Rabbit Boss by Thomas Sanchez

I know of your Ancestors. The blood of your blood saw the Whites eat of their own flesh on yonder lake, Donner. Captain Rex gambled the money of the people away and lost his way in a blizzard, he came into a cabin and slept, when he awoke white bodies were lying dead all around him with the blood they had coughed up splattered on their clothes. he took their White death back to the people, that was the year all the Washo were burned to the ground at Elephant Head, one was saved, Ayas, the Antelope, who was sent into the valley of clouds to warm his sightless grandmother who wove flowing streams into her baskets... I can see into all the days past. I can see into all the days coming. Along the Big Lake of the Sky your son shall walk in a new Rabbit robe. Sparling his image on the quiet waters. The forest shall grow thick and free. The Birds return. The fences fall. In their shadow the openness will find its home once more.

Thomas Sanchez's Rabbit Boss begins with Gayabuc, a member of the Washo tribe of Nevada and Northern California, looking down at the infamous Donner Party. He watches them attack and eat each other, and he knows immediately that something evil has arrived in their lands. Rabbit Boss traces the history of this evil over four generations, beginning with Gayabuc, and continuing on with his son, Captain Rex, a gambler and petty criminal who makes money by recruiting other Indians to pick pigweed along the side of the transcontinental railroad. Captain Rex's son, a preacher named Hallelujah Bob, grows up among whites after all the other Washo are decimated by tuberculosis, and then burned in their huts by whites who fear the spread of the disease. Bob grows up knowing little about his background until he is taken to an Indian School (a real place in Carson City where, somewhat coincidentally, we were able to tour a small museum last week) and learns about his true identity. Hallelujah Bob's son is Joe Birdsong, who ekes out a proud but simple existence as a rabbit-hunter for large ranches during the Depression.

In Sanchez's telling, the Washo have always been a small tribe. They identify with the rabbit, whose medicine, or power, is small, but who gets by through tenacity and cleverness. They are few in comparison with the Shoshone or the Paiutes. Leaders of the Washo are said to wear the "Rabbit robe," and despite the designs that white settlers have on the land, it's exactly this identity and power that is passed down, perhaps unknowingly, to Birdsong. The stories of the four men resemble each other in certain important ways: the latter three are all, at times, hunted by white forces who want to destroy them or drive them out. For Captain Rex, it's marshals and bounty hunters that pursue him, in scenes that often provide the novel some of its blackest humor, as when the representatives of the federal and territorial government bicker over just who it is that's going to hang him, or when they realize they can't hang him, because the Nevada desert is short on trees. For Birdsong, it's a shadowy land company that has begun to make inquiries with all the landowners in the Lake Tahoe region. They begin by offering enormous sums, but when Birdsong refuses, they move against him with legal force, claiming that because Hallelujah Bob was not a U.S. citizen when he purchased the land (Native Americans were made citizens in the 1920s), his claim is null and void. They seize upon a murder and frame him for it, and Birdsong ends the novel like his grandfather: on the run.

As far as I know, the author, Thomas Sanchez, is not Native American, and I have to say, outside of perhaps Vollmann, I don't think I've ever read a fictional account of Indigenous history by a non-Indigenous writer that seems so scrupulously researched or knowledgeable. It was really something to be able to visit the actual residential school where Hallelujah Bob ends up, and where Birdsong must travel to search for the documents that prove his ownership of the land--I hadn't imagined such verisimilitude was necessary. It's especially impressive, I think, because the story is about the Washo, a small tribe whose history is not so popularly known as the Lakota or Cherokee, or even the larger local tribes like the Shoshone.

At the climax of his story, Hallelujah Bob has a vision of the Ghost Dance leader Wovoka (a member of the Paiutes, another Nevada tribe) who recognizes him as Ayas, the personification of the Antelope. Wovoka helpfully summarizes the novel for anyone who has missed it--Guyabuc has witnessed the arrival of a great evil, and Captain Rex has carried it along by unwittingly spreading the disease among his people, but Bob and his son Joe will oversee a rebirth of the Washo and the return of trees and animals. I found myself wondering, how does this novel think about the real-life prophecies of Wovoka? To me, it seems like there's a bitter irony here: Joe Birdsong ends up on the run just like his grandfather and his father did, hunted and dispossessed again. But then again there is the resilience of the rabbit power within Joe, and even when he is chased away by the predatory speculators, he ends up having a vision of ambiguous power on the shores of Lake Tahoe, the "Big Lake in the Sky." Is Joe the culmination of the rebirth of the Washo, as Bob hears from Wovoka--the one who wears the "Rabbit robe?" What does it mean to write such a book in the 1980s, and stop short of the next 50 years of the American Indian and environmental movements? I found Rabbit Boss troubling and ambiguous, but often very moving, even funny, and powerful.

Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko

I have a sister too, but this ship and you, Ocean, are taking me farther from here, Indigo whispered. She imagined Sister Salt on the depot platform in Needles, searching for her among the boarding school students returning home for the summer. Now the great ocean lay between them. Her plan for an easy way home had taken her much farther away. Tears filled her eyes and she cried softly into her pillow: Please help me, Ocean! Send your rainy wind to my sister with this message: I took the long way home, but I'm on my way. Please don't worry.

Indigo is a young girl of the (presumably) fictional Sand Lizard tribe, living in the Colorado River region where Arizona, California, and Nevada meet. When her family is swept up by soldiers during a Ghost Dance ceremony, she's separated from her mother, grandmother, and sister, and placed in a brutally repressive Indian school. She escapes, and finds a place to hide near the home of Hattie, a clever young woman expelled from graduate school for her unorthodox ideas about the early Christian church, and her husband Edward, an older naturalist living with the disgrace of a failed commercial expedition to South America. They take Indigo in to prevent her from being reabsorbed by the Indian school, and soon Indigo finds herself on a train bound to New York, and from there, a steamer to Europe.

Gardens in the Dunes is an interesting contrast to Leslie Marmon Silko's most famous novel, Ceremony, about a Laguna man suffering from PTSD after World War II. In that novel, Tayo learns that healing can be found in reconnecting with the rituals of his Laguna culture. Gardens in the Dunes is a more outward-looking novel, a global one, in which Indigo grows by being exposed to the wider cultures of the world--though like Ceremony it suggests that there is a power and safety in return. Indigo makes friends with a monkey and a parrot, and wherever she goes, there are gardens, from which she quietly takes seeds for her collection. When, at last, she returns to the "gardens in the dunes" of her Grandmother's country, she plants these new seeds, it is perhaps a symbolic expression of Indigo's going out and return. She brings the best things of the world back with her, and integrates them into her homeland. This is in contrast, maybe, with the rapacious pursuits of Edward, who sees in the natural resources of the world--orchids, citrus trees, iron meteorites--things to be purchased and sold for profit.

What I found most interesting about Gardens in the Dunes was the connections it draws between the Ghost Dance religion that developed in the 19th century and other unorthodox forms of Christianity. Wherever Hattie, Edward, and Indigo go, they are confronted by signs and symbols of repressed religion, including, in England, mysterious Druidic artifacts. Hattie has been dismissed because of her thesis, which emphasized the primary role of Jesus's female followers over the male disciples. Silko draws a direct line between beliefs and practices like these and the Ghost Dance, which was popularized by a "Messiah" figure named Wovoka in the late 19th century. Indigo has been taught to associate Wovoka explicitly with Jesus Christ, and in the great churches and chapel gardens of Europe, she insists again and again to Hattie and Edward that Jesus Christ was not crucified as the stories say, but traveling with his followers in the Americas. The Ghost Dance legend is another story of return and restoration: Wovoka, the Messiah, promised that the dance would bring back the many dead and lost who perished in American wars of conquest. It's no wonder that Indigo, torn from her family, holds tight to this belief--as meaningful in its way as any orthodox form of Christian theology.

I didn't quite expect a book like Gardens in the Dunes, having only read Ceremony. Ceremony is an inward book, a complexly layered story of memory and inward healing, but Gardens in the Dunes is a kind of adventure story. Its suggestions of erudition, its wide-ranging scope, and its 19th century setting, reminded me most of A. S. Byatt. Like Ceremony, it's more complex than it looks, introducing several minor characters--a Black cowboy cook, a thieving Mexican radical who operates a dog circus--whose presence make the book shaggy and strange. I'm not sure how I feel about the novel's final chapters, which feel somehow both anticlimactic and too pointedly dramatic--but it left me a lot to think about.

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

The mind is a mine.  So often we revisit its winding, unsound caverns when we ought to stay out.

The first story in Claire Vaye Watkins' collection Battleborn is, supposedly, improbably, semiautobiographical: Watkins, whose father spent some time palling around with Charles Manson back in his day, ends up living in the same Reno building as a woman who Manson plucked, as a newborn, from her mother with the help of a razorblade.  She calls this woman Razor Blade Baby.  This is the kind of place that Watkins' Nevada is--not a place of stark natural beauty (though there's a little of that), but a cursed place, where civilization is blighted and all human activity takes on a pall of seediness and desperation.  I've never been to Las Vegas, but that probably about describes it, right?

Some of the stories are a little self-conscious and distant for me.  The name "Razor Blade Baby" has a sinister mystery to it, but where it might have sparked a poem it keeps me at an uncomfortable distance in the story.  "The Last Thing We Need" struggles to find a voice that works in its epistolary form.  In that story a man, who is haunted by an act of violence in his past, writes letters to another man, whose things he finds in the detritus of a car wreck on an empty highway.  The details of the letter-writer's life are real and stark enough.  He writes about going camping with his daughter, waking up to find that she's not there, only to find her after a few desperate moments playing nearby--but rather than hugging her, he hits her.  That feels true to me, but the letter-writing shtick seems more like an MFA exercise than a story.  "Virginia City" has a promising setting--a kitschy pioneer museum town in the desert--on which it hangs a limp story about shallow hipster friendships.

Two of the stories stood out for me.  One is "Man-O-War," about a divorced prospector who finds an unconscious Hispanic girl out in the malicious saltpan of the Great Basin.  It could have been a hokey disaster--lonely old man is reinvigorated by the friendship of a rebellious teen--but Watkins walks the narrow line between touching and creepy.  I love how he thinks in geological metaphors ("for months the photos slid around the house like sheets of gypsum").  I love how the protagonist is self-aware enough to be guarded against both the girl's friendship and her physical attractiveness, but is not strong enough to fend them off.  The title object is a massive discarded firework he sets off to impress her, and in a classically tragic touch, also the thing that alerts her father to her whereabouts.  No one lights a giant-ass firework to impress himself.

The other is a novella about nineteenth-century prospectors called "The Diggings":

In California gold was what God was in the rest of the country: everything, everywhere.  My brother Errol told of a man on a stool beside him who bought a round with a pinch of dust.  He told of a child dawdling in a gully who found a queerly colored rock and took it to his mother, who boiled it with lye in her teakettle for a day to be sure of its composition.  He told of a drunkard Pike who'd found a lake whose shores sparkled with the stuff but could not, once sober, retrieve the memory of where it was.  There were men drowning in color, men who could not walk into the woods to empty their bladders without shouting, Eureka!

And then there were those who had nothing  There were those who worked like slaves every single day, those who had attended expensive lectures on geology and chemistry back home, those who had absorbed every metallurgy manual on the passage westward, put to memory every map of those sinister foothills, scrutinized every speck of filth the territory offered and in the end were rewarded without so much as a glinting in their pans.

"The Diggings" is, first and foremost, a good yarn: a story about two brothers, one of whom has prophetic visions, going west to find gold.  They never find it, but the prophetic one, tired of looking, lies about having a vision of gold, which leads his brother to an obsessive madness.  It reads, quite successfully, like a first-ditch attempt at writing a novel, and it makes me think that Watkins' Gold Fame Citrus could be really good.

The Nevada-California border of this story is not so different from the one in the contemporary stories; it's an inhospitable space that dismisses and murders the brilliance of human ambition.  The failed promise of the gold is not so different from the failed promise of Manson's family, or the failed promise in the smiles of the sex workers in "Rondine al Nido," or the failed promise of the girl passed out in the basin.  There's a touch of love for Watkins' native country in these stories, but it's an honest kind of love, bereft of sentimentality.