Native American Literature
Exam number 300817
Our Mothers’ Stories: Gender in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes and Beth Brant’s “A Long Story"
Introduction
This paper makes a case for the view that gender constructions in Native American
fiction are directly related to issues of identity and sovereignty. Shari M. Huhndorf argues in
Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (2009)
that Native Americans have come to internalise the European patriarchal system which was
imposed upon them during the colonisation of America. This is reflected in Native American
writing: Even Native literary nationalism, a branch of literary criticism which opposes
colonisation and seeks to recover traditional values has become a “predominantly male
endeavour” (Huhndorf 4), and the novels written during the first Native American
Renaissance1 focused almost exclusively on male protagonists and plots (Huhndorf 114).
As Paula Gunn Allen argues in The Sacred Hoop – Recovering the Feminine in American
Indian Traditions, woman-centred fiction by Native Americans plays a major role in the
resistance to this “degynocraticization” (Allen 42). Through a close reading of Louise
Erdrich’s novel Tracks (1988), Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999) and
Beth Brant’s short story “A Long Story” (1988) this paper aims to illustrate how the three
authors challenge the dominant discourse of patriarchy and offer alternatives to traditional
gender constructions. The analyses of the three texts is largely based upon Paula Gunn
Allen’s feminist theory, but the analysis of Tracks also makes use of trickster methodology in
order to illustrate how gender stereotypes and patriarchy can be resisted through trickster
discourse.
1
The period between the 1960s and mid-1970s where there was a dramatic increase in Native American
writing.
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Native American Literature
Exam number 300817
The Recovery of Feminine Power in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks
Louise Erdrich’s writing can be placed within the period normally referred to as the
second Native American Renaissance, the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s,
where Native women writers became far more prolific and began to prioritise female
protagonists and plots (Huhndorf 114). Tracks is predominantly a novel about female
experience: The two most central characters are the protagonist Fleur Pillager, an
Anishinaabe2 woman with mysterious supernatural powers, and the complex, mixed-blood
woman Pauline Puyat, who eventually becomes a Catholic nun. Erdrich examines the
damaging effects of settler colonialism on Native American women in the juxtaposition of
Fleur and Pauline, but Tracks can also be read as a feminist discourse which resists the
suppression of women in Native American culture through textual and narrative strategies.
The resistance to patriarchy and stereotyping of Native women mainly takes place
through the act of storytelling in the novel. The two narrators, Fleur’s adoptive father,
Nanapush, and Pauline vie for narrative authority throughout the novel. Nanapush
establishes his position as a tribal elder and a representative of Native tradition in the
beginning of his narrative: “I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot. I trapped
the last beaver. I … refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods
and lake” (Erdrich 2). Pauline, on the other hand, rejects her Native heritage, believing that
she is “made for better” (Erdrich 14), arguing that “even as a child I saw that to hang back
was to perish” (Erdrich 14) and eventually comes to believe that she is “not one speck of
Indian but wholly white” (Erdrich 117). Daniel Cornell argues in “Woman Looking:
Re(vision)ing Pauline’s Subject Position in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks” that Nanapush’s
assertions that Pauline is a liar can be read as an attempt to silence women: “It is not lies
2
Anishinaabe is the traditional, transnational term for the Ojibwa/Chippewa people (Bastian and Mitchell xi).
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that she constructs but her own right to look. In the process she reveals the sexual politics
within Nanapush's narrative discourse” (Cornell 52). The dialogical narrative between
Nanapush and Pauline cannot be reduced to a conventional power struggle between a male
and a female voice, however. Pauline is not a representative of the average Native American
woman, fighting to be heard. Instead, she reveals through her religious fanaticism and
racism how damaged she has become from over-assimilation. Nanapush’s reaction to
Pauline is a reaction against the internalisation of white influences. Far from wanting to
suppress the female perspective, he actually seeks to restore power to women who
embrace their Native American identity.
Nanapush is an obvious trickster character - his name is a direct reference to
Nanabush or Nanabozho, the Anishinaabe trickster and culture hero who is responsible for
creating and re-ordering the world: “My father said, ‘Nanapush. That’s what you’ll be called
… The first Nanapush stole fire. You will steal hearts’” (Erdrich 33). As a trickster, Nanapush
uses storytelling subversively. Jeanne Rosier Smith argues in Writing Tricksters: Mythic
Gambols in American Ethnic Fiction (1997) that tricksters “challenge the status quo and
disrupt perceived boundaries” (Smith 2), making them especially appealing to “women
writers of color who, historically subjugated because of both their race and their sex, often
combine a feminist concern for challenging patriarchy with a cultural interest in breaking
racial stereotypes“(Smith 2). The purpose behind Nanapush’s narrative is to heal the rift
between Fleur and her daughter, Lulu Nanapush: He tells Fleur’s story to Lulu in order to
persuade her to forgive Fleur, whom she “will not call mother” (Erdrich 2), for abandoning
her as a child. By describing Fleur as a powerful feminine force, Nanapush hopes to make
Lulu reconceptualise her mother. In doing this, he challenges the dominant view of Native
women as marginalised and powerless: not only is Fleur a strong female character in his
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story, but by naming Lulu after himself and choosing her as his audience, he essentially
narrates her identity as his spiritual successor, and passes the tribal tradition on to a female
heir, an act which strongly resist patriarchy and paves the way for a return to the lost
gynocracy.
Nanapush’s narrative also functions as an act of opposition to the dominant discourse
of Native women as potential race traitors. Huhndorf argues that Native women have
traditionally been represented as complicit in the colonisation of their own lands: “the role
of traitor falls most frequently to Native women, who are remembered … as collaborators in
the invasion” (Huhndorf 106). In Nanapush’s narrative, Fleur refuses to accept the
impending loss of her land even when the rest of her family gives up hope: “She said the
paper had no bearing or sense … as no one would be reckless enough to try collecting for
land where Pillagers were buried” (Erdrich 174). By describing Fleur as “the funnel of our
history” (Erdrich 178), Nanapush strongly resists this stereotype of Native women as
colonialist collaborators.
Smith argues that since the trickster is typically an over-sexualised male, women
writers often “explicitly question the sexism of their male tricksters, thereby critiquing the
sexism of their cultures' myths” (Smith 22). However, it can be argued that while it is true
that Nanapush is a womaniser who is destined to “steal hearts” (Erdrich 33), who has
“satisfied three wives” and teaches Eli how to seduce Fleur (Erdrich 41), this sexualisation is
not negative, but rather makes the tribal community cohere and actually restores power to
women. Fleur and Eli are brought together in the first place – and later reunited after his
adultery - by Nanapush’s advice to Eli, and Nanapush slowly coaxes Margaret Kashpaw out
of her isolation and widowhood with comic taunts, making her an essential part of the
Nanapush-Pillager-Kashpaw family unit.
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The contradiction between Nanapush as a seducer of women on one hand, and a force
for empowerment of women on the other hand, can be explained by his paradoxical identity
as a trickster. He may not even have a conscious feminist agenda - the trickster often
restores or transforms the world through accident rather than conscious intention, after all.
Having said that, in her article “Quincentenial Trickster Poetics” Judith Legatt quotes Gerald
Vizenor’s description of Nanabozho as: “the compassionate trickster … the one who cares to
balance the world between terminal creeds and humor with unusual manners and ecstatic
strategies” (qtd. in Legatt 225). Given Nanapush’s close association with Nanabozho, it
makes sense that his role in Tracks is also one of positive restoration and opposition to
terminal creeds, a term used by Vizenor to describe “stereotypical structures which confine
and deform those who embrace them“ (Stafford 155) – in this case, patriarchy and the
suppression of womanhood in Native American culture.
As a feminist device, Nanapush’s narrative is akin to postmodern trickster discourse.
Gerald Vizenor defines the postmodern trickster as "disembodied in a narrative . . . a
communal sign, a comic holotrope and a discourse" (qtd. in Smith 14). Although Nanapush
is obviously a real, ontological character in the text, his narrative also functions as a textual
strategy which undercuts patriarchal systems. As Caroline Rosenthal states in Narrative
Deconstructions of Gender in Works by Audrey Thomas, Daphne Marlott, and Louise Erdrich
(2003), “[t]rickster is a rhetorical device for Erdrich’s transcendence of supposedly realistic
tales of gender” (Rosenthal 149).
Literary critics have also viewed Fleur as a trickster character. Jeanne Rosier Smith
argues that “Erdrich creates feminist revisions of the trickster in Fleur” (Smith 29), while
Rosenthal views Fleur as a “trickster sign” that moves throughout Erdrich’s interrelated
novels (Rosenthal 145). Fleur does have trickster traits, most notably her shape-shifting
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abilities: She is consistently described as animalistic with her “wolf grin” (Erdrich 19, 32)
and is likened to a bear by Nanapush who tells Eli, “*a+long comes this bear. Don’t let her dig
in her claws” (Erdrich 46). Pauline believes that Fleur literally shape-shifts into a bear: “we
followed the tracks of her bare feet and saw where they changed, where the claws sprang
out … By night we heard her chuffing cough, the bear cough” (Erdrich 12). In the white town
of Argus, she displays uncanny skills at cards, another trickster trait which connects her to
the evil gambler myth3. Like a typical trickster, she makes the community cohere while
unsettling it at the same time: “she kept the lake thing controlled … But she also disturbed
the area around Matchimanito” (Erdrich 35).
There is also evidence that speaks against viewing Fleur as a trickster, however, and it
is important not to overlook her role as a female shaman or witch by reducing her to her
trickster characteristics. Unlike the typical trickster, gambling does not result in survival for
her. In Argus, the men become enraged and rape her when she consistently wins, and she
loses when she gambles against them for the life of her dead child in the spirit realm.
Furthermore, while she is a hinge of the Native society, she is not a culture hero in the same
sense as Nanapush, who creates and restores community. Like Nanabozho, Nanapush relies
on community as a source for his power: “I never made the mistake of thinking that I owned
my own strength, that was my secret. And so I never was alone in my failures” (Erdrich 177).
Fleur, on the other hand, positions herself outside the community: “She returned to
Matchimanito and stayed there alone in the cabin that even fire did not want. A young girl
had never done such a thing before” (Erdrich 8). As a woman who refuses to conform to
typical gender roles by living alone, disregarding “old women’s advice” and dressing “like a
3
In Anishinaabe mythology, Nanabozho is often credited with defeating an evil gambler, thereby freeing all
the souls he has previously defeated (Gamber 158).
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man” (Erdrich 12), Fleur cannot exist alongside Nanapush on the borders of society – she
must become an outcast in order to stay true to herself.
Fleur’s power and special position in relation to the community are directly related to
her connection to the mystical. Fleur almost drowns three times, but because of her affinity
with Misshepeshu, the entity that lives in Matchimanito Lake, others die in her place. As she
grows older, Fleur indicates a sexual relationship with Misshepeshu, and he chooses her as
his lover and protégé precisely because she embraces her feminine power: “it was clear that
Misshepeshu, the water man, the monster, wanted her for himself … He’s … maddened for
the touch of young girls, the strong and daring especially, the ones like Fleur” (Erdrich 11).
More than a trickster, Fleur is a shaman or sorceress, an outsider who is feared for her
supernatural ability to control or harm others: “She got herself into half-forgotten medicine,
studied ways we shouldn’t talk about” (Erdrich 12). Nanapush also wonders if Fleur has used
her witch-like powers to seduce Eli: “It didn’t occur to me till later to wonder if … Fleur had
wound her private hairs around the buttons of Eli’s shirt, if she had stirred smoky powders
or crushed snakeroot into his tea” (Erdrich 48). Fleur does in fact use her powers to kill
those who wrong her: Following her rape, Argus is hit by a violent storm that specifically
targets the butcher’s shop where the incident took place: “It was a fair-minded disaster, no
one could be said to have suffered much more than the next, except for Kozka’s Meats”
(Erdrich 29). Although she is victim of gendered violence, Fleur’s ability to take revenge for
herself – rather than allow herself to be reduced to a passive victim or have a man take
revenge for her – is clearly part of Erdrich’s feminist discourse.
Fleur and Pauline can both be viewed as representations of the female affinity with
mystic powers and sacredness. Whereas Fleur’s powers are rooted in nature and Native
American mythology, however, Pauline becomes corrupted by her attempt to integrate with
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Christianity. To her, Misshepeshu is “a devil” (Erdrich 11) who must be defeated. Jennifer
Sergi argues in “Tradition and Preservation in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks” that Pauline’s
intermixing of Christian and Native American mythology shows “the utter confusion that
some Chippewa could feel because of the crisis in their belief system brought on by
Christian influences”. To Pauline, Misshepeshu becomes “a symbol of the crisis of identity
for Pauline” (Sergi 281). Similarly, Pauline’s masochism, which shocks even the other nuns
can be read as an expression of her racially founded self-hatred; a more or less unconscious
attempt to kill her Native self.
This crisis of identity also warps Pauline as a woman. Paula Gunn Allen states that
“*p+recontact American Indian women valued their status as vitalizers … They were mothers,
and that word implied the highest degree of status (Allen 28). Pauline comes to represent
the total opposite of this original state of women as life-givers. She is associated with death
throughout Tracks: She discovers that she has a talent for caring for the dead: “I handled the
dead until the cold feel of their skin became a comfort” (Erdrich 69), she has memories of
being responsible for locking Fleur’s rapists in the meat locker where they die: “I relived the
whole thing over and over … Every night when my arms lowered the beam, it was my will
that bore the weight, it drop into place – not Russell’s or Fleur’s” (Erdrich 66) and she
eventually strangles and kills Napoleon Morrissey, the father of her child, thinking that he is
Misshepeshu.
She is also contrasted with Fleur in terms of motherhood: While Fleur loves her
children Pauline tries to perform a self-induced abortion when she discovers that she is
pregnant. Even more potent examples of Pauline’s twisted motherhood abound in Love
Medicine (1984), the chronological sequel to Tracks, where she beats, scalds and stabs her
own daughter, Marie, in the belief that she is driving the devil out of her. Furthermore, as
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Michelle R. Hessler points out in “Catholic Nuns and Ojibwa Shamans: Pauline and Fleur in
Louise Erdrich's "Tracks", “Pauline's failure to save Fleur's premature child without white
medicine demonstrates that she has forgotten even the most common traditional practices”
(Hessler 42), pointing again to how rejection of Native traditions is directly connected with
the death of the tribe, represented by the new-born child.
While Pauline becomes a symbol of death, Fleur remains a symbol of survivalism:
Although she gradually loses much of her power in Tracks, she survives drowning three
times, she overcomes the gendered violence that she is subjected to, she endures the death
of a child and finally, she perseveres despite the loss of her land. In a final display of her
mystic feminine power, Fleur takes revenge on the lumber crews. She has sawed through
the trunks of the trees with stolen equipment and seems to command a powerful wind:
“The wind shrieked and broke … swept full force upon us … the trees surrounding Fleur’s
cabin cracked off and feel away from us in a circle, pinning beneath their branches the
roaring men, the horses” (Erdrich 223). The attempt to dominate nature at the end of
Tracks is only partially successful as Fleur uses the wind and the trees as weapons to fight
the lumber crews to the last. While she does lose her land – her domain of power – she
herself is never dominated. Rather than returning to live with her family on the reservation,
Fleur leaves, indicating that while she has lost everything else, she still has agency and
control over her own destiny.
Gendered imperialism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes
Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko belongs to the first wave of the Native
American Renaissance in literature and although her earlier novels involved political
themes, Gardens in the Dunes (1999) is her first explicitly feminist novel. In this historical
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novel, Silko relates imperialism to gender politics through the trope of the garden, which
comes to symbolise the imperialist displacement of both nature and women. As Stephanie Li
argues in “Domestic Resistance: Gardening, Mothering and Storytelling in Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes”: “By drawing explicit parallels between the act of gardening
and that of mothering, Silko … indicates that treatment of the earth reflects attitudes about
maternity and female power.” (Li 19). Paula Gunn Allen also claims that Native American
cultures traditionally view “all creatures as relatives … as children of our mother” and
believe that “the earth is alive in the same sense that human beings are alive” (Allen 59, 70).
In other words, gardening as a nurturing activity is directly related to the gynocentric world
view found in pre-colonial Native American cultures while the imperialist exploitation of the
earth becomes linked to white Euro-American patriarchal values.
In Gardens in the Dunes, the Native American world view is primarily represented by
Indigo, Sister Salt and Grandma Fleet, the last surviving members of the Sand Lizard people,
a fictional near-extinct tribe who have a close connection to the earth as gardeners and
subsistence farmers. As noted by Li, “Grandma Fleet honors Indigenous values by
recognizing the old gardens as a source of food, shelter, and identity, and she passes this
respect for the earth on to her grandchildren” (Li 19). In addition to showing the sisters how
to live off the land, Grandma Fleet also teaches them to treat other living creatures as equal
inhabitants of the earth: “Grandma Fleet talked about the big snake many times because he
was almost as old as she was, and the spring belonged to him … Grandma Fleet said
whatever you do, don’t offend the old snake who lives at the spring” (Silko 36). Indigo later
demonstrates a degree of maternity and responsibility with regard to her pets which goes
beyond what one would expect of the average eleven-year-old. When she loses her beloved
parrot, Rainbow, she elevates the bird’s feelings to those of a person and punishes herself
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for failing to live up to her responsibility to a living creature in her care: “Rainbow had
nothing to drink or eat where he was, so Indigo would not drink or eat either. He would not
understand why she left him after she promised to always love him and take care of him”
(Silko 308).
It is important to note that white women in the novel who resist the patriarchal
structures of their culture also subscribe to the view of all life as sentient and gardening as
an act of mothering. Hattie Palmer, who resists the patriarchal system as an intellectual
woman has gone to university and written a thesis on the possible gynocentric origins of
Christianity and her aunt Bronwyn, a devout pagan, both have maternal attitudes to
gardening: “When they returned to Riverside, Hattie planned to show the neglected gardens
they were loved again … Bronwyn agreed; if a garden wasn’t loved it could not properly
grow!” (Silko 240). Bronwyn explains her belief that “plants have souls and human beings
exist only to be consumed by plants and be transformed into glorious new plant life” (Silko
240). Hattie’s immediate response is to think that “Edward and her father would have a
good laugh at that!” (Silko 240). They would laugh because to them the idea that human
beings could serve a purpose for plants is absurd. Edward and Mr Abbott represent the
world view of wealthy white men who, to borrow Paula Gunn Allen’s words, envision the
world as a “great hierarchical ladder of being … on which ground and trees occupy a very
low rung, animals a slightly higher one, and man (never woman) – especially “civilized man”
– a very high one” (Allen 59). Bronwyn’s ideas are a complete reversal of this, and so the
conflicting values of imperialism and earth-bound spirituality mirror the dichotomy between
patriarchal and matriarchal systems.
The gardens referred to in the title of the novel are a haven for Indigo, Sister Salt and
Grandma Fleet, but they are also symbolic of the displacement of their woman-centred
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culture: The gardens are vulnerable, remote and seem to be one of the last remaining places
where the Sand Lizard women are free to live as they please. Indigo senses the danger of
leaving the gardens as the sisters depart to search for their mother: “it was as if the old
gardens and Grandma Fleet herself were telling them, “Come home. Don’t go.” … Indigo had
the saddest feeling they would not be able to return to the old gardens for a long time”
(Silko 58). Away from the gardens, the sisters are put through an enforced assimilation
where colonialist gender norms are imposed upon them. At boarding school, Indigo
experiences how Native American identity has been completely suppressed in the girls and
women who have undergone the Americanisation process: in the case of the older students
“only their skin looked Indian” (Silko 67) while the matron “looked Indian but behaved like a
white woman” (Silko 68). Indigo also becomes Americanised to some extent during her stay
with Hattie and Edward Palmer, and she is well-aware of the distance this creates between
her and the indigenous cultures: when they approach a group of Native American women in
Albuquerque Indigo is “relieved to see that none of the Indian women had noticed her,
dressed as she was like a white girl … They would see the clothes and hat she wore, and
they would laugh and say ‘What kind of Indian are you?’” (Silko 124). Meanwhile, Sister Salt
discovers that even the other Sand Lizard people she meets at the reservation are
assimilating into other cultures and adopting Christian norms:
“The few Sand Lizard people who remained were married to people of other tribes; they went
to church every Sunday and spoke English. They … shook their heads and whispered behind
their hands about the fierce young Sand Lizard woman. Poor thing! She lived out in the hills
too long!” (Silko 205)
This explains why the sisters must return to the gardens in the dunes after they are
reunited: It is the only space left where they are free from the influences that encroach
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upon their native culture. In short, the return to the old gardens becomes a quest for
sovereignty and cultural survival for Indigo and Sister Salt.
The imperialist exploitation of the planet is primarily a masculine endeavour in the
novel. Edward has a strong desire for exotic plants and flowers as an educated botanist, but
his desire is tainted by his utilitarian view on nature as resource to be used for monetary
gain. His outlook is in stark contrast to the Native American view of the earth as a living
entity that should be nurtured and cherished: While Indigo collects seeds in order to plant
them as a means of sustenance and joy, Edward cuts down whole plants for profit. To him,
flora is merely a commodity. It is also noteworthy that although he worries about the legal
repercussions of his actions, Edward never reflects on the moral issues of botanical piracy.
The most obvious example of this is the flashback to the Pará River Expedition. Edward
believes that his companion Vicks, who has been sent on the expedition to steal specimens
for Kew Gardens, “smuggled the disease-resistant seedlings for a noble purpose” (Silko 142).
This clearly shows Edward’s imperialist ideology: to him, any endeavour that extends the
power of one’s country is noble, even if it involves stealing from another nation. Moreover,
when his other companion Eliot sets fire to a large area in the jungle to make sure his
investors’ rivals cannot get their own specimens of the rare orchids, Edward is outraged
because “[h]e was used as a decoy in the service of scoundrels” (Silko 142). Edward feels
personally mistreated by his companions, but he never reflects critically on the
mistreatment of nature and ironically, he never realises that he uses Hattie and Indigo as
decoys for a similar undertaking himself when he brings them along to Corsica on his illicit
quest to smuggle Citrus medica back to America and break the French and Italian monopoly
on the fruit.
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Susan James’ garden is also a symbol of imperialism and gross exploitation of nature,
but it is important to note that Susan’s motives are pastoral rather than utilitarian, and that
her interest in gardening is actually an expression of deeper female desires. Terre Ryan
points out in “The Nineteenth-Century Garden: Imperialism, Subsistence, and Subversion is
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes” extravagant gardening was one of the only
ways that Victorian women could place themselves in a position of power and make their
mark upon the world in a “socially acceptable” way (Ryan 19). The garden is also a cover for
Susan’s affair with the gardener. As Ryan puts it: “since gardening is perceived as a virtuous
act, Susan can subvert the constraints of American society behind the protective blind of the
moral ideology of American landscape gardening” (Ryan 19). Susan’s gardening ideology is
clearly morally reprehensible, but at the same time it can be seen as a manifestation of a
suppressed woman’s desire for power and sexual freedom.
While imperialism is associated with patriarchy, experiences with the sacred primarily
belong to women in the novel: during their journey, Indigo hopes to find the Messiah while
Hattie is searching for answers about the mystical white light she saw in Bronwyn’s garden.
She never shares her mystical experience with Edward: “She was reluctant to confide in
Edward because it was his nature to demand a rational explanation” (Silko 280). The climax
of the journey comes at the same time for Edward, Hattie and Indigo, but for different
reasons: the moment when Hattie and Indigo see the Messiah and his Mother appear on
the wall of a school-house in Corsica coincides with Edward’s theft of the citrus cuttings. Not
only does Edward miss the vision because he is busy achieving his imperialist goal, but the
Citrus medica can also be seen as another symbol of how imperialism disparages the
sanctity of nature. Ryan explains that since the Citrus medica itself “has had sacred
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connotations” (Ryan 117) Edward’s plans to sell the citrus as candy can be seen as a
“commercial trivialization of the sacred” (Ryan 118).
It is also important to note their contrasting reactions to Laura’s garden of old
European sculptures. Hattie and Indigo both immediately connect with the figures that
represent motherhood: “The figure was a seated bear mother tenderly cradling her cub in
her arms; Indigo could feel how much the bear mother loved her cub just from the curve of
the clay” (Silko 296). Hattie’s maternal instincts are stirred by the figure of a bird-woman
hybrid and her child: “the expression of the mother’s body as she cradled her baby in the
arms touched Hattie deeply and she felt a surge of emotion that caught in her throat until
her eyes filled with tears” (Silko 298). Edward, on the other hand, sees the garden as “an
affront to science and scholarship” and argues that “artifacts of the early millennia belonged
in the hands of scientists and scholars, not in gardens” (Silko 293). Because of his utilitarian
outlook, the primordial power of the garden is lost upon Edward, and his desire to keep the
sculptures contained in a museum rather than let them exist as a part of the natural world
can be seen as a wish to control the female power that they represent.
One of the dominant ways that white men exert control over white women in the
novel is to pathologise behaviour that goes against the patriarchal system. Unable to accept
Laura’s position as an independent woman and scholar, Edward reasons that: “a connection
must exist between the absent husband and the exposure of the artifacts. Poor Laura must
have suffered a break-down!” (Silko 293) Hattie receives the exact same treatment when
she becomes depressed after the topic of her master’s thesis is declined: Her doctor blames
“the overstimulation of the lectures in the presence of young gentlemen for Hattie’s illness”
(Silko 96). Although Hattie resists this diagnose at first, she is also strongly influenced by the
dominant views of her society: She is shocked when she learns that Laura is divorced and
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that Bronwyn has abandoned Christianity, she doubts her own sanity at times and she
constantly represses and displaces her sexual desire.
The physical gendered violence that Hattie is subjected to, first by Mr Hyslop and later
by an unknown attacker in Needles, are the ultimate sanctions against her deviation from
the dominant gender constructions. After the attack in Needles, Hattie is “lucky to be alive
because her skull was cracked” (Silko 458). As noted by Ryan, Hattie’s “very name suggests
her cerebral nature” (Ryan 129) and cracking her skull can therefore be read as an assault
on her divergent femininity as a female scholar. Ryan argues that “in Gardens violence is a
manifestation of the imperialistic greed of white men” (Ryan 129). The fact that Hattie’s
luggage has been “dumped and rifled and scattered in the ditch” (Silko 456) supports Ryan’s
argument. Just as importantly, the attack is a direct result of Hattie’s association with the
Native Americans: A white woman behaving like a Native American is even less tolerable to
the dominant society than a female intellectual.
In some ways, Hattie’s revenge on the town can be compared to Fleur’s in Tracks: Both
women use natural forces as weapons against their oppressors. However, while Fleur’s
revenge is fair and measured, Hattie acts out of rage and desperation when she sets fire to
the town. Louise Barnett argues in “Yellow Women and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Feminism”
that as a white American woman Hattie lacks the “mythic roots” to support an act that can
“overcome convention to produce a powerful gesture of individual sexual assertion or
heroic action for the community” (Barnett 29). Sexuality is a crucial part of Silko’s feminism
and Hattie ultimately fails as a feminist heroine because she has repressed this aspect of her
femininity in her sexless, childless marriage with Edward. Silko’s ideal feminist heroine is
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modelled on Yellow Woman4 who “achiev*es+ success through sexuality rather than
destruction” (Barnett 20) and as Barnett notes, Sister Salt is contrasted with Hattie as a true
“Yellow Woman heroine” (Barnett 27). Like Yellow Woman, Sister Salt becomes pregnant
after she is abducted from her home and by returning with a child she secures the future of
her tribe. The novel ends on a positive note; the first steps towards rebuilding their
community have been taken and new life has returned to the old gardens: new shoots are
growing out of the trunk of the dead apricot tree and a new snake has arrived, indicating
regrowth and hope – even if it is a fragile and vulnerable hope at best.
Colonised Bodies in Beth Brant’s “A Long Story”
Beth Brant’s short story “A Long Story” (1988) parallels the experience of two Native
American mothers whose children are taken from them by force – one living in the 1890s
and the other in the 1970s. In the historical narrative the children are removed by
government agents and placed in boarding schools while the contemporary mother, Mary,
has lost custody of her daughter Patricia due to her homosexuality. The parallel narratives
and the title of the story imply that the child-theft perpetrated by the state is not a thing of
the past, but still takes place in the present-day, as courts of law continue to impose the
heteropatriarchal norms of the dominant society upon Native Americans.
The so-called civilisation process of the Native American children in the historical
narrative is a gradual stripping away of their cultural identity: their names are changed from
She Sees Deer and He Catches Leaves to Martha and Daniel, they are dressed like white
children and the boy’s hair is cut. At boarding school, the children are taught to internalise
Euro-American gender roles: Daniel “works in the fields” while Martha “cooks and is being
4
Yellow Woman, also called Kochininako, is a mythic figure and culture hero in many Pueblo oral tales. She is
usually abducted by a spirit or other tribes and returns to her people pregnant, thereby rejuvenating the
culture through ceremonial birth.
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Exam number 300817
taught to sew aprons” (Brant 171). The idea that work is split into the binary categories of
men’s jobs and women’s jobs is not antithetical to Native American thought as such, but as
Allen explains, gender designations and divisions of labour based on sex were much more
fluid in pre-colonial Native cultures: “individuals fit into these roles on the basis of proclivity,
inclination, and temperament” (Allen 196). For example, in many tribal cultures a
homosexual woman would fulfil a man’s role, or gender designation may be decided
depending on a child’s dreams, choice of companions or toys (Allen 196). The suppression of
these fluid gender designations naturally led to the suppression of sexualities that diverge
from the heteronormative system of settler colonialism. Mary asserts that the father of her
child will teach Patricia that homosexuality is wrong: “He will teach her to hate us. He will!”
(Brant 170). As a child-thief and indoctrinator of children, the role of Patricia’s father mirrors
that of the government agents in the historical narrative.
Dismembered bodies are a central metaphor for the dismantling of the children’s
identities in the short story. Mary’s dream reflects the feeling that her daughter is being
torn apart in the struggle between her parents, her identity stolen as her father keeps the
core of her being: “my daughter is dead. Her father is returning her body to me in pieces. He
keeps her heart” (Brant 169). Similarly, the cutting of the boy’s hair in the historical
narrative can be seen as symbolic of his spiritual death as a Native American. His parents
handle the braids as if they were the dead body of their child: the mother clings to them,
but feels them slip lifelessly to the floor before the father wraps them up and carries them
away. Diana Lopez Jones explains in “Is This Progress?: Surveying a Century of Native
American Stories about Hair” that many North American tribes believed that “hair was
sacred, even powerful, because it held the essence of the person to whom the hair
belonged” (Jones 144). Therefore, the cutting of hair is often symbolic of a violent attack on
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Exam number 300817
personal power and identity in Native stories. The mother expresses her intense grief and
feeling of powerlessness in this way: “I cut my hair … I throw the tangled webs of my hair
into the flames” (Brant 173).
In the love-making scene between Mary and Ellen, hair becomes a positive image of
power regained through love as the women’s long hair “braids together on the pillow”
(Brant 173). To Mary, Ellen becomes a “healer of spirit” (Brant 173). There is a stark contrast
between this affectionate homosexual relationship and the distance between the parents in
the historical narrative where the husband is “good only for tipping bottles and swallowing
anger” (Brant 173). The implication is that two mothers can form a family unit that is just as,
if not more, stable and loving than a mother and a father. Arianne Burford states in “Her
Mouth is Medicine: Beth Brant and Paula Gunn Allen’s Decolonizing Queer Erotics” that “the
racist, heteropatriarchal settler colonialist definition of family was and is an attempt to
destroy Indigenous cultures and families” (Burford 174). According to Allen, Native families
were originally based upon “spiritual kinship” and “clan membership” (Allen 251), and it was
“quite possible that lesbianism was practised rather commonly” (Allen 250). By showing the
strong spiritual and erotic bond between Mary and Ellen, Brant reclaims this aspect of precolonial Native cultures. Put differently, her writing essentially becomes an act of
decolonising gender.
Language and writing is used as a way of silencing and controlling those who diverge
from the dominant society in the short story. The government agent confuses the Natives
with a logic that is totally foreign to them: “We signed papers, the agent said. This gave
them rights to take our babies … It will make them civilized, the agent said. I do not know
civilized” (Brant 167). The boarding school and Patricia’s father control the contents of the
children’s letters to their mothers, taking their own voices away. As Linda Cullum points out
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in “Survival’s Song: Beth Brant and the Power of the Word” this becomes a “metaphor for
patriarchal control”. In their grief, both mothers also begin to lose their voices: “I begin
howling … I begin a scream that turns to howling” (Brant 171, 175). Mary finds a single word
that leads her back to sanity, however: “The word lesbian. Lesbian. The word that makes
them panic … The word that dares them. I am one … I will not cease to be!” (Brant 175). By
naming herself a lesbian and refusing to relinquish her identity, Mary reclaims the power of
language in a defiant act against her oppressors. As Cullum puts it: “Brant shows us that the
importance of understanding language's potential for self-affirmation and survival cannot be
minimized” (Cullum 135).
The modern term “Two-Spirit” did not come into use until after Brant wrote “A Long
Story” (Driskill 52), but it has later become an essential part of the resistance to colonial
definitions of Native Americans. Unlike gay, lesbian or the other designations which place
non-heterosexuals outside the societal norms, the term Two-Spirit is a reminder of the
privileged position and spiritual gifts of Natives who had a combination of male and female
souls in the original tribal societies. Qwo-Li Driskill writes that: “It is in our stories, including
our written literatures, that I search for meaning and reflection of my Two-Spirit body in
order to survive” (Driskill 56). In short, storytelling and language are crucial means of
reclaiming the gender identities that have been lost to Native Americans – whether as a
woman or as a two-spirit person.
Conclusion
The authors of Tracks, Gardens in the Dunes and “A Long Story” each draw attention to
how the issue of gender has affected Native American identity and sovereignty. Through
strong female protagonists who find ways of resisting the patriarchal and colonial powers,
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Exam number 300817
the three works function as ways of reclaiming the status of Native American women.
Tracks has one of the most powerful, yet elusive female characters of modern fiction: Fleur,
a female shaman who ultimately becomes a symbol of survivalism despite the loss of her
ancestral lands. Yet one of the central feminist devices in Tracks is the male voice of
Nanapush who, as a trickster, subverts the stereotypes of Native American women.
Through the twisted counter-perspective of Pauline, Erdrich shows how Native women’s
over-assimilation and self-hatred can result in the total disintegration of women’s original
role in tribal cultures as givers of life. In Gardens in the Dunes Silko juxtaposes the feminine
tribal perspective on nature with the masculine exploitation of the earth and suppression of
women. While Hattie is eventually defeated and estranged from her own culture,
motherhood and female sexuality, embodied in Sister Salt as a Yellow Woman heroine,
become essential means of regrowth for Native women. Brant parallels a historical and a
contemporary narrative in “A Long Story” in order to show how Native American gender
roles and motherhood have been under assault from the time of the colonisation until the
present-day. Only by finding her own voice and refusing to renounce her sexual identity can
Mary oppose the heteropatriarchal system.
In telling these stories of gendered violence and oppression Erdrich, Silko and Brant
are describing the experiences of Native American women throughout history. Literature is
essential in reclaiming the gender structure that Native American women lived by before
colonisation and so Native writers may shape the future of their daughters by telling the
stories of their mothers.
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