﬁnally succeeding in getting
June (ﬁgured here as the car) home completes the opening chapter’s failed promise, but
Erdrich has already stripped “home” of much of its power.

Practically speaking, Gerry’s continued ﬂight from the law and by extension his

family weakens the value of home and origins for continued survival. Gerry declares he

169

will visit his wife and daughter in Canada, but this will not constitute a home: “I won’t

 

ever really have what you’d call a home”(362), he tells Lipsha, echoing Call’s sentiments
in Lonesome Dove. His commitment to Indian causes (represented by his membership in
AIM and his standing up to non-Indian authority; see 341) suggests how he can help
Lipsha and others, but his constant running counteracts his usefulness. He will remain on
the run, and Lipsha will return to a home lessened by his father’s perpetual absence. He
learns from his father that they are both “cons,” for example, but reﬂects, “since we were
splitting up, that did not give me a whole lot of consolation”(365). Whatever poetic
language Erdrich applies to the reunion, the separation offers no consolation. Lipsha
learns what kind of “seed” he comes from, but also realizes that neither family biology
(inherited traits like his bad heart) nor family politics (June’s claiming King and not
Lipsha) guarantee success or failure: “The son that she acknowledged suffered more than
Lipsha Morrissey did”(367). Given the very tenuous relationship between family
stability and survivability in Love Medicine, Erdrich’s call for Native writers to celebrate
contemporary survivors and cores of culture promises nothing.

In the end, Love Medicine leaves readers with no solutions to the problem of
survival for modern Ojibwa that Erdrich depicts. Many of her characters’ core values,
the foremost of which is the value assigned to home and family, are shared with most
other cultures in the world. When the “love medicine” of Lipsha and others works to
bring people together to live successfully, its efﬁcacy does not derive from any
speciﬁcally Native American ritual or essence. Erdrich celebrates the Ojibwa “cores of

culture” even where these hold no promise for future survival.37 Instead, her characters

 

37 These core values don’t actively harm the culture, either, but their inefﬁciency calls into question the
value of celebrating them.

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value “home” and Ojibwa identity on the principle that it belongs to them alone (and has
not been lost “in the wake of the catastrophe” that befell the peoples native to the
hemisphere). Even the plot of coming home, so central to the book’s structure, has two
outcomes, June’s and Lipsha’s. Erdrich’s survivors succeed independently of how much
is Indian about them, just as some of them fail despite being quite Indian (according to
the book’s own measure of this). As Scott Sanders writes, “If you were drawing a graph
of what remains distinctly Indian about them, the curve, as it passes through our time,
would be heading unmistakably towards zero”(Sanders 9). Love Medicine does detail
the lives of contemporary survivors, but provides no essentially Indian medicine that can

insure the survival of future Ojibwa or non-Ojibwa.

171

CHAPTER 5
The Father One Cannot Acknowledge: Genealogy and Identity in Nash
Candelaria’s Memories of the Alhambra

Jose Rafa, the protagonist of Nash Candelaria’s Memories of the Alhambra
(1977), takes to extremes the concern of some Mexican-Americans to prove the value of
their stock by establishing blood ties to Spain. Like Frank Dominic in Rudolfo Anaya’s
Alburquerque, Jose Rafa concerns himself with tracing his genealogy beyond New World
encounters to the Old World of Spain; indeed, he travels all the way to the monument to
Heman Cortes in Merida. His long journey from home results in his death but fails to
settle the matter of his identity, though his last thoughts tentatively make him “A new

”1

race. The New Mexican. Candelaria presents Rafa’s memories as ultimately false and
replaces them with a new world identity that, while it has new world memories, foregoes
the lure of the past. Through Rafa’s failed quest, Candelaria exposes the folly of tracing
genealogy beyond the New World encounter that produced Chicanos; through the
reﬂections of Rafa’s son Joe, Candelaria presents the Chicano as a new race, with all the
problems that attend racial thinking.2 If in its main plot, the novel devalues notions of
racial purity, at its limits, it reestablishes them in the form of the Chicano. Thus,
Candelaria’s genealogy of Mexican-American life denies the possibility of a pure

European past for any Chicano, but does not deconstruct the integrity of the new race it

posits, leaving intact an essence that would explain Chicano life. Memories of the

 

' Nash Candelaria, Memnriee pi the Alnmbra (Palo Alto: Cibola Press, 1977), 173; all subsequent
references to the novel will appear in parentheses in the text. Candelaria spells the name Jose without an
accent over the ‘e,’ and l have preserved his usage.

2 Much of what Candelaria argues for Chicanos applies to Mexicans generally, but his novel is so
concerned with people who are located in New Mexico and California that it would be a disservice to elide
the differences between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the book.

172

Alhambra thus serves as a document supporting the Chicano Movement, but can also be
read in the context of the other works under consideration as a meditation on national and
ethnic group identity.

Candelaria prefaces his quest novel with an oft-used quotation from T.S. Eliot’s
“Little Gidding”: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/
Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the ﬁrst time”(Candelaria 5).
Candelaria uses the stanza as a combination of tease and moral: his protagonist Jose Rafa
does not really arrive where he started (ﬁguratively or literally), nor does he know the
place (his home, be it New Mexico or Los Angeles). Just before his death, he knows only
that he has found a false answer by looking for his heritage in Spain. His insights into
belonging to the New World are muted and fragmentary. While Jose does not fulﬁll the
promise of Eliot’s words, Candelaria does ﬁlter his failure through son Joe’s
consciousness, suggesting that the next generation will be more self-aware. If Jose’s
search for his identity in the past fails, at least Joe will have a more realistic idea of his
own identity. Politically speaking, Candelaria favors Joe’s awareness of himself as a
Chicano, a new world personality, over Jose’s self-deluding genealogy. At the same
time, Joe’s own conception of Chicano identity runs the danger of essentializing a
composed identity by turning it into “a new breed”(l84), ﬁxed to a certain biology.

This plotting device defers the promise of Chicano identity onto the next
generation; combined with Eliot’s quotation, though, it also suggests that the quest will
never end. A. Robert Lee has suggested that readers looking for a bold political
statement of Chicano identity may be disappointed by Candelaria’s pacing: “If, at times,

Candelaria has been felt to go too slowly, to risk a certain inertness, he cannot be faulted

173

for ambition. His ﬁction seeks nothing less than to remember a whole multicultural ebb
and ﬂow in the making of chicanismo”(Lee 329). Candelaria captures the quest for
identity, but hints at more than presents the end result, making Memories of the
Alhambra much less utopian fantasy (like Anaya’s Alburquerque) and more a tragedy.

The opening and closing of Memories of the Alhnmm focus on the aftermath of
a father’s death. This simple structuring device allows Candalaria to present attitudes as
they change through the generations. The novel opens with Jose’s terse thoughts on his
father’s passing: “The patriarch was dead”(7). Jose’s use of the very formal “patriarch”
(instead of a familiar form like “father,” or a possessive like “my father”) distances him
from his family and positions his father as an almost omnipotent ruler. The stufﬁness of -
Jose’s description reveals his estrangement from his father, extended family, and at the
utmost limits, his people or race. Now that the patriarch is gone, Jose’s life opens up to
new possibilities, but also new problems. He feels “on the precipice of a crisis”(7).
Losing his father reveals to him a need to understand his own past and to be more than
the simple farmer his father was.

Jose reﬂects as he drives from the modem metropolis of Los Angeles to his old
home, Albuquerque (named “Albuquerque, New Mexico”(7) in a show of Jose’s anxiety
about the smallness of his origins compared to the larger world of Los Angeles), and
speciﬁcally the section named Los Rafas (for his family). Albuquerque has changed
from his boyhood into a metropolis, but “[o]ne thing had not changed. The dust”(7). The
dust links the physical setting (the arid desert, but also the cemetery where the patriarch is
being interred) to the history played out there; dust represents not just the passing of one

man, but all those who have passed before. It also represents poverty and the primitive,

174

for though Albuquerque may be a modern city, the Rafas’ home is found down a “rutted
way so covered with dust that you would not believe it was ever paved. A road one did
not see. A road that one could feel and breathe”(9). The vital connection he feels with
the road foreshadows his failure to recognize that he belongs to New Mexico, not Spain.

Against the broad backdrop of lives past, Jose’s family engages in petty squabbles
which, it soon becomes clear, typify their family’s behavior. Siblings argue over who
belongs in the lead car during the funeral procession, and Jose’s sister Juana tries to mark
him as an outsider: “You weren’t here all the time he was sick. You were in California
getting rich. So why should you care whether or not you’re in the ﬁrst car?”(8) Jose
returns their deSire to push him away with his own desire to get away: “He glanced past
his wife with a ﬂeeting look of desperation, of frustrated entrapment”(8). He has been
away since he and his wife “left Albuquerque forty years ago... to get away from all this.
Yet the place would not let them alone”(9). Clearly, Jose leaves Albuquerque the ﬁrst
time to escape the petty squabbles of his family, who are depicted consistently as small
minded and jealous, even arguing during the funeral “like dogs quarreling over a
bone”(9). Moreover, Jose escapes literally and ﬁguratively from his past, and Candelaria
has his protagonist connect his family’s small-mindedness to the fate of all New
Mexicans. Jose aligns himself with California and the new, leaving behind old New
Mexico.

Through Jose’s perspective we see the rural lifestyle of the other Rafas as simple
but not noble. His brother Carlos covets the land he may inherit: “There was avarice on
Carlos’ face. Even his feet rested tenderly on the ground so as not to despoil the precious

land which seemed more valuable than life to him”(9). Jose’s cousin and friend

175

Herminio now provokes not camaraderie but pity: “Jose felt the touch self-consciously,
seeing the rich texture of his suit in contrast to his cousin’s calloused paw and threadbare
sleeve”(10). Jose acts condescendingly at times, but he shows that his family has some
self-awareness of their poor behavior. His sister Juana declares a need to rush home,
implying that others will take objects from her father’s home before she can. Jose
confronts her: “You mean they’ll steal everything before you get your hands on a
share?”(10) He reads her thoughts and smiles “to let he know that he knew. She looked
away from him. Thieves, his expression said. Goddamned Indian thieves”(10). The tacit
accusation of racism cuts two ways, for if we read the Rafas as being of pure Spanish
blood (they seem to think this, but it’s rather unlikely), they are descended from thieves
who stole Indian land generations before; if we see them as mestizos, they are hating a
part of themselves and demonizing their Indian roots.3

Though he acts disapprovingly, Juana’s attitude mirrors Jose’s own, for he too is
ashamed of his family and will racialize its ﬂaws by seeking a purer heritage in Spain.
As he tells his wife, “These are not my sisters, my brother. Look at their brown, greedy
faces. Listen to their accented speech. We’re not members of the same family. We’re
not even members of the same race”(12). Candelaria exposes the deep illogic of his
racial thinking, for Jose is convinced that “He was someone”(12) and that tracing his
genealogy “back to the root of things, to the beginning—to the conquistadors”(12) will
prove it, but he also disavows his immediate family: “These pretenders he had thrown out

of the house were not his family. Not his siblings. He was more than that”(12). One

 

3 Jose’s denial of his Indian heritage, which would make him like every other Mexican more than it would
make him “Native American” (which is only approached as a possibility in the novel when Jose thinks of
Pocahontas as an ancestor ( 173)), confuses the reader about the truth of their identity. Candelaria does
suggest that even pureblood Spanish-Americans should adopt a new world identity (Chicano/a). but also
has Jose remember his Indian heritage late in his quest (172-3).

176

might expect that Jose would reﬂect instead on how he had made something of himself
despite his humble origins; instead, he hopes to show he was always something because
of his roots while, paradoxically, his siblings (with the same heritage) are nothing. He
makes the mistake Michel Foucault cautions against in his description of genealogy as
historical method. Offended by the dust of his home and behavior and brown skin of his
siblings, Jose seeks something pure in his past: “Jose looked past his mother... past the
apple orchard toward the river. But his thoughts carried him farther. Across the ocean to
the source, the beginnings. To a place he had never seen that was some secret, essential
part of himself”(13). A. Robert Lee calls this “his dynast’s dream of ‘pure’
Castilianism”(Lee 329). Foucault writes that genealogy “opposes itself to the search for
‘origins’”(“Nietzsche” 77). Foucault reads Nietzsche as challenging the notion of
Ursprung (original, original basis) because he sees it as “an attempt to capture the exact
essence of things, their purest possibilities, and their carefully protected
identities”(“Nietzsche”78). Foucault argues that this pure past is an illusion, that identity
springs from a series of historical accidents, but Jose’s disgust drives him on his
impossible quest of ﬁnding origins that will never be able to explain why he differs from
his family. Nonetheless, Candelaria uses Jose’s self-hatred to illuminate a certain type of
Chicano thought that defends itself against the insult of Anglo America by aspiring to its
own imperialist past.

In wife Theresa, Candelaria combines Jose’s longing to escape his dusty origins
through the appeal to long forgotten ones with a typically American desire to climb the
social ladder. Her family has “lived in New Mexico for over two hundred and ﬁfty

years... [y]et Theresa did not feel that it was home”(l3). She also distances herself from

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recent immigrants from Mexico to California: “These were not her people, these latter
day migrants from below the Rio Grande River, these Chicanos who huddled protectively
under the shelter of common language and common appearance”(l3).4 Even though she
doesn’t feel at home in New Mexico, she nonetheless feels a Daughters of the American
Revolution-type pride in the duration of her family’s life in what is now the United
States. Her pride joins with Jose’s distaste for his own family to move them to
California, rejecting a free house on the Rafa land. In California, she wants to live not in
“Frijole Flats” but with an “everybody else”(16) she deﬁnes implicitly as non-Mexican.
She dreams of assimilation with Anglo-American society not because it seems racially
superior, but because it seems less primitive. She looks back on the transformation she
longed for as a newly married woman: “No longer content to be a brown-skinned chula
of the ranchitos, but a modern woman”(l6). She envisions both her race (and the color
that symbolizes it) and her position in life changing; modernity is clearly raced as Anglo
for Theresa.

Her son Joe (signiﬁcantly he’s not Jose, Jr.) embodies her efforts to become more
modern. Candalaria depicts him at “his suburban ranch house”(l7) surrounded by
modern conveniences like telephone and automatic dishwasher. Joe works as a ﬁlter for
us to see Jose’s change and ambivalence about being Mexican-American: “Joe
understood his father’s feelings about the family. Hadn’t he had them too?”(17) A
feeling from “a deep hidden place”(17) tells him to be ashamed of his New Mexico

relatives. Most of his distaste for them springs from their treating him as an outsider, and

 

’ Theresa seems to be misusing the word here, though the reasons for doing so are arguable. Either she
lacks a grasp on the word’s deﬁnition (recent migrants would not be Mexican-Americans at all, but
Mexicans, especially since she highlights their migrant, not immigrant, status), or Candelaria wants to show
solidarity among people of Mexican descent.

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Joe responds by racializing and degrading them: “browner even than he, with their
Spanish-accented English”(l7). They close him off with their secrets, and he ﬁnds
reasons—his father’s reasons—for staying away.

However, when Jose disappears after the patriarch’s funeral, Joe reacts with
disdain for his father’s obsession: “Conquistadors! Joe thought. Son of conquerors.
Bullshit!”(18) Jose leaves his wife and country based on the promises of a fraud who
sells phony genealogies, abandoning his real family for a fantasy heritage. Joe tries to
restore the family by visiting the genealogist, Alfonso de Sintierra (“without land”).
Sintierra affects gentlemanly behavior and appeals to Joe’s assumed interest in being a
gentleman with important lineage by appending “dc” to his name; Joe refuses the
addition: “‘It’s Rafa,’ he said ﬁrmly. ‘Not dc Rafa”’(20). Joe answers Sintierra’s
musings about his family’s roots with his own humbler alternative: “‘de Rafa. Sevilla?
Barcelona? Madrid? No. Barcelona.’ Now Joe did smile. ‘Beanﬁeld, New Mexico.
By way of Tortilla Flats, California. ‘I was born in Los Angeles. My parents are from

’7’

New Mexico. (20). The exchange reveals that Joe is more at peace with his origins in
the New World than Jose, who, Joe thinks, would be frustrated could he not “place”
Sintierra: “Not so much a failure in a guessing game but more an unanswered mystery
about something vital to his own sense of knowing where he stood”(20). Joe’s
acceptance of his identity means he doesn’t need to compare himself to others, nor
improve his own genealogy. Jose, however, goes to Sintierra because he places “value”
in “[k]nowing those threads of relationship to one’s noble forebearers [sic]. Having the

certainty that one sprang from noble stock. Such knowledge was priceless”(21). This is

worthless information to Joe, but Jose and others go to Sintierra to convince themselves

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of their importance. Joe dismisses the appeal to royal Spanish lineage by applying
historical perspective: “But we lost. And losers don’t get many pages in history
books”(22). Having descending from Spanish royalty will not bring back those parts of
Mexico lost to the United States over the years; it will not help Joe or any other Chicano,
but even Joe sees that the desire for the downtrodden to belong to something could make
them believe Sintierra’s ﬂattering lies.

Jose’s trip to Mexico to track down leads secured by Sintierra yields mixed
results. At ﬁrst, he feels “this was his place to be what he considered his true self’(23).
His self-conception seems rrristaken here, too; his true self was the self who recoiled at
his siblings’ behavior and station in life. Part of his calm in Mexico comes not from the
place itself, but from the fact that he has escaped home so successfully. For he is an
outsider in Mexico, too, as a cab driver recognizes: “the senor doesn’t sound like a
Mexican”(24). Among these strangers, Jose’s memories unravel. His early life
resembles that of a Willa Cather pioneer, “[s]cratching a living from the high desert earth
that was luckily blessed by the life-giving waters of the Rio Grande”(24). Candelaria
contrasts this typically western American story with the unease Jose feels regarding his
nationality. New Mexico had not been a state long in his school days, and he remembers,
“The only sense he had of country was in the song they learned in school, ‘My country

9”

‘tis of thee (25). While one teacher confuses the students with questions about their
nationality (which some take to mean ethnic background), a new teacher pleases Jose by
erasing England and Spain as nationalities: “‘Young man,’ she said, ‘If anyone ever again ,

asks you your nationality, say AMERICAN !’ She patted him on the back”(27). For a

child whose Anglo classmates’ smug self-conﬁdence is daunting, the teacher’s dream of

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assimilation holds strong appeal; it includes Anglos and Mexicans as equal partners
despite their different economic and political stations. World War I (in which Tomas and
Carlos serve) reinforces Jose’s United States nationalism: “Jose was proud of his older
brother. He’d show those Huns”(29). Though Brother Tomas ﬁghts for the US, he
sees that an onslaught of Anglo settlers threatens “Hispano” farmers’ self-sufﬁciency.
Just as Theresa views modernizing as Anglo, Tomas warns Jose, “The time of the Anglo
has come, even here on the ranchitos. After two hundred years of isolation, our ways are
going. You have to be ready to take your place in the new world”(30). Tomas does not
preach assimilation, but adaptation; he envisions his brother as retaining Hispano identity
even while doing Anglo-American things.

Jose thinks he can ﬁnd “a new life” in Mexico City, but “the morning brought
frustrations”(3 1) as the alien place hinders his investigations. He tries to read signs of
Aztec history that make no sense and give him “an uneasy fear”(32). The disparity
between the rrrightiness of the Aztec god Tlaloc (represented by a huge statue) and the
downfall of the Aztecs before the conquistadors causes cognitive dissonance: “The
awesome Tlaloc did not match the downtrodden Mexico he knew, and this incongruity
made him doubt'his own perceptions”(32). Jose has long allied himself to history’s
winners, the conquistadors, so he ﬁnds the reminder of past Aztec greatness puzzling.
The happiness of these “downtrodden” people also confuses him. In the United States, he
(and his son) were well-off but still seen as second-class citizens; here, young boys play
freely, “uninhibited by the thought of Anglos about”(32). In looking past Mexicans for
the purity of the conquistadors, Jose has missed out on crucial differences between the

US. and Mexico. His dream of ﬁnding a noble genealogy has blinded him to key facts,

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and he nearly has a heart attack when his contact (Sintierra’s cousin) tells him he is
chasing a lie: “Liars. Every last one of them. He makes a good Norteamericano, that
one. Shrewd”(33).

His high blood pressure, linked to the pressure he feels to prove his own “blood”
or lineage is “high,” forces him to bed. His dreams confuse him because he still wants to
reject his Chicano identity: “Mexican, the voice in his deep dream kept whispering.
Mejicano. Chicano”(35). He thinks back to high school now, a world “for Anglos, or for
Spanish-Americans who were trying to be like Anglos”(35). His brother Carlos’s vision
has come true, but the Hispanos (not those “who were also going to be farmers”(35))
don’t seem to be retaining any identity that is not also Anglo identity. In Jose’s
recollection, Hispanos are only farmers; once they become like Anglos (educated), they
lose their Hispano identity. Jose recalls the tension between old and new ways, Anglo
and Hispano: “In the world he wanted he was a stranger. In the world he rejected he was
at home”(35). A race riot pitting Anglos against Chicanos embodies his inner tensions.
During it, Jose divorces himself from Mexican identity while working for an Anglo
drugstore when he blames “Mexicans” for stealing ham he had given his cousin.
Herminio’s light skin makes him appear white, and he and lose both ﬁnd themselves in
between groups, a position Jose describes as “loco”: “It’s like I can’t be either one. Can’t
be at home either place. In the middle. Nowhere”(39). He pits himself against Anglos
only inasmuch as they make it difﬁcult for him to succeed; he opposes other Chicanos
much more vigorously because they place the preservation of their identity above their

desire to succeed in the Anglo world. Above all, Jose’s concern about the riot’s issues is

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personal, not political; that is, he cares more about how the chaos (and what it represents
of everyday life) affects him than about the power differential it exposes.

Recovering from his heart episode and his dream, he continues looking for
answers, though he also begins to see his quest as folly: “It had been madness to begin
with, rushing off to a foreign country to ﬁnd himself”(41). His deep desire to ﬁnd a true
self he has lacked exposes a dilemma. Either he is mistaken in his quest (and has been
himself all along, which Candelaria stresses), or he has been living a lie as a “counterfeit
who could only be redeemed by the coin of the realm found in another country”(41). He
recognizes he may just be running away from his life (not running to anything), but desire
pushes him on: “Madness to start. Madness to not start”(4l). If Candelaria makes Jose
seem daft for taking so long to see what should be obvious, he also stresses how strongly
Jose feels the “raging compulsion”(4l) to ﬁnd some grounds for his superior self-image.
From the point of view of a Chicano activist, the ends of Jose’s quest are clear from the
start; Candelaria’s project allows him to balance the politically effective (the
consolidation of identity under the rubric of “Chicano”) with the dramatization of
individual inner struggle. If the answers Jose reaches for at the end (and which son Joe
already knows) were easy to come by, that would lessen the Candelaria’s depiction of
how the intensity of the pressure on Chicanos to assimilate to Anglo-American culture.

Gomez, his guide in Mexico City, conceives of Mexicans as pure Indians,
innocent of the taint of the conquistadors. He marks off an Indian “we” from the Spanish
to describe the conquest: “They not only raped our bodies, but also our souls”(42).
Before the foundations of Mexican identity, namely twin conquests by Cortes and the

church, he sees his people as already Mexican. Yet he also contradicts himself by setting

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off Mexicans from the foolish Indians who accepted the new gods and doomed
themselves to subservience to Spanish power. Jose confronts Gomez about his identity,
and the answers are politically savvy if genealogically na‘r've: “‘What is your heritage?
Isn’t it Spanish?’ ‘No, senor.’ ‘Indian then?’ ‘No, senor!’ ‘Then what?’ ‘Neither,
senor. I am a Mexican!”’(44). Jose cannot accept this view of things, but the impression
he gets from visiting religious sites confuses him, too. He sees strong similarities
between the poor and religious of Mexico and those of New Mexico, despite their
differing histories. He knows the Spanish conquered Mexico, but he sees few racial signs
of Spanish there. Despite the evidence, he still cannot connect himself to any Indian
heritage: “We Spanish beat them. We were conquerors. Yet look what happened. Our ’
institutions won, but our people lost”(44).

The inﬂuence of Spain seems to have disappeared because the Mexicans don’t
consider themselves Spanish (and not even Indian); still, Jose misses these clues that
would help him sort his own identity. Ultimately, the racial and cultural impurity of
Mexico (its non-Spanishness) drive him away. A cantina shooting scares him; Mexico
comes to represent disorder, and Jose seeks order. Another dream presents answers to his
quest that he is not ready to accept. In this dream, he sees himself borne in a cofﬁn
during an Aztec ceremony. The “stoic Indian”(50) leader gives Jose a look of
recognition, which Jose rejects. Through dramatic irony, Candelaria depicts Jose as
walking away from the answers to his genealogical probing: “Mexico was not for him.
This was the wrong place. The hell with the missing links in Mexico. To Spain! To the
beginnings of the exploration of the Indies. And of himself”(51). As Robert Lee says of

Rafa’s choice to remember Mexico’s “conquistador heroism”(Lee 330) but not the

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murder in the cantina or his own arrest by the border patrol, “His, in other words, is
selective memory, the wished-for over the actual”(Lee 330).

As he reaches Spain, it becomes more clear that Jose is ﬂeeing his typical middle-
class problems, “a pushy wife” and a son “who went off instead in some direction Jose
did not understand”(l42). He tries to think instead of the Spain of his dreams, but the
reality disappoints: “Madrid. Another airport,” “Bustling. Crowded. Old.
Undistinguished. Like any large city”(l42), “Madrid was just another big city”(144).
The people, of course, are different because he has imagined them as like himself, brown-
skinned. Instead, he sees “Few dark complexioned. No heavy Indian features. Just
Anglos. Like—like probably any other European. . .. He could have been in Germany for
all that it mattered. . .. Certainly not in the Los Rafas of his dreams”(144). So strong are
the misguided impressions that underlie his self-conception of being Spanish, he has
difﬁculty adjusting to the real Spain. Seeing a monument to Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza, “a madman and his servant fool”(143), he dismisses it, then sees its
appropriateness: “Only here.... But then he thought about his mad, foolish self alone in
the world”(l43). Don Quixote’s foolish questing perfectly mirrors his own, and he
understands this; still he wonders, “Where are the monuments to the
conquistadors?”(146) He expects the Spanish to remember those who left Spain because,
from his perspective, they matter. Hunting down a book of passengers to the West
Indies, he shows himself more like Don Quixote jousting at windmills: “His was an
important book. Didn’t they know that? Why—It should be on display somewhere.
Prorrrinently. In a glass case ﬂanked by guards. Floodlighted. A burglar alarm in case

anyone tried to tamper with the bullet-proof glass”(150). His frustration mounts as he

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apprehends that not only do the Spanish not care about him, they don’t even care about
the important things he cares about, like the settlement of the Americas by important
Spaniards like his presumed ancestors.

Spain confounds him in other ways as he continues his vague search for “some
thing” where “future, present, and past converge”(153). He tries to make a connection
between his boyhood and the Spanish countryside, as if his youthful play resonated with
Spanish history and landscape. He tries to share his memories with a fellow Spaniard, his
tour guide Benetar: “I would ride [the horse] through the ﬁelds playing Spaniards and
Moors. Or maybe I was a conquistador defeating the Indians”(154). Benetar does not
react as Jose expects; Jose thinks every Spaniard must share his dreams of conquest (as if
they are racially grounded), but Benetar replies, “I am of Moorish descent”(154).
Benetar has his own sentiments about the past, as Jose observes when some nearby guitar
music moves Benetar to tears. He looks “as if the melody had captured his soul and
transported it back to that beginning place where feeling once again joined the mind so
that they were one”(157). Music performs as Jose wishes his quest would, to link his
thoughts and feelings. Benetar explains his reaction to the song, which is Moorish: “I
never expected to hear that song in this place. . .. It is called ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra.’
‘Memories of the Alhambra.’ It takes me back. Back. To when my people ruled this
country”(157). Jose sees that Benetar feels in Spain the way he feels in New Mexico:
both are descended from former conquerors whose reign has long since ended. At ﬁrst,
he thinks defensively of Spain (“Well! My people rule it! Conquerors!

Conquistadors!”(157)), but then reacts to the personal drama: “he saw only this sad old

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9”

man next to him. ~ ‘That was a long time ago, senor (157). Jose tries to get Benetar not
to focus on past losses, but the past weighs heavily on both of them.

Benetar’s reﬂections offer Jose a glimpse into unknown comers of Spanish
history and reveal a different way of viewing loss. He describes the conversion of Moors
after La Reconquista: “All they lost was their religion—their souls. . .. My family was one
who carried with them through the centuries the memory of the grandeur that was
Moorish Spain”(157). Some families retain the old ways, and others convert; in either
case, the people still have an identity, albeit a changed one. Spain and its various people
have changed over time to the point where speaking of their essences is farcical. A.
Robert Lee notes, “Spanish racial purity, quite as much as its Hispano-American
offshoots, has been an illusion from the start”(Lee 330). After 500 years, Benetar
remembers his Moorish roots, but accepts the changes. His father converts to
Christianity, Benetar converts back and even moves temporarily to Africa. However, just
as Jose’s home is New Mexico and not the old country, Benetar returns: “Now I am
coming back to Spain. After all those years I realize it is my home”(158). Benetar’s
sentiment is observably genuine and moves Jose to question his search and his memories
themselves: “I don’t know if it’s a real memory or not. Maybe it’s just the memory of a
dream”(158).

The two men compare the various exiles Spain has produced, including
themselves and contemporary Spanish workers who migrate to Germany. Now, however,
the fact of mi gration—the need to migrate and the harsh reception given migrants in the

United States-—angers Jose. Now separated from his racial pride, his nationalism takes a

hit: “for Jose, going to the ﬁsh cannery in California had been like a young Spaniard

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going to Germany to build roads. Another language. Another culture. The same
prejudices. But in his own country. That was what had galled him most”(l60). Jose has
mostly buried his feelings about his own country betraying him because of his presumed
ethnicity, focusing instead on his individual gains. While his son Joe (see below) sees the
injustice of US. prejudice towards Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, Jose has sheltered
himself from these memories by replacing them with false memories of Spanishness.
Benetar’s conversation haunts him even in his dreams. Benetar presents a thesis that
people of the New World should be able to solve old racial conﬂicts: “You have the
chance in the New World to bring them together—Spanish, Indian, Anglo”(l62). Jose
reacts with virulent racism and self-loathing: “I am Spanish. A son of conquistadors.
Maybe we can get together with the Anglos, but with the Indian dogs—never”(l63). The
voice of Benetar challenges his blindness: “what about your grandchildren? They refute
your denial”(l63). Jose spotters, “No.... Never. Never”(l63) before waking up and
reestablishing his racial purity for himself: “I’m in Sevilla. No Moors here, leading back
to Africa. No Indians either. No taint of those dark races that pollute the blood and make
a man a slave. I’m Spanish. Pure Spanish”(l63). He brushes off the residue of the
dream that suggests the Spanish were conquered, too.

Too many possibilities in Spain lead him away from ﬁnding a clean link to the
conquistadors. Despite many roadblocks, he still believes in a pure origin: “Perhaps I
shouldn’t have started this crazy search. As if I was never meant to discover the
source”(l66). He ﬁnally meets a bookseller who directs him to another part of Spain,
“the country of the conquistadors”(l65). He imagines Extremadura will be his promised

land, the homeland that will answer all his questions. Again he dreams of being a

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conquistador, but this time dreams of killing Indians who turn out to be his brothers and
himself (168-9); the dream presents conquest as equal to murder. Once he ﬁnally views
the statue of Cortes in Merida, Jose understands the dream and the dark side of conquest.
The statue stands in a depressingly poor area, not in a place of honor. J ose does not feel
at home in the home of conquerors: “he felt that pang for home. . .. But this dismal place
only gave him pain, only gave the lie to his hope that ﬁnally he would ﬁnd home”(173).
Cortes’s body, he learns, rests in Mexico, though “There were no monuments to Cortes in
Mexico. Only a memory of infamy. A kind of awesome, grudging accord one gives a
rapist whose victim gave you birth. The father one cannot acknowledge”(l73). Jose’s
words show the dishonor in Cortes’s actions and the impurity of historical memory. The
attempt to blot out the rapist father indicates how slippery identity is, how likely one is to
focus on the positive and try to ﬁx it as truth. As Foucault writes of doing genealogy,
“The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs
what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought
uniﬁed”(“Nietzsche” 82).

His thoughts of Cortes and the conquest of Mexico soon bring Jose to admit to
himself that he is also Indian. As he thinks of the Mexican perspective on Cortes, he
begins to share it: “your mother was—He did not want to think the next words. They
popped out anyway. Malinche. An Indian. And you, child of the Old World and the
New, are Mexican”(173). His denials now compete with his acceptance, for he wants to
hang on to the glory of being “Pure Spanish. Conquerors”(l73) while acknowledging as
possible ancestors, “Pocahontas. Or Desert Blossom. Mestizo”(l73). Jose feels the truth

of his genealogy; like other Chicanos, he is the product of the old and new worlds, part

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European, part Indian, part conqueror and part victim, though neither'identity is purely
conqueror or victim anyway. His genealogy brings him no satisfaction, characterized as
it is not by unadulterated accomplishment, but by rape, mixed bloods, and chaos. Instead
of “the grandeur of history”(l74), he ﬁnds “less than the home he had left for this
journey. The fear came to him that he would go on like this forever—unfulﬁlled”(174).
Jose dies in Spain while calling out for wife Theresa and home, for he acknowledges that
New Mexico is his home, whatever his heritage. Candelaria leaves the quest unfulﬁlled
with the suggestion that the accidents of history disallow the possibility of purity.
Though Jose’s death suggests a metaphysical answer to his questing (an equation
between home and death), Candelaria continues the story through Theresa and Joe,
adding to the political dimensions of the novel as well.

While Jose quests, Theresa’s memories supply background reasons for his
behavior. She and her husband both feel out of place in New Mexico and struggle to ﬁt
in California. Jose’s family “assaulted her life”(67) whenever they visited. Unlike Newt
in Lonesome Dove or Lipsha in Love Medicine, who seek more family ties, she wants to
ﬂee such connections to the past. After losing a child, she stays with her grandmother,
Nana, in rural northern New Mexico (a retreat that greatly resembles the idyll in Cordova
in Alburquerque). She tries to understand her husband’s ﬂight by understanding her own
ties to the past. Nana creates appeals to heritage that resemble Anaya’s in many ways.
She places her family in New Mexico from the time “when the Spanish ﬁrst came from

Mexico”(69), implying a purity of blood for her family that probably is illusory.s Nana

 

5 Martha Menchaca writes that when the Spanish moved into New Mexico in 1598. people of color (non-
Spanish, i.e. mestizos and afromestizos) “participated in the conquest of the indigenous peoples they
encountered"(67). This included more inter-marriage, making Hispano claims to pure Spanish blood

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claims that her people remained the same through Spanish, Mexican, and American
control, though modemity’s intrusion now leads the young people away to cities to
become “like Anglos”(71), a process already begun in Jose and Theresa’s youth. While
Nana acknowledges the great changes wrought on Hispanos by Anglo culture, she
believes in a preservable core identity that can only be racial: “Nothing good can come of
trying to be something you’re not”(71). Nana also instills a deep faith in Theresa, though
Theresa’s faith is founded more in herself than in God or religion.

Though her grandmother advocates that people remain the same, Theresa wants
more than a simple rural life. Her various trials, including the intrusions of her in-laws,
the loss of the baby, and Jose’s work-related depression, deepen her faith in her dreams
of success. When she gets pregnant again, they seek a new life in California: “There was
ample time. Yet her spirits soared. It was time to strike out, to seek more. More than her
parents. More than her Nana and her little mountain home. . .. It was time to leave home
and claim a new life”(76). Her dreams complement her husband’s, and both seek to
leave behind an identity at once Chicano and poor for the chance at something more. If
enriching themselves means becoming less Chicano (or not Chicano at all), Theresa and
Jose abandon their ties to New Mexican identity.

Several times, Theresa ﬁnds that their American roots don’t matter in California.
Candelaria presents an episode from the past when Jose disappeared, rounded up by
immigration police arresting and deporting Mexican workers before payday. The police
condescend and spout racial epithets at Theresa for appearing Mexican: “They’re never

Mexican. It’s Spanish. Hah!”(124) Jose treats his Mexican co-workers with more

 

possible but unlikely. See Martha Menchaca, R v ri ist Con tructin : Th n ian Black
and White Rents df Mexican Amerieens (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).

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dignity, but his refusal to see his resemblance to them aligns him with the Anglo police:
“They were nice for Mexicans. I’m glad I’m not a Mexican”(126). While Theresa
deplores the deportation of the Mexican workers on the grounds that “they’re people just
like us”(126), Jose rejoices in the citizenship that protects him: “I’m an American.
Those people came from another country. They were here illegally. Lawbreakers”(127).
The scene allows Candelaria to show Jose’s selﬁshness in conﬂict with Theresa’s
religiously motivated altruism, but neither one ultimately sides with the non-citizen
Mexicans any more than with their own farrrilies.

While Candelaria uses Theresa’s thoughts to add to his depiction of Jose’s
abandonment of Mexicanness, he uses Joe to critique both parents. Despite their plans
for him, Joe doesn’t share many of their values (Jose’s investment in Spanish identity,
Theresa’s piety); as Theresa puts it, “To see yourself reborn, with another chance to set
things right, then to see that reborn self go off in another direction”(l40). This other
direction more closely represents Candelaria’s commentary. Joe judges his father’s latest
ﬂight (to Mexico and Spain) harshly: “the only real thing that his father ever did... was to
run away”(77). Though Candelaria presents Jose’s struggles as personal, he makes Joe a
surrogate reader who views them as political. Thus Joe reads his father’s desire to run as
derivative of the oppression of Chicanos: “Ay, raza suffrida. Suffering race”(77). His _
family memories include cousin Dandy’s emergent Chicano nationalism, later to
inﬂuence the grown up Joe. Dandy places racial, ethnic and national identity in the
context of power. These markers of identity matter not by themselves, but in relation to
other groups: “One of their weapons is what they call you. So they can steal from you

and not feel guilty about it”(7 8), he tells Jose. As one who has tried to get along with the

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powerful Anglo businessmen, Jose hesitates to view them so harshly: “What counts is
how they treat you”(79), he argues, holding out hope that racism is personal rather than
systematic. Dandy feels a new identity can be a political statement, while Jose views
identity mainly as a way to separate himself from the rabble. Both, however, would
prefer to be called “New Mexican”; as Dandy puts it, “We’re a new race. Not Mexican.
Not Spanish anymore. More than just Americans. We’re New Mexicans”(79). Such
subtleties are lost on Joe’s cousins, who continue to persecute him for being less Mexican
than they. Like his father reacting against the insanity of Mexican rioters chasing the
light-skinned Chicano Hemrinio, he responds with a reminder: “Whatever I am, I’m the
same as you!”(80) He does not avoid his identity and even defends it.

Unlike his father and cousins, Joe recognizes complexities to identity, recognizes
that not all Chicanos or Anglos behave one way. When his father sees differences
between himself and other Chicanos, he ﬁgures he must not really (i.e. racially) be like
them. Joe also ﬁnds himself in the middle of competing groups, but his encounters with
non-Anglo, non-Chicanos allows him greater perspective. Though he defends his
Mexicanness by ﬁghting (he refers to his “ﬁghting years”(83)), he also makes friends
with non-Mexicans, like Catholics, Jews, and Blacks. He thinks, “He supposed that in
New Mexico a Jew might be considered an Anglo, but somehow it didn’t make sense to
him”(83). He recognizes! the political battles behind ethnic and religious identities, but
rejects the “us vs. them” politics of his cousins, who would even call Blacks Anglos. “So
who did that leave to be an Anglo?” he asks, and his answers preserve some divisions
even while making allowances that not all Anglos are alike: “The ‘enemy.’ Who were

Protestants. Non-minority. And some of whom were unaccepting”(83). His “some of

193

whom” leaves open the possibility of viewing racial and ethnic others as politically
positioned (and capable of making choices that would change their relationship to the
‘other’) rather than racially bound and determined to preserve power differences.

His ﬁghting forces him to transfer to a parochial school, which turns out to be a
blessing in disguise. Like the Mexican children in Mexico City playing without a thought
for Anglos, he loses his “reasons to fight”(86) once all his peers are Catholic, for “he
didn’t consider his fellow Catholics Anglos”(86). He broadens his circle of friends ﬁrst
in Catholic school and again at the public high school. It helps that Joe sees common
ground where his father would see differences even between him and his own family:
“There were even some Anglo friends. But here, too, they were like himself. Vices.
and virtues had no ethnic exclusiveness”(87). Joe expands his mind further at college,
but balances himself between his father’s refusal of Mexicanness and the anger of
campus “politicos.” He doesn’t join radical Chicanos protesting for economic and
political equality, but sees “their pain. It was no different from his own pain”(89). His
sense of balance, reinforced by years of being in between competing identities, causes
him to reject the radicals who directed “their personal compasses to the false north
labeled ‘outcast”’(89). Yet Joe feels free enough to answer “Si” when asked by a
Chicano activist if he is “Mejicano”(92). Thus does Candelaria present Joe as the
practical, middle-class Chicano, aware of his heritage and distinctiveness, but living and
struggling along with others who were more alike than different: “Yes, he thought.

American. Mexican. Human. Ape descendent son of God. Yes. Yes. Yes”(92).6

 

6 The format of his afﬁrmation mirrors that of Quentin Compson’s rejection of the south in Absalom
Absalem.

 

194

Jose’s hopes that his son will improve his status and Joe’s more even-handed
perspective on identity cause father-son conﬂict. Joe thinks of his son as “The ﬁrst Rafa
not to be born in the beanﬁelds. To be born in a city”(112), again connecting the rise to
modernity with the ﬂight from Mexicanness. Jose drives away Joe’s Mexican girlfriend
Isabel with questions about her background that position her as inferior: “I told her we
were Spanish. Real Spanish. Descendants of conquistadors. Not that so-called Spanish
from south of the border. Indians with Spanish names”(106). He adds, “I won’t have
you marrying a Mexican!” Joe is disgusted by his father’s overt racism, but interprets the
actions as intended to help Joe see that his social station made marriage to a Mexican
impossible. For their part, Isabel’s family also rejects Joe, apparently because of their
own sensitivity and pride. Joe thinks, “His parents had left New Mexico to get away
from that maddening entanglement. Now was he going to marry into the same sort of
thing? Bullshit!”(104) Joe’s idealistic way of treating all people equally runs up against
ﬁrmly entrenched racial attitudes on both sides. Though his mother and father may see
him as representing their new life (his mother insists, “You’re your own hope. It’s just
you. . .. Not your father nor your mother no whomever”(l 13)), they and others still
pressure and entangle him with their attitudes. Again Candelaria plays out the slow
march towards changed attitudes towards Mexicanness.

After Jose dies, Joe gets the ﬁnal thoughts on the meaning of his father’s quest.
He sees “Hispanic pride”(180) as one motivation, the desire for non-Anglos who lacked
power in the United States to possess something of value that could not be taken away.
His father wants to be one of history’s winners, whatever that says about the character of

his ancestors (though ultimately he. sees Cortes’s conquest as rape). Joe puts this desire

195

in the context of “the forgotten promises of America”(181), including equal treatment for
all. Where his father seeks to show he belongs in the United States by appealing to
genealogy, Joe sees belonging as a right to be supported in the abstract without appeal to
speciﬁc racial histories. He acknowledges the right of Chicanos to be considered
Americans and the use of “Mexican” to denigrate their citizenship: “Decades after the
homes in which they had lived for almost two hundred years had become part of the
United States, they were still not written about as Americans. Much less Spanish”(182).
Joe actually finds it easier just to admit he is Mexican that to explain to the ignorant that
this also means Spanish; thus he avoids “the knowing smile. That said: ‘He’s ashamed of
being a Mexican”’(183).

Through it all, however, Joe returns to an understanding of himself based on race.
In complicating his father’s wishfully simplistic genealogy, Joe merely adds another
racial identity, namely Indian, to the mix. He envisions his mixed identity as making him
“brother to all the other Hispanos”(183) based on “common roots”(184) traceable to
Spain and native Indian cultures. He calls Hispanos “The new race. The way of the
future”(184), but this identity never escapes being linked back to its roots. Joe’s Anglo
wife Margaret gains a measure of acceptance from his extended family that shows how
far they have come in their thinking from his youth: “You’re not really like an
Anglo”(l9l), an aunt tells her, “You’re just like one of us”(l9l). This behavior ﬁts in
with the philosophy Joe learns in college (in which only a few Anglos are the enemy),
which would preserve racial and ethnic divisions while “rewarding” good behavior. At
the same time, opening the family up to Margaret offers ambiguous hope for future

inasmuch as it acknowledges that her positive behavior (i.e. marrying Joe and all that

196

implies about her character politically) has no essential connection to any racial identity.
If an Anglo can be “one of us,” Candalaria suggests, then the things one does (which
confer identity) are independent of a prior identity. Using the words “Anglo,” “Hispano”
and “us,” however, show that change comes slowly, as the old divisions are kept in place.
Joe’s thoughts closing the book link landscape to generational change: “Though
the slowly changing landscape, life runs it deep, familiar course”(191). Though the
appeal to the power of the landscape makes Memories of the Alhamer resemble Anaya’s
Alburquerque, Candelaria does not suggest an eternal connection between Chicanos and
the land of New Mexico, but rather constant change. Joe puts change into perspective in
describing his Uncle Carlos’s adobe house: “He felt from it a solid, heavy inertia that
said: This is where I belong. No stone castles as in Spain on this new frontier, but the
earth itself. Leaving no monuments after man has gone”(l90). Belonging, Joe realizes,
is always temporary. Despite the adobe’s inertia, time will wear it back into the earth.
Monuments take on the power of marking identity, but identities change, leaving
monuments that tell incomplete stories, as the statue of Cortes stands neglected, or the
Alhambra points to a long-gone Moorish Spain. Jose dies unsettled and unhappy because
he sought monuments to false memories. Joe and his contemporaries hold on to their
identities because of outside pressures, Candelaria suggests, not because of their
investment in these speciﬁc identities. Memories of the Alhambra works as a Chicano
text7 in that it depicts the struggles of people identiﬁed and identifying as such, but it also
opens itself up to the broadness of time’s erosion of monuments to identity, indeed to the

futility of tracing identity at all.

 

7 We might add that it constitutes itself as a document of the Chicano movement, for all its hesitation on the
issue of establishing identity.

' 197

CHAPTER 6
The Politics of Origins in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Gardens in the Dunes
In her celebrated and widely taught novel Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
suggests that healing the witchery unleashed by the assault of Europeans upon America
will require knowledge of both European and Indian traditions. Her medicine man
Betonie relies on old paraphernalia like “medicine bags and bundles of rawhide” but also
non-traditional, Euro-American items like Coke bottles and Santa Fe railroad calendars.l
While her protagonist Tayo has been trained by the US. military to view the Japanese as
enemies during World War II, he has visions linking them and him, as Betonie
acknowledges, “You saw who they were. Thirty thousand years ago they were not
strangers”(124).2 The witchery brought by “destroyers,” Native Americans and others
who “see no life”(l35) when they look at the world, manifests itself in the sickness that
Tayo feels. The ceremony of the witchery also proves the inter-relatedness of all living
beings (including the Earth); just as thirty thousand years ago, all humans were one, so
will they be ultimately: “the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in ﬂat dark lines on
ﬁne light sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s ﬁnal ceremonial sand painting.
From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers
planned for all of them”(246). Once Tayo understands this pattern that connects all
things, he is cured: “he had never been crazy,” he thinks, “He had only seen and heard the
world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and

time”(246).

 

‘ Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremeny (New York: Viking), 120-1. Future references will be given
parenthetically in the text.
Tayo’s insights resemble those of Anaya’s Joe during the Vietnam conﬂict in ﬂbgguergue.

198

If Silko’s Ceremony promotes a vision of all cultures being united with no
boundaries, @rdens in the Dunee (1999) presents us with a much different set of
problems regarding the boundaries around and between identities. The solution to the
problem of witchery in Ceremony lies in combining different cultures, even if the
witchery itself is mostly deﬁned as white (inasmuch as there are also Indians who are part
of the witchery, but they are the exception) and/or European. Whether drawing ’
connections between Tayo’s conﬂicts with Japanese soldiers and Indian-white conﬂict at
home, or portraying his rrrixed-blood heritage as a blurring of identities with neither one
ultimately to be denied or excluded, Silko is presenting endgame strategies that involve
reaching out to other cultures, including their characteristics found in the divided self.
Tayo’s multiracial heritage, in particular, suggests not a politics of borders, with cultural
identities carefully delineated and separated, nor even the creation of an indigenous,
racially mixed identity as we ﬁnd in the work of border theorist Gloria Anzaldua. Rather,
it gestures backwards to a pre-cultural moment, and forward to the end of witchery
promised by the ceremony, when the only division among humans (the only division we
might call political or cultural, ignoring these terms for the moment as applied to human-
nature relations) is Respecter of Life versus Destroyer.

Gardens in the Dunes explores intercultural conﬂict and appreciation, but
ultimately seems to suggest that the modern problems (imperialist violence, sexism,
destruction of the planet) encountered by her characters and by turn of the century society
in general can be solved by a return to the homelands and a retrenching of original
identity. To a greater extent than in Ceremony, Silko goes back in time, presenting her

characters as they discover their respective cultures’ myths of origins. As she did in

199

Almanac of the Dead, she’also opens up her scope to include more non-Indian
perspectives and stories, including for her main white characters a “return” to Europe.
Throughout the travels of her many characters in the Southwest, east coast, and western
Europe, she provides them with ample chances to discover the similarities among their
cultures, with the garden performing the main symbolic function of indicating that all
peoples are alike (that in the last accounting, all humans plant gardens, but also that all
humans need to eat, need beauty, need to cultivate gardens to assure survival).

In this much (this mutual recognition of the importance of gardens as a symbol of
life), the novel seems to present a way of thinking about culture comparatively that would
in the last reckoning eliminate the concept of culture. That is, if Silko’s characters could
just confront, like Tayo, the artiﬁcial boundaries that prevent their mutual understanding,
they might ﬁnd a way to live peaceably together. After presenting the Sand Lizard
people’s need and affection for gardens, she shows that gardens have functioned similarly
for Euro-Americans and Europeans. The comparisons would end in a realization that
there were no grounds for difference, and therefore no grounds for “culture.” But Silko
puts her characters through a next step that re-draws those boundaries between cultures
and gestures towards establishing a politics based on what is often called “difference
multiculturalism”(Goldberg 7). This turn towards the politics of separation occurs even
though her portrayal of two “cultures”(broadly, Indian and European) that once held in
common “origins myths” involving gardens and a veneration of female fertility ﬁgures
actually seems to invite a “critical multiculturalism”(Goldberg 7). Tracing Silko’s
depiction and differentiation of different “cultures” in Gardens in the Dunes will reveal a

politics of culture that ultimately divides rather than uniting (as in Ceremony) and that

200

posits a common ground among different characters, but ends up separating them again
into different cultures.

The stakes involved in these cultural politics go beyond Silko’s novel and include
the other novels under consideration. As I tried to suggest in the introduction, the ﬁelds
of Chicano, Native American, and Western American literatures have held themselves
aloof from each other, rarely venturing across disciplinary lines (until recently) for cross-
group comparisons. Disciplinary boundaries have been preserved despite the fact that
many works in these ﬁelds concern the same geographical and socio-political territory.
Silko’s encounters between Euro-Americans and Native Americans illustrate the
proverbial “contact zone” of recent thinking on culture, showing how groups form their
own identities in contrast and conﬂict with other groups.3 It might be argued that the
subject of @rdens in the Dunes is not Sand Lizard culture (the tribe is ﬁctionalized after
all) but the meaning of culture itself, or how culture works to ﬁx differences. Silko opens
her novel to the possibility, in fact, that differences marked as cultural mask a
fundamental sameness shared by all people, though ultimately her characters’ affections
for the marks of their own culture anchor them within those cultural boundaries" While
Silko presents a common ground on which her characters could potentially meet to de-

culture5 their understanding of self and other, a common ground which could model a

 

3 The now-commonplace term “contact zone” comes from Mary Louise Pratt, Impen'dl Eyes: Travel
Writing and fifransculturatipn (New York: Routledge, 1992) 4. My use of the term is meant as suggestive
rather than proscriptive; for a critique of Pratt’s term, see Scott Michaelsen, The Limits pi
Multiculturalism: Interrogating the Origins pi werican Anginomlogy (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999) 196 n.7.

’ The characters, white and Indian, tend to have a pride in their cultural traits whether they view their own
group as superior to others or merely equal, but different.

To de-culture would be ﬁrst to understand culture not as a way of explaining their fundamental identity,
but as a way of categorizing, ﬁxing and even commodifying identities that keeps people separated, and then
to de-emphasize identity formation itself. Michaelsen and Johnson describe “de-thinking—thinking
backward—the status of the differences themselves and imagining a future not more but less complex or

201

way of understanding literature outside of ethnically grounded ﬁelds, she ﬁnally re-
distributes her characters into the homelands that belong to them “originally.”

Silko previously displayed her investment in a cultural separatism in her attack on
“white shaman” poets like Gary Snyder. In “An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in
Two Parts,” Silko evinces a commitment to race as underlying culture and identity even
as she condemns the racism of white anthropologists and poets.6 According to Silko,
these white writers Operate under the “racist assumption” that “through some innate
cultural or racial superiority,” they have “the ability to perceive and master the essential
beliefs, values and emotions of persons from Native American corrrrnunities”(21l).7
From its roots in anthropology (she mentions Boas and Swanton), this assumption has
ﬂourished in romantic writing about Native Americans in which white authors pretend to
“inhabit souls and consciousness far beyond the realms of their own knowledge or
experience”(211). In trying to defend the image of Native Americans from these “white
shamans,” Silko displays her own racism by completely separating white and Indian
consciousnesses. She attributes the white inability to inhabit, understand, and write about
Indian consciousness in part to experience, but also to innate characteristics. In other

words, it won’t matter if a white writer gains the experience to write about Indians; he

 

mixed. This means forgoing the ‘saving’ of cultures, and instead destructuring one’s sense of
them”(“Border Secrets: An Introduction” 10).

6 Leslie Marmon Silko, “An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in Two Parts,” W,
Ed. Geary Hobson (Albuquerque: Red Earth Press, 1979), 211-215. References to this article will be given
by page number in the text.

7 Another assumption she criticizes is that native prayers, chants and stories are public property ripe for the
plucking of ethnologists and poets; for an analysis of Silko’s views on this debate in Native American
writing, see Paul Beekman Taylor, “Silko’s Reappropriation of Secrecy,” W
Cpllgtipn pi Qn‘tjcal Essays, Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, Eds. (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1999), 23-62.

202

will still be incapable of doing 80.8 Alongside her charge that whites possess a racist
assumption about being able to understand other cultures, she posits her own racist belief
in the impossibility of this understanding. The “power” to “inhabit any soul,” she tells
us, is a white idea (and not really a power since white are powerless to do what they
claim to do), “restricted to the white man”(212).9
In a later interview, Silko changes her tack and takes offense at the amateurism of
these white shamans rather than their appropriation of Indian materials. She explains that
the inability to understand other cultures is a personal failure, not a racial one:
There was a whole white shaman movement, and it was so bogus, it was
such a complete joke and a kind of con game. These were like followers
of Snyder. They weren’t even working; they couldn’t have gotten to a
deep level of fear, love, hate. They didn’t have the artistic capacity to ever
reach that level, even if they’d been writing about themselves and out of
their own cultural experience.10
While she bases her defense of Indian culture for Indians only (which resembles Louise
Erdrich’s mission to preserve Indian “cores of culture” against the ravages of Western
imperialism) partly on artistic integrity in this interview, she also suggests her belief that

artists should write about their own culture rather than borrowing from other traditions.

 

8 Silko’s language is balanced between a warning (a “don’t do this” or “you can’t do this, it’s not right”)
and a charge of inability (you are unable to do this because of who you are); the tension between these two
meanings reveals Silko’s anxiety that Indian consciousness is open to understanding by others, however
much she might protest that whites are incapable of understanding Indians.

9 Given in the context of anthropological writing as they are, Silko’s comments strongly resemble Vine
Deloria’s early remarks on anthropologists and Indians. See Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins (1969;
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), especially “Anthropologists and Other Friends.”

1° From Kim Barnes, “A Leslie Marmon Silko Interview,” flfhe loumal of Ethnic Studies 13, 83-105. Rpt.

in “Yellpw Womn”: Leslie an Silk , Ed. Melody Graulich (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1993) 53. Future references to the reprinted version are given parenthetically in the text.

203

While in “An Old-Time Indian Attack” she dismisses the artist’s ability to inhabit
the consciousness of others as a white racial fantasy, Silko wants (as a writer) to keep
open the possibility that artists can capture the important experiences of others because
these are shared among different peoples: “I think that it’s possible that the most deeply
felt emotions, like the deepest kind of fear or loss or bereavement or ecstasy or joy, those
kinds of deep, deep, deep level feelings and emotions, are common in all human I
beings”(Bames 52). Though she wants to reserve certain privileges of representation for

H ‘6

true artists (i.e. not “nitwit white shaman prancing around thinking that they could
appropriate that level of experience”(Bames 53)), she also wants to preserve culture as a
sort of birthright reserved to those on the inside, those who share this culture originally.‘l

Because non-Indians writers cannot and should not try to appropriate Indian
experiences, she advises them to seek their own myths and not borrow Indian ones. Her
speciﬁc attack on white poet Gary Snyder arises from his using “Indian poems” (Silko
borrows the phrase from Louis Simpson) as a way of understanding his own identity
rather than using his own background. Silko displays a deterministic belief in the value
of origins in her description of why whites should look to their own myths and
experiences: “I value the truth. We are taught to remember who we are: our ancestors,
our origins. We must know the place we came from because it has shaped us and

continues to make us who we are”(213). Like Anaya, Silko associates a transcendent

truth with place. In this formulation, there is seemingly no escape from the

 

” Her description of writing about other genders (for her, male characters) provides an interesting
corollary. While she has experienced many male experiences because the Laguna people allow men and
women to “range freely”(Barnes 54) between their respective worlds. She blames “this particular stupid,
great middle-America society” for the “segregation of the sexes that we have in America” (Barnes 55) that
prevents other artists from depicting the other gender. Gender differences are not “inherent” but '
determined by “particular place in time”(Bames 55).

204

determinations of place: no migration to another place that could affect identity, no
contact zone in which one could share experiences with the “other,” no way even of
theorizing bicultural identity. This last matter should be important to Silko, who after all
claims white, Laguna, and Mexican heritage, but in setting the Native American beyond
the understanding of the non-native, she makes it impossible to think of related issues,
such as how her own mixed origins and migrations may be relevant to her identity.12 She '
generally claims Albuquerque as her home, but lives in Tucson. Her mother was from
Montana; her father’s family (the Marmons) moved to the southwest from Ohio after the
Civil War.'3 If “the place we come from” “continues to make us who we are,” what
happens when one moves away from one’s origins (say, moving from Albuquerque to

Tucson or Alaska, or moving to New Mexico from Ohio)?‘4

Place of origin alone cannot
explain Silko’s identity, much less that of any of the many peoples (Laguna, white,
Mexican) she claims as hers.

Instead of theorizing how migration and inter-group contact may change identity
and complicate the notion of origins, she ﬁxes white and Indian roles in place (literally

and ﬁguratively). She contrasts an Indian connection to place and lore with Anglo-

American disconnection.” Her own family history (like her ﬁction and unlike her

 

'2 Silko treats the Mexican as “other” from the perspective of her Native characters rather than as another
kind of Indian; see the example of Charlie Luna in Gardens in the Deng.

'3 See Robert M. Nelson, “A Laguna Woman,” Leslie Marmon Silkp: A Collection pf Critical Essays,
Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, Eds. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 15-
22. Though his research tends to emphasize Silko’s Laguna heritage (over her Anglo and Mexican
heritage), Nelson does describe Silko as from a “cultural intersection”( l6) and the Marmon family as
deeply entwined in the history of Euro-American and Laguna contact (17).

” The consequences of her thinking are too far-reaching to explore more fully here. but I will mention a
few problematic areas: African forced migration, Indian removal, and Mexican migration to and from
“Aztlan” or the southwest United States. All of these cases require thinking beyond “the place we came
from” to determine a “who we are” that Silko’s formula does not provide for.

'5 Silko uses the term “Anglo-American” as a catch-all for “non-Indian, non-Mexican,” but the term itself
complicates her notion that origins determine identity. Americans can be Anglo-American without being
from England, or speaking English, or even being white. Her ability to classify a group of people as

205

polemics) is more complicated. Robert M. Nelson writes, “The story of the Marmon
family at Laguna is a story of outsiders who became insiders and of insiders who became
outsiders—a story about the arts of cultural mediation, from both sides of the imaginary
borderline”(Nelson 17).

Yet in “An Old-Time Indian Attack,” there is not only no mediation, there is no
possibility for it. Writers like Snyder and William Eastlake are simply unable to
understand Indian ways, making their attempts to mediate two cultures offensive and
harmful. Silko demonstrates an understanding of the Anglo-American writers’ desire to
write about and approach their own understanding of the Native American; she admits
that when one asks whether “knowledgeable, sympathetic” white poets might be allowed

9’ “

to write “Indian poetry, [tlhe answer is complicated”(213). Rather than describe
criteria for extending this right (or ability) to some poets, she turns to the implied
question of why white poets should be interested in Indian matters when they have their
own origins. She turns white sympathy into part of her attack, blaming the Anglo-
American tendency “to cast off familial and geographic ties; to ‘go West, young man,’ to
change identities as easily as changing shoes”(213) for the whites’ failure to adhere to
their own traditions. In seeking out truths from another culture, she writes, “they violate
a fundamental belief held by the tribal people they desire to emulate: they deny the truth;
they deny their history, their very origins”(213). Since knowing one’s origins equates to

truth for Silko, casting off one’s origins to study another’s equates to lying. If for most

writers it is difﬁcult if not impossible to understand Anglo-American identity without

 

Anglo-American implies for them a shared identity that only comes from their position in the United States
and not from their origins anywhere else.

206

recourse to their relationship with Native Americans”, for Silko the rejection of even an
attempt at this understanding forms the ground for understanding Anglo-American ’
identity. After all, she concludes, “writing of imitation ‘Indian’ poems... is pathetic
evidence that in more than two hundred years, Anglo-Americans have failed to create a
satisfactory identity for themselves”(213).

The search for Anglo-American identity (which is of interest, one presumes, to
Silko because of her own part-Anglo origins) must begin not with the Anglos’
relationship with the Native, but with Anglo roots, especially as focusing on the non-
American origins of Anglo-Americans will highlight that “at best, the Anglo-American is
a guest on this land”(215). Silko even comes close to admiring the goal described on the
jacket of Snyder’s book Turtle Island, to make “the rediscovery of this land and the ways
by which we might become natives of the place, ceasing to think and act [after all these
centuries] as newcomers and invaders”(215). It is still difﬁcult to conceive of how
Anglos will re-conceptualize themselves while keeping their invader past in mind without
reaching out to the non-Anglo. Silko’s goal (“to ﬁght bitterly to regain control of the
occupancy and land that was taken”(214)) depends on white writers leaving Indians alone
in order to come up with their own new myths (which paradoxically will help them
become natives, inasmuch as Silko accepts this part of Snyder’s blurb, without
understanding the previous natives). Since Silko believes two hundred years in America

have not added any new myths to help describe Anglo identity, she encourages them in

 

'6 As I argued elsewhere about Rudolfo Anaya, delving into this relationship allows writers to perform a
critical genealogy on the nation’s stories about itself, bringing the unspoken or erased into the open.

207

this enterprise.'7 She quotes Snyder, “Gary Snyder once said to me, ‘you must create
your own new myths.’ That is good advice to follow”(215). Silko’s advice in “Old-Time
Indian Attack” does not seem to guide whites to any new myths generated by their
encounter with Native Americans, for she permits no Indian topic to be written of (even
by “sympathetic” whites), and she claims that Anglos have not created “a satisfactory
identity for themselves” here, so one might conclude that she wishes for Anglo-
Americans to seek truth in their European origins.18
Gardens in the 134unes also displays a marked equivocation about the truth of one’s
origins and contact with the other. Silko takes on the task of representing characters of
many cultures not her own (white American, English, Italian, African-American, South
American Indian, Caribbean), yet having demonstrated deep commonalities (not just the
feelings and emotions she mentions above, but forms of worship and structures of belief),
she calls in the end for separation of different cultures. Furthermore, even in its
equivocations, the novel validates the culture concept. The opening chapters seem to
establish Silko as a “critical” or “resistance” multiculturalist. A critical multiculturalism,
Peter McLaren writes, rejects the “conservative” and “liberal” forms of multiculturalism
for stressing sameness and a common culture and also rejects the “left-liberal” form for

over-emphasizing differences. McLaren believes these other forms of multiculturalism

depend on essentialist logics instead of interrogating the role of history, ideology and

 

'7 The contrast between her viewpoint and that of Anaya and Candelaria is stunning. Both Chicano writers
mentioned emphasize that years of contact with the ground of the new world are enough to “place" New
Mexicans in the new world, whatever their origins.

’8 For Chicanos to follow her advice would be to make the mistake of Frank Dominic (in Alpurpuergne)
and Jose Rafa (in Mempries pf ine Alhenipgp) in seeking truth in the purity of origins (which don’t exist of
course).

208

power in creating identity (McLaren 53). To the extent that Silko establishes the role of '
history and power in determining identity, she practices critical multiculturalism.

In the ﬁrst portions of her novel particularly, Silko examines some historical
situations that contribute to identity. The encroachment of whites on Indian lands,
including the establishment of the reservation system and govemment-run “Indian
schools,” forces her Indians to shore up their own identity. Whether they want to. be
Indians or not does not matter when whites insist on racial divisions as a technique of
domination. Further divisions (and thus a multiplication of identities) occur as some
Indians join the white world. Silko’s depiction of the ghost dance movement and the
prophet Wovoka shows how historical events affect identity, though these events also
throw pre-existing cultural differences into relief. Paiute visitors arrive with tales of
Wovoka, who has talked to Jesus Christ in heaven and carries the message that Indians
should dance together for the sake of self-preservation. The ghost dance movement uses
familiar cultural practices and emerges historically because of the power imbalance
between whites and Indians. As the Paiutes explain, “Jesus was sad and angry at what
had been done to the Earth and to all the animals and people”(23). The Sand Lizards,
like several other tribes in their area (Paiutes and Shoshones), are historically agricultural,
so the appeal to the earth’s destruction speaks directly to their very existence. The vision
of what will happen if the Indians dance addresses their historical concern with the loss
of land and power: “The winds would dry up all the white people and all the Indians who
followed the white man’s ways, and they would blow away with the dust”(23). Indians
can cross cultural borders and become like whites; this indicates that neither culture nor

race fully determine one’s identity.

209

The clash of white and Indian civilizations forms a major theme of the novel, but
the characterization of different tribes shows that cultural differentiation has a pre-
conquest history, too. Her ﬁctive Sand Lizard people’s historical relationship to the
warring Apache helps determine how other tribes see the Sand Lizards. Not racial
characteristics but choices determine their identity. Grandma Fleet explains that Sand
Lizards would ﬁght back when the Apaches used to raid the Sand Lizards’ villages, “but
then, instead of ﬁghting to the end to crush the Apaches and make them slaves the way
the other tribes did, the Sand Lizard people used to stop ﬁghting and let the Apaches get
away”(48). Neither Silko nor her characters comment explicitly on the efficacy of this
strategy, but Silko implies that she favors the survival of culture over mere survival in the
joy Grandma, Sister Salt, and Indigo take in their particular cultural formation: “Yes, the
Sand Lizards were different”(49). They preserve their differences irrespective of their
usefulness: “When Indigo asked why the Sand Lizard people stayed there [the dunes], if
it was easier to grow plants close to the big river, Grandma Fleet laughed. Sand Lizards
did things differently than other people”(48).l9 In fact, while there seems to be no reason
to preserve their differences from other Native American groups who aren’t attacking
them (as there clearly is a reason to distinguish them from the Apaches or whites), they
hold on to their practices for the sake of difference: “Sand Lizards didn’t mind if others

found them odd; that’s how they distinguished themselves from others”(48).

 

’9 Silko adds that the farmers by the river must deal with white authorities, a hassle the Sand Lizards would
like to avoid, but she undercuts this rational explanation with the Sand Lizard insistence on difference for
its own sake. Here one begins to see the fetishization of origins as an explanation for identity over the
historical factors mentioned above.

210

Silko takes great care in distinguishing her ﬁctional creation, the Sand Lizard
people,20 and her descriptions of their cultural practices introduce her themes. From the
ﬁrst page, Silko depicts gardens as sources of life and refuges from trouble. Against the
background of US. soldiers and Indian police who break up ghost dance gatherings, the
“old garden terraces in the dunes”(13) represent both timeless peacefulness and historical
means of survival for the Sand Lizards. Silko also use the garden motif to balance
specific cultural differences based on place with the universal dependence on gardens for
food. The seclusion of the Sand Lizards’ gardens makes them safe from intrusion and
makes them a sort of tribal secret, comparable to a ritual; Silko’s in-depth descriptions of
how the Sand Lizards get plants to grow in deep sand compound the depiction of the
gardens as a sacred, ritualistic place. Grandma Fleet passes her knowledge of gardens on
to Sister Salt and Indigo with speciﬁc lessons about honeycomb as “good medicine” and
broader historical lessons about the garden as their original homelands: “Grandma Fleet
told them the old gardens had always been there. The old-time people found the gardens
already growing, planted by the Sand Lizard, a relative of Grandfather Snake, who
invited his niece to settle there and cultivate her seeds”(14). Grandma traces her people’s
history back to the beginning of time; therefore, whenever her people return to the old
gardens, they are returning to the very place they became the Sand Lizard people. The

cultivation of plants comes to represent the raising of children and organization of tribes,

 

2° Silko identiﬁes herself as Laguna; born in Albuquerque, she has long resided in and written about the
Tucson, Arizona area. Ceremony, Storﬁelle , and Almanac of the M do not feature ﬁctional Indian
tribes, and Silko’s desire to ﬁctionalize a tribe at this point in her career (1999) is a subject ripe for
speculation. Her sensitivity to giving away tribal secrets (see Paul Beekman Taylor’s treatment of this
subject, “Silko’s Reappropriation of Secrecy,” lie Marmon Silko: A 11 t' f riti l ssa .
Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, Eds. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999) 23-
62) may be responsible, and this forms a theme of Almanac pf the ﬁnd. It may simply be that Silko
desired a greater freedom in depicting a people than historical faithfulness allowed her. The ﬁctional Sand
Lizards are contextualized by actual tribes.

211

or culture itself. Silko uses plant growth, hybridization, and transplantation as metaphors
for civilization, contact, and migration.”

Though the principal of the garden represents timelessness (because people
always need gardens), the gardens and the world around them do change. Grandma tells
that some Sand Lizards abandoned the old gardens to live along the river, but that “the
old gardens could be counted on for sanctuary”(15). Therefore, when “the aliens”
(whites) come with “disease and fever,” the Sand Lizards “return to the old gardens”(15).
This historical return preﬁgures that of several characters who return to homelands to
restore their identities. The pull of homelands is so strong that Grandma, after an
invasion by white prospectors scatters the group, imagines the very plants calling for the
Sand Lizards to return: “How lonely she had been, grieving for her husband, for the
others, while all around her the plants they had tended, and their houses, seemed to call
out their names”(l6). Later, after Grandma’s death, the girls will imagine the gardens are
advising them not to leave in search of their mother: “it was as if the old gardens and
Grandma Fleet herself were telling them, ‘Come home. Don’t go’”(58). While this
mystical connection would seem to suggest something essential and unchanging in the
Sand Lizards’ make-up, Grandma’s stories also feature choice and historical contingency.
Only some of the “old-time people” choose to settle at the gardens; no racial or essential
component guides them. Sand Lizard must warn her children to share, which locates
conﬂict and contingency even within this origins myth.22 Some of the Sand Lizard

people left after “their numbers increased” and “joined their relations who lived down

 

2' As should become clear throughout my discussion, the garden symbolism works on both levels of Silko’s
depiction of cultures as l) importantly different and 2) hiding a fundamental sameness to all people.

22 Were Silko attempting to suggest a racial, essential component to the Sand Lizard people, the possibility
that they would divide themselves by not sharing (i.e. by wielding power over one another) would not exist.

212

along the big river”(15). The gardens remain sacred in their stories, and the Sand Lizards
remain Sand Lizards even if they leave the gardens. It seems the mere memory of the
previous settlement at the dunes—the event that makes them Sand Lizards in the ﬁrst
place—can preserve their identity, though there is no guarantee it will.

This identity becomes more tenuous over the years as Sand Lizards leave the old
gardens; transplantation or migration does not always work, and identities do not travel
well. Though memories and stories of the old gardens can help departed Sand Lizards
remain Sand Lizard, integration with other cultures makes this unlikely. Ultimately, only
Grandma, Mama, Sister Salt (and later Indigo) remain. Silko suggests that the practices
of other groups take over, making the departed less like Sand Lizards. They join
reservation families and lose their old identity: “A few remaining Sand Lizard people
married into other tribes on the reservation at Parker. Grandma Fleet said she would die
before she would live on a reservation”(l7). Once again, Silko places the survival of
culture over individual survival, though she tempers this judgment by arguing that the
reservation Indians would not survive long without their own gardens. When Grandma
takes Sister Salt and Indigo back to the gardens, she keeps them alive by passing on
survival lore; the tribe stays alive as an entity only to the extent that they continue to
insist on their Sand Lizard identity (which they do, as I discussed above). In fact, their
isolation at the dunes threatens to make them disappear if only because they cannot
survive without new members. As Sister Salt grows into womanhood, she ponders
expanding their family by having a baby, a way to increase the tribe’s size without

including outsiders. Sister longs for any company, though she keeps Sand Lizard

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survival in mind: “she began to wish someone, anyone—except white men or Indian
police—would come”(57).

By emphasizing the tribe’s closeness to nature (they barely eke out an existence at
the dunes and offer sacrifices to nature for ensuring their survival), Silko can associate
the Sand Lizards’ survival with the survival of mother earth itself. The lessons imparted
by Grandma Fleet (passed down from the original Sand Lizard) become lessons in how
everyone should treat the planet (these include “Always greet each plant
respectfully”(l4) and “Don’t be greedy”(15)). At times, their existence is almost idyllic
or utopian, though the specter of invasion always remains. As a mother ﬁgure, the earth
takes care of the Sand Lizard people, who must reciprocate by taking care of the earth. .
Life at the gardens must appear desirable to the reader for Silko’s message of respect for
the planet to take hold; there must be some payoff for living as the Sand Lizards do, and
there must be reason to mourn its potential loss (and to long to return, as Indigo does
throughout her journeys). Silko contrasts the agricultural world of the dune gardens with
the capitalistic, commercial world of the train depot, where Indians are both commodiﬁed
(by travelers who “capture” them through photography) and devalued (treated as inferior
to white workers and travelers).

This commodiﬁcation speaks not to some essential failing of the southwestern
Indians, but to the “role of history, ideology and power in creating identity”(McLaren
53). Again, such historical explanations suggest Silko writes from a critical
multiculturalism rather than “left-liberal” inasmuch as she stresses historical reasons
(even if these include the choice to be different) for their differences. She adds to this

sense in her depiction of white Mormons whose culture resembles the Native

214

Americans’. Unlike other whites in the novel (especially Hattie and her extended
family), the Mormons share with the various Indian groups a belief that the Messiah has
returned and roams the western United States. The history of Mormons in the west has
many parallels to Indian history, aligning Mormons more closely with Indians based on
practices than with other whites. Power relations (including a power struggle between
the old and new church) help determine Mormon identity. As the US. government
continues to persecute them, Mormons either cling steadfastly to old practices (for the
sake of retaining their identity) or change due to pressure: “Grandma Fleet thought
maybe the other Mormons got tired of resisting the US. government. For years and
years, the US. soldiers chased Mormons when they weren’t chasing Indians”(38). The
“old Mormons” (those not in favor of reforms that would bring the church into
compliance with US. law) even “believed they were related to the Indians”(44). She
doesn’t elaborate on this as a biological or historical relation, but allows that the
worshipful behavior and persecution by other Christians and the US. Government of the
Mormons make them something very close to relatives (albeit still “relative,” having a
relation, but not the same). During the dancing, “the Mormons looked like all the
others”(29). Their banding together with Indians suggests forms of resistance to the
dominant power in the west and shows that cultures are formed in relation with other
cultures (and not from an essence).

Authority ﬁgures try to show and maintain their dominance by destroying the
gardens of a white Mormon friend of Indigo’s grandmother, Mrs. Van Wagnen. Van
Wagnen and other traditional Mormons set themselves against the soldiers and against

the new Mormons; she ﬁnds an ally in the Indians and accepts their Messiah as her own.

215

Her actions make Mormon culture a series of choices rather than a ﬁxed identity
determined by birth. Silko sets up a dichotomy regarding the use of power familiar to
readers of Ceremony, with whites and Indians on both sides. For Indigo, the preservers
and lovers of life seem powerless against the destroyers, whatever their race: “If this was
what white people did to one another, then truly she and the Sand Lizard people and all
other Indians were lucky to survive at all. These destroyers were out to kill every living
being, even the Messiah”(61). The banding together of Mormons and Indians against
white ofﬁcials and Indian police speaks to the historical developments that arrayed forces
of all races and cultures against like groupings. Mentioning the potential death of the
Messiah raises the stakes for Silko’s critique of environmental destruction, as well,
equating killing the environment not with progress (as the narrative she works against
would have it) but with Armageddon.

After the soldiers and police break up the ghost dance of the Mormons and
Indians, Sister Salt and Indigo are sent to the Sherman Institute, an Indian boarding
school. Robert M. Nelson reports that Silko’s paternal grandfather, Henry Marmon, went
to the Sherman Institute; her great-grandmother Marie Anaya Marmon (a Keresan) and
great-aunt Susie (a Laguna) both went to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania (Nelson
16-7). While her own family’s experiences with the government schools clearly did not
make them less Indian (whatever the schools’ goals), Silko lends this power to her
ﬁctional depiction of the historical Sherman Institute. The authorities send Indigo to the
school because “[tlhere was hope the little ones might be educated away from their
blankets”(67) and into Euro-American society. Indeed, when Indigo arrives, the school

has succeeded in making children from other tribes into whites, ready to exert their new

216

powers over Indians who are still Indian: “Cocopa and Chemeheuvi girls her own age
who had already lived at the boarding school for three years were in charge of new
students; only their skin looked Indian”(67). She also describes a matron “who looked
Indian but behaved like a white woman”(68).

Indigo suffers three months at the Institute. The episode suggests different
potential reactions to the govemment’s attempts to make over Indians and different
repercussions for change. Merely being away from their place of origins kills some
students: “[S]he had watched three girls from Alaska stop eating, lie listlessly in their
beds, then die, coughing blood. The others said the California air was too hot and too dry
for their Alaskan lungs, accustomed to cool, moist air”(68). Other students and adults
adapt to what Silko consistently characterizes as “white” ways, from the Chemeheuvi and
Cocopa girls to the Pomo matron to the boys who help the white superintendent. Silko
accounts for the different reactions partly by another appeal to Sand Lizard uniqueness;
the other Indians mock Indigo: “They wanted to make her cry because she was from the
Sand Lizard people with their odd ways”(70). This does not, however, account for the
Alaskan Indians’ deaths. Silko ascribes these to environmental differences, suggesting
the brutal consequences of forced migration (and preﬁguring her later reversal of the long
white migration from Europe to American through Hattie’s return to Europe).

Given the emphasis on Indigo’s origins at the gardens in the dunes, her negative
reaction to the school does resemble the Alaskan Indians’ rejection of their new
environment. Still, white institutions like church and school are more threatening and
alien to Indigo than the new environment. She at least thinks that the school will kill her

by trying to assimilate her to white ways, and so she escapes to the Palmers’ garden. The

217

garden is hardly a wild space (nor is Indi go’s home at the dunes), but it offers her refuge
from the pressures of the government school. That Indigo and Hattie meet in the garden
is important because it reinforces the theme that gardens sustain life through sustenance
and the beauty of variety, something the two women will grow to ﬁnd in each other, and
because it establishes gardens as the common ground of all humanity. Silko also uses
gardens, plants, and transplantation to comment on human cultures and migrations.
Introducing Indigo into the family of Edward and Hattie Palmer allows Silko to examine
critically how such historical matters as l9lh century botany and its participation in
colonialism and global capitalism mold individual and cultural identities.23

Hattie and Edward’s reactions to Indigo derive from a combination of their
relative power over her and individual character traits (through which Silko comments on
white society at large)“ Hattie possesses views atypical of her place in educated, upper-
class white society, but as a 19‘h century wife, she is also largely inﬂuenced in her
attitudes by Edward. Silko reveals Hattie’s independent side through Hattie’s master’s
thesis, which uses Coptic scrolls to argue that “Jesus had women disciples and Mary
Magdalene wrote a Gospel suppressed by the church”(77). Through Hattie’s research
interest in marginal, suppressed topics, Silko makes her open to understanding, accepting,
and even adopting views that may contradict her own. She reacts sympathetically to

Indigo’s loss of her mother, but also to her plight at the government school. Hattie’s

mistrust of institutions extends to the govemment’s treatment of Indians: “She wondered

 

23 Denise Cummings has analyzed how Silko critiques western civilization through Edward’s belief in
science, on which I will have more to say below. See Cummings, “‘Settling’ History: Understanding Leslie

Marmon Silko s ____M.Ceremo Smmellsr Jam and W” Micah

American Indinn Litereture 12. 4 (Winter 2000), 65- 90, especially 84-6.
2" In one of Silko’s many reversals in the novel, Indigo will ultimately triumph over both Palmers; in

establishing their characters, however, Silko gives them deﬁnitive advantages Indigo lacks—formal
education, knowledge of the world, and wealth. These do not end up helping them survive in the new
world.

218

what the school fed the Indian children. Did they feed the children the tribal foods they
were accustomed to?”(73) She shows her sympathy towards the Indians, but from a
position Of difference (and superiority) from them; Indians need different foods because
they are different, Hattie thinks. Her belief in preserving cultural differences (as Opposed
to assimilating others) makes her similar to Indigo and Silko. At the same time, Hattie is
a sort Of blank slate, Open to other possibilities. Through her encounters with various
Others (Indians and Europeans), Hattie slowly abandons many Of her own beliefs.

In the meantime, however, Edward’s Opinions, representing modern western
science, still inﬂuence her. In some ways, Silko tries tO present Edward as somewhat
sympathetic, someone blind tO how damaging his cultural bigotry can be, as a scientist
Often tOO wrapped up in classiﬁcation and experimentation to examine his role in
imperialism. He cannot conceive Of himself as a destroyer, but we are meant to ascertain
that he is when, for example, he speaks from the colonizer’s perspective in calling
Indians “wild.”25 Edward views Indians as culturally inferior, though they can be
“civilized” in the Indian schools and can help in his gardens: “Edward said the Indian
students were quick to learn civilized ways. In the summer, when he was not away on an
expedition, Edward hired two or three'Indian boys to help with the weeding and
mowing”(72). Silko’s quick passage from “civilized ways” to the physical labor the
Indians contribute sums up Edward’s view that Indians can be civilized and assimilated

(the two are the same to him) to the extent that they are willing to work for him.

 

25 Again, Silko makes gardens and agricultural knowledge stand in for civilization. As I state above.
Indigo’s home at the gardens in the dunes is no more a wild space than the Palmers’ highly organized
English-style garden or their orange groves. Edward’s characterization Of Indians who cultivate gardens as
he does as “wild” further establishes his blindness. His opinion can hardly be taken ironically since the _
careful reader will expect it, but Silko does seem to be using this dramatic irony (Edward indicting himself
without knowing it) to critique western science’s lack of self-awareness.

219

Furthermore, while much of Edward’s agricultural work seems to be productive and even
creative, Silko characterizes through the destructive imagery Of weeding and mowing.

Edward’s investment in “modern.” science represents a major theme through
which Silko contrasts the development Of Euro-American and Native American cultures
and it deserves further analysis. The characterization Of Edward as a 19‘h century man Of
science implicated in the violence Of emergent global capital further suggests Silko is
performing a “critical” or “resistance” multiculturalism, analyzing power relations and
ideological differences from a historical perspective. She ﬁlls his Riverside Ofﬁce with
artifacts from his travels, cultural capital removed from all context: “bows and spears and
arrows bristled out Of pottery jars painted with serpents and birds. A strange carved mask
with a frightful expression gazed at [Hattie] from another comer stacked high with
colorful handwoven textiles”(76). Edward has collected Objects that represent other
cultures; the contrast between the traditional weapons and tools and Edward’s scientiﬁc
instruments (not to mention the context of his large estate) supports Edward’s feelings Of
superiority (especially as he has captured these objects). James Clifford describes
western collecting as a “marking-Off Of a subjective domain that is not the ‘Other,’” “an
exercise in how to make the world one’s own”(218). Though he claims that gathering
Objects is “probably universal” (Clifford 218), in its Western incarnation, the connection
between anthropology and modern art has meant the appropriation of “exotic things,
facts, and meanings”(221). Yet Edward’s sense of collecting Objects from other cultures
is not yet modern like those Clifford describes. The modemists, Clifford argues,

appropriated Objects of the other to show how similarities between tribal “fetishes” and

modern art meant that artifacts from disappearing cultures could help renew the modern

220

west.“ Their efforts appeal towards a common humanity to be discovered in the Objects
Of the defeated other; Edward’s collection is pre-modemist in that there is nothing in
common between his scientific instruments and the other’s artifacts. For Edward, the
Objects represent his conquest Of the other, not a reminder Of his shared humanity with
them.27

Edward’s botanical work extends Silko’s critique Of western science. The ﬂora of
Other lands fascinate Edward in part because Of their difference from ﬂora he knows; in
this much, Edward represents a weak form Of contemporary difference multiculturalism
and is somewhat sympathetic.28 More importantly, Silko continually imbricates his
aesthetic and scientiﬁc interests with global capital and the power differentials it
maintains: “Edward’s special interest was in aromatic grasses and plants, which were
always highly prized by horticulturalists and gardeners. Edward traveled to places so
remote and collected plants so rare, so subtle, few white men ever saw them before. He
added these rare treasures tO his growing collection”(78). Perhaps because he himself
does not bring the items to market, Edward does not consider himself as a merchant
(much less an imperialist). Nonetheless, he exploits the appearance Of mere aesthetic
interest in foreign lands and plants for ﬁnancial gain. In his stories Of expeditions to far-

Off lands, “he portrayed himself humorously, as the innocent tourist hell-bent on disaster.

 

2‘ See Clifford’s chapter 9, “Histories Of the Tribal and the Modern,” 189-214. He argues that modernist
“pioneers” (he uses quotation marks to ironize their claims Of originality) discover in primitive art
5 imens “new dimensions Of their (‘Our’) creative potential”( 195).

And Edward will continue to reject signs that he shares his world with Others, as in his rejection Of the
“ rimitive” European fertility ﬁgures in Italy.
2 Combined with his will to exert power over Others (people and scientiﬁc Objects are equal to him),
Edward’s division of cultures becomes the sinister underpinnings Of 20‘” century imperialism. For
example, he continues to insist that Indigo be trained as a lady’s maid, even as Hattie grows to see her as a
member Of the family. I am not suggesting that Silko has the same goals in the difference multiculturalism
she ultimately advocates at the end Of Gardens—far from it. Nonetheless, the logic of separation
encouraged by Silko can be and has been used in the way Edward uses cultural separation—a tOOl for
classiﬁcation and domination.

221

The tourist identity was the disguise he adopted to confuse the customs Ofﬁcers. Some
foreign governments were quite unpleasant about the export of valuable roots stock and
seeds”(79). Of course, Edward’s collection Of foreign specimens depends on his and his
country’s relative power over other countries; his photographic capture of “interesting
subjects”(86) resembles the commodiﬁcation of the exotic through the photography Of
Indians at the Needles train depot.29 Finally, Edward’s two main concerns with
specimens reveal much about the workings Of science and capital. First, rarity Of plant
specimens will make them more valuable on the market. Second, the disappearance Of
non-westem cultures (their rariﬁcation) makes them more exotic, but also indicates the
degree to which their resistance to empire has faded. Edward puts his interest in Indi go’s
people in these terms: “[H]e was actually interested himself in rare or extinct Indian
cultures”(122). Living Indians may be able to serve him in the garden, but dead or
disappearing cultures are far more valuable as a sign Of his (and his culture’s) power.3o
Edward’s science thus functions to separate him from the Other, particularly
through the distancing technique Of making the other his Object Of study. As Denise
Cummings has argued, Silko makes Edward blind despite his many scientiﬁc instruments
for seeing: “The epistemological failure of Western science and technologies renders
Edward blind; he can never ‘see’ and, consequently, dies trusting in a quack’s ‘scientiﬁc
cure’ for an illness he endures”(Cummings 85). His failure to see what Hattie ultimately
sees (the resemblances between Old European snake worship and veneration Of female

principles) makes him comparable to Silko’s targets in “An Old-Time Indian Attack,”

 

2” The details of Edward’s expedition to the Para River are tOO numerous tO mention here, but solidify the
connection Of science and imperialism and foreshadow his theft Of citron cuttings from Corsica
3° The trope of whites preferring dead Indians is familiar from Erdrich’s “The Plunge Of the Brave” in Love

Medicine and Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Ypur Sins.

 

222

while Hattie seems to follow the advice Silko gives Gary Snyder. Within her own
tradition (which we might broadly call modern Euro-American Christianity), she
researches signs of the importance of feminine principles in the early church. In contrast
to Edward’s scientiﬁc collecting, which distances and differentiates him from the other,
Hattie’s work reveals similarities between some Christian and pre-Christian European
beliefs and Sand Lizard (or Native American more broadly) beliefs, such as “the equality
Of the feminine element”(99) and the connection of “female spiritual principle” and the
“Snake, the Instructor”(lOO). After her thesis is rejected by her graduate committee, she
begins to question the institutions that perpetuate their brand of Christianity while
suppressing their own traditions. As I suggested above, once Hattie starts to reﬂect more
on the suppression Of Old European beliefs by the Church, catalyzed by Indigo’s
companionship, she begins to see important, basic similarities between European and
non-European traditions.

In the Parts One and Two, set entirely in the southwest, Silko performs the work
of a critical multiculturalist: analyzing the historical and ideological sources of
differences among Indian tribes, and between whites and Indians. Once she removes
Indigo and the Palmers from California, however, and moves them to the East and to
Europe, she begins to de-emphasize her focus on ideological power relations as
determinant of different identities (i.e. colonizer/colonized or civilized/wild) and to focus
on Hattie’s slow-dawning discovery Of a fundamental similarity between her culture and
Indigo’s, a discovery which contains the potential not only to alter radically her view Of
how history affects culture, but also to force the question Of culture itself. As the family

travels in England, Italy, and Corsica, Hattie begins to connect her academic interest in

223

Christian female mystics back to pre-Christian religions of “Old Europe,” which
emphasized a female fertility principle much like Indigo’s people do.“ The exposure to
her people’s traditional beliefs sparks Hattie’s interest in returning tO EurOpe, which she
eventually does.

While still in the United States, Hattie has a dream that foreshadows her discovery
of pre-Christian European religious beliefs. She dreams of “sitting on a strange ﬂat stone
in front Of the church door”(163) with her Aunt Bronwyn. The dream is signiﬁcant for
several reasons. First, it temporarily removes Hattie from her current surroundings,
namely Oyster Bay and white New York society. Silko portrays east coast society as
alternately superﬁcial (in Susan Palmer’s love affairs and destruction of her gardens)32
and idealistic (Hattie’s father’s interest in helping the poor makes him another
sympathetic white character, his philanthropic interest in science balanced against
Edward’s selﬁshness). Hattie’s dream takes her away from the hubbub surrounding her
sister-in-law’s party and towards more important spiritual concerns. The dream also sets
up Silko’s more complete depiction of pre-Christian European stone worship in the
chapter to follow. Hattie’s subconscious during the dream is more Open to suggestion
than her waking mind; her dream reveals her readiness to accept the stone veneration of

her Aunt Bronwyn. This and subsequent dreams during her visit with Bronwyn

 

3 ' Silko establishes the importance of female fertility principles in the early sections, both through
Grandmother Fleet’s lectures on agriculture and the story of how the original Sand Lizard planted her seeds
at the gardens when asked by her Grandfather Snake to settle there (14-5). More broadly, Silko makes her
novel gynocentric, with the male characters basically uncreative appendages for the procreative female
characters.

’2 Indigo also notices many ﬁelds that have not been planted for a long time: “Where did white people get
their food if they didn’t plant these ﬁelds?”( 165) Her question points out the disparity between wealthy
east coast families (who buy their food through the market and don’t need to use the land fully) and
Indigo’s people (as well as many whites of the time). East coast whites are interested in gardens, of course.
but their wealth makes it possible not to plant all their land with food crops. Ultimately, Silko celebrates
Indigo’s interest in the purely aesthetic appeal Of some plants, but never loses focus on the importance of
their use-value.

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eventually result in her re-connection to the sacredness of life, a shift that Opens up the
novel to the possibility that all people are fundamentally alike.

Bronwyn represents an advanced version Of Hattie. She has already “left the
church” and moved to England “to live in seclusion and study the prehistoric archaeology
of the British Isles and Old Europe”(165). Bronwyn actively keeps alive an ancient
tradition in Europe Of stone worship, a practice frowned upon by encroaching
Christianity (just as Wovoka and his followers are suppressed in the U.S.). Her religion
celebrates life and abundance, like the myths of the Sand Lizards’ origins. The former,
Christian garden of the Cloister Bronwyn occupies had “severe plain lines and sparse
plantings designed to mortify the soul”(240), while her new garden is more properly
multicultural: “The kitchen garden was the modern garden as well, she explained. Plants
from all over the world”(240). While in the light of Edward’s botanical contributions to
global capitalism we certainly might read Bronwyn’s garden as just another symbol of
colonial appropriation Of Objects from other cultures, Silko encourages us to see Bronwyn
as akin to the Sand Lizard people, protecting an ancient belief system against encroaching
modernity, while also infusing her garden with various new specimens designed to
increase its vitality. And unlike Edward, for whom the Earth and indeed some cultures
are dead things to be studied or experimented with, Bronwyn believes “plants and trees
had individual souls”(242) just as humans do, and Bronwyn certainly seems to live in
harmony with nature, for her cows are “quite at home” in her front room (236).

Bronwyn’s afﬁnity extends to stone structures as well as plants and trees. She
prefers Bath’s Older buildings to its recent attempts to improve commerce by widening

Bath Street and adding “ghastly faux colonnades”(234). Old stone represents the

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authenticity of Celtic origins, while modem renovations become a betrayal of origins.
She criticizes the excavation of earth and removal of trees to make “more mansions of
gigantic rrrisproportions built for business tycoons from London and Bristol”(235). Her
concerns parallel the story of Indigo’s Sister Salt, who ends up working near a dam
construction site in California; in both locations, the geography, including plants and
stones, is drastically altered in the name of progress. The similarity between Sister and
Bronwyn’s concerns makes Bronwyn a surrogate family member; her views come much
closer to Indi go’s than any other non-Indian in the book. Her efforts to preserve locations
and hear “the history and tales about Bath and the surrounding countryside from [the]
fervent defenders of Old trees and stones”(24l) resemble the scenes where Grandma Fleet
instructs Indigo how to take care of the earth. Even Bronwyn’s call to her cattle connects
her to Indi go’s family: “The calls were lovely and made Indigo think of the Old gardens
and Grandma Fleet and Mama and Sister Salt”(238). Predictably, Edward treats
Bronwyn’s religious and architectural beliefs with polite derision.

Bronwyn shares her concerns for the removal of trees and stones and advocates
pre-Christian beliefs in, among other things, worship of toads “as incarnations of the
primordial Mother”(24l). Throughout her lessons, Bronwyn emphasizes the authenticity
of origins over the adaptation of new ways; this characterization seems to be Silko’s way
of showing what would happen should Euro-Americans follow her advice to Gary Snyder
and look to their own (pre-New World) mythology for their identity. She inﬂuences
Hattie greatly, in large part because Hattie’s beliefs in suppressed feminine principles
prepare her to accept pre-Christian versions of these beliefs. After days Of touring

ancient sites with Bronwyn, Hattie has a life-altering epiphany. She sleepwalks through

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the Old garden and ﬁnds herself surrounded by stones arranged as if a church and sitting
on the stone she dreamed about at Oyster Bay. She sees a beautiful light and feels a deep
joy (248). The continued recurrence of the dream will convince Hattie of the truth of its
message: she belongs in Europe, the place of her origins. Even the next day, the
remembrance of the transcendent experience “caused Hattie to weep again with the joy
she felt with all her being”(249). In Corsica, she shares a similar epiphany with many
others, including Indigo, while viewing an image Of “the Blessed Mother,” Mary on a
schoolhouse wall (3123-9).33

Inﬂuenced by Bronwyn’s close connection with the earth, her growing awareness
of her culture’s lost roots in Old EurOpean mythology, the extravagance of her sister-in-
law Susan’s transplanting of huge trees (a scene described as if the trees were bleeding),
and by Indi go’s homesickness, Hattie realizes she belongs not in Riverside with the spirit
of her dead mother, but in England. The opposite side of the great joy she experiences in
discovering her true origins is the terrible violence implicated in anyone’s removal from
their place of origins. While thinking of the mistake she made in removing to California,
“Suddenly she realized they must help the Indian child return to her sister and mother!
This was all wrong! How foolish she had been!”(249) Though the ﬁrst thing Hattie
thinks of after the epiphany is separating herself from Indigo, a separation I will discuss
below, she simultaneously recognizes Indigo’s need to be with her own people and that
she is Indigo’s own people. The ﬁrst realization clearly serves Silko’s underlying
difference multiculturalism since it insists on Indi go’s alterity and Hattie’s inability to

give her the community she needs; however, the second realization, that common myths

 

’3 This image of the life-giving mother combines Catholicism and pre-Christian worship of female fertility
principles; as such, it appeals to Indigo and to Corsican Catholics. The church leaders, however, are
unhappy with the people’s devotion to the reoccurring image.

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of origins link Europeans and Indians, opens the novel to a different possibility, albeit
brieﬂy.

The possibility is that, coupled with Silko’s critique of 19th century science’s
complicity with imperialism, a critique will arise of anthropology’s forrnalizing of its
methods of differentiation Of cultures, which has been linked to imperialism by writers
like Vine Deloria (in Custer Died for Yonrﬁ Sins). The purpose of anthropology, Scott
Michaelsen writes, “is to stabilize the differences”(ms xviii) between cultures, to
preserve “culture” as the Object of anthropology. In most of Silko’s novel, we can see
that sciences like anthropology and the discourses that surround them (such as Edward’s
interest in the dead Indian cultures) are destructive, since in creating “cultures” (and the
concept of culture can only be understood if there are multiple cultures to classify), these
sciences create hierarchies and exclusions every bit as destructive as other facets of
imperialism. Discussing the anti-anthropological bent in Vine Deloria, Michaelsen
writes, “Deloria understands Amerindians. .. as particularities or as endlessly complicated
bricolages that cannot be disentangled either practically or intellectually. To be human,
he seems to argue, is to be, in the end, nonidentiﬁable at the level of group
identity”(_ILm_iis 5); a group may come to be something, “But to name it is to WWW
5). During part of Indigo and Hattie’s travels in Europe, their co-discovery Of similarities
between their “cultures” threatens to strip away their sense of essential group

differences.”

 

3’ This discovery has an important analogue later in the book when Indigo shares her discoveries about
European snake and stone worship with Sister Salt. Told of the moving, talking stones at Aunt Bronwyn’s.
“Sister nodded; she believed that”(454). Told of a medusa ﬁgure, “Sister was interested but not shocked:
Grandma Fleet always said humans were capable of sex with anything”(455). However “new” these
archeological discoveries may seem to Hattie or Edward, Sand Lizard cosmogony has already
comprehended them as universals: “Grandma Fleet always said snake girls and bird mothers were
everywhere in the world, not just here!”(455) Modern white belief is made to look provincial and

228

 

In a garden in Italy, the group comes across statues revealing the old European
veneration of snakes, Edward tries to repress the connection Hattie is beginning to feel
between her and Indi go’s beliefs: “The child was from a culture of snake worshippers and
there was no sense in confusing her with the impression the old Europeans were no better
than red Indians or black Africans who prayed to snakes”(302).35 By this point, we are
familiar enough with Edward’s lack of insight to make our own connections: the
evidence of European snake worship means exactly what Edward fears. Europeans are
no better than anyone else, but instead fundamentally the same as others.36 Though
Hattie supports her husband’s Opinion here, she herself is deﬁnitely confused and ends up
rejecting Christianity in order to study the Old religions that fascinate Bronwyn and her
friend Laura. Everywhere she visits, she seems to encounter a “presence”(28 1) that lets
her know she belongs in Europe. This confusion of cultures opens up the possibility in
Silko’s work for a critique of culture as a concept, for the similarity between the two
worship practices could render impossible the identiﬁcation of any human at the group
level. After all, if all groups worship snakes and pass down similar myths of origins,

nothing at the group level can distinguish them from each other.37

 

incomplete for forgetting its own past; Sand Lizard belief seems universal and all-encompassing by
contrast. .

35 That is, Hattie and Edward view them for the ﬁrst time. Their guide Laura, a friend Of Bronwyn’s, is
quite familiar with pre-Christian religion. It’s important to remember that the Old pagan religions are alive
in Europe, forming a competing discourse, not a dead one.

36 The power differential among different cultures is explained in critical multiculturalism through analysis
of history; here, Silko gestures back in time to a pro-history when essential differences among people, if
they existed, would manifest themselves. That the groups’ pre-historical myths and practices resemble
each other should eliminate any possibility of essential differences as enumerated by difference
multiculturalists.

3’ Silko’s paperback publisher, Scribner Paperback, tips her hand on the back of the book. The ﬁrst
paragraph of their blurb reads, “A sweeping, multifaceted tale of a young Native American pulled between
the cherished traditions of a heritage on the brink of extinction and an encroaching white culture, Gardens
in the Dunes is the powerful story of one woman’s quest to reconcile two worlds that are diametrically
opposed”(n.p.). Though Indigo is physically pulled away from her traditions, she makes no gestures
towards accepting non-Native culture; she discovers nothing that her culture does not already contain. At

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But Silko does not pursue this possibility, and as the novel returns to America, the
ground laid for a critical multiculturalism gives way to a difference multiculturalism.
Throughout the journey in Europe, Hattie opens up to the myths in her own history,
enabled by her upbringing (her studies, her father’s radicalism), her growing mistrust of
Edward’s character and beliefs, and by Indi go’s inﬂuence. She even grows to treat
Indigo not as a future maid whose “docile willingness to serve must also be
cultivated”(309), but as a friend or family member: “She realized she loved Indigo
dearly”(392).38 Given how close Hattie grows to Indigo (while growing apart from
Edward), one expects their friendship to remain close back in the United States.
Furthermore, Hattie has begun to shed all connections to her past life. She demands a
divorce from Edward. She casts off former beliefs in religious dogma: “She realized she
no longer believed”(374). She does not settle into her home in Riverside: “As soon as
she’d obtained the information and the permission to return with Indigo to Arizona, they
would be off again. In any case she did not wish to remain in the Palmer house any
longer than necessary”(376). A beam of light in her bedroom reminds her of the new
(Old) beliefs she picked up in Europe through her visions of light: “How beautiful and
perfect it was—there was no need for anything more, certainly not her attachments to the
past”(377). Her recollections of the light make her feel connected to the earth (the chief

metaphor used is gravity) in a way that illustrates Silko’s environmentalism and politics

 

most, she discovers cultural conﬂict, but this Obtains between cultures and not inherently in any of them.
The other side of the blurb (the “one woman’s quest”) suggests that Hattie tries to reconcile white and
Native American ways, which she never does, nor are these worlds “diametrically opposed.” Silko
certainly opposes Respecters of Life and Destroyers of Life, but members of both groups can be found
among whites and Indians. Instead of presenting a vision of her two protagonists ﬁnding some common
ground, Silko cordons each one off in her own original tradition, as I argue below.

8 Interestingly, though Hattie is Old enough to be her mother, Silko does not suggest a mother-daughter
bond. For her part, Indigo remains friendly but aloof from Hattie, content to share her company since she
has no other choice, but not desirous of remaining with her.

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of origins. The recollections make Hattie feel she belonged in Europe, close to the earth
but also to her ancestors: “She experienced a gravity of well-being and peace as she
gazed at the glow; later she felt traces of that Odd gravity from the Old stones Aunt
Bronwyn protects; it was the same gravity exuded by the carvings in her
possession”(424).

The importance of closeness to one’s homelands impresses itself upon Hattie, for
her sake and Indi go’s. She certainly pushes for returning Indigo to her home and family
quickly out of concern for Indigo, but also because she has abandoned all her own
anchors to people, places, and beliefs. She brieﬂy seems to believe that she will ﬁnd her
own place by returning Indigo to hers: “Hattie felt a ﬂicker of anticipation and excitement
at setting out for Indigo’s homeland in parts unknown. It was just the change she
needed”(378). Similarly, Indigo has a dream of returning to the old gardens, and “even
Hattie was in the dream—she carried water from the spring in a big gourd balanced on
her head”(393). If Hattie’s divorce from all parts of her former life suggests she will
successfully transplant herself into Indi go’s homelands, Indigo’s dream seems initially to
encourage this move.

Hattie is at a loss upon reuniting Indigo and Sister Salt. She feels pride for having
taken care of Indigo, but now discovers “how alone she was”(410). Silko’s description
makes Hattie an outsider: “But she loved Indigo with all of her heart; without the girl she
didn’t know what she would do. Hattie watched from the doorway as the girls chattered
happily inside, laughing all together. It was clear how much Indi go’s homeland meant to
her”(409). Hattie uses “Indigo’s homeland” in a way she could never describe her own

homeland, given her migratory existence. It highlights Indi go’s solid placement in space

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and Hattie’s separation from her origins. Hattie’s incipient interest in old European
religion and archaeology (which, combined with the references to stone worship, itself
become religion) suggests she might ﬁnd a cure to both her loneliness and her anomie by
returning to her original homeland, Europe.39 The reception of Indi go’s sister also
impresses upon Hattie that she doesn’t belong with Indigo: “She knew she was an
intruder here. Indigo’s sister didn’t’ trust her”(438).

While Hattie makes plans to help Indigo and her sister, she draws the ire Of local
whites, who (like Edward) favor absolute separation from Indians. Though Indi go’s
friends do not welcome Hattie as Indigo does, Hattie still considers herself close to them.
Her concern for them, mixed with their lack of interest in her, isolates her from Indians
and whites alike. In this newly marginal position, she Observes racist behavior that was
transparent before: “Hattie noticed the buggy driver was acquainted with the trader and
his wife; all the white people here seemed to know one another. ‘Strength in numbers,’
she supposed, since whites were outnumbered by Indians here”(412). While the Indians
treat Hattie to nothing more than a few impolite stares (which seem natural given their
experiences with white police and slavers), town whites treat Hattie as a race traitor. For
daring to cross boundaries between the two groups, Hattie is punished when the driver
assaults and rapes her. The price of her drifting becomes apparent to Hattie ﬁrst as she
vows not to return to her parents’ home: “NO, she’d rather wander naked as Isaiah for
years in the wilderness than go back to Oyster Bay to endure the stares and expressions of
sympathy”(452). This doom is visited on her literally through the assault: “She’d been

found wandering naked and dazed beside the road near Topack. . .. [S]omeone had beaten

 

3” The home above the riverbed more accurately belongs to Indigo’s Chemeheuvi friends; the pull of
Indigo’s original home is strong, too. She thinks of her old home in parallel fashion to Hattie’s thoughts of
Europe: “She had been thinking of the old gardens more and more”(448).

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her head with a rock, then left her for dead beside the road”(456). Silko presents the vow
and the naked wandering just four pages apart, as if tO highlight Hattie’s gift of foresight,
gained when she abandons the false beliefs of modern western civilization for original,
Old European beliefs. Silko suggests literal punishment for those who cross boundaries
between groups; here she is far from those critical, historicist accounts of
multiculturalism that advocate hybridity.

Hattie’s personal involvement in Indi go’s life derives from the admirable
motivation to help a friend, and not from a condescending philanthropy (like that of the
government or Edward in his quest to help Indigo by making her a maid). Still, her
actions in remaining part of Indi go’s life after Indigo returns home cause her punishment.
In part, Silko uses the assault to critique white society for its violent attitudes even
towards other whites who deal equitably and intimately with Indians.”0 Silko’s depiction
of Sister Salt, who also rejects Hattie, is gentler. After she and Indigo are reported to the
government authorities for living in the wrong place (the Chemeheuvi girls’ home can
not be theirs: “they didn’t belong there”(453)), they prepare to return to the dunes. Sister
thinks of Hattie’s recent displacement: “Sister felt a little regretful for the mean feeling
and thoughts she’d had about the white woman who was so generous to her sister and
her”(453). However, personal feelings do not win over Sister’s accumulated beliefs
about the “other,” and she convinces Indigo that Hattie’s friendship can only be
temporary: “[S]omeday she wouldn’t come back. As Indigo listened she realized her
sister was right; Hattie couldn’t live there and she couldn’t come month after month or

year after year”(447). Yet the reason for this is nothing more than received wisdom,

 

‘0 As always with Silko, there are exceptions to her broad sociological characterizations, such as Hattie’s
lawyer, Mr. Maxwell. He is not a virulent racist, though he is cognizant of the dangers of boundary
crossing and warns Hattie against traveling alone.

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“Stories Grandma told, about a long time ago”(447) when local Indians temporarily made
money working for Mexicans, then lost that windfall when Apaches killed the Mexicans.
This would hardly seem to constitute a theory of why two groups can’t live together, but
the power of stories makes Sister’s—and eventually Indigo’s—decision ﬁnal.

On an individual level, Silko makes her Native American characters sympathetic
and understanding when they reject someone and makes whites violent and surly. On a
political level, though, the result is the same: the two sides are kept apart. The
government even enforces the separation by regulating where Indians are allowed to live,
i.e. not in town where whites live. On one hand, this authority seems cruel, as it separates
Indigo and Sister Salt from their Chemeheuvi friends. On the other hand, the Sand
Lizard girls do want to return to their original home at the dunes. Here, government
policy works rather ambiguously."l Silko critiques their violent methods in breaking up
the ghost dance, but agrees with their philosophy of enforcing separation of white and
Indian as long as the Indians can remain at their ancestral homes. Since homelands are a
source of strength and sign of legitimacy in Silko, her Sand Lizards will gain by returning
to the dunes, while white invaders will still be far from their original homes.

Silko also turns the assault into something symbolically positive for Hattie
inasmuch as it ﬁrms up her decision to leave America entirely; this decision helps
complete Silko’s separation of white and Indian. Hattie treats the assault less as a

warning than a sign of rebirth. Though “left for dead”(456), the aftermath feels like new

 

4' Overall, Silko is critical of how the government forces patrol borders but not necessarily of the fact that
this force keeps whites Off Indian land, at least temporarily. Other Native American writers are less
ambiguous, especially when dealing with tribal groups that have been forcibly removed from their ancestral
homes. Silko shows the pain Of removal in the beginning of her novel when the girls are taken from their
home, but allows them to return at the end. This option is not open to characters in other Native American
novels.

234

life starting. She begins her new life naked as a baby, with “fresh blood”(457)
symbolizing the pain and promise of childbirth. When the pain is too much, she sinks
into “the gray light”(457) so reminiscent of the light in Bronwyn’s garden and the
Corsican schoolyard. Her rapist steals her beloved carved gemstones (symbols of old
European religion): “In a way, the loss of the carvings was worse than the outrage done
to her body. . .. [Iln their presence Hattie felt cherished in the way her father loved her.
Now they were gone”(458). The stones, literally pieces Of the land, have a loving
presence; they make present her European homeland. They function as an earth mother,
complementary to the love of Hattie’s human father; their importance highlights Silko’s
advocacy of close human relationships with the earth, not just conceived as political unit
(“place” or homeland) but in its geological sense."2 The loss of the stones spurs her not
to ﬁnd a new life in America, but to return to the homeland where she found them.

Hattie is not one to be intimidated, so we must not read the assault as scaring her
away. Rather, it conﬁrms for her what Sister has already decided, that she belongs
elsewhere. White society in Needles is no more a home for her than Oyster Bay: “[I]t
wasn’t terribly different from the way it was done in Boston. Now it was clear to her, she
could never return to her former life among the lies. She had to leave at once”(459). The
Sand Lizards take care of her because no one else will. She remains with the Sand Lizard
sisters long enough to help make preparations for the return of the Messiah. As in the
beginning of the novel, the Messiah’s visitation promises a utopian togetherness for all

humans similar to the convergence of fates in Ceremony. Several tribes join together to

 

’2 Silko strengthens this depiction through Edward’s adventures with meteor stones. He visits a site where
meteors have struck the earth and Indians have treated it as a deceased child: “The burial objects with the
meteorite—the tiny stone bead necklace and the toy whistle—were intended for a child”(403). Grandma
Fleet’s teachings also appeal to the connection of humans to the heavens: “Grandma Fleet said the stars
were related to us humans. The twins agreed”(4l7).

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dance and sing, and “in the presence of the Messiah, all languages were understood by
everyone”(465). Despite the importance of homelands elsewhere in the novel, during the
dance, all people can “trail their feet gently to caress Mother Earth”(465), in hopes of
making their utopian unity real. Hattie also witnesses more holy light in the dawn before
the Messiah’s arrival: “the lemon yellow light was the same color as the lost carnelian
carved with the waterbirds. The crushing pain was gone and her head felt clear; all her
sense were alert for the ﬁrst time since the assault”(468). Furthermore, she feels the
“dancers’ prayers saved her life”(47l). Their beliefs are her beliefs, she realizes, and
seem to transcend their cultural differences.

However, Silko cannot allow Hattie to stay. There will be no exploration of what
would happen were the white townsfolk’s worst nightmares of border crossing to come
true. Aided by the US. army, the Apache police come to break up the event because of
Hattie: “the police and soldiers came to break up the Indian gathering because of her—
because they came looking for her there”(470). In addition to breaking up the dance, the
police bring Hattie’s parents, there to pick up Hattie. Hattie’s long stay among the
Indians and her Indian garb seem like signs of dementia to them; she is forcibly removed.
Before heading back to Oyster Bay, though, Hattie gets her revenge on Needles.43 She
slips away from her father at the train station and burns down half the town. Like her
reawakening to old European religion, like the dawn before the Messiah comes, this act
takes on religious signiﬁcance symbolized by light: “Little wings of ﬂame gave off a
lemon yellow low that recalled the lost carving of the waterbirds. What a lovely light the

ﬁre gave off as she warmed her hands over it”(473). The “wings of ﬂame” suggest

 

‘3 In another form of revenge fantasy in the book, the houses of Christianized Indians who harass the
Chemeheuvi girls and Sister Salt are consumed in a ﬂood caused by the army corps of engineers as they'
dam the river.

236

angels, and the ﬂames “snaked”(47 3) house to house, in another religious reference.
Hattie ﬁnds the destruction beautiful: “the reds as rich as blood, the blues and whites
luminous, and the orange ﬂame as bright as Minerva’s gemstone”(473). Silko gives the
act her imprimatur by referring to Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, though the destruction
cannot guarantee new life for the people of Needles.

Hattie and Indigo find happiness in going their separate ways. Hattie starts a new
life in England, and a trip “to Scotland to visit the old stones”(475) conﬁrms her new
religious commitment. Through Hattie’s move back to the old country, Silko reverses
centuries of European migration to the Americas.“ Indigo and Sister Salt happily return
to their homelands at the dunes. They discover desecrations similar to those that Aunt
Bronwyn describes in England: “Strangers had come to the Old gardens; at the spring, for
no reason, they slaughtered the big old rattlesnake who lived there; then they chopped
down the small apricot trees above Grandma Fleet’s grave”(476). While the Destroyers
of Life are still destroying, life ﬁnds a way, and the apricot tree rebounds: “growing out
of the base of one stump were green leafy shoots. Who knew such a thing was possible
last winter when they cried their eyes sore over the trees?”(476) The old snake, resonant
with the religious beliefs of Native Americans and Europeans, symbolic of persistence,
also ﬁnds a new form, in an ending much more unambiguously utopian than the similar
endings of Love Medicine and Albugguergue: “Old Snake’s beautiful daughter moved
back home”(477).

Taken together, the revenge fantasies of ﬂood and ﬁre that punish whites and

assirrrilated Native Americans alike, the successful return of the Sand Lizards to the

 

’4 Her solution to what we might call the “European problem” for Native Americans resembles Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s dispatching of the newly-freed George Harris to Africa at the end of lincle Tom’s Cabin.

237

dunes, and the reverse migration all suggest that people should stay in their places. In the
white sympathy for the Indian plight Of the 20th century that inspired the white shaman
poets lambasted in “An Old-Time Indian Attack,” Silko saw an abandonment of white
origins. She blamed their desire to seek myths of other cultures on the Anglo-American
tendency “to cast Off familial and geographic ties; to ‘go West, young man,’ to change
identities as easily as changing shoes”(“Attack” 213). In place of the migration that so
many (including Anaya, McMurtry, Erdrich, and Candelaria) see as an essential part of
the human experience, she calls for a return to original homelands, as if these could be
simply repopulated by the original dwellers, be they whites or Native Americans or
Chicanos. Native Americans who assimilate or even just act meanly are “just like white
people”(446), as Indigo accuses her sister. Similarly, the problem with Euro-Americans
in _G_ardens in the Dries is that they are not European enough. There is no new identity,
no American Adam, no attempt to reconcile European origins with hundreds of years in a
new land (which is how Rudolfo Anaya and Nash Candelaria approach Chicano identity).
Silko presents a politics of authenticity stemming from origins and earth; as she says in
“An Old-Time Indian Attack,” “at best, the Anglo-American is a guest on this
land”(215). The striking similarities among different groups’ myths of feminine fertility
principles, human-animal interbreeding, and stone and serpent worship—which seem to
posit a human commonality at the most basic level—are cast aside. Silko comes close to
suggesting that people are all basically alike, only they can’t live together, and migration
only confuses the issue.

Scott Michaelsen reads the meaning of migration for culture in the work of David

Theo Goldberg: “He posits, then, a world of original differences, quickly usurped by

238

mi gration-driven hybridity, but he imagines that this process has not gone far enough:
‘we’ are still to much like ourselves—we need more relation with others—and a critical
multiculturalism will massively expand the heterogeneous effects of mi gration”(m
16-7). Silko gestures the Opposite way: we are in danger of becoming like others, and a
difference multiculturalism must counter the effects of migration by segregating groups
from each other. Silko’s politics are perhaps best understood in the context of Native
American claims for tribal sovereignty, including claims about land ownership. As
Chadwick Allen explains, Native Americans might best be served not in imagining new
identities and resisting years of colonially enforced segregation (in grdens in the Dm,
we see this in Silko’s ambiguous treatment of tribal police; see above), but in accepting,
even demanding a return to, terms set down in treaties. Allen suggests Native Americans
“might re-recognize, rather than deconstruct, the authority of particular colonial
discourses, such as treaties, for their own gain”(Allen 18). Native Americans signed real,
binding treaties with the US. government, but postmodern notions of identity that have
deconstructed Indian identity have also damaged the validity of their land claims. They
have responded not with ambivalence about identities, but with re-afﬁrrnation (even to
the point of essentialism)"s Where the authorities (the US. government) soon disavowed
treaties, Native Americans sought not to reﬁgure them (as Horrri Bhabha’s work argues
colonized peoples must do to colonial discourse), but to reify them: “Instead, this
disavowed discourse is reiﬁed—reclaimed from impotent abstraction and once again

rendered concrete”(Allen l9).

 

’5 Allen appeals to the work on blood/memory in N. Scott Momaday, but Silko’s tropes of connection to the
land work as well. See Allen, 16. I am skeptical that this deconstruction has so wholly damaged land
claims, but clearly confusion over Indian identity can obscure issues surrounding treaties.

239

While understandable, several problems emerge from such a politics. There can
be no guarantee that reiﬁcation of (racist) colonial discourses about the Indian will help
restore treaty promises, but the continuation of racism at individual and societal levels is
virtually guaranteed by it. Irnpoverishing rather than enriching notions of racial and
cultural identity holds the promise of ending the damaging exclusions that Silko puts a
positive spin on. Her difference multiculturalism encounters the same risks as critical
multiculturalism and guarantees nothing. As David Johnson and Scott Michaelsen write,
“Judged as a politics, what such a narrative [multiculturalism], or model of both a present
and an ideal future, necessarily leaves behind as a trail of debris is an opening for virulent
forms of differentiation—on both sides”(“Border Secrets” 9). Differentiation by culture
can never merely strengthen one’s conception of oneself and one’s culture, since by its
exclusions it always leaves open the possibility of discrimination: “multicultural or
liberal notions of difference are also, at one and the same time, fuel for a rhetoric of
dislike or even hate. One can always read a narrative of differentiation either way,
depending on one’s political sensibilities”(“Border Secrets” 9). Finally, given that
outside of utopian thinking, differences will always invite hatred, Silko’s separation Of
cultures back into their original formations seems like a poor solution to their problems.

Weighed against the risks of continued racist discrimination, Silko’s politics of
origins measures up poorly. While her utopian gestures towards the commonality of all
people seem to prorrrise an ultimate togethemess—even the dethinking of culture as a
force of differentiation—her separation of characters by their origins leads only to more
division. Similarly, I would argue that basing literary disciplines on identity formations,

as in “Native American literature,” runs up against the limits of differentiation by culture.

240

Isolating Native American writing as “Native American” Opens it up for attack; indeed,
any attack upon such a formulation could be conceived of as racist since the very grounds
on which Native American writing are being discussed are racially deﬁned. Any ﬁeld
conceived this way begins with difference rather than commonality and runs the risk of
reifying difference rather than analyzing it.

Even by placing Gardens in the Dnnes in the limited context of the other works I
have discussed, we can see a number of common concerns and different approaches to
them. Against the eternal rootedness of the Sand Lizard peOple and Silko’s suggestion
that Euro-Americans look to their ancient roots, we have the rootlessness of Anaya’s
Frank Dominic and most of McMurtry’s characters. In McMurtry’s hands, no settlement
is permanent, and people will always wander as part of their human condition, forsaking
all origins. The Chicano characters of Anaya and Candelaria’s texts invest much of their
self-conception in carefully constructed new world, American identities, partly
characterized by “recent” arrival, but also by the connections to the earth shared by
Silko’s heroines. Anaya’s Abran searches for a utOpian sense of himself as inheriting
Aztlan even in the company of his Native American companion Joe, whose presence
always threatens to undo the “puro indio” indigeneity of Anaya’s Chicanos. Like
Candelaria, who uses Joe Rafa’s distance from his father to demonstrate ambivalence
about the value of measuring one’s self against one’s ancestors, Erdrich presents a broad
spectrum of possible results of historical and familial connections. Her Lipsha returns
home to seeming wholeness after reconnecting with his father, but the specter of his
mother June’s failed homecoming hangs over the whole novel, dampening the value of

homecoming and of whatever in the book makes Ojibwa identity Ojibwa. Interpreted

241

only in the context of the ethnic or regional groupings in which they are Often placed,
these texts appear to afﬁrm the sense of identity of their main characters and identity as
imagined by the critical practitioners of each ﬁeld; thus Silko’s sisters or McMurtry’s
cowboys might be seen as representative ancestors of their respective peoples, their
stories emblematic of their descendants’ history. Yet taken in each other’s company, as
co-inhabitants of the common ground of the American West, one sees signs in all of these
novels of the “details and accidents that accompany every beginning”(Foucault 80). In
place of the “distant ideality” Foucault sees in the metaphysician’s search for pure origins
and which critics in these ﬁelds prop up as their ﬁeld-Imaginary, we would “discover that
truth or being does not lie at the root Of what we know and what we are, but the
exteriority of accidents”(81). These accidents are the checks to the conﬁdent belief in the
purity of one’s origins, the inconsistencies in one’s stories about one’s genealogy, and
their mapping, though it diminish certain established and cherished beliefs about each
group’s identity, is crucial to promoting mutual understanding. Such is the promise of a
contextual criticism of these bodies of literature that are so important in narrating how the

people of what is now the United States have deﬁned and redeﬁned themselves.

242

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