Walking Northwards Into Darkness

Figure 1: "Wendigo Altar" by Walter Bruneel

Walking Northward into Darkness:

Wilderness, Wendigos, and Wastelands in the Writings of W. D. Valgardsson

Samuel Levesque

Icelandic-Canadian Short Stories Háskólí Íslands Haust 2005

Foreword: Wandering out of the world

I have my mother to thank for more than a few of my eccentricities. Growing up in the rapidly emptying Northeast corner of Oregon, she was all but raised in a ghost town, a weather beaten bit of hilly land east of Pendleton, which as of three years ago now lies completely devoid of habitation. Her youth was spent playing and exploring around empty farmsteads, aging grain elevators, and overgrown schoolhouses.

I spent my childhood in a town that was well on its way to becoming a ghost town. Throughout the late 70’s and 80’s, South Prairie, Washington was slowly sinking into economic desolation. There were abandoned homes scattered throughout town, ringed in protective thickets of black-berry and vine maple, while out in the woods the remains of railroad works, saw-mills, coal mines, and farms reclaimed by the forest provided a wealth of exciting, if rather dangerous, playgrounds. Mom loved it. So did I.

There is something particularly evocative about abandoned places, where the works of man stand visible, but conquered by the slow tide of Nature. There is also something thrilling, even downright scary about such places. The world is full of stories of haunted houses, abandoned mental hospitals that house maniacs with axes, and hidden ghost towns populated by inbred clans of cannibals. Exploring a newly discovered site was always a nerve-racking event for my friends and I, often with good reason, though we never encountered a horde of inbred man-eaters.

While the reality may not be so harsh, the wastelands we create nevertheless serve as a reservoir for our fears, real or imagined. No one was afraid of ghosts when they burnt down the old South Prairie School, but they were afraid of the teenage drinking and promiscuity that sheltered in its weathered walls. That alone was enough. Later on, in my teens, I had friends who were thrown out of usual society, more often than not due to their parents’ prejudices. Many of these friends squatted in the older neighborhoods and forgotten outskirts of surrounding towns. Being outside of societal norms, they not only had to fear the bugaboos of normal society such as murderers, rapists, and thugs, but also had to fear elements that society usually looks on as good, policemen, social workers, and missionaries, who often were as bad as the criminals. There are frightening things enough in the forgotten places of our world, but the imagination takes it further. It seems that these days, it is not the wide open untouched spaces that scare us, but rather the man-made, man-forgotten wilds in our own backyards. We want to put up signs bearing the legend “Here there be Dragons” under every urban bridge and around every sub-urban greenbelt. W.D. Valgardsson understands this fear. It is at the heart of much of his writing.

Introduction: Wendigos, Wilderness, and Wasteland, Oh My!

W.D. Valgardsson’s short stories are packed with allusions, metaphors, and themes that are so well integrated into the text that they often slip under the reader’s radar at first. The myth of the Wendigo, or its non-mythical sociological ramifications, pops up throughout his writing, even if never mentioned by name. Instead, the Wendigo myth is expressed through the actions, inaction, and motivations of his characters. Wilderness, that is the land and life of the land, appears in a Janus mask, at once the essence of home and the terrifying face of the unknown. Most striking of all, wasteland, a place both physical and physiological permeates the bulk of his stories in a myriad of forms. These three elements are worth examining in detail, as they are in large part the essential elements of Valgardsson’s prose.

Figure 2: Wendigo Costume by Comtemporary Artist Ken Warren

Walking with Wendigos

In the mythology of many North American tribes, especially those around the Great Lakes and northern plains, the Wendigo is truly fearsome and malevolent being, a disheveled brute with a chunk of ice for a heart, blackened fingers and lips, and terrible strength. Often the Wendigo is depicted as hugely tall, but also emaciated, and it is said that these creatures emit a terrifying combination of groans, snarls and whistles, being devoid of human speech.

But it is not this aspect of the Wendigo that Valgardsson makes use of, rather other, less graphic aspects of the myth. According to some of the legends, one can become a Wendigo, either by consuming human flesh, or by simply looking upon one. Once one has “gone Wendigo”, all food except for human flesh and unhealthy, often poisonous matter, such as frogs, moss, and toadstools, becomes unappetizing, and one is driven to kill and eat others, often starting with one’s own family. There have been cases throughout northern and central Canada of “Wendigo Psychosis” whereby an individual, most often a native, believes they have “gone Wendigo” and begin to crave human flesh.

It has been argued that the Wendigo myth was an important mechanism in Native societies to prevent widespread cannibalism during the long northern winters, but in Valgardsson’s hands, it becomes something else. When Valgardsson subtly and skillfully evokes the Wendigo he uses it as a symbol for the cyclical nature of violence, where victim becomes victimizer in an ever-expanding downward spiral.

The most effective examples, in my opinion, are in Valgardsson’s What Can’t Be Changed Shouldn’t Be Mourned, as well as in “An Act of Mercy” in Bloodflowers.

Starting with “A Matter of Balance”, and continuing through “Wrinkles” and “Identity”, the Wendigo keeps appearing in a rather subtle form in What Can’t Be Changed… In “A Matter of Balance”, the unnamed protagonist gazes upon the face of two men-turned-predators, bikers who live by symbolically feeding on others in the “wilderness” outside normal society. The protagonist has entered that world, both through the loss of his wife to a murderer, and by his harmless, but nonetheless illegal prospecting on public land. Once out in the wild, having seen the two “Wendigos” he begins to take on some of their characteristics. They plot with cool efficiency (hearts of ice) to head him off at the trail, and he plots with equally frigid heart to lure them onto a slope that only he is prepared to descend safely. Once the Wendigo bikers have slid down the slope and are hanging by their fingertips from certain death, the protagonist again coolly and methodically decides to leave them to die, rather than giving them a chance and thereby restoring his own humanity. As in the myth, he has looked at the face of a Wendigo, and himself become one.

This cyclical violence appears again in “Wrinkles”. The two young men Duke and Albert are already Wendigo. They wait in the woods, and are already in the “wild” outside of normal society. They both seem to have a drug problem, or in Wendigo terms, they subsist on poison when not preying on humans. Duke seems to be the originator of this Wendigo cycle, as it was he who bludgeoned “Wrinkles”, an elderly woman, to death with a hammer in a botched robbery. Having seen the face of the monster, Albert becomes one himself, selling his friend out to the victim’s vengeful fiancé, who has himself gone Wendigo because of the violence brought into his life by Duke and Albert.

But not all those who witness the Wendigo become the Wendigo. Many die before they have that chance. In “Identities” the unnamed protagonist wanders unprepared into the “wild” outside of his normal middle-class existence, where he encounters a Wendigo in the form of a police officer. The officer, who through the course of his job must have looked on violence and its perpetrators, kills the protagonist due to his own lack of humanity. His doubt and trust have been trained out of him, and his experience in the “wilds” of the urban ghetto forced him to go Wendigo.

Finally, there is the tale of two brothers, Niels and Helgi, in “An Act of Mercy” from Valgardsson’s Bloodflowers. The brothers share a fishing camp with their abusive drunken father, who foolishly attempts to bring in his nets in the face of a sudden early winter storm and is caught out on the water overnight. Despite their obvious dislike for their father, the brothers head out to rescue him as soon as the storm has cleared. After a long search, they find him frozen in place in a narrow cove, horribly frostbitten. This is one of the few instances where Valgardsson’s use of the Wendigo myth includes allusions to the actual beast. The father is described as having frozen black lips and a chattering, wheezing voice. His limbs have been frostbitten so badly that he is likely to lose an arm and both legs, and he begs his sons to push him into the water end his suffering. While the brothers disagree on what to do, one wishing to end his father’s suffering and the other unwilling to have it on his conscious, they are both acting out of human decency. When Helgi falls to his death, however, Niels decides to let his father live, rather than push him in, as he originally planned, as punishment for his brother’s death. As it says in the story: “All mercy in him died”. He has become Wendigo.

The Wendigo appears in Valgardsson’s work subtly, sneaking around the undergrowth of the stories, never calling itself by name. Rather than use the myth to provide an actual creature, Valgardsson keeps to a more modern interpretation; one expressed in films such as “Wendigo” and “Ravenous” wherein the Wendigo is not a physical presence, but rather a kind of contagious psychosis. Valgardsson’s Wendigos are the products of unresolved or unresolvable violence, and their propagation continues in a vicious cycle.

While many of these tales take place in the wilderness, many of them have an element of urbanity as well. The Wendigo, a spirit of the frozen woods, seems to have crept down into the cities and suburbs of Valgardsson’s world. This begs the question, why? Why would a creature of the vast wilderness confront modern characters? To Answer that question, we have to take a look at the next related theme in Valgardsson’s work, wilderness.

Wilderness: Romance or Rapine?

These days most people recognize, or at least pay lip service to the idea that wilderness is a good and valuable thing in and of itself. Beginning with Wordsworth and the other Romantics, and crystallizing with the American Transcendentalists, nature in wild and untamed form has been seen as a source of healing, spiritual renewal, and authenticity.

This is the wilderness that Valgardsson’s fellow Icelandic-Canadian author, Kristjana Gunnars, points to in her essay “Poetry and the Idea of Home”. Wilderness in this view is the unobtainable “home” that manifests itself in memory, evoked by sensual elements of the natural world. The poet longs for a home that never was and will likely never be, which, according to Gunnars, is where much of the emotional power of poetry resides. In simple terms, one could define this viewpoint as claiming that we all want to return to a natural state, to reenter the Garden of Eden and reclaim our unspoiled innocence.

This ideal of wilderness has been the most pervasive in recent years, but it has never managed to block out or silence and older, darker vision of wilderness that pre-dates the prevailing Romantic notion.

Beginning with Beowulf, (who himself encountered a “Wendigo” in the shape of Grendel) the very first written English fiction, and continuing unchallenged until the birth of the Romantics, wilderness was not a source of healing, spiritual renewal or sanctuary, but rather the visible darkness that lurked at the edge of the everyday world, the abode of monsters, beasts, and witches. The wilderness was a devouring thing that had to be kept at bay, and was only entered by the very brave, or the very foolish. This vision has continued to this day, but not in the “legitimate” literary forms. Rather, it has found a home in the horror and macabre genres, where wilderness still serves as the breeding ground of monsters, and in the adventure tale, where the harsh land challenges the hero and destroys the unprepared.

This is the wilderness most often encountered in Valdgardsson’s work. His characters are tested by wilderness, frighten by wilderness, and often killed by wilderness, but they are rarely comforted by it.

Which is not to say that the Romantic wilderness is completely lacking in Valgardsson’s work. In “The Man from Snaefellsnes”, Valgardsson-as-character is symbolically healed of his traumatic past and obtains a measure of peace with his immigrant up-bringing by baptizing himself in a hot spring on a trip to the Icelandic countryside. In “The Cave”, Valgardsson evokes the pastoral joys of a bright Winnipeg summer, replete with rose petals and lovemaking in haystacks to add an element of poignancy to the section of the tale dealing with his love interest. But even in that pastoral bliss, there is a creeping darkness. Early in the story, he mentions that Sigga is plagued with mosquito bites, which seems to affect Icelanders worse than others. Then, as the story progresses, the reader is pulled into the tale of Sigga’s father and grandfather, both of whom go mad upon entering the wilderness, symbolized by a cave on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

In other stories, there is even less of the pleasant wilderness. In “Seiche” and “An Act of Mercy,” we see the harsh northern landscape taking a toll on the men who enter it, often ending in their deaths. Even the darkly comic “The Couch” pits its main characters against an absurdly malevolent wilderness that seems almost conscious. “The Couch” presents us with a wilderness that is actively trying to thwart the desires of the main character. While comic, this vision of wilderness as something antagonistic and dangerous, pervades many Valgardsson’s stories, whether it is the brutal weather of "An Act of Mercy,” the unpredictable danger of “The Seiche,” or the subtle slide into madness of “The Cave.”

In this, Valgardsson keeps to a common thread in Canadian literature, as Margaret Atwood points out in her lecture on wilderness in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. There is a long history of Canadian story telling dealing with the madness of the northern wilderness, where men “go bush,” catch “cabin fever,” or “go Wendigo,” or are simply swallowed up by the harsh landscape. Discussing a poem based on the doomed Franklin Expedition, and its representation of the wilderness, Atwood states, “[It’s] noteworthy that the figure conjured up is giant, female, icy, connected to madness, and destructive: a sort of Nature white in tooth and claw.” (26) This is not the safe, tranquil and idyllic wilderness of the British, or even American mind, this is wilderness unbared, Nature as a bitch goddess and devourer of men.

Interestingly, this unbared wild “white in tooth and claw” is neither remote, nor untouched by the works of man. Like the wild in which his characters encounter their Wendigo fates, Valgardsson’s wilderness is at once removed from us, and lurking just beside us. The characters in “Seiche” are not a long way from help, but the just as well might be. “Waiting” gives us a man so at home with the wilderness that he is forgotten in it, even by his family. They move on to urban life, yet he cannot make that transition, even though such a move would be simple, at least in practical terms. The wilderness is a world away and right next-door. In “Snow,” the young couple is only a short walk from their home, but for all the husband is aware, he could be miles away. Lacking his wife’s keen sense of direction and instinct (she is the more successful hunter of the two), he has entered the wilderness unprepared, and the reader is left with the uncomfortable feeling that he will pay a steep price. The wife, however, is comfortable in the wilderness; she has been tested and proven herself.

This is the other main use Valgardsson makes of wilderness. It is the testing ground, the place that challenges and changes. “Saturday Climbing” is a perfect example. It is only by being tested on the cliff-face he is climbing that the father in the story can come to grips with his daughter’s newfound maturity. Loathe as he is to admit it, the wilderness forces him to accept it in very real and physical terms, when he must rely on his daughter to belay him, to literally hold him up. Faced with this hard physical fact, he can no longer entertain his illusions of paternal control and superiority.

Valgardsson’s wilderness is neither remote, nor static. It challenges his characters, and through them, the reader, in very dynamic ways. It lurks, for as dark a thing as Valgardsson creates can only lurk, just outside the everyday. It is a wilderness more mental than physical, and in that vast North of the mind, anything is possible.

Wasteland

The final element in Valgardsson’s work that frankly fascinates me is his occasional forays into what I have come to term “wasteland.” My use of this term takes a bit of explaining, and even then, I wonder if it is not simply an aspect of my own internal mythos rather than a literary concept.

Wasteland as a concept is perhaps best explained by T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name. I have always interpreted it as a lament for the world lost in the fires of the First World War. The poem seems to say that the world has ended, and we are all living in the ruins of the world that was; the wastes of our own creation.

Wasteland can be a physiological, geological, or mythological place. It is that place outside of the illusion of normality, and it is wasteland that encompasses both the wilderness and the Wendigo in Valgardsson’s writing.

Wasteland contains wilderness. Even in the most densely packed urban areas; one finds pockets of the wild in forgotten, unnoticed places. These places are not, however, unpopulated. They are the home of the ghosts and monsters of the post-modern age: the homeless, the forgotten, the murderer, the criminal, and the poor.

It seems that Canadian authors are more aware of this world than their American and British counterparts. Charles DeLint, a best-selling Canadian fantasy writer, has made a career for himself writing about the strangeness that lurks just beneath the surface and around the corner of everyday life. Valgardsson’s fellow Icelandic-Canadian short story author, David Arnasson, sets many of his stories in places abandoned by or outside of what most people would think of as normality. It is this lurking wasteland that lends an aura of menace and uncertainty to Valgardsson’s writing. I think that Canada, with its multi-cultural ethos, tends to create more of this liminal wasteland than other nations. Instead of pockets of sub-cultures welded together by one over arching nationalism, Canada is much more an amalgamation of separate societies, making it easier for one to feel cast out.

“The Man from Snaefellsnes” gives us an especially clear example of this socio-phychological wasteland. Valgardsson-as –character in this story feels separated from Canadian society, remembering slights at the hands of “English” schoolteachers among others. His Canadian wife annoys him with her good-natured, but rather shallow attempts to connect with his, or anyone else’s for that matter, ethnicity. Yet he also feels separated from his Icelandic heritage, both due to the slights of fellow Icelandic-Canadians (he mentions being called útlendingur by his peers) and due to the historical injustices that drove his grandfather to Canada in the first place. He is in the waiting place, the wasteland between two worlds, and though this story ends with his reconciliation to both worlds, many of his characters do not reach such a happy ending. Rather, they are abandoned, or preyed upon in the wastes.

Abandonment appears time and again in Valgardsson’s stories. In “A Matter of Balance,” the action takes place along an abandoned stretch of railway converted to pedestrian trails. Duke and Albert in “Wrinkles” squat in abandoned buildings and Duke meets his end in an abandoned cistern. The young couple in “Snow” moves into an abandoned railway station on the outskirts of a country town. Another Albert, this time in “Waiting” is himself abandoned on his island by a family caught up in the rush of modernity. Jack and Dana Andrews drive into an actual wasteland, a place stuck between the developed and the wilderness in “An Afternoon’s Drive” and are nearly trapped there. Danny Thorson is trapped when he arrives on a bleak island wasteland seemingly forgotten by the rest of the world in “Bloodflowers.”

Yet it is not abandonment alone that makes a wasteland. People also drift into it of their own accord. Duke and Albert in “Wrinkles” are a good example, but the best example I can find are Norman Thomas and his family in Bloodflower’s “Brothers.” Thomas has married a Native woman and taken to the wilderness. In doing so, despite his protests to the “British” fish-camp owner Alex, he has stepped outside of the norm and into the wasteland, where nothing is certain. Alex, in comparison, holds tight to the ideals of civilization and normality. He flies the Union Jack above his camp, hangs the Queen’s portrait in the mess hall, and prides himself on keeping his operation both physically and morally “clean.” In this way he stays out of the wasteland that Thomas inhabits.

Another good example is the peddler in “A Place of One’s Own.” Separated from the narrow-minded mainstream because of his tattoos and wandering nature, the peddler exists outside of society in a myriad of ways. “Neither Fedorchuk nor his wife approved of people not brought up in the area. Of the peddler, they were particularly contemptuous because he had no place of his own and, therefore, no trustworthy identity. Like all people who live on the very edge of having nothing, a place one’s own was very important to them. Divorced from the land, constantly travelling, appearing and disappearing without explanation, the peddler was no better than a gypsy.” (53) This lack of permanence is one of the essential elements of the wasteland, but it is not just his unusual appearance or nomadic lifestyle that alienate the peddler, but even the manner in which he makes his living. Buying cast-off and fire-damaged goods and then re-selling them tie him to the wasteland. Storing these goods in an “abandoned church” which he rents out distances him even further. Even though he makes an attempt at re-entering the mainstream by buying a local store and taking a wife, he is nonetheless abandoned in the end, and goes right back to his nomadic ways. A sad ending, but it could be worse.

The wasteland, Valgardsson makes very clear, is a dangerous place where assorted creatures prey on the unwary. There are the bikers from “A Matter of Balance,” out to prey on the unwitting, and the policeman in “Identities”, trigger-happy and blinded by his prejudices. There are sweet-talking predators like Jack Spitzer and Henry Smith in “On Lake Therese,” plying with bottles what they cannot take by force. Even denizens of the “normal” world can be fearful to those living beside them in the wastes. Alex the fish-camp owner attempts to rape Thomas’s teenage daughter, precisely because she doesn’t fit into his narrow view of propriety. Orville in “Red Dust” prostitutes his niece to pay for a hunting dog, stating that “Everybody’s got to earn their keep.” One wonders if he would have done this if the niece were not already in the wasteland, separated from normality by her mental deficiency. “First Flight,” offers the reader another character wandering the wastelands of their own mind. Simple-minded Gregory Jorganson’s fateful amble through the empty streets of Middleton ends when the very men he idolizes, NATO pilots and personnel, turn on him, driving him out into the cold despairing night to end his life on the railroad tracks.

The wasteland is the unknown, the out-of-bounds, the between space where what we think we know may not be so. While it is tempting to say that it is the post-modern condition, this is not the case. Rather, it is a facet of the post-modern state that troubles and haunts us, and one that Valgardsson makes artful use of in his tales. Valgardsson returns again and again to the wasteland in order to makes us uncomfortably aware of it. By guiding his reader to look into the abyss, he makes sure that we acknowledge it, and in so doing, avoid it.

Walking back into the world

In the end, most of my squatter friends got places of their own, landed a job, moved on with their lives. But the time they spent out in the wasteland, amongst the Wendigos and wilderness left its mark. Many of them bare scars, physical and mental, and many will hurt for the rest of their lives. But the tragedy has a brighter side as well. As a group, they are less complacent, less materialistic, and consume less. They are also more willing than most others I know to reach out and offer aid and comfort to their fellows. Sadly though, some of them were lost. One of them even “went Wendigo”.

It is this danger and redemption, the state of being tested by the world that is at the core of Valgardsson’s writing. He seems to say to his readers, “This is the world you think you know, but look at all the strangeness and danger underneath it all. Look out for yourselves and others, lest you become one of the monsters.” Valgardsson presents us with tales that are dark and foreboding as a haunted forest, but he does so to warn, not simply to frighten or disgust. When one is wandering around the wilds of the wasteland, it is good to know about Wendigos, if only to avoid them.

Works Cited:

Valgardsson, W.D. Bloodflowers. Oberon Press, 1973

Red Dust. Oberon Press, 1978

What Can’t Be Changed Shouldn’t Be Mourned

Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 1990

Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995

Gunnars, Kristjana. “Poetry and the Idea of Home”, Stranger at the Door.

Online search: Encyclopedia Mythica: “Wendigo” 20.11.05 http://www.pantheon.org/areas/mythology/americas/native_american/articles.html

Online Search: Wikipedia: “Wendigo” 18.11.05 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo

Online Search: Native Online: “Wendigo” http://www.nativeonline.com/wendigo.htm 18.11.05

“Ravenous” Fox Pictures Inc. Antonia Bird, Director 1999

“Wendigo” Magnolia Films. Larry Fessenden, Director 2001

Sisters in the Struggle

Sisters in the Struggle:

Feminine Dualities in Native American Literature

The literature and art of ethnic minorities has long been a subversive force in the sense that it challenges the often-unjustified norms and values of the ruling class. By writing, singing, painting, or performing works that stand in contrast, whether subtly or blatantly to the established norms, these works subvert, mock, and challenge the perceived reality of the majority, forcing them to confront the troubling possibility that their world-view may not be the only valid one, or worse yet, that it is as flawed as that of those they feel superior to.

Native American literature has challenged Anglo-European notions since it’s earliest publication, just as Native American customs, cultures, and commodities challenged Anglo-European explorers and colonizers during the colonization of North and South America. There is an almost universal political element to Native fiction, whether the subtle barbs of Lucy Tapahonso, the stereotype shattering of D’Arcy McNickle, the tongue-in-cheek revolutionary rants of David Seals, the homey wisdom of Louise Erdrich, or the outright assault on Anglo-European norms employed by Leslie Marmon Silko. While Silko’s work is not the focus of this particular paper, it is worth keeping in mind her oft-repeated remark, to the effect that she was writing in English to “use the enemy’s language against him”.

This is exactly what D’Arcy McNickle and Louise Erdrich’s female characters do, especially in regards to the “good sister” and the “bad sister” which both employ in their novels. These pairs challenge, both by their actions and attitudes, Anglo-European ideals of the feminine and the roles women are assumed to take, as well as Western notions of morality in general. By their refusal to sit comfortably in the box Western literature has built to hold female characters, even feminist ones, these sisters struggle to make know to their Western readers a world-view that is as challenging as it is refreshing, and a threatening as it is timely.

Two Sisters

A traditional Ojibwa story cycle relates the tale of Matchikeis, the “good sister” and Oshikiwe, the “bad sister”[1]. Matchikeis follows the customs and norms of her society, and is considered reliable, hard working, trustworthy, and moral. Oshikiwe is the opposite side of this coin, flighty, lazy, tricky, and loose. In an Anglo-European story, one would expect that the “good sister” would be praised, while the “bad sister” is vilified, just as the dutiful Cinderella is praised at the expense of her “wicked stepsisters”. However, in the Ojibwa stories, this is patently not the case. Both sisters are equally loved, and both are equally heroines in the tale. More than that, they share a husband, quite happily in fact, which in many ways is an affront to Anglo-European notions of family and of female sexuality.

The Ojibwa seem to recognize in these stories an idea, which, despite its obvious logic, has never been popular in Anglo-European thought. In Western culture, the idea that in order to have good, one must necessarily have bad, and that to remove one would make the other meaningless, has always been considered subversive. Western cultures have long propounded the notion that there are both “pure” good and bad, and that one or the other can exist alone. Most monotheistic religions are in fact based on this very principle, and Anglo-European culture is still, at its core, based on these religions.

This, to my mind, is why Erdrich chooses to parallel this ancient story in Love Medicine. By making the two matriarchs of the families portrayed such seeming opposites, and yet having them share the love of one man, Erdrich issues a challenge to the white world’s ideas about the nature of love, female sexuality, and morality.

Marie, the good sister, is everything a respectable wife should be, a good homemaker, loyal to her husband, pious, and very caring towards not only her own children but also those that she has taken in from extended family. She tries to keep her husband from drinking, tries to keep him “respectable”, and strives for a sort of pious peace both for herself and within her community. In this way she is a stark contrast to Lulu, who freely sleeps with whatever man she desires, regardless of marital vows or public censure, whose home seems at first a pocket of chaos, and who seems not to care at all what others in the community think of her.

Yet neither Marie, nor Lulu is as clear-cut as they first seem. While Marie is pious, even aspiring to be a nun, she enters the convent not because she hears the call, but because she dreams of being a saint. Marie’s conception of sainthood is flawed by her pride however. She sees her piety as a way of proving herself superior to whites in general, and to the authoritative nuns who run her school in particular:

“...No reservation girl ever prayed so hard. There was no use trying to ignore me any longer. I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I was going up there to pray as good as they could.... And they never thought they’d have a girl from this reservation as a saint they’d have to kneel to. But they’d have me...”

Her excessive pride is evident elsewhere as well. She brags about her husband’s leadership in the tribe, takes great pride in the accomplishments of her children, and looks down on Lulu and her relations as less respectable. Despite her “goodness”, she is tainted by a kind of feverish pride, which makes her at times makes her seem harsh and unforgiving such as when she uses gossip to punish her friends for nosiness.

Lulu, on the other hand, has many positive qualities that are masked by her bad girl image. She is extremely fond of her sons, no matter who their fathers might be, and runs her home with a firm but loving hand, she “...managed to make the younger boys obey perfectly...while the older ones adored her to the point that they did not tolerate anything less from anyone else.” Her sexuality, the cause of much of her “badness”, is nevertheless also a source of immense power for her, shown to perfect example when she threatens to “hit the tribe with a fistful of paternity suits that would make their heads spin” unless her demands are met by the tribal council, or when Beverly Lamartine is pulled helplessly into her arms, unable to resist her.

Both women share a love in common, that of Nector, Marie’s husband and Lulu’s long-time lover. Both bare him children, and both provide something very much needed in his imperfect life. At the end of the novel, the two do something almost unheard of in a Western story, becoming fast friends after his death, taking care of each other throughout their twilight years. As Lipsha Morrissey recounts:

“ Only Grandma Kashpaw [Marie] wasn’t one trifle current at the insight Lulu showed. She and Lulu are thick as thieves now...”

These paired “sisters” serve as more than just allusions to and ancient Ojibwa story, they subtly challenge the stereotypes of women that are all-too-prevalent in Western writing. Neither Marie nor Lulu really needs Nector; rather, they both want him. They act on their sexual desire, subtly in Marie’s case, and blatantly in Lulu’s, which is an anathema for traditional Western female characters, who are usually acted upon. They are also extremely strong women, the center of their respective families. One gets the impression that Marie would have no problems if Nector left, save that of her own thwarted desire, just as Lulu gets by quite well despite having no male “bread-winner” to support her. Neither woman needs a man, but both want one. The only characters exhibiting such behavior in most Western novels are either whores or libertines. Erdrich’s “sisters” are neither, making their very existence in print a subversion of Anglo-European values.

Catherine the Faithful vs. Elise the Libertine

D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded contains two female characters that in many ways foreshadow Erdrich’s Marie and Lulu. Catherine the Faithful, mother of the protagonist Archilde, and Archilde’s love interest, Elise La Rose. The Salish people, of whom McNickle writes so passionately, shared many cultural elements with their northern neighbors, Erdrich’s Ojibwa, and one can find parallels to the story of Good Sister and Bad Sister in The Surrounded. Catherine is a highly regarded member of the tribe, educated by the Catholic missionaries and daughter of a chief. She is in many ways the epitome of a good Indian woman, whereas Elise, also the daughter of a chief, Old Modeste, is neither pious, nor traditional. She drinks, dances with white men, and is very sexually assertive. Unlike Marie and Lulu, these two women do not share a lover in common, but they both love Archilde, one maternally and one romantically.

However, whereas in Love Medicine Lulu as the Bad Sister is by far the more subversive, in The Surrounded it is Catherine as the Good Sister who most strongly challenges Anglo-European ideas of progress, civilization, and morality.

Elise may be a bit of a libertine, but she is almost expected to be. In the rural West especially, Indian women are often thought of as “easy” and promiscuous, alcoholics and barflies. Elise to some extent fulfills these expectations, and therefore doesn’t challenge Anglo stereotypes to any great degree.

On the other hand, Catherine is educated by priests, married to a successful European farmer, held in high regard by her tribe and in as high regard as an Indian woman might be by the Anglo community. Despite this, or rather because of it, hers is the most subversive role played in the novel. Her rejection of English, her disdain for modern conveniences, and eventual renunciation of Catholic faith make of her life a direct challenge to the ruling ideals of Anglo-European culture.

Despite her marriage to the prickly and proud Max, Catherine chooses not to live in the fine house at the center of the family’s ranch, instead spending her days in the smoky comfort of an old log cabin. She refuses to speak any language but Salish, despite being educated in English and possibly in Spanish as well. Her husband Max is forced to use Salish to speak to his wife:

“When he talked to her he had to use her tongue, since if he tried to use English, which she knew perfectly, she would pretend not to understand”

It is this focus on her language, which slowly leads her away from the white world. The language of one’s thought and dream-life colors one’s social interaction and daily life, and by choosing to live in Salish, Catherine is defying the white world, if only subtly.

This defiance comes out in other ways as well. Catherine’s cabin is littered with “modern” contraptions, all gone to waste and ruin:

“The stove had been worn away by rust but not by use, because she went on cooking over a camp fire. With every new thing it was the same. The Sisters had taught her many arts, but they had not quite taught her to be interested in using them. Possibly there was a deeper reason for her neglect, but on the surface that was what she felt”

Her rejection of white materialism is a striking critique of the differences between the two cultures. While trained in the domestic arts of the white world, she has a nomad’s disdain for bulky possessions and complicated practices that lead to evermore work and an individual being “owned” by their possessions. To Catherine, “it seemed that you could not live in a house as you lived outdoors or in a tepee. The outdoors cleansed itself and so did a tepee. You moved it and the dirt fell out. Besides, you did not mind a little dirt.”

Catherine’s desire to go hunting is another subtle challenge to Anglo-European culture, one that Leslie Marmon Silko uses in as well, both in Ceremony and Storyteller. In Anglo-European culture, hunting is an exclusively male endeavor. White writers speak of “Man the Hunter”, and traditionally regulate women to the role of gatherers, handy-craft workers, and domestics. There are several falsehoods in this perception; most notably that hunting was the main source of food for “hunter-gatherers”. In fact, the gathering done mainly, but not exclusively, by women provided the majority of subsistence for such cultures, making women the center of such tribal economies and as such extremely powerful. Additionally, women in such cultures often hunted as well as the men, particularly when they did not have young children or after their children were grown. (Mander) One rarely hears mention a huntress in Western literature, with the possible exception of Greek myth, with Diana the virgin huntress as an archetypal figure.

Furthermore the crisis of the novel, Catherine’s killing of the game warden, came about largely due to a conflict between two radically different views of the nature and purpose of hunting. For Anglo-Europeans, hunting is often thought of as a recreation, a hobby of the rich and idle, particularly in the early days of North American settlement. (Mander). As such, only certain animals were to be hunted, usually males, which made good trophies. Louise killing a doe, because the meat would be more tender, and Catherine’s acceptance of this, are therefore affronts to the ruling class’s idea of proper hunting, but make perfect sense from the point of view of a subsistence culture. As Louis says to Archilde, “I suppose you shot a fifteen-year old buck like a God-damned white man. That’s tender meat, that, a yearling doe.” Unlike the Natives, the Game Warden sees this as a breach of the law. “You’ve got a doe here. You know there’s a law against killing female deer, don’t you?” This difference in world-view, and the warden’s rejection of the family’s claims to being exempt from game laws leads directly to the death of both Louis and the warden.

Ultimately, it is Catherine’s rejection of Catholicism and it’s faith in authority that makes the strongest statement in the novel. In attempting to ease her guilt over the killing, she first goes to the priest to seek absolution through confession, but leaves the church without achieving peace of mind. It is only after she goes to the elders and asks to be whipped that she achieves a measure of peace.

This is perhaps one of the most radical ideas proposed in the novel. The idea that absolution, and the authority to absolve rest in the individual, and not in an authority above the individual is a challenge not only to the rule of law and of organized religion, but to one of the basic tenants of Western culture itself.

Amongst the Salish, one must go and ask to be punished, and hence absolved, of a wrongdoing. No one has the authority to force punishment or repentance on another without they themselves being guilty of wrongdoing. The Salish were a society without police, without organized structures of coercion and permanent laws that applied without regard to situation. Yet even the Jesuits found them to be “instilled with a sense of Moral Law”. The tradition of the whip negates much of what is thought necessary and right in Western society. No authority, be it God or the penal system, can absolve a person of a wrong unless they choose to be absolved. As Modeste says, “When we were told to give this [whipping] up, they said they would give us new laws. Well, they gave us those new laws and now nobody is straight. Nobody will confess and nobody will go to the white judge...” Such logic renders a thousand years of Western political thought and jurisprudence null and void, making anathemas of these perceived saviors of society. In effect the Salish are saying that the judge who sentences and the jailor who imprisons are as guilty of crimes as the criminals they incarcerate or execute.

This ethos is to be found in only one school of European thought, which was itself largely inspired by the “discovery” of Native American societies, namely Anarchism. Not the anarchism of everyday parlance, the idea of no order or responsibility, but rather the idea that authority begins and ends at the individual, and that the use of coercion for any means is an affront to free will and therefore a kind of criminal act, a theft of choice. As Proudhon, one of the most influential anarchist writers put it:

“To be governed is to watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, not wisdom, nor virtue [to do so.]”

In her rejection of the authority both of Church and Law, Catherine loses her faith, but finds a peace in her last days, having lived a life that, while smeared with tragedy, nonetheless served as a wonderful critique of the contradictions and injustices that underlie the culture that has come to dominate her homeland. As she says after under going her whipping:

“If any of you think I’ve done wrong, it will do no good to say so. To me it is clear and I won’t go back. Only consider. For years I saw how the world was going. You knew my sons and how I prayed to keep them from going to hell. It would have been better if they had been given the whip. Praying was not what was needed for them, and it does me no good. You have made this promise [to forgo the whip in favor of confession] but tonight you ought to forget about it. If you get in trouble over it, it will be nothing new. We have trouble no matter what we do, and we ought to just forget about it and live as it seems best.”[2]

Elise and Catherine, Marie and Lulu. Both pairs challenge Anglo-European thought in ways both subtle and sublime. Whereas it is Bad Sister Lulu in Love Medicine that makes the challenge most clearly, it is the Good Sister Catherine that most challenges the white world in The Surrounded. The reader is forced to recognize the idea that not only are the Good Sister and the Bad Sister equally loved, they are equally important. They are not polarized opposites, but the connected ends of the same circle, with the wealth and variety of human behavior and action stretching between them even as they stand back to back, sisters in the struggle to keep their traditions alive and adapt their people to a new and hopefully better world they will help bring about.

Works Cited:

Edwards, Stuart. Selected Writings of P-J. Proudhon. New York, 1969.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992

McKnickle, D’Arcy. The Surrounded. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1981./

Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

---

[1] From Nina Bjornson’s lecture, The University of Iceland, 15.02.2005

[2] Italics added.

Another Native Lit Response

Samuel Levesque

NA Lit

Response to The Surrounded

At first glance, Storyteller and The Surrounded seem to be very different books. Storyteller is a radical attempt to challenge the conventional novel, incorporating myth, poetry, photography, and short story forms. McNickle’s The Surrounded is, as far as structure goes, a rather standard novel. It has a main plotline beginning with Archilde’s return to his childhood home, moving through a series of events and crisises ending with his arrest. Behind and interwoven into this overall story are the back-stories of many of the characters (such as the story of Max and Catherine’s estrangement) and “side” plots (such as Mike’s torment in the Jesuit school and subsequent cure) that have bearing on the main plot line, but exist as somewhat distinct sections.

It is probably safe to say that The Surrounded had some effect on Storyteller, as it was one of the first novels about Native Americans published by a Native American, but I see Storyteller as more of a response to, rather than an echo of, The Surrounded. McNickle was very “American” in his style and his life, in some ways an example of an “assimilated Indian”, whereas Silko, despite her accomplishments in the “white” world, seems to identify much more with her “Indianness” and defy European-American literary traditions. The difference is that The Surrounded tells a story about Indians in the white man’s language using standard literary forms, while Storyteller tells an Indian story in the white man’s language, without regard to white traditions or form. Storyteller seems to be saying to The Surrounded, “Why don’t you be more Indian? If you’re going to tell stories about us, why tell them like a white man?”

Nevertheless, there are echoes of The Surrounded in Silko’s work. Story and history are central themes and catalysts in both books. Old Modeste’s story at the feast opens Archilde’s eyes to his people and his history, just as Silko’s aunt’s stories kept her tied to her tribe and birthplace. Also interesting is the fact that both books deal with mixed families, Archilde’s Salish-Spanish, and Silko’s American-Laguna. Both involve European people who live and work amongst the Indians, although in McNickle’s character Max, such a life is both uneasy and somewhat lonely.

As far as the women in both books go, there is a noticeable difference. The majority of Silko’s protagonists are women, and many of the most important actors in her tales are mothers, daughters, grandmothers, or other female relations. In contrast, McNickle’s female characters, though important to the plot, serve mainly as catalysts and are not terribly well fleshed out. Both authors write strong female characters, both independent and capable, but Silko’s characters are more fully realized, and more numerous.

Throughout this course, as well as in my outside reading of Native American writing, I have found it interesting how the gender of the author almost always mirrors the gender of the majority of the characters. There are characters of both sexes in both books, but a preponderance of women inhabit Storyteller, whereas it is mostly men who play out the story of The Surrounded. I do not think this has much to do with any chauvinism or blatant feminism on the part of either author, but more with the fact that most writers write what they know. Whether this is also due to some cultural differences, the pueblo peoples matriarchy, or a more separate gender dynamic within NA cultures is more perhaps in the hands of an ethnographer than a lit major.

One motif I see in common between the two books is the idea that what was brought to the Natives by the whites was far more harmful than beneficial, often in subtle ways. Aside from the obvious germs, guns, and alcohol, whites brought with them a material culture and spirituality very much at odds with that of the Salish and Laguna peoples.

It is this cultural/spiritual conflict that lies at the heart of The Surrounded, the imposition of a hierarchal, materialist worldview onto a decentralized, nomadic people. This same conflict comes out in “Storyteller”, and both The Surrounded and “Storyteller” end with someone being punished for a crime, however just or unjust the case may be. Both the protagonist in “Storyteller” and Archilde run into a system of law that will either punish them for something they did not do, or refuse to punish them for something they did do.

The other common motif is the story of the harm done by the Indian Schools, although both books also show some small good coming from them as well. Both Silko and McNickle got their education from mission schools, and whatever their retrospective regrets, it is true that their stories wouldn’t be the same without this intervention, unjustified as it was. Archilde’s time in the schools was unpleasant, but he came away with a useful skill and an ability to function more in the white world than his brother Louis. Silko’s aunt, introduced early in Storyteller, is another example of an Indian educated away from home and returning to her people. This in no way justifies the harm done to Indian children like those in “Lullaby” and Mike and Narcise, but it shows the kind of liminal space these people were forced into by the conflict between their traditional cultures and their western education.

Early Days...Goddamn I'm preachy!

Work and Wealth on the Border:

Representations of Ethnic Economics in the Works of Simon Ortiz and Dagoberto Gilb.

As human beings, we, as personal and social cultural entities, are conscience beings because of story, no other reason. (Ortiz,viii)

As any reader knows, what is left unsaid and unmentioned in a story is often as important as that which is stated. One can call attention to an issue by naming it, or by one’s refusal to speak its name. As often as our words help create the world, so do our silences. Much of what is meaningful and powerful in the world is rarely spoken of, rather it is left unnamed to grow in a void of silence.

Dagoberto Gilb is not one for silences. His The Magic of Blood is a calling forth of the lives, loves, fears and passions of an often-silenced segment of American society. He and Ortiz speak for their people and their selves, weaving tales of poverty and near-poverty, of the duties and failings of fathers, of the disempowerment of men and women (but mostly men) whose lives are forever at the mercy of policies and institutions that they have little or no say in. Gilb and Ortiz look at the oblivion of drink, the complex web of multi-lingual and multi-cultural interactions, and the loss of innocence and coming of age universal to human life. They chose mainly masculine voices to tell the tales, chose short, carefully crafted tales to tell, and chose the voices of the poor, the lower-class, and the struggling.

But for all their similarities, there is a gulf of silence between Gilb and Ortiz in regard to one central theme. While Gilb’s work abounds with references to work and wages, payments, rent, bills, and all the paraphernalia of a currency driven economy, Ortiz barely whispers these words, instead letting his silence speak for him.

Why this glaring disparity between two authors whose stories otherwise seem to have so much in common? Why does one speak with his silence and the other shout? I believe the answer lies in the differing concepts of wealth and work held, and the differing values placed on these seemly central issues by Native Americans and Latinos. But how do these ethnic economics compare to each other, and to mainstream Anglo-American economics, and what can we learn from them?

Dagoberto Gilb and the Latino Work Ethic

“You remember the days when we were not rich, but when poverty was different, not a thing to be ashamed of, and we got along okay. You remember when we had a certain freedom, and you know we don’t have it anymore….”

--John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (145-146)

Whenever one discusses an ethnic group in a general sense, one has to be careful to make sure that the stereotype is employed as a useful fiction, that while the general state of things might be a certain way, there are always exceptions to the rule. This holds true of an author’s work as well. While Gilb gives us an insight into a world inhabited by many Latinos, it is not the only world they live in. The borders of ethnicity and class are not fixed, but it is often easier to view themes and issues from a generalized view than to attempt to paint an exact portrait of the lives of any group.

The central theme in The Magic of Blood is the struggles of the laboring class in a society where there exist no guarantees to the basic necessities of life. The men and women who make up this class are constantly on the border of poverty. An injury or illness, changing economic trends, the whims of employers or social services, all these can push an individual to one side of the border or the other. This disempowerment is strongly felt by Gilb’s characters. As Frank Lopez, a supporting character in “FDR Was a Democrat” explains as he holds up a finger mangled in a work accident:

“Five months ago I smashed it…They took off my fingernail and bled it and said I crushed the bone. Then, to top it off, the very next day the company had problems and shut down the job. I got one days work.” (249)

One way Gilb’s laborers combat this disempowerment is through a work ethic that accepts lay-offs and unemployment as an inevitable part of working life, but nevertheless takes considerable pride in and places considerable emphasis on skill and perseverance. Gilb’s characters are often multi-talented, able to do a wide variety of work and willing to take whatever work is on offer. The important point is to be working, making a living for oneself and ones family.

Another strategy is a sort of voluntary lowering of material standards. Most of Gilb’s characters take pride in their possessions, even though they are few and far from new. As in the quote from The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s protagonists are not ashamed of their poverty, so long as they have pride in their work and their basic needs are met. A good example is Juan Romero, the title character of “Romero’s Shirt” who “hangs wall paper and doors, he paints, he lays carpet, does just about anything someone will call and ask him to do.” This same character had a car which “he’d kept up since his early twenties…and he worked on it so devotedly that even now it was in as good a condition as almost any car could be.” (94-95) There is a rather stoic, Spartan character to these men, they do whatever they need to get what they need. However, unlike the rural characters in The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s are generally urbanites, to far removed from the land to make a living from it.

The Latino work ethic is strongly related to the idea of machismo, not the Anglicized version of the word, implying chauvinism, violence, and misogyny, but in the Spanish sense, implying a code of honor whereby a man must provide for his dependents regardless of the personal sacrifice involved so long as one’s pride is intact.

While not ashamed of their poverty, Gilb’s creations are acutely aware of it, and it shows in their constant discussion and fixation on finances. There is hardly a story in the book where no mention is made of money. Prices, payments, wages, rent, unemployment benefits, and winnings are a constant theme, restraining or liberating the characters according to the seemingly random fluctuations of the economy. This does not mean that money in and of itself is of primary importance. As the unnamed narrator of “Look on the Bright Side” says at the opening of the book:

The way I see it, a man can have all the money in the world but if he can’t keep his self respect, he don’t have shit. A man has to stand up for things even when it may not be very practical. A man can’t have his pride and give up his rights. (3)

Rather than a prime motivator, money is used as a yardstick by which success is measured, but one gets the impression that despite his emphasis on money, most of Gilb’s characters would sooner give up material success than their own pride.

Simon Ortiz and the Socio-Economics of Native America

“Flat broke, not one sawbuck left.”

Nobody seemed to care much, including Paymaster Philbert. I mean, what’s money? It leaves Traditionals cold. It’s nothing. They had full gas tanks, full stomachs, good friends and family all around…who needs those green frog skins of the whitemen? If it might have made an American a little sick to his stomach to have blown two grand on handouts to strangers…it didn’t bother old-time Indians. Generosity was one of the great virtues of the old-timers, along with endurance and wisdom. They felt good. They weren’t worried. Something would turn up…

--David Seals, Sweet Medicine (54-55)

To understand why the virtual silence on the issues of wealth and work in Simon Ortiz’s Men on the Moon speaks volumes about the Native American worldview, one must examine and understand a system of economics so diametrically opposed to that of the industrialized west that it is rarely if ever discussed in the modern world.

In the Industrialized West, the foundation of the economy is surplus production, that is, producing more than what one needs in order to sell it at a profit. Profit implies competition, and in an equal exchange such as traditional barter systems, no profit is made.

Native Americans continue to be by far the poorest ethnic group in North America, with higher rates of infant mortality, shorter life expectancy, and higher rates of substance abuse than other ethnic groups. However, as Jerry Mander argues in In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, much of this poverty is caused more by the interruption of traditional lifestyles than by any inherent flaw in their traditional modes of survival.

Until roughly 400 years ago, most Native American societies were entirely self-sufficient in food, clothing, shelter, and most other material needs. Trade, in the form of barter, was reserved almost solely for luxury goods. According to Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Salhins, most pre-industrial aboriginal cultures also made of point of “deliberate under-production”.(20)

There is a conscience and consistent disregard for the notion of ‘maximum effort from the maximum number of people’…Labor power is underused, technological means are not fully engaged, natural resources are left untapped…production is low relative to existing possibilities. The work day is short. The number of days off exceeds the number of work days. Dancing, fishing, games, sleep, and ritual seem to occupy the greater part of one’s time. (Salhins, 25)

Salhins goes on to point out that in hunter-gatherer societies the average workday amounted to roughly four hours a day, and that in non-feudal, pre-industrial societies the work day was no more than an hour or so more on average. Many individuals did not do “productive work” at all. All this points to a culture more interested in rest than production, very unlike the Industrial West. (12-150)

Furthermore, most tribes had a combination of traditions and social sanctions that prevented individuals from amassing a disruptive amount of wealth. Reciprocal gift giving, communal food storage, and “potlatch”, the practice of giving away or destroying excessive wealth in order to gain social prestige, were all common practices, and in many tribes they remain so (Mander, 221-224).

These factors lead to an economy so unlike that of the industrialized west as to be almost unrecognizable as such. Rather than measuring wealth in material terms, subsistence economies measure wealth in leisure, communal harmony, and sustainability (Mander, 247-262). In fact, many tribes continue to practice traditional industries in order to feed themselves, and until recently there were many that still lived largely off the land. Examples of this abound in Ortiz’s text, in “Kaiser and the War”, with its recurrent talk of cornfields and sheep-camps, or Jimmo’s father making his own crutches from native wood in “Something’s Going On”. (59-60) As Suzy Erliche of Kotezbue, Alaska put it:

I came from a subsistence family. I grew up that way. I am very proud of it. I want my children to grow up that way. It brings strength to us as Inupiats. It is something different than going to the store. Our grocery store is millions of acres wide, and it brings us pride.

--Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey (165)

It therefore comes as no surprise that Ortiz, a member of the oldest continuously inhabited pueblo in North America would not place a great deal of emphasis on money, or on wage-work. To a traditional, or even quasi-traditional Native American, such things are not only foreign, but also somewhat distasteful. As another Alaskan Native, Antoinette Helmer put it:

Profit to non-natives means money. Profit to natives means a good life derived from the land and the sea…This land we hold in trust is our wealth. It is the only wealth we could possible pass on to our children…

--Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (301)

Wealth and Work on the Border: The Anglo-American Reality

The differing views of wealth and work, detailed in Gilb’s work and hinted at in Ortiz’s, serve to illustrate that while the different ethnic groups of the Border Southwest may share some characteristics, other telling differences lie just beneath the surface. When compared with mainstream Anglo culture, these distinctive “ethnic economies” shed a harsh light on the norms and values associated with work and wealth in America’s consumer culture.

Summing up the most basic and general facets of the mainstream consumer culture, one quickly sees the contrasts. Success and economic health are measured almost solely in terms of currency. Nowhere is this more telling than when one examines the Gross National Product (GNP), the primary measurement of economic health according to standard Western economics. The GNP measures the vibrancy of an economy by how much money changes hands, either in earnings or payments, and how often these exchanges take place. The problem is that this system is inherently flawed, as detrimental social costs, such as increased crime rates and hence crime prevention costs or increased rates of disease and hence medical costs, serve to push up the numbers in the very same way that social gains (increased home ownership, for example) do. When viewed from the point of view of either of the two ethnic economic theories previously discussed, this is not only strange, but also downright distasteful. (Mander, 25-30)

The same could be said for the issue of work. Despite growing concern over the nature of work in Anglo-American culture, there is still a common prejudice against manual labor of the sort that Gilb’s character engage in, and against the “lazy” subsistence economy of traditional Native groups. Jobs are ranked according to their rate of pay, and the level of specialization required, not according to their social impact or needfulness. That is to say that a professional athlete, whose work is highly paid and highly specialized, despite the fact that it does little to serve the community, is more highly respected than the multi-skilled handy man employed to repair public parks or the subsistence farmer supporting his family and community.

Finally, the concept of “newness” and its supposed desirability over “old” or “traditional” is not only the foundation of consumerist culture, but also a direct contradiction of both the pragmatism of Latino economic thinking, where one cares for possessions and purchases long-lasting products, and the immaterialist ethos of traditional Native America.

Reaching Across Borders

The hard-working, hard-drinking toughness of the Latino labor class is just one facet of a culture that also places a high premium on family, pride, craftsmanship, and tends to disdain crass materialism in favor of economic prudence. While there is danger in a life lived on the border of poverty, there is also great pride and accomplishments, which are often overlooked by the standard Anglo emphasis on material wealth and “white collar” prestige jobs.

The radically different economic thought behind Native America’s traditional and resilient cultures show by its stark contrast with Anglo-America’s that they are other ways of life possible. In our increasingly money-driven, money-oriented, and money-soaked world the existence of a time-proven and currency-free system offers a refreshingly different vision of a life that is slower, more stable, more relaxed, and free of much of the more egregious aspects of modern life.

Both Men on the Moon and The Magic of Blood are more than just collections of superbly written stories, they are cross-border views into cultures all too often ignored by “mainstream America”, with lessons to teach should the Anglo world wish to sit still and listen.

Works Cited:

Berger, Thomas R. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaskan Native Review Commission. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Gilb, Dagoberto. The Magic of Blood. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992.

Nichols, John. The Milagro Beanfield War. London: Arrow Books, 1974.

Ortiz, Simon J. Men on the Moon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1972.

Seals, David. Sweet Medicine. New York: Orion Books, 1992.