Food for Thought

A Postcolonial Study of Food Imagery in Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife

SHIRLEY BROZZO         

Whereas Ojibwa author Louise Erdrich's first five novels chronicle the lives of the Kashpaws, Lamartines, Morriseys, and Pillagers, her sixth novel, Antelope Wife, begins the tale of different families: the Roys, the Whiteheart Beads, and the Shawanos.¹ Her new characters face many of the same challenges that the earlier characters did, but this novel integrates an innovative twist to colonialism; almost every page of this intriguing narrative includes mention of food or food imagery. If food is not directly being discussed, then people or objects are described using images of food.
        The colonizer's arrival changes everything about life for Native Americans.² Not only were the people on the eastern coast affected, but so too were those further inland, like the Ojibwa, as European settlers forced them further and further west. This encroachment leads not only to the physical movement of people, but also to changes in dietary habits of the displaced natives. Not only does Erdrich illustrate actual instances of physical hunger caused by the European invasion, but she makes additional references to other varieties of hunger, such as deprivation and longing. For example, Blue Prairie Woman, who loses her child in the opening scene, yearns for her. Blue Prairie Woman is driven nearly crazy during her search to reunite with her first-born daughter. Klaus Shawano and Richard Whiteheart Beads, two Ojibwa men who have lost their way and succumbed to alcohol (originally brought to the people by early colonizers), crave their next bottle of booze. Cally Whiteheart Beads, one of Richard's twin daughters, longs for the information that will reveal the {2} identity of her grandmother. Knowing her true identity will ground her, making her feel complete.
        Food imagery even provides some comic relief, as evidenced by Erdrich's inclusion of the Windigo Dog, a personification of death, and Almost Soup, the storytelling dog. Almost Soup, a pure white dog who gathers up all his "puppiness," his way of tail wagging, sloppy puppy kissing, and false growling that illicit help from the little girl (Cally) who saves him from a grandmother's stew pot, is a kind, helpful creature unlike the Windigo Dog. Although this Windigo Dog provides comic relief in parts of the novel by telling off-color Anishnaabe jokes, a Windigo is generally described as a malevolent spirit likened to greed. Windigo spirits possess an insatiable hunger which can never be satisfied. Icy coldness and strange compulsions are traveling companions of this hunger. The Ojibwa's constant search for food and the European's need to devour land, vegetation, and original inhabitants of this land are prevalent themes in Erdrich's novels. Differing types of hunger, as couched in food imagery, make yet another political statement about the continuation of Ojibwa life despite colonization.

      IN THE BEGINNING

Traditionally, the Ojibwa people, like many others, did not have a written history. There was no need for written words because stories would be told that recounted important historical events or battles.³ Storytellers would roam from village to village reciting tales of important deeds, helping the whole community to remember. Writing in vignettes, or short pieces of story or history, is Erdrich's way of staying true to her oral tradition by providing easily digestible snippets of information. Linking these vignettes together to form a novel is consistent with the circular pattern that pervades most Native American works. Laguna Pueblo author and critic Paula Gunn Allen says,

The structure of the stories out of the oral tradition, when left to themselves and not recast by Indian or white collectors, tend {3} to meander gracefully from event to event; the major unifying device, besides the presence of certain characters in a series of tales, is the relationship of the tale to the ritual life of the tribe. (Sacred Hoop 153)

        Erdrich combines all of her stories and characters while letting them roam freely throughout the present, past, and future. An ambiguous portion of the story may reach a subsequent resolution, but not necessarily within the same time period. Time frames are irrelevant within native culture, a concept which runs contrary to the linear model of time used by the conquerors.

Chronological time structuring is useful in promoting and supporting an industrial time sense. The idea that everything has a starting and an ending point reflects accurately the process by which industry produces. (Sacred Hoop 149)

Writing contrary to the European linear fashion, Erdrich obviously arranges her words from a native consciousness using very few historical references, but some of the events can be pieced together, based on what is known about colonial history from the European perspective. In a native retelling of the westward expansion that satisfied the European's hunger for more land, Erdrich's saga opens with a scene in which a cavalry soldier, unable to tolerate the senseless killings of old women and children, follows a dog with a cradleboard strapped to its back. This soldier, Scranton Roy, rescues the infant and tries to keep her alive. This female infant, too young to eat solid foods, wails in hunger until in one desperate move Roy cradles her to his breast where she suckles until she miraculously receives nourishment from him. Roy, the son of Quakers who ironically is sent to annihilate the Sioux, now finds himself the savior of this Ojibwa woman, the first-born daughter of Blue Prairie Woman. Employing typical colonial practices, Roy renames this baby Matilda, after his own mother. Whenever Europeans could not pronounce a name or thought it too long or awkward, they Anglicized it. Changing a person's name is one way in which the dominant culture enforces assimilation.
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        Scranton Roy's nursing of Matilda mocks Christianity, poking fun at the Madonna, in that males (like virgins) are not traditionally thought of as life givers. Paradoxically, Scranton Roy's ability to nurse a child happens not only once, but twice within this novel. When his wife Peace McKnight dies in childbirth, Roy is once again left with an infant, this time his son Augustus, to nurse and raise. Without hesitation he lifts the newborn boy to his breast, giving him nourishment and life. Roy, who is originally sent to slaughter the natives, instead ends up providing them with first food. These Roys are the ancestors of twins Aurora and Rozina Roy and twins Deanna and Cally Whiteheart Beads.

     FOOD AND GRIEF

Death, a common element in most Native American stories, is inevitable given the collective history of the people and the destructive and oppressive practices of the colonizers. Drowning in bereavement, Rozina Whiteheart Beads turns to food to comfort herself when she loses first her daughter Deanna and then her ex-husband Richard. Both are alcohol-related deaths. When Richard gets drunk and tries to asphyxiate himself because Rozina is leaving him for Frank Shawano, the baker and nephew to Richard's business partner Klaus Shawano, he fails miserably in his attempt. Young Deanna is not as fortunate. She hides in the back seat of the yellow truck that her father attempts to use as a means to kill himself, but it is she who falls asleep and dies from carbon monoxide poisoning, while her father lives. Although Rozina chooses bread over wine (booze) by selecting Frank over Richard, Deanna becomes another statistic; an innocent child killed by alcohol, a disease spread by the colonizers.

After Deanna's death, Rozina turns to food to help ease her sorrow. She swam in the grief, she cooked with it, she bagged it up and froze it. She made a stew, burned it out the back yard, dug a hole and threw it in, sacked it for garbage, put it up on a shelf, brought it to the trees she loved, and set it free out on the leaves. (84)

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        Following Ojibwa traditions she prepares food which sends Deanna on her journey to the spirit world. After conducting proper ceremonies, a feast would have been held, but all of that changes with the coming of the colonizers who outlaw ceremonies and traditional practices.
        Rozina, caught between the traditional world and the colonizer's world, as many other natives people are, leaves Richard because she falls in love with Frank Shawano, an urban Indian. Richard cannot accept this, even after Deanna dies and Rozina divorces him. In fact, he tries several more times to win Rozina back, but she is ready to move on with her life. Eventually Richard ruins her wedding night with Frank when he shows up at their hotel and commits suicide in front of them by shooting himself in the head. His death sends Rozina spiraling into another depression in which she is again surrounded by food and food imagery. In her depressed state she cannot fathom feeding her sexual hungers and become Frank's wife until she can accept the tragedies in her life. After seven days of fasting, Rozina tries to fill her grief-laden emptiness with food.

On the table, at the western end because that is the death direction, she sets two places carefully. Spirit plates, with tobacco [. . .] She fills the plates with the wild rice in a heap beside the turkey, the milky, buttery corn, a bit of fruit salad containing strawberries, and beside them, a large bowl of vanilla pudding. Eat it, eat it all up, now, she thinks vehemently, heartsick, setting another smaller plate for her daughter at the head of the stair, then go to sleep. (188)

        Rozina uses food and prepares new meals to help her cope with her losses. Her return to traditional ways reveals a tribal memory that runs counter to colonial ways of simply grieving and moving on. In an earlier time period, after losing a husband, Rozina would have gone through a year or more of mourning and self-sacrifice before recovering sufficiently to rejoin the day-to-day activities of her tribal community. She might have gone through a similar experience when Deanna died. Her assimilated family and friends around her in Minneapolis probably expect her to go through only a short grieving pe-{6}riod, but she needs to experience a more traditional closure, a feast of mourning. In this respect, Rozina refuses to be colonized.

     FOOD AND FEAR

Along with colonization comes change, but change also breeds fear. Apprehension permeates this novel and the life (hi)stories that Erdrich tells. In addition to the deaths of Rozina's loved ones, another memorable event in Antelope Wife is the World War II story wherein the first Klaus is mentioned. Some Ojibwa men liberate Klaus, a young German soldier with no last name, from a detention camp near Minneapolis. In an offer he hopes will spare his life, he proposes to bake a cake for his captors. Unable to speak each other's language, these Ojibwa ogitchida and this German warrior communicate via drawings of a common bond, food. Once the foodstuffs are gathered, the cake is baked. Will Klaus pass the taste-test to earn his freedom? According to Erdrich, these Ojibwa warriors are more accustomed to eating plain food, straight from Mother Earth, things like manomin, weyass, and baloney. But it is Frank Shawano's lifelong ambition to recreate the blitzkuchen that he first tasted there; however, he can never get the recipe right until he stumbles upon the secret ingredient that made that particular cake taste so special . . . fear.
        Asinigwesance, or Old Asin, the elder who has Klaus taken as a prisoner, is the one who creates the fear in the first place. Like a hand grenade with a loose pin, Old Asin could explode at any minute. Unknowingly, Asin becomes a colonial mimic. Critic Dee Horne says "the mimic strives to resemble that which is being imitated, but in imitating the other, the mimic reveals -- either knowingly or unknowingly -- his/her difference" (5). In this instance Asin becomes like the colonizers who use revenge as a reason for taking actions that would not normally be taken. Taking Klaus captive as a slave to replace a cousin killed in World War II is not a traditional Ojibwa action, yet after years of forced assimilation Asin begins to act like those who have colonized him.
        Another example of colonial mimicry occurs around the Christmas dinner table. Christmas, a Christian holiday, was not observed by {7} natives prior to European arrival, since native people did not worship Christ. After colonization many native people convert to or are forced to accept Christianity. A promise of a food delivery to a starving community often serves as the payment for this spiritual adoption. Throughout Erdrich's Christmas feast scene, various food imagery appears in addition to ample discussion of the actual meal being served. The table itself is "wheat-grained and butter smooth,"some of Elder Mary Shawano's conversation centers on her eventual death and her desire not to have a "commodity funeral," and the salad bowl that cousin Chook holds and passes around the table is constructed of honey-colored wood (202, 203). Grandmothers Mary (Shawano) and Zosie Roy are described as looking like cookie sheets, one newer looking and one well-used and broken in.
        Traditional American Christmas feast foods materialize, and include turkey with stuffing, potatoes and gravy, cranberries, and a variety of pies and cakes, most of which are indigenous to the Americas. Cally Whiteheart Beads, Deanna's surviving twin recalls,

My Grandmothers would prefer the burnt-heart of the turkey to the white breast meat and will accept cranberry sauce made from fresh berries only. Mincemeat pie gives Zosie the runs. Pumpkin stops Mary's bowels. Wild rice must be prepared with no salt, and garlic gives both an instant cramp. Otherwise, they are to me the perfect Christmas guests. (194)

        Although many Native American families celebrate Christmas holidays today, others have returned to previous traditional ways of celebrating (or not celebrating) holidays or feast days. While some have become fully acculturated, or become colonial mimics, others revive traditional practices.

     FOOD AND ASSIMILATION

Before contact by Europeans, early medicine men and/or shaman could find herb, roots, barks, and plants to create concoctions or lotions to cure most ailments. After contact new diseases arrived that could be cured by medicines of either world. One of these new dis-{1}eases was diabetes, an affliction that makes it difficult to keep a person's natural insulin levels regulated. Changes in diets due to increased consumption of refined sugars and commodity foods have caused this illness in natives, and about one in eight Native Americans contracts diabetes (Diabetes 1). Mary Shawano suffers from this affliction. At the Christmas dinner Zosie tells Cally that "Mary's got the sugar in her blood. She craves it, though. Try not to tempt her. She'll make a pig of herself behind your back and then she'll lapse into a coma" (199).
        In yet another example of the effects that settler foods and practices have on the Ojibwa, Zosie herself appears to be watching her cholesterol since she comments that she "eat(s) the whites of eggs only, yolks will kill me" (195). These forced changes in the grandmothers' eating habits can be directly attributed to forced assimilation and colonial mimicry.
        Cally's cousin Cecille succumbs to colonial mimicry by assimilating into white culture, perhaps to her own detriment. Through her actions, she starts to look and behave like the dominant culture, even though she will never be fully accepted by them. Erdrich writes,

She runs her kung fu studio right next to the bakery shop. Through this, and peroxide, she has made herself a bicep blond Indian with tiny hips and sculptured legs that she shows off by wearing the shortest shorts. (110)

        Cecille's eating habits define who she is. She salts everything before she tastes it as if she knows that her food, like her life, is not spicy enough. She eats mainly health food and swallows vitamin supplements and ginkgo while consuming gallons of bottled water when Cally first meets her. All of these actions point to modern diet fads undertaken by dominant society women in their attempts to stay young, thin, blond, and beautiful. But by the time Christmas comes and the family is feasting together, she "fills her plate three or four times, and devours her food with the slow assurance of a woman of bottomless depth" (204). Just like mainstream women who have harder times sticking to their diets over the holidays, Cecille's dieting days are over. She is a prime example of colonial mimicry in this {9} book. As Horne states, "While the mimic may desire to become like another, the mimic can never be the other" (4). As much as Cecille tries to change her appearance through hair dye and exercising herself into a size two body, she cannot really become a white woman and will not be accepted as such by the dominant culture.
        Cally's search for her identity leads her to the city where she moves in with her mother's boyfriend, Frank, who has moved to Minneapolis from the reservation to start his bakery as a part of the relocation program. Their living quarters are above the bakery. In operating this bakery, Frank has become assimilated into the dominant culture, concocting sweets which are not a traditional part of an Ojibwa diet. Traditional sweetening is done with maple sap collected in the spring, boiled until usable, and then utilized sparingly throughout the year. The influx of refined sugar into the daily diets of natives not used to such foods contributes to the rising number of Native Americans with diabetes.
        In spite of this setback to native health in general, Frank's bakery allows him the freedom to continue searching for the secret recipe for the blitzkuchen. Even though running the bakery is not a traditional Native American occupation, Frank persists. Horne posits,"As part of their civilizing mission, settlers encourage colonial mimicry in their efforts to facilitate the process of assimilation" (6). Frank Shawano's actions reveal his assimilation. He has a Puritan work ethic, such as rising before dawn to create his confections, and cleaning and recleaning the glass in his display cases. He keeps his recipes a secret and becomes professionally jealous. Frank, in business to make money, obsesses with recreating the blitzkuchen, and does not talk about the old ways or the traditions he is using for the recreation of the blitzkuchen and does not stay connected to his family, even those members who live with him.
        Although Frank stays firmly ensconced in his Minneapolis bakery, Mary and Zosie vacillate between their reservation and Minneapolis, keeping their migratory traditions alive. Mary and Zosie are defined as being "off the reservation," a term that Laguna Pueblo activist Paula Gunn Allen defines as "someone who does not conform to the limits and boundaries of officialdom, [one] who is unpredictable and {10} thus uncontrollable" (Off the Reservation 6). Mary and Zosie continue to fit this rebel description by their non-conformity and ambiguity. They are neither reservation nor urban Indians, but simply come and go as they please. The idea of adhering to boundaries is a European concept. Boundaries exist only on paper and are not sufficient barriers to keep someone confined. When Cally searches for her grandmothers in order to find out more about her own heritage, she hears various stories about where the women are sighted, including playing at several bingo games, attending funerals, living in an apartment just down the street from the bakery, and conducting traditional workshops both on and off the reservation. These ladies refuse to be restricted to the reservation that once bound their ancestors. They hunger for a different kind of life, a simpler life, a non-colonized life.

     HUNGER

Nearly every page within the novel has a reference to food or descriptions of other objects with food-related qualifiers. Erdrich's stories "turn upon meals, because the Ojibwa and Cree worried enough about food to create a spirit of starvation, the Windigo" (Antelope Wife 1). The Windigo Dog is a prime example of this hunger throughout the book. Early in the novel, Erdrich describes one Windigo Dog as the puppy, Sorrow, who nurses at the breast of Ozhawashikwamashokaodeykwe, Blue Prairie Woman, and helps ease the pain in her milk-engorged teats. Sorrow (literally and figuratively) follows Blue Prairie Woman westward, but even when her name gets changed to Other Side of the Earth, it does not lessen her hunger for her lost child who is raised as Matilda Roy. Now the dog and the woman, as well as their descendants, are bonded together forever through this first food, breast milk.
        The second Windigo Dog, Almost Soup, nearly becomes a meal himself because of his white coloring. Erdrich employs a stereotype perpetuated by the colonizers that all Indians eat dogs. Although tribes like the Lakotas did eat dog, often as part of a ceremony, most did not. In one episode, Cally begs her grandmother to spare Almost Soup, and in gratitude, Almost Soup stays by her side to protect her. {11} Both Cally and Almost Soup are descendants of the original woman and dog.
        Klaus Shawano is visited by yet another Windigo Dog. His description continues the hunger motif. He is a

bad spirit of hunger and not just normal hunger but out-of-control hunger. Hunger of impossible devouring. Utter animal hunger that did not care whether you were sober or brave or had your hard-won GED certificate let alone degree. No matter. Just food. Klaus was just food to the Windigo. And the Windigo laughed. (127)

        Klaus cannot control his hunger for alcohol, and whenever he drinks to excess, he encounters the Windigo Dog. Klaus succumbs to the bottle when he feels that things are not going his way, but the European traders initially created this dependency on alcohol when they began to barter whiskey for furs. Once touted as a source of nutrition, alcohol is really nothing more than a numbing agent, a way to take control over a person by creating dependency and controlling his or her thoughts and actions. Chippewa novelist Gerald Vizenor posits,

Native American Indians bear the burdens of a nation cursed with the manifest manners of alcoholism. Once thought to be nutritious, alcohol has been the earnest measure of temperance, and the sources of enormous excise revenues from the sale of beverage alcohol. (29)

        Once the colonizers find out that alcohol can be bartered, they take advantage of native peoples. As the natives become hooked on this addicting beverage, the colonizers then have another means to enforce assimilation. By threatening to withhold shipments, they control the natives. By keeping natives addicted, the colonizers perpetuate the stereotypes of the "drunken Indian," and further manipulate them. Vizenor also notes that "Indians are the wild alcoholics in the literature of dominance" (29). Natives have so often been stereotyped and portrayed as "drunken savages," that they have surrendered to the self-fulfilling prophecy for hundreds of years. Only recently {12} have native peoples, as a whole, taken a serious look at what alcoholism has done to them and made prudent strides to get and stay sober.
        Klaus, one of these alcoholics, has been out of balance in his life ever since he captures his "Sweetheart Calico." He doesn't realize that by enticing her away from the Plains, he has upset the balance of not only his world, but the entire world. At one point he comes very close to knowing the secret of being in balance, but then falls into alcoholism. He battles the bottle spirits when he sees the Blue Fairy in the bottom of the Mississippi River. She is a "trembling beauty alive with Jell-O, surrounded by a radiance of filtered sun and nuclear dust and splintered fish scales" (98). When he feels he can sink no lower, he knows what he has to do to survive: he must set his Sweetheart Calico free. She must be returned to the deer people in the western direction from which she was stolen.
        Also out of balance is fellow alcoholic, Richard Whiteheart Beads. After downing a bottle of Listerine with Klaus, the men are begging for change outside the art museum. Once they collect enough for more booze, they head for the liquor store on Hennepin to shop. Richard places his order:

I opt for a subtle white [wine]. Something with volume. I don't get too hung up on the bouquet. My circumstances won't permit it. I can tell the difference between a dollar ninety-nine and a two fifty-nine bottle of white port wine, though, you can't fool me. Don't try. (96)

        His dependence forces him further down than Klaus and he suffers torturous withdrawals. He weeps uncontrollably and cannot keep down anything except milk.
        Not always drunk, Klaus and Richard once shared a prosperous garbage business. While feasting from a buffet Klaus comments,

Used to be us Indians had nothing to throw away -- we used it all up to the last scrap. Now we have a lot of casino trash, of course, and used diapers, disposable and yet eternal like the rest of the country. Keep this up and we'll all one day be a landfill of diapers, living as adults right on top of our own baby shit. (43-44)

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        They celebrate the successes of their garbage business, the end of the consumption process, by feasting, the beginning of the consumption process. Here is yet another example of the wastefulness of the colonizers and a practice learned by colonized natives.
        Alcohol does not directly affect all natives, though. Richard's surviving twin daughter Cally has a hunger that is not physical, but intellectual in nature. She searches for her grandmother's true identity. Who is her mother Rozina's mother: Mary or Zosie? In the colonized world, children are only allowed one birth mother and one birth father. Yet within the tribal kinship system a child, who obviously has only one "real" set of parents, would still call all of her aunties "mother" and her uncles "father." Erdrich continues her confusion about the grandmothers until the Christmas dinner when Zosie finally admits to being Cally's grandmother. Zosie says to Cally after consuming a piece of twelve layer chocolate raspberry cake, "during my motherhood, when I was rocking or nursing my baby, I had a lot of time to think"(215). Finally Cally receives the information she yearns for. Good food and good stories seem to go together.

     FOOD AND COMMUNITY

Paula Gunn Allen believes that "besides food, which may be the single most definitive aspect of a sense of place, stories provide a deep sense of continuity within a psyche space" (Off the Reservation 234). All of the stories Erdrich tells in Antelope Wife revolve around strong women figures, including surviving twins Cally (Cally/Deanna) and Rozina (Rozina/Aurora) and grandmothers Mary and Zosie. Food surrounds these women who are a part of an oral tradition which portrays women and men in complementary positions. Men and women's roles are separate, but interdependent. As Allen also states,

The women's traditions are largely about continuity, and men's traditions are largely about transitoriness and change. Thus women's rituals and lore center on birth, death, food, house holding, and medicine -- that is all that goes into the maintenance of life over long term. Men's rituals are concerned with {14} risk, death and transformation -- that is all that helps regulate and control change. (Sacred Hoop 82)

        Cooking and eating at the Christmas feast is a natural segue to the return of balance in the world. Once again the women are holding the world together with what they know and the stories they hold and share. Susan Bordo says,

That is, indeed the prevailing gender reality. For women, the emotional comfort of self-feeding is rarely turned to in a state of pleasure and independence, but in despair, emptiness, lonliness, and desperation. Food is, as one woman put it "the only thing that will take care of me. (28)

        Rozina and Frank start their second year of marriage after a rocky start. Cally reconnects with her grandparental heritage, and Sweetheart Calico is on her way home. Some of the hunger has been abated and the world is back in balance for this Ojibwa community in Minneapolis.
        Journalist and food critic Judyth Hills says, "And we get it. We understand. This is the food that unites us, that tells the story of who we have been, and whom we have met and what we may together become" (39). The native community endures. The colonizers have not won.

     NOTES

        1. Ojibwa and Ojibwe are simply different spellings of the same word.
        2.The terms native and Native American will be used interchangeably throughout.
        3. The terms Ojibwa/Ojibwe, Chippewa, and Anishnaabe all refer to the same people.

     WORKS CITED

Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border Crossing Loose Cannons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.

------. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

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"The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich." http://www.dancingbadger.com/antelope.htm (accessed 2/15/2002).

Bordo, Susan. "Hunger as Ideology." Eating Culture. Ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

"Diabetes and American Indians." Diabetes Prevention Program. http://www.preventdiabetes.com/statind.htm (accessed 7/11/2002).

Erdrich, Louise. The Antelope Wife. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.

Hill, Judyth. "Corn Dance Café." Native Peoples 14.6 (Sept/Oct 2001): 39. http://www.firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FTFETCH?sessionid=sp01sw07-56531-cyoph (accessed 3/11/2002).

Horne, Dee. Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Hanover, MA: University Press of New England, 1994.

Representing Cherokee Dispossession

ARNOLD KRUPAT         

On February 21, 1828, the Cherokees published the first issue of the first newspaper in America to contain writing in an indigenous native language. The paper was called Cherokee Phoenix -- Tsalagi Tsu-le-hisa-nu-hi, or something like "I will arise" in the Cherokee language.
        Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 196

On August 1, 1838, Chief John Ross "assembled his Cherokee followers and led them in a pledge that, despite the loss of their homeland, the Cherokee Nation would never die."
        Hoig, The Cherokees and Their Cheifs, 171

It is useless to attempt to describe the long, wearisome passage of those exiled Indians.
        Wahnenauhi (Mrs. Lucy L. Keys), "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 207

Granma and Granpa wanted me to know of the past, for "If ye don't know where your people have been then ye won't know where your people are going." And so they told me most of it.
        Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 40

"Grandpa," I said, suddenly excited. "Grandpa, I can hear them. They're singing."
        Conley, Mountain Windsong, 218

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I regarded this new birth as not just the end of our suffering but also as the dawn of a new day -- the first day of our new life in the promised land.
        Twist, "The Promised Land," in Boston Mountain Tales, 143

"Full Circle: The Connecticut Casino". . . all the gold stolen from the Cherokees in Georgia seeming to return now to the Pequots in Connecticut, . . .
        Smith, The Cherokee Lottery

Maritole:
        "The baby who had been born was crying.
        "Luthy took my arm. 'It's a new voice that won't grieve for our old land in North Carolina.'"
Quaty Lewis:
        "Some night I'd listen to the wind in the pines. Only there weren't pines here. I looked around. They were oaks, a different kind of oak than we'd had in North Carolina, but they would sound the old truth of the pines."
Luthy:
        "As for the trail -- it's over -- Tanner and my boys are alive."
Maritole:
        "Maybe someday love would come."
        Glancy, Pushing the Bear, 228, 229, 233

How to represent in writing the dispossession of the Cherokees -- in particular, the experience of "Nunna daul Tsunyi . . . 'the trail where we cried,'" the Trail of Tears, on which, from the summer of 1838 until March 1839, of some thirteen thousand people (black slaves and intermarried whites among them), more than a third, perhaps four thousand people, died (Mankiller and Wallis 46)?
        Difficult as it surely is to represent this climactic event of Cherokee dispossession, it is not very difficult to say how it came about. Even in an age wary of "facts," the facts in this instance are very little contestable. Set out as a "Chronology of the Cherokee Removal," they can be {18} listed, as Theda Purdue and Michael Green have done, in little more than two pages of text. Except as noted, what follows is based on Purdue and Green (176-79):

Around 1700 the Cherokees first encountered Europeans in the persons of British traders.

In 1776 the American Colonists invaded Cherokee towns.

After the American Revolution, the Treaty of Hopewell (1785) pledged peaceful relations between the new United States and the Cherokee Nation.

In 1800 Moravian Fathers from Germany established a mission among the Cherokees to further their Christianization.

In 1802 in exchange for a land cession from the state of Georgia, the U.S. government promised to extinguish Creek and Cherokee title to lands in the state of Georgia.

From 1808 through 1810, one of the first major migrations of Cherokee people west of the Mississippi occurred.

In the Creek War of 1813-14, the Cherokees fought on the side of Andrew Jackson and the United States against hostile Creeks.

In 1821 Sequoyah invented a syllabary by which the Cherokee language could be written, and in 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix began publication in English and in Cherokee.

Also in 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected President, and in 1828 and 1829, the state of Georgia refused to acknowledge Cherokee sovereignty within the state, extending its laws over the Cherokees in 1830.

In 1830 the Indian Removal Act, granting the president the authority to enter into treaties with the Eastern Indians that would provide for their "removal" west of the Mississippi, was passed by Congress and signed into law by Jackson.

In 1832 the Supreme Court, in Worcester v. Georgia, upheld Cherokee sovereignty in the state, but Jackson did not act to protect the Cherokees from individual Georgians and from officers of the state.

In 1832 Georgia organized a lottery to assign Cherokee lands and property to "fortunate drawers" (Wilkins 225).

In 1835 a small number of Cherokees led by the Ridge family, believing further resistance to Georgia and Jackson was futile, signed the Treaty of New Echota, pledging the Cherokees to remove west of the Mississippi by May of 1838.

In 1836 the Senate ratified the Treaty of New Echota.

In 1837 a party of 466 wealthy Cherokees, with considerable property including African slaves, emigrated west of the Mississippi to Indian Territory (Foreman, Five Civilized Tribes 273). Others, but not the vast majority of the Nation, would follow.

On May 23, 1838, federal troops, under the command of General Winfield Scott, began forcibly to round up the Cherokees, driving them into what Grant Foreman, writing in 1932 (i.e., before Hitler's implementation of the "final solution" to the "Jewish question"), called "concentration camps" (Foreman, Indian Removal 290, 300).

In June General Scott sent the first contingent of resisting Cherokees west, but as the summer progressed, heat and drought took such a toll on the travelers that Principal Chief John Ross persuaded Scott to allow the Cherokees themselves to oversee the removal once the worst of the summer had passed.

The first party under Cherokee direction left on October 1, 1838; eight more left later in October and another four in November.

By March 1839, all those who managed to survive had reached Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. For more than a century the figure of four thousand deaths in a population of some thirteen thousand, as I have noted, has been generally accepted as a more or less accurate statement of the mortality of the Trail. Rus-{20}sell Thornton estimates that between 1835 and 1839, the overall death toll was probably as high as eight to ten thousand persons.

        How to represent such horror? The question has been asked again and again in Holocaust studies examining the fiction and autobiographical production of Jews and others who found themselves swept into the Nazi death camps, as it has also been examined by Armenians reflecting on the Turkish genocide of 1915, and, more recently, by Cambodians reflecting on the mass killings between 1975 and 1979, and by Rwandans confronting the murder of 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, in 1994. This essay focuses on the work of four contemporary Cherokee writers -- Robert J. Conley, Glenn J. Twist, Wilma Man-killer, and Diane Glancy -- each of whom, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, attempted to represent their ancestors' dispossession in writing. I also briefly consider work by two non-Cherokee writers, William Jay Smith, who is part Choctaw, and Forrest Carter, a pretend-Cherokee, and not even the particular white man he claims to be (see below). They, too, write of Cherokee Removal, and I include them to provide some further context for the work of Conley, Twist, Mankiller, and Glancy.

Wahnenauhi, Mrs. Lucy L. Keys, granddaughter of the eminent Cherokee leader and statesman, Major George Lowrey, wrote "Historical Sketches of the Cherokees, Together with Some of their Customs, Traditions, and Superstitions" in 1889. Wahnehauhi was, as the contemporary Cherokee scholar Jack Kilpatrick notes, a member of the "planter class of mixbloods. [. . .] English was its first language, evangelical Christianity its religion, and acculturation its code" (181). But that "planter class of mixbloods," as Kilpatrick makes clear, was "indissolubly bound" to more conservative, traditional, fullblood people "by the only ties that Cherokees ever understood or still understand -- a fierce loyalty to common ancestry" (182). Nonetheless, as she looked back, Wahnehauhi seems to have thought it "useless" to attempt to convey the pain and suffering, the trauma of the forcible dispossession of the Cherokees. Perhaps it had also seemed useless or, more likely, impossible to those Cherokees who endured and sur-{21}vived it to convey the day-to-day experience of the Trail, at least in writing. Although many of them were literate in English and/or in the Sequoyah syllabary, not one seems to have left a detailed account of the terrible ordeal. Cherokee letters and brief remembrances from before and after the Trail exist, but the "only daily record of the Trail of Tears yet found" is that of the Reverend Daniel Butrick, a white minister who accompanied the Cherokee detachment led by Richard Taylor (Hoig 171).
        We must set beside this observation, however, James Mooney's testimony that even near the end of the nineteenth century, there were Cherokee people who not only vividly recalled, but harrowingly could relate some of the worst moments of the winter of 1839. Mooney writes,

In talking with old men and women at Tahlequah [still Indian Territory, not yet Oklahoma] the author [Mooney] found that the lapse of over half a century had not sufficed to wipe out the memory of the miseries of that halt beside the frozen river [the Mississippi], with hundreds of sick and dying penned up in wagons or stretched upon the ground, with only a blanket overhead to keep out the January blast. (Myths of the Cherokee 132-33)

And the contemporary Cherokee writer, Marilou Awiakta tells of meeting "Maggie Wachacha, an eighty-eight-year old member of the Eastern Band [of Cherokees]" in 1984; Maggie Wachacha's grandson informs Awiakta that his grandmother remembers hearing "her elders tell how they walked the Trail of Tears" (33). But very few of these people, as I have said, wrote of these experiences, and the distinction between the spoken and the written word continues to be important for Cherokee -- as, indeed, for a great many Native American -- thinkers today.
        At the end of the nineteenth century, James Mooney observed that "Unlike most Indians the Cherokee are not conservative [. . .] the Cherokee mind [. . .] is accustomed to look forward to new things rather than to dwell on the past" (Myths of the Cherokee 229, 232). A more nuanced generalization comes from Jack and Anna Kilpatrick, {22} who, just past the middle of the twentieth century, write of "the amazing ability of the Cherokees to maintain an equilibrium between two opposing worlds of thought" (v). The Kilpatricks offer as an illustration the image of a "Cherokee businessman, on the way to his country club, while 'wrapped in deep speculation as to the exact height of the slant-eyed giant, Tsuhl'gul,'" or "the television set in the cabin of his fellow tribesman," behind which "lurk the Little People" (v). Both "the Bible and Thunder share Cherokee reverence," the Kilpatricks assert (v, my emphasis). I would amend this only to suggest that "the amazing ability of the Cherokees" to which the Kilpatricks refer is perhaps better described as the capacity to maintain two different rather than "two opposing worlds of thought" (my emphasis). This seems to be the case with Conley, Twist, and Glancy, three of the four contemporary Cherokee writers under consideration. Their representation of the trauma of dispossession references Christian and classical images and concepts of rebirth, return, and renewal, but it also sets these non-Cherokee materials in relation to very different, traditional Cherokee images and concepts.
        Robert Conley is the author of some thirty books, at least ten of which comprise "The Real People" series, novels documenting virtually every aspect of Cherokee life and history. In Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1992), Conley tries to represent at least some of "the long, wearisome passage of these exiled Indians," from Georgia and North Carolina to Indian Territory, by telling the story of an invented Cherokee conservative, named Waguli or Whippoorwill, and his love, Oconeechee (Wahnenauhi 207). Resisting removal from the first, Waguli is beaten and manacled, yet he repeatedly tries to escape as his detachment wends its way overland, and by paddle-wheeler down the Tennessee and Ohio rivers to Mississippi, before trekking into Indian Territory. A broken man, Waguli succumbs to alcoholism and despair before being rescued by an aged white man, Titus Hooker or Gun Rod, someone who had fought with the Cherokees beside Andrew Jackson at Horseshoe Bend in the Creek War. Hooker, after a lengthy series of adventures that threaten to obscure the main lines of the narrative, is successful in bringing Waguli back, largely detoxified, to his ever-loyal beloved, Oconeechee. Conley's {23} unabashedly sentimental account regularly fills itself out with long quotations from C. C. Royce's 1887 The Cherokee Nation of Indians, the Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and from James Mooney's "Historical Sketch of the Cherokee People," the first section of Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee, also a Bureau of American Ethnology Report, published in 1900. Other documents of interest, for example, almost twenty pages of the Treaty of New Echota (1835), and Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 letter to President Van Buren protesting Cherokee removal, are dropped in as efficient if esthetically jarring means of conveying the facts and feel of the period. (But of course there is a real problem in trying to write about these matters for an audience who can be expected to know little or nothing about them -- a problem this essay has faced by providing a list of "facts.")
        Conley's novel is narrated in the present by a young man whose name is LeRoy or Sonny, although he is referred to by his folksy, mountain grandpa as chooj, or boy. At the beginning of the novel, the boy and his grandfather take a walk in the hills, and the boy hears a "windsong," which, his grandfather explains, is "a lovesong" (6). To explain the lovesong, Grandpa commences the story of the love between Waguli and Oconeechee, as this is set against the background of Removal. As already noted, that story ends happily for the two nineteenth-century lovers, and, in an epilogue to the novel, Conley has chooj ask his Grandpa, "'What happened . . . after that?' Grandpa says that the couple lived and had children and 'By and by, they died. That was all a long time ago'" (218). This observation causes chooj to recognize, in a fairly standard trope of the "coming of age" novel, that his grandpa and grandma will also one day die. But the sadness of this realization is lessened when the boy looks up into a tree, hearing a sound on the wind. The "wind picked up some more, and [chooj] heard that sound again. 'Grandpa,' he says, suddenly excited. 'Grandpa, I can hear them. They're singing'" (218).
        So Whippoorwill and his beloved live on in a sound, a song in the wind through the trees. And, doubtless, when Grandma and Grandpa also pass away, they too will live on. It will return, it will survive, it will rise again -- not as bird or God, but as a "windsong" in the trees. Con-{24}ley here risks perpetuating the dominant society's stereotype of the intimate connection between the native and nature; nonetheless, the ongoing presence of Waguli and Oconeechee is entirely a matter of Cherokee history and culture. This particular "windsong" is a Cherokee song for Cherokee ears.
        Curiously, Conley's chooj and his situation -- he is spending the summer with his traditional grandfather and grandmother in the North Carolina hills -- strongly echo the by-now notorious Education of Little Tree: A True Story by an author who called himself Forrest Carter. Forrest Carter's real name was Asa Earl Carter, and we know for certain that Asa Carter grew up in Alabama (not Tennessee), that he was not Cherokee, and that he was not orphaned. Thus, Little Tree, although it is subtitled "A True Story," must be considered a novel. Its narrator, Little Tree, is a five-year-old orphan. "Ma lasted a year after Pa was gone," the novel begins, "That's how I came to live with Granpa and Granma" up in the Tennessee hills (1). Granma is a full-blood Cherokee but Granpa is mixed-blood, the child of a marriage between his full-blood Cherokee father, whose family took to the "mountains" in order to escape Removal, and the daughter of white mountain men/outlaws (42). Contrary to historical fact, Carter insists upon an alliance between these two peoples based upon their strong opposition to "guvmint" as a cornerstone of his racial mythologization of the past (Carter had been a Ku Klux Klan member and speech-writer for the segregationist Governor of Georgia, George Wallace) (44, 46). Granpa's father will later join "the Confederate raider, John Hunt Morgan, to fight the faraway, faceless monster of 'guvmint,' that threatened his people and his cabin" (44). Before developing these matters, however, Carter first has Granpa offer an account of the Trail of Tears, for all that his people did not themselves walk the Trail. This account, too, seeks to create an odd and quite inaccurate mythology of the Trail.
        The great villains of Cherokee dispossession for Carter are "the government soldiers" a phrase repeated some five times in the first two pages of the chapter called "To Know the Past" (40, 41). The soldiers bring "wagons and mules" for the Cherokees to ride in, but the Cherokees refuse as a matter of pride (41). Then, when the Cherokees {25} begin to die in greater numbers than can be buried, the soldiers tell the Cherokees to put their dead in the wagon. The Cherokees refuse, and we get a picture of people walking the Trail with the bodies of their dead in their arms. Carter insists that "the Cherokee did not cry" (42). The migration route to Indian Territory was called the Trail of Tears because "it sounds romantic and [it] speaks of the sorrow of those who stood by the Trail" (42, my emphasis). Thus, the Cherokees who submitted to the "government soldiers" are not even the originators of history's name for their dispossession! The Trail of Tears commemorates the sorrow of the whites who watched the Cherokees pass. Granpa's Pa's greatest loyalty, in the end, is not to his fellow Cherokees removed to Indian Territory but to the slaveholding rebels with whom he shares a hatred of "guvmint."
        Glenn J. Twist, a Cherokee writer (d. 1995) whose name will likely be unfamiliar to most readers, tried to give some sense of the pain of the removal period in two texts called "The Dispossession (1837)" and "The Promised Land (1837)," the second and the ninth (and final) story in a collection called Boston Mountain Tales: Stories from a Cherokee Family (1997). Twist's name derives from his nineteenth-century ancestor, Ganu'teyo'hi, which translates as twist or twister, and describes the man's ability to braid fine rope from animal hair or vegetable fibers. Ganu'teyo'hi, his white wife, Rachel, and other members of his family are "thought to have traveled to the West with the B. B. Cannon wagon train" (Twist xiii). The party reached "the base of [a then-] unnamed mountain, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory side, on 27 December 1837" (xii).
         In "The Dispossession (1837)" Twist offers the only contemporary text I know to represent and re-imagine in detail the humiliation of Cherokee "dispossession" as first occasioned by the Georgia lottery which granted to lucky white Georgians specific tracts of Cherokee lands with all buildings, livestock, and improvements upon it. (There is, of course, reference to all this in Smith's The Cherokee Lottery.) It is after Ganu'teyo'hi and his family are driven off their land that they eventually make the journey to Indian Territory, the journey that is chronicled in "The Promised Land (1837)." After a long and difficult journey, during which many members of the party perish,"The Can-{26}non train arrived in Indian Territory approximately one year prior to the so-called Trail of Tears" (xii). (Twist regularly precedes reference to the Trail of Tears with "so-called." Is this because the Trail of Tears is not literally called that in Cherokee?)

Traveling, as we have noted, a year earlier than the first detachments forcibly sent upon the Trail, and traveling voluntarily as it were, Twist's ancestors were free to proceed at whatever pace they could, to stop where they chose, and so on. But the story does give a strong sense of the extraordinary difficulties involved in removing west to Indian Territory. Twist assigns the narration to the only white woman in the Cherokee family, Rachel, Ganu'teyo'hi's wife, and her way of making sense of the dispossession and the pain of the journey -- Glenn J. Twist's way, very likely -- also involves the concept of renewal.
        As the party finally enters Indian Territory, somewhat ironically but also hopefully referred to as "the promised land," Little Flower, wife of Ganu'teyo'hi's cousin, Smokehouse, dies, as do the last children of an unfortunate white family named Timberlake. But, says Rachel, "Still we were blessed." Balancing, as it were, the deaths, Jess Half Breed's wife, Sally, gives birth to a "big healthy-looking boy" who "came into this world hungry"; Rachel concludes,

If the others were like me they would see the birth of Half Breed's son in much the same light as I did, a good omen. I regarded this new birth as not just the end of our suffering, but also as the dawn of a new day -- the first day of our new life in the promised land. (143)

Here, any irony associated with the phrase "promised land" drops away; much has been lost, but quite literally a new day dawns and brings new birth.
        William Jay Smith, part Choctaw and a prolific poet, published The Cherokee Lottery: a sequence of poems in 2000. The book is constructed around meditations on the 1832 Georgia lottery to determine by chance which whites were to appropriate which lands of the Cherokees. In the final poem of his "sequence," Smith sees history -- if that is the appropriate word -- coming "Full Circle" as the roulette {27} wheels go round and round at the Pequots' multimillion dollar casino, Foxwoods, in Mashantuckett, Connecticut. Smith's sense of "return" is rather different from that of Conley and Twist, and it seems worth a moment of attention. Smith writes,

high above that table where the spinning ball comes to rest
on the red and black numbers of the roulette wheel,
I hear the faint ghostly creaking of the clumsy wooden wheel, designed more than a century and a half ago
for the Cherokee Lottery in Georgia. (87)

This eighteenth and final poem of the sequence, perhaps the very best thing in Smith's slim volume, gathers past and present, myth and history, stereotypes and their ironic re-emergences.
        At one point in the poem, the speaker thinks he is having a vision of a herd of buffalo, only to see not buffalo but

steaming buses queuing up to deliver
their anxious occupants
to the gambling tables of the great Foxwoods Resort Casino (85)

The recent success of that casino and of the Pequots who own it will be referenced further, as we shall see. The last part of the poem introduces the Native American trickster, Coyote, here, Ms. Coyote, fully and brilliantly described:

From the thin lascivious full-reddened lips drawn back
under the black round rubbery tip of her nose
in a wry sinister smile over the pointed teeth
emerges a voice neither male nor female
but one having a somewhat unsettling sexless and timeless quality
and the cold compact clarity of a computer chip. (89)

The voice announces,

All those who are willing and eager to relinquish territory
obtained illegally from Indian tribes at any time in the past will kindly
{28}
record their property identification numbers on their Wampum
Cards and leave them at the Cherokee Lottery Roulette table.
When their numbers are called, they are requested to proceed
to the Holding Area in front of the Casino. There the
Native American Escort Service will help facilitate their
departure on fully-monitored Buffalo Buses by providing
each one with a TRAIL OF TEARS Passport printed in Cherokee
that will insure their safe passage on the Tall Ships
that await them at the principal ports of the Eastern Seaboard. (90)

The past is not past; the past lives -- in transformed and also in transformative fashion -- at least in the poet's imagination. Postmodern trickster ironies here rewrite the past, and some justice, ironic justice to be sure, is done, "all the gold stolen from the Cherokees in Georgia / seeming to return now to the Pequots in Connecticut" (89). It returns, at least in some fashion. (We will consider Diane Glancy's use of a similar but also different irony in Pushing the Bear, conveyed by the phrase, "It comes back" [237]).

Wilma Mankiller, Principal Chief of the Cherokee from 1985/87 to 1994, in her autobiography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (1994), discusses the removal period but she doesn't at all comprehend it in terms of the figures of renewal, rebirth, and return that the Cherokee novelists use. On one hand, this may be because Mankiller does not offer her book primarily as a work of art, but rather as the testimony of a public person. That is to say, her autobiography consistently portrays her life in terms of Chief Mankiller's growth in her will and ability to serve her people. She presents herself foremost as a woman of action, and, much as she values words and language, it seems clear that, for her, "actions speak louder than words." On the other hand, it may be that Mankiller is not drawn to figurative images of return because she literally returned to Oklahoma in time, as her ancestors did not return to Georgia or North Carolina. In any case, for her the Trail is not perceived in terms of rebirth, return, and renewal as it seems to be for the Cherokee fiction writers we are considering, but in terms only of {29} loss. For Mankiller the Trail was nothing other than a "tragedy" for the Cherokees. In a chapter called "Genesis of Removal," Mankiller speaks of the "sesquicentennial" commemoration of the journey west by the eastern Cherokees. "There were no festivities," she writes,

Nobody smiled. There was absolutely nothing to be happy about. It was a solemn observance, a very emotional time. We regarded the removal as something that happened to our family -- something very bad that happened to our family. It was a tragedy. It brought us pain that never seemed to leave. (47)

When Mankiller thinks about Removal today, it is not because some good came from it (the lovers still sing, after much pain Indian Territory became a kind of promised land, and so on), but because it is a benchmark against which to measure subsequent federal assaults upon the Cherokees -- in her own case, the termination and relocation programs of the '50s that led her family from Mankiller Flats in Oklahoma to innercity San Francisco.
        Mankiller begins the chapter "The Trail Where They Cried" with a version of a traditional story about trickster Rabbit's escape from the wolves, noting that, "After my family relocated in San Francisco," she felt like a rabbit surrounded by wolves only without Rabbit's power to escape. This is how she introduces her account of the Trail:

I experienced my own Trail of Tears when I was a young girl [. . .] the United States government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was again trying to settle the "Indian problem" by removal. I learned through this ordeal about the fear and anguish that occur when you have to give up your home, your community, and [. . .] move far away to a strange place. I cried for days, not unlike the children who had stumbled down the Trail of Tears so many years before. (62)

When, in her discussion of the period, Mankiller speaks of the Cherokee Phoenix, she gives, but does not translate the Cherokee name for "the newspaper, Tsa la gi Tsu lehisanunhi or the Cherokee Phoenix" (83). Many readers will think, of course, that the second part of the phrase quoted, Tsu lehisanunhi, somehow translates to Phoe-{30}nix, but as we have seen that is not the case. Rather, the phrase means something like I will arise, or I was down and I will arise. Nonetheless, the Cherokee newspaper was called the Cherokee Phoenix, and Mankiller is quick to translate the newspaper's name back, as it were, into Cherokee terms. She writes, "The name given to the newspaper was a fitting choice," because "the power of that mythical bird [. . .] reminds us of the Cherokees' eternal flame" (83, my emphasis), the Keetowah fire. With no traditional Cherokee Phoenix imagery to invoke (and not tempted, it would seem, in the direction of Christian imagery), Chief Mankiller focuses on the Cherokees' "eternal flame," which, "According to our legend, as long as that fire burns, our people will survive" (83, my emphasis). Her account of the Trail firmly details its horrors and forthrightly insists on what other accounts either ignore (Conley, Twist) or merely mention in passing (Glancy): "It should be remembered," Chief Mankiller writes,

that hundreds of people of African ancestry also walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokees during the forced removal of 1838-1839. Although we know about the terrible human suffering of our native people [. . .] during the removal, we rarely hear of those black people who also suffered. (95)

For African people and for the Cherokees, the Trail was a place and a time of suffering that must be remembered and also referenced as an event against which to measure assaults on the people in the present and the future. But Wilma Mankiller does not represent the Trail as having led to a promised land, to birth after death, or to some sort of renewal. As we have seen, its commemoration 160 years later was a time of pain when"Nobody smiled" (47). (Mankiller writes about the 1984 reunion of the Eastern and Oklahoma Cherokee, mentioned above, as a much happier occasion.)

We come at last to Pushing the Bear. In fairness it needs to be acknowledged that the account which follows limits itself, for the most part, to the representation of the Trail, even if this inevitably slights significant aspects of the novel. This is to say that just as Robert Conley set the love between Waguli and Oconeechee against the back-{31}ground of removal, so, too, does Glancy set the deterioration and possible amelioration of the marriage between Maritole and her husband, Knowbowtee, as they endure the northern land route west from North Carolina to Oklahoma against the experience of the Trail. Much could be said about their relationship; for the purposes of this essay, however, I largely restrict commentary to the fact that the novel concludes with Maritole thinking of Knowbowtee and hoping that, "Maybe someday love would come" (233). I chose her words for the last of the epigraphs to this study because Maritole's hopefulness in regard to her relationship with her husband also works in concert with other gestures of renewal and rebirth in the last pages of the novel.
        Pushing the Bear consists of eight chapters, each marked by a date and a place, along with a map for stages of the journey to the west. Glancy will attempt the formidable task of re-imagining the Trail in its entirety. The novel begins in "Late September, 1838," in North Carolina and concludes on "February 27, 1839," in Indian Territory. Each of the chapters is made up of a number of separate sections, for the most part headed by an individual's name (Maritole, Knowbowtee, Tanner, Quaty Lewis, etc.). There is a section headed "James Mooney" -- although, as Glancy surely knows, Mooney did not travel the Trail with the Cherokees, nor was he yet born in 1838. The "James Mooney" section is a very slightly altered version of the account Mooney gives in his "Historical Sketch of the Cherokee Nation" of the stockades into which the Cherokee were driven before being sent off on their journey. Other sections are called "Voices as they Walked" and "The Soldiers." There is no section given to an African voice or voices.
        Glancy also has sections that are titled, "A government teamster's journal," or "The Baptist," as well as "A White Traveler from Maine." There is a section that consists of a tally of the expenses incurred by Principal Chief John Ross and a list of Ross's lost personal property; a list of items the Reverend Jesse Bushyhead had submitted of requirements for the journey is also printed. These sections offer writing of one sort or another rather than speech or thought.
        The words printed under the names of individuals historically present at the time of the story may be, as I have suggested above, {32} spoken words or, perhaps, thoughts -- interior monologues. Meanwhile, Maritole's words in English, whether thought or spoken, must be a translation from the Cherokee, because Maritole knows little or no English.(This is surely true for others who have their names at the head of one or another section.) There are also words and phrases in the Sequoyah syllabary, which Glancy sometimes translates and sometimes leaves untranslated. Although she prints the syllabary among the materials appended to the novel, I have not always been able to figure out some of the words in the text that are in the syllabary.
        Use of the syllabary would seem to be Glancy's way of conveying some specific Cherokee-ness or difference to her text, a kind of resistance to any transparency of thought and experience. But the syllabary was for writing Cherokee, and where it appears in the novel, it is usually conveying what seems to be speech or thought, oral narrative or song. This latter issue, the difference (in function, in value) between spoken and written words, is frequently important in contemporary Native American fiction, as noted earlier, and this is the case as well in Pushing the Bear -- although there is no space to pursue the matter here.
        Along with meditations on the spoken and written word come speculations about the uses and powers of stories, both traditional stories, which Glancy composes on at least one occasion in the Sequoyah syllabary (194-95, we shall return to this below), and the story as testimony to personal experience that is also quite self-consciously recognized as historical experience (for example, Mari-tole says: "I would have the tongue of a leaf. I would tell our story I thought" [172-73]). Someone called "The Basket Maker," says: "The baskets hold fish and corn and beans. Just like our stories hold meaning"; baskets "copy our stories" (153). Maritole's mother says or thinks: "Tell stories. [. . .] Riding on your stories you can walk" (72). Knowbowtee, Maritole's estranged husband, echoes this when he states, "The stories fueled my walk" (144). He may also echo Maritole when, near the end of the novel, he says, "Could the trees also mean something about words?" (227-28). But his monologue then goes on to speculate further about the differences between spoken and written words in relation to words on documents by which the Cherokees {33} were betrayed (224, and see also meditations on Sequoyah's syllabary, making it possible to write in Cherokee; words can be used in different ways, to different ends, and that is true for the written as well as the spoken word).
        Let me turn now to the metaphor that provides the title of the book and operates from around page 15 to page 233, the very last page of the book: the metaphor of "pushing the bear." The "bear" is Maritole's way of imaging the oppression of the Trail. The bear is the weight, the pain, the violence of the journey; the bear is that which can destroy us by devouring us. It is Maritole who mostly feels the bear or pushes it, suffers from it, is nearly devoured by it, and finally, perhaps, overcomes it. Others, it should be noted, are also aware of the bear and, at one moment at least, "When we stopped at midday," Maritole says she "heard someone telling the story of the bear" (102).
        It is only later in the book that Glancy offers a section set in italics, called "The Story of the Bear." This particular story seems to be told by one of the Ani' Tsa' guhi, an ancient Cherokee clan that long ago chose to go into the woods and become bears so that the people, in times of famine, might hunt them and have food to eat. Glancy's version may derive from Mooney's "Origin of the Bear: The Bear Songs" (325-27; see also "The Bear Man," 327-29) -- although she gives no references at all to work she has consulted. If her story is based on the one Mooney published (I think it is), it is much abbreviated and impressionistically altered. Here is Glancy's version in its entirety:

THE STORY OF THE BEAR
A long time ago the Cherokee forgot we were a tribe. We thought only of ourselves apart from the others. Without any connections. Our hair grew long on our bodies. We crawled on our hands and knees. We forgot we had a language. We forgot how to speak. That's how the bear was formed. From a part of ourselves when we were in trouble. All we had was fur and meat to give. (176)

This differs considerably from Mooney's version of traditional Cherokee oral stories about bears which begin with a boy who decides life is easier in the woods than at home. He persuades his parents and all the members of their clan to join him, and, {34} although people of the other towns try to dissuade them from going, they do go into the woods to live. (There are no bear stories of this type in the Kilpatricks' collection from Oklahoma Cherokees in the early 1960s.) Their bodies grow hairy; they become and are henceforth known as yanu, bears. They give their fellow Cherokees songs with which to call them, so that they may come and sacrifice themselves for those who are hungry.
        Glenn Twist, in "Na'Ci'e and the Ani'-tsa'ghui (1814)," the eighth of his Boston Mountain Tales, offers a similar account. Twist has Na'Ci'e (she is Ganu'teyo'hi's mother) begin the story as follows:

Long before the memory of anyone living today, a great famine prevailed among the Ki-to'hwa people. They were starving. The spirit of Selu [the corn-giver . . .] called upon one clan of the Kitu'hwa to go into the forest and become bears. As bears they were to sacrifice themselves by becoming food for the rest of the clans. (113)

In neither Mooney's version nor Twist's is there anything like Glancy's sense of a fall from community (the Cherokees forgetting that they were a tribe), or what appears to be the punishment of crawling on hands and knees, a kind of regression, rather than an importantly positive transformation. The bears of the traditional story do not lose language; although they surely will no longer speak human words, their brother and sister Cherokees can always call them with song. Nor is there the sense that the bears came "From a part of ourselves when we were in trouble" -- unless that is to mean some of us when we were in trouble chose to sacrifice ourselves (in some versions of the story, there is a way for the bears to come back, to regenerate themselves after being killed). And the giving of fur and meat--the traditional versions speak only of the bear as food -- as "all we had" -- perhaps something less than what we might have had? -- is certainly poetically intriguing, although, once more there seems to be nothing like it in the traditional stories. In any case, Glancy's "Story of the Bear" comes fairly late in the novel, and it is not developed further. Glancy's use of the bear image is exclusively as a metaphor for a sense of enormous difficulty and oppression.
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        About halfway through the novel (but not halfway through the journey; this occurs in Tennessee on the first leg of the journey), Maritole feels herself being eaten by the bear: her toes, her legs, her stomach, her chest, until she "was inside him" (114). But then she feels "the shaman" over her, "Sucking me out of the bear" (114). Although she resists him, apparently the shaman is successful in his doctoring. Maritole wakes and will be well. Other than stating that the shaman sucked her out of the bear, Maritole gives no information about his practice.
        Elsewhere in the novel, however, Glancy includes healing formulas from James Mooney's "Swimmer Manuscript," published in 1932. The format for the healing formulas in the Swimmer collection is: Cherokee text with an interlinear, literal translation, then a "Free Translation," followed by an "Explanation." Although Glancy does not identify Mooney/Swimmer as the source, in Pushing the Bear, a section such as the one entitled "A Holy Man," contains a slightly rewritten version of Swimmer's formula 21, "This (is) to cure (them) with whenever they have lost their voice" (Mooney 198). Glancy calls it "This (Is) to Cure (Them) with Whenever They Have Forgotten Their Voice," and she gives a slightly rewritten version of the "free translation" in which she also includes a part of the "Explanation" that follows the "free translation" in Mooney (128, my emphasis). That is, Glancy's text puts the formula itself and Mooney/Swimmer/ Olbrecht's explanation of it together. For reasons that are unclear to me -- unless she wants to convey here that someone who speaks in English is really speaking Cherokee -- Glancy has put the formula into awkward "Indian" English. Glancy writes, "Some of it rub on neck" (128), where Mooney has (in the "Explanation"), "Some of the liquid is also rubbed on his throat and neck" (199). Or, Glancy: "The bark from east side of tree" (128); Mooney: "The bark, as usual, is from the east side of the tree" (199). Glancy repeats this gesture a few pages later when she has one named "Kakowih" think/speak of Maritole and the bear also in pidgin: Maritole "got eat by bear. She have bear strength"; This has been preceded by "Womens cry and make sad wails" (131). This is odd, inasmuch as Maritole, who also speaks no English, is nonetheless "translated" grammatically. Perhaps {36} the brief bits of awkward "Indian" are meant to distinguish the traditionalists of that time from the Christians?
        On another occasion, "Healing Song," Glancy combines and rewrites Swimmer #79, "This is for the Purpose of (Curing) Children When They Constantly Cry" (Glancy 138; Mooney 284). Here, Swimmer gives two formulas, numbers 59 and 60, for "whenever their feet are frost bitten," both of which might surely have aided the Bushy-head detachment of Cherokees as they marched through the coldest part of winter (257-58). Bear imagery continues in such comments as Maritole's observation that "At times my own body was the bear I pushed on the trail" (191). And it is extended in a manner I will examine further when Lacey Woodard calls Jesus "the man who pushed the bear," the man who was nailed to the cross "with claws" (220). In much the same vein, Tanner (Maritole's older brother) meditates on "the story of Jesus that could hardly be understood," although it is not entirely different from the story of Selu, the corn-giver of the Cherokee (182).
        Perhaps it is the Reverend Jesse Bushyhead, leader of the party in which Maritole and her family walk the Trail, who enunciates what I take to be Glancy's own belief in the necessary coexistence of traditional Cherokee and Christian thought and belief. Bushyhead says,"I would not be one of those ministers who tried to rid the Cherokee of their stories. It would take everything we could muster to start again" (186). Bushyhead here echoes what Maritole herself had concluded, that the minister who "preached Christ as the corn god, the giver of life along with Selu," was right because "if any one of us made it to the new land, then it must be true. Both Christ and myth [sic!]. It would take both" (112). Later, Maritole will say, "I heard the conjurers. I heard the Christians. I believed them both" (215). As I have said, I think this is the position Glancy herself strives toward. I'll return to this point by way of conclusion.

As the Bushyhead detachment approaches Indian Territory, and the novel moves to a close, a good deal of material about death and loss being balanced by birth and renewal is introduced. I will cite only some of it. In chapter 6, "Missouri," Reverend Bushyhead's sister, {37} Nancy, dies and Bushyhead notes,"As Nancy died, my second daughter, Elizah Missouri Bushyhead, was born January 3, 1839, in a clump of trees" (166). In chapter 7, "Arkansas," Knowbowtee says to O-gana-ya,"'Everything is broken [. . . Even my wife loved a soldier -- She's broken for me, too.' O-ga-na-ya answers, 'We're all torn and hurt. [. . .] But we're nearing a place where we have to start over. Maybe what Maritole did doesn't matter'" (217). In the final chapter,"Indian Territory," in a section given to Maritole -- quoted among the epigraphs -- we learn that "The baby who had been born was crying," to which Luthy responds,"It's a new voice that won't grieve for our old land in North Carolina" (228). This same section has Maritole also feeling the signs of renewal:"I feel something happen in me as I walk. Something small and strong begins to grow" (228). Affirming that she will "hold the memory of this trail," she turns to the future: "We'll have the new Keetoowah fire to light our hearth. We'll have our stickball games again [. . .] somewhere deep inside me I carry a tiny piece of joy like a ball" (229). Quaty Lewis, who I have also quoted in the epigraphs, affirms that the oaks she sees growing in Indian Territory "would sound out the old truth of the pines" of South Carolina; no new pines does not mean no old truths. Luthy adds,"As for the trail -- it's over -- Tanner and my boys are alive" (229). The novel concludes as it began -- with Maritole: "At night the children slept against us . . . Knowbowtee and I held them between us. Maybe someday he would touch me. Maybe someday love would come" (233). Maybe, for all the pain, for all the loss, maybe something good will come from the suffering of the Trail.
        It is by imagining such possibilities of renewal, return, and rebirth that Robert Conley in his Mountain Windsong and Glenn J. Twist in two of his Boston Mountain Tales also try to understand Cherokee dispossession. Glancy's turn to these images and concepts as a way of understanding the Trail, however, is very specifically a commitment to both the "conjurers and the Christians" and it is that dual commitment that governs the materials Glancy appends to her novel after the formal narrative has concluded (215, my emphasis).
        After the formal close of the story, Glancy prints first an "Author's Note" and then "A Note on the Written Cherokee Language." This {38} latter gives the eighty-five symbols of the Sequoyah (Glancy spells it Sequoia) syllabary so the reader can go back and decipher some of the untranslated words in the syllabary that appear at various places in the novel. (I have admitted to little success in doing this.) It also reprints, with only the addition of "an English phonetic version [. . .] the story of the boxturtles and deer that Quaty told on pages 194 and 195" (240).
        This story is a version of the familiar tortoise and the hare tale. It appears in Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee as "How the Terrapin beat the Rabbit," and more recently in Jack and Anna Kilpatrick's Friends of Thunder: Folktales of the Oklahoma Cherokees -- versions in which the Terrapin races either the Rabbit, the Deer, or the Fox. I have not been able to find a source that prints this story in the Sequoyah syllabary. Glancy, who, as I have said, gives no references of any kind, seems to have chosen to reprint the story she had already printed in the novel to remind the reader that Maritole has been thinking of it in her final monologue. Maritole:

Sometimes I thought about Quaty's story of the Trickster Turtle. I had heard Luthy telling it to her boys again. I told it now to the orphans. There was a turtle at the starting line in the old territory. There was a turtle at the finish line in the new. Our Cherokee nation had become two to survive. (233)

Once again, this is a rewriting of the traditional tale in which Terrapin wins out over the speedier animal not by becoming two, but, rather, by placing other Terrapins at various points along the trail so that whenever the Rabbit or Deer looks ahead of him to the next stage of the race, he already sees a Terrapin there -- and of course yet another Terrapin simply steps to the finish line ahead of the swifter animal. Glancy's version here, like her version of "The Story of the Bear" earlier, offers traditional material that is filtered through the lens of an artist who is deeply Christian.
        Insofar as the emphasis on Quaty's story was a gesture in the direction of the "conjurers" and their worldview, the "Author's Note" gestures more nearly in the direction of the Christians and their world-view. (But we have already seen that these presumptively disparate {39}"views" are not at all incompatible, nor have they been for over a century.) Glancy begins by telling of a trip she and her daughter took "In 1977 or 1978" to see a dramatization of the Trail of Tears. Just before the play begins, Glancy sees "two rainbows in the sky above the amphitheater" (235). "In the summer of 1995," she "saw the [sic] two rainbows again," this time on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota; this marks for her "the closure of my work on Pushing the Bear, some seventeen or eighteen years after it began" (236). This is followed by thanks and acknowledgements, after which Glancy notes that she "knew this wasn't going to be a good Indian/bad white man story. You know there has to be both sides in each" (237). She informs the reader that the "dried-up land" the Cherokees once sold to some Osages turned out to have oil on it. "It comes back," Glancy observes in a single sentence paragraph. Similarly, the farms Sherman burned in Georgia during the Civil War were farms taken from the Cherokees. It comes back. Glancy concludes her "Note" by saying, "Maybe, in the end, our acts cause little energy fields that draw their likenesses toward them" (237). I think this is fairly close to a restatement (and a recommendation) of the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Be that as it may, although I have treated the "Note on the Written Cherokee Language" before the "Author's Note," it is the former that concludes the book; Quaty's story in the Sequoyah syllabary gets the last word.
        Before I comment on that, let me note that although Wilma Mankiller in her treatment of the Trail was not interested in parceling out blame, she most certainly didn't see a "both sides" to the story of Cherokee dispossession. Robert Conley and Glenn J. Twist are determined to believe that not only bad but some possible good -- in Conley's case, a kind of continuance, an eternal return; in Twist's, arrival in the promised land -- came to the survivors of the trek to Indian Territory. Nor is either one of them interested in demonizing whites -- but no more is either one of them interested in urging a two-sides-to-the-story approach. Pushing the Bear is not very much interested in doing this either -- although as Glancy in her "Author's Note" thinks back on how her work on the novel began and concluded under the sign of two rainbows -- doubling the sign of God's covenant {40} with Noah that the world would not be destroyed by flood again -- she most certainly wants to emphasize the message that "Maybe someday love would come," and not only between Maritole and her husband, Knowbowtee, but between conjurers and Christians, whites and Indians, both sides (223). If our acts draw their likes to them, then do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It seems to have been necessary for Glancy to believe this in order to recreate in detail the long and painful journey of The Trail Where They Cried. But it seems to have been necessary as well to believe in clever turtle, a shrewd survivor, from a time far antecedent to Cherokee Removal.

        NOTE

An earlier and slightly different version of this essay appeared in French as "Répresenter la dépossesion des Cherokees," in Recherches Amerindiennes à Québec 23.3 (2003). This is its first appearance in English.

        WORKS CITED

Awiakta, Marilou."Red Clay." Aniyunwiya/Real Human Beings: An Anthology of Contemporary Cherokee Prose. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. Greenfield Center: Greenfield Review P, 1995. 29-41.

Carter, Forrest. The Education of Little Tree: a true story. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1986 [1976].

Conley, Robert J. Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992.

Foreman, Grant. The Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chicasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989 [1934].

------. Indian Removal. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1976 [1932].

Glancy, Diane. Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.

Hoig, Stanley. The Cherokees and Their Chiefs: In the Wake of Empire. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1998. Kilpatrick, Jack F., and Anna G. Kilpatrick. Friends of Thunder: Folktales of the Oklahoma Cherokees. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1964.

Mankiller, Wilma and Michael Wallis. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. New York: Saint Martin's/Griffin, 2000.

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Mooney, James. Myths of the Cherokee. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970 [1900].

------. The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and Medicinal Prescriptions. Revised, completed, and edited by Frans Olbrechts. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 99, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1932.

Perdue, Theda, and Michael Green, eds. The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/Saint Martin's, 1995.

Smith, William Jay. The Cherokee Lottery: a sequence of poems. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2000.

Thornton, Russell. "Cherokee Population Losses during the Trail of Tears: A New Perspective and a New Estimate." Ethnohistory 31 (1984): 289-300.

Twist, Glenn J. Boston Mountain Tales: Stories from a Cherokee Family. Greenfield Center: Greenfield Review Press, 1997.

Wahnenauhi (Mrs. Lucy L. Keys). "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript: Historical Sketches of the Cherokees, Together with Some of their Customs, Traditions, and Superstitions." Ed. and with an introduction by Jack F. Kilpatrick. Anthropological Papers, Numbers 75-80, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 196, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966. 175-214.

Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. 2nd ed. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1988.

From Internalized Oppression to Internalized Sovereignty

Ojibwemowin Performance and Political Consciousness

CHAD URAN         

        THE ARRIVAL AS A DREAM

I entered into that place with my eyes wide open. I was a little scared. But I also knew that I would come out of that place. I may not be the same person after I get out, but I knew I would get out. There were four people waiting in that place for me. For each person waiting, I knew I would have to give a piece of myself.
        At that time, the first person spoke to me, telling me that it was necessary to cut myself up into pieces, and that each piece had a purpose for me. Each piece would go to someone, each person in that place would get a piece, and that more pieces would go to everyone else who was waiting for me to get out of that place. Some pieces would be reserved for the people I loved. Others were reserved for my enemies. I was only allowed to take the smallest bit of every piece I had to give up.
        He then asked for my heart. He said that he would keep it safe for me. I cut it out, and he told me how to take the piece I would keep. He told me to cut it apart, hand him a piece, then cut my piece into two and hand one to him, then again, and again, and again, until I had only the smallest piece for myself. That was enough, he said, for you to never forget yourself and always know who you are. That was the only way to understand your self.
        He led me to the next person in that place. For him I was to give my hand. I cut it up as I had cut up my heart, keeping the smallest piece for myself.
        He led me to the next person in that place. For him I was to give my eye. I cut it up as I had cut up my hand, keeping the smallest piece for myself.
{43}
        He then led me to the next person in that place. For her I was to give my brain lobe. I cut it up as I had cut up my eye, keeping the smallest piece for myself.
        After I was finished cutting myself up and giving away the pieces to those people, he spoke to me again. He told me that I was ready, and that I would go out and work, and watch, and learn, and that he would take care of my heart as each of these people would take care of the parts I had given them. I would get them back when we were finished with our work together. The parts would not be the same, each one would be cleaned, and as the weak parts were cleaned away the strong parts would grow to fill their spaces.
        We then had a feast.
        He led me out of that place and into another. The people I love were waiting for me there, and they were there to help me. What was left of my body was theirs, and by their being with me I did not feel like I was missing any part of myself. They completed me. We all walked out into the dawn together.
        That's it.

{44}
We ought to include as sovereign states those who have united themselves with another more powerful by an unequal alliance, in which, as Aristotle says, to the more powerful is given more honor, and to the weaker more assistance [. . .] Provided the inferior ally reserved to itself the sovereignty, or the right of governing its own body, it ought to be considered as an independent state that keeps up an intercourse with others under the authority of the law of nations.
        Cicero

It is when the social world loses its character as a natural phenomenon that the question of the natural or conventional character of social facts can be raised.
       Bourdieu, 168-69

When the language dies, we become descendants of the Ojibwe people, and we are no longer Ojibwe.
        Earl Nyholm, in Vollum, preface

Nindanishinaabew. Shaawano nindigo. Gaa-waabaabigaanikaag nindoonjibaa, idash Miskwaaki-akiing indaamin noongom. Gaawiin mashi ningikenimaasii nindoodem. I began studying the Ojibwe language in 1995 at the University of Minnesota. My dad's grandfather was the last speaker in his patriline. I include these statements to situate myself for the readers of this paper.

THE ARRIVAL

We were set to attend an Ojibwe language immersion camp on Rainy Lake in the summer of 2001. The camp was hosted by Pebaamimowinini, an Ojibwe language instructor at a large Midwestern university. He was born on the trapline in Ontario, and the camp was his father's land on the Nicickousemenecaning (Nigigoonsiminikaaning) First Nation.¹ The name translates as "the place where the little otter plays" or "where there are little otters everywhere." Because of his standing in the Ojibwe language movement, and because his brother and mother are both language teachers, this Reserve is (half?) jokingly referred to as "The Heart of the Ojibwe Nation." Most of the {45} participants were teachers and students of Ojibwemowin at tribal colleges and other universities in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Ojibwemowin, a member of the Algonquin language family, is spoken in an area spanning from Quebec to Saskatchewan, and from Michigan to Montana. Ojibwemowin ranks as the fourth largest spoken indigenous language in North America, with 50,000 speakers as of 1992 (Baraga vi).
        My family drove up, grateful for the small language study grant from the University of Iowa's Department of Anthropology. We brought with us my nephew, Chris (age 14), and both daughters (ages 3 and 1). We also brought several quilts and other gifts in case we needed them. We had no intention of telling the border guard that we would be leaving anything in Canada.
        The drive up was pleasant; the weather was clear and sunny and not too hot. We had some trepidation at crossing the border with our undocumented children, one not our son. We had gotten a note from his grandmother giving him permission to come with us, but the note made no mention of Canada. At the crossing in Fort Frances, the guard was aware of a caravan of people going to Nigigoonsiminikaaning because others who had preceded us were unable to pronounce it clearly (which may mean in a manner not Anglicized enough for the non-Indian guard). We were granted entry.
        The reserve is located about twenty-four miles east of Fort Frances. We were supposed to meet at the community center for a potluck feast, but we were early. We took the opportunity to drive around a bit. The Reserves up there are small, more like central towns with their lands surrounding them. The housing was Rez standard: small frame houses with composite siding, most of which had been built onto over the years. Many had replacement windows. No paved driveways, the lucky ones had rock. No lawn, so the distinction between yard and driveway was rather fluid. Some had carports, and I saw only one garage. The roads were unpaved, full of ruts and holes. It was all familiar.
        The community center was up a short hill and around a bend from the tribal center. It was a rather new structure, built in the manner of a newer rural grocery store -- like a pole building with a con-{46}crete façade. There were no windows, a common building style that avoids the necessity of replacement after vandalism, and is also more secure and energy efficient. There was a small concrete slab near the outside staircase with a picnic table chained onto it. Further up the road was an outside maintenance storage area, partially fenced off.
        We decided to try to find a phone to find out where we were supposed to go first. We found an old convenience store, closed for an unknown number of months or even years, and with no phone. We saw Pebaamimowinini and his wife pass by, so we followed them back to the community center. We were eager to feast after a long drive.

        AND NOW INTRODUCING OJIBWENESS

After everyone has filled a plate for the welcoming feast, someone is selected to begin the introductory speeches. A language teacher makes this choice. The basic performance is a scripted introductory speech (see figure 1).² Protocol dictates a minimum of stating one's name, home, and clan. It is the speaker's option whether to use his or her English name, Ojibwe name, or both."Home" is usually one's reservation or community name. Off-reservation Ojibwes usually name the reservation at which they are enrolled or tied to by descent. Most append their present home, usually by the Ojibwe place name, if known.
        Clan identification is important; it situates the speaker within a kin-based social and political system. Ojibwes may state that they do not know their clan, but may be reminded to include the particle mashi, or "not yet." Gaawiin mashi ningikenimaasii nindoodem, "I do not yet know who my clan is." Elders and language teachers who host these gatherings will help Ojibwe Ojibwemowin learners with questions about their clan. Participants' introductions in Ojibwemowin at the welcoming feast serve as an initiation into the larger project of Ojibwe revitalization, situating themselves for everyone in terms of their national orientation, kinship ties, and level of cultural and linguistic competence.
        The concept of shared linguistic competence is made problematic by the extremely uneven distribution of the ability to speak or even

{47}
Figure 1. Ahaw, Ojibwemodaa: An Introductory Speech

Boozhoo . . . / Aaniin . . .	Hello . .. / Hi. . .
nindinawemaaganidog.	my relatives.
nijii-gikinoo'amaaganidog.	my classmates.
niiji-bimaadiziig.	my fellow human beings.
niij-anishinaabedog.	my fellow Indians.
Bangii eta go ninitaa-ojibwem.	I only know how to talk Ojibwe a little.
Gaawiin aapiji ninitaa-ojibwemosii.	I don't know how to talk Ojibwe very much.
Ninga-gagwejitoon ji ojibwemoyaan.	I will try talking Ojibwe.
___________ niin nindizhinikaaz zhaaganaashiimong.	My name is ___________ in English.
___________ nindigoo ojibwemong.	I am called ___________ in Ojibwe.
Niin nindoodem ___________.	My clan is ____________.
Gaawiin niin nindoodemesiin.	I don't have a clan.
Gaawiin ningikenimaasiin nindoodem.	I don't know my clan.
________ niin nindoonjibaa.	I come from ________.
________ nindaa.	I live in ________.
________ nindananokii.	I work at ________.
Nimino-ayaa gaye niminwedam omaa ayaayaan noongom.	I'm glad to be here today.
________ izhinikaazo ninaabem/niwiiw/ niinimoshe.	________ is the name of my husband/wife/ sweetheart.
Gaawiin mashi niwiidigesii.	I'm not married yet.
Bezhigo niniijaanis.	I have one child.
Niizhiwag niniijaanisag.	I have two children.
________ izhinikaazo nindaanis.	My daughter's name is ________.
________ izhinikaazo ningozis.	My son's name is ________.
________ o'apii ningii-tibshkaa.	My birthday was ________ (month).
________ ningii-ondaadiz.	I was born in ________ (month).
________ nindaso-biboonagiz.	I am ________ years old.
Ni________biboonagiz.	I am ________ years old.
Niminwedam gikinoo'amaagooyaan ji nitaa-ojibwemoyaan.	I'm glad to be learning to talk Ojibwe.
Niminwendam ________ miinawaa ________.	I like ________ and ________.
Mii o'o minik waa-ikidoyaan noongoom.	That is all I'm going to say now.
Miigwech bizindawiyeg.	Thank you for listening to me.

Source: Created by Chad Uran.

{48}
understand Ojibwemowin. The participants violate the usual definition of a speech community by the lack of regular or frequent contact, the lack of a shared linguistic competence, and what could be a total lack of clear linguistic distinction from other groups (Gumperz 43). The Ojibwemowin camp is a community based upon a more or less shared understanding of what should constitute linguistic and social competence for Ojibwemowin and Ojibwe people; they are brought together by a common desire to reinforce these understandings for themselves, their families, and their people.
         I argue that the Ojibwemowin immersion camp welcoming feast was an arena for negotiating individual and collective identities. For individuals, the performance of Ojibwemowin is a strategy to reformulate their worlds and recast their perspectives within their worlds. Attention to the verbal exchanges between leaders and followers, as facilitated and officialized through ritualization, uncovers different levels of agency within the subjects (Bourdieu 40). In this paper I refer to ritualization as those practices responding to and reworking social structure. I am applying Bell's approach to understanding how ritualization negotiates power, creating various forms of domination and resistance at the level of ethnic differentiation and cultural political action (Bell 211). The sharing of introductory speeches creates a conceptual, emotional, and physical place for participants to learn and grow through language and social interaction. Through this activity, which is viewed as "caring" for the language, participants are empowered by both connecting to a relevant history and working towards a vibrant future.
        The individuals who participate in this activity often append, in English or Ojibwemowin, remarks on the importance of learning and speaking the language for their personal, spiritual, and political identity.³ Ojibwemowin becomes symbolic communication between the participants and an Ojibwe worldview. The language is both instructive and constructive of an alternative social system and way of living, and in this way is subversive of mainstream educational and social systems.⁴ The introductory circle is a supportive space, a place to receive guidance for behavior, and a place to bring participants into consensus by reenergizing a fundamentally Ojibwe framework that
{49}
Figure 2.

Source: created by Chad Uran.

informs personal and collective action. It is a ritualized activity aimed at cultural revitalization and (re)creation of social unity (Bowie 151; Bell 216).
        The focus of my paper is on how ritualized Ojibwemowin performance is directly engaged with social change. This creative marriage of verbal action and societal manipulation through words is the essence of Bauman's definition of performance (Bauman 5). The use of Ojibwemowin in the introductory speechmaking keys a performance, as well as changes the social structure surrounding the performance. This social change is aimed at several levels. First, it is a change in the manner of relations among Ojibwe people. Second, it is a change in the relationship between Ojibwe people and their history and culture -- emically defined. Third, it is a particular relationship to mainstream society -- a distinctiveness and celebration of difference. Fourth, emerging from the previous levels, there is an emotional, even spiritual, engagement with self-perception and perception of place in the world. Ojibwemowin performance responds to the historical situations of the Ojibwe, as well as creates critical alternatives to these situations through both a perceptual reframing through Ojibwemowin speech acts and the more practical efficacy of a counter hegemonic embodiment of critical thought through politically informed action. Such ritualized performance emerges between the {50} ideological, ritual structure and the values and consciousness(es) constituting individual and collective identities.⁵
        I see the ideological structure as mutually (though not equally) generative of consciousness. Language ideologies are those generally agreed upon notions about the proper use and place of a particular language. These ideas encompass matters of status and prestige, as well as social judgments made about users of a particular language or variety of language. These language ideologies are analogous to other ideologically derived social judgments, meaning that discrimination along many social axes occur along linguistic and other indexical distinctions.
        Consciousness can be boiled down to ideological competence. This hints at a connection to the consensual collectivity of the group, conformity of ideological underpinning (accepted, constructed, or co-constructed). Further ideological development emerges from consciousness. I see ritualization as mutually (though not equally) generative of values. Ritualization depends upon the reflection of societal values, and ritualization can create or modify societal values.
        By consciousness, I mean a critical awareness of the historical, social, political, and economic position of the Ojibwe, and here especially a critical awareness of the status of Ojibwemowin. With this consciousness comes an ability to manipulate and deploy the ideological underpinnings of ritualized Ojibwemowin performance. I place the ritualized performance of Ojibwemowin into the realm of social act, examine the strategies by which this social act becomes ritualized through privileged distinction, and then look to how this ritualized performance reveals power relationships within that social system and among the actors involved. This ritualization works through adherence to community values, even as the ritualization itself creates these values. Participants immediately judge the efficacy of ritualized practice, and there are no "mere" bystanders. As the values are shared, either a priori or co-generated, these values go into creating and receiving the performance itself.
        I found Ojibwemowin performance reveals the community norms, strategies, and values that guide the production and interpretation of Ojibwemowin. It is important to acknowledge that this sharing
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Figure 3.

Source: Created by Chad Uran.

of values does not imply stasis or an essentialist uniformity of opinion. The running metapragmatic commentary by both teachers and students demonstrates how social values are mediated by the internal community and shows an awareness of how these values are mediated by outside forces. However, the ritualized performance of Ojibwemowin as both constitutive and reflective of the shared values of the Ojibwe reveals a specific concept of being and becoming a leader. The creation of leaders is dependent upon the (re)establishment of shared values, and leaders are necessary to activate these values within the Ojibwe -- in this case by spreading competence in Ojibwemowin through ritualized performance.
        These individual and collective relationships to history, self, each other, and the world contribute to a creative and shifting worldview that seeks to encompass life through Ojibwemowin. Taken as a developmental cycle, each diagrammed element can become highlighted or submerged according to the immediate goals of performance, as well as the success of the performer as judged by the community.
        For example, a speaker could begin with a consciousness of gender and accompanying inequalities of power. The speaker could use the indefinite maleness or femaleness of third person animate verbs to forward an ideology of Ojibwe gender equity. The speaker thus officializes gender consciousness and a value of gender egalitarianism as {52} evidenced by the structure of Ojibwemowin. This move is strengthened by the symbolic capital of Ojibwemowin itself. This ideology could then be mobilized through ritualized Ojibwemowin performance, whereby the speaker may be able to bring about a social change through an acceptance or engagement with his or her performance by the other participants.
        I argue that the completion of this circle is the direct connection between performance and social change; I see the activation of that link as an aspect of the practice of sovereignty -- as individual or microlevel autonomy. I take Ojibwemowin as one major vehicle of this activation. It is through Ojibwemowin that Ojibwe people can embody sovereignty at a personal level.
        It must be understood that sovereignty was a European term applied to the peoples of this hemisphere through treaty making. This served to set into motion a legal status that remains, however modified, to this day for many American Indian nations.⁶ The Ojibwe were never martially conquered, and thus their entire relationship to foreign governments has been in accordance to peaceful agreements -- though not always fully voluntary or consensual.
        Sovereignty is a part of nationhood, a concept that the Ojibwe clearly satisfy.⁷ The Ojibwe have an identifiable language, culture, and social organization. The geographic extent of their dominion is largely recognized, though by no means uncontested, by their neighbors. They have the capacity to govern themselves and to form alliances with other entities. This application of the term "nation" to Indian tribes is historical, as well.
        

The very term "nation," so generally applied to them [Indians] means "a people distinct from others." The Constitution, by declaring treaties already made, as well as those to be made to be the supreme law of the land, has adopted and sanctioned the previous treaties with the Indian nations, and consequently admits their rank among those powers who are capable of making treaties. The words "treaty" and "nation" are words of our own language, selected in our diplomatic and legislative procee