The Names by N. Scott Momaday

The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think what it means? Events do take place; they have meaning in relation to the things around them. And a part of my life happened to take place at Jemez. I existed within that landscape, and then my existence was indivisible with it. I placed my shadow there in the hills, my voice in the wind that ran there, in those old mornings and afternoons and evenings. It may be that the old people there watch for me in the streets; it may be so.

When I visited Walatowa, the main settlement at the Jemez Pueblo in northern New Mexico, a couple summers ago, I told the guide at the visitor center that I was interested in the life of author N. Scott Momaday, who had grown up at Jemez. He took me into their small museum and showed me a huge photograph of Momaday's mother, Netachee, who had come with Momaday's father to teach at the Jemez Day School. A similar photograph, or perhaps even the same one, is printed in Momaday's memoir The Names, an illustration of the community that adopted Momaday and his family, inviting him into the place about which he writes, "My spirit was quiet there." As in House Made of Dawn, Momaday writes so beautifully about the landscape of Jemez, and it's clearer here than ever that it's a loving eye that produces such descriptions. It's the voice of a man writing about his home.

The Names begins with accounts of Momaday's ancestors, including his namesake Mammedaty, and Pohd-lohk, who gave Momaday his "Indian name," Tsoai-talee, which is derived from the name of Bear Lodge, or Devils Tower, in Wyoming. On his mother's side, Momaday describes a heritage that is part Cherokee but mostly white Kentuckians. His father's side is Kiowa, and here as in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday writes with affection about his Kiowa family in Oklahoma. These places and heritages combine to make Momaday who he is, but not all equally; you can see that Momaday writes with respect and reverence for the Kiowa of Oklahoma, and with a mystic detachment about Bear Lodge, but much more ardently about Jemez. Between these there is a sojourn to Gallup, the colorful, largely Native city of western New Mexico, and Hobbs on the state's northeastern side, where Momaday's account of his life might be difficult to distinguish from any of the other children, whose big themes are school and sports, bullying and being bullied. This section contains a long section of stream-of-consciousness that captures the point-of-view of young Momaday, and is some of the memoir's most experimental and unusual writing.

What struck me when the novel turns to Jemez was the feeling that Momaday has of being an outsider. The hero of House Made of Dawn (and I did read much of The Names through the lens of this novel) is a native of Jemez, made an outsider by his alcoholism and the alienating experiences of war, but the novel is also interested in true outsiders, like the white woman Angela and the priest, Father Olguin. Here, as in the novel, Momaday writes of the Pecos Pueblo people who were given refuge at Jemez when their pueblo was destroyed. But only here in the memoir did I understand how much Momaday identifies with those people: refugees. The Names illuminates other parts of the novel, too. Here, for example, is an old and admired man named Francisco, who no doubt has become the Francisco of the book, and here is an account of the strange ritual where men try to pluck a buried chicken from the ground on horseback. Momaday describes it here as an ancient tradition that has degenerated, becoming a game for boorish young men; this really recontextualizes the scene in House where Abel kills the man who has embarrassed him at it.

More than anything, I thought The Names was beautiful. Momaday has a way of writing that feels utterly sincere. I guess it's not true that there's no room for irony here--Momaday's account of growing up in Hobbs makes great use of a child's narrow and self-involved worldview--but when Momaday grows up, or when he talks about Jemez, or the land, there's none of that, no detachment. I think of it as the prose of a writer who is deeply engaged with the world, and who speaks only when he has something to say. He really was remarkable.

Two Novels by Brandon Hobson

How do you lose a child to gun violence and expect to return to a normal way of life? This was the question I struggled with the most. My son was a victim. The officer who shot him--now retired--lived in our town, and there were many sleepless nights when I wanted to drive to his house and kill him myself. I wanted to hit him as hard as I could, so that he could feel pain. Yes, yes, I have always known grief is difficult and that forgiveness takes many years. I still haven't learned to completely forgive. I could only put it in the will of the Great Spirit.

I have reread Brandon Hobson's excellent novel, The Removed, so that I might teach it in the spring. I think--or hope--that it will hit the sweet spot for students: a book that is challenging in ideas, sometimes in prose, but mostly is made up of a kind of plain but sophisticated everyday language. It resonates, too, with topics that are on the mind of students today, like police violence, which it places in the context of the larger history of Indian Removal and dispossession. The story centers on the Echota family, whose son Ray-Ray was shot a decade prior by a cop. They take in a young foster boy, Wyatt, whose eerie similarity to Ray-Ray seems to reverse father Ernest's creeping Alzheimer's. Another son, Edgar, is lost in a fantastical "Darkening Land" of addiction and suicide, and where a sinister friend threatens to turn him into the bounty for an Indian-hunting game. What will students make, I wonder, of the book's mixture of realism and fantasy, and its refusal to cohere into something logical and explainable?

One thing I had a greater appreciation of this time around is the way that Hobson weaves the various timelines and narratives together. There are four third person narrators--mother Maria, sister Sonja, Edgar, and the legendary Cherokee rebel Tsala--and the story of each is punctured with visions and epiphanies in which the others seem to break through. This complicates, for example, the story of Wyatt, whom we are otherwise willing to believe is only strangely similar to the dead Ray-Ray. But when Wyatt's stories prove to have a kind of oracular insight, it becomes clear that we must take seriously the belief that Wyatt is Ray-Ray resurrected. I can already hear the students now--Well, is he?--but the answer, of course, is that he is and he isn't, that Hobson gives us a kind of Schrodinger's cat whose waveform threatens to collapse if you look too closely. This matters because the novel wants to give us models of resurrection and return that are larger than the realm of the materially possible. What "the removed" search for is not a literal return to Cherokee homelands--not in this book anyway--but some other kind of restitution or redemption that is not one-for-one. The last image of the book, with the family gathered for a memorial bonfire, watching a mysterious figure approach, underlines this nicely: is it Edgar? Wyatt? Tsala? Or somehow Ray-Ray himself? Yes, Hobson suggests, yes, yes, and yes.

The instances when Milton would wake in the middle of the night feeling like he was suffering in a bed of putrefaction, his dreams digested and visible as the glow of the school in flames, he could smell the sour gunpowder and dead bodies lying in pools of blood, their foreheads marked with the number of the beast while the rest of the students cried out in a panic, yet all he could hear were the voices of the dead buried in the land all around, rising out of their graves and asking him for an account of his decision to shoot and kill, and for the remainder of the night his sleep was restless and uneasy, full of their shrieking voices and hollow moans, because he worried about bearing the weight of all that guilt. In his notebook for English class, Milton had written down the following quote from Shakespeare: "Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind."

Hobson's new novel, The Devil is a Southpaw, opens with a note that the author has received a manuscript in the mail from a former classmate, or cellmate, having both been institutionalized in a juvenile detention facility long ago. The manuscript, which makes up the bulk of the book itself--very 19th century--is a novel with the same name by Milton Muleborn, and it draws on those experiences at the facility, which it describes as a kind of phantasmagoria of demons, witches, and sinister captors. Much of the novel focuses on Matthew Echota (the same last name as the characters of The Removed), a fellow student-inmate who, we're told, is the most intelligent and talented of them all, a gift for which he is sometimes praised by the prison guards, and sometimes isolated and brutally tortured. We intuit quickly that the author, Milton, is and has always been deeply jealous of Matthew, who it seems not only has a kind of artistic genius that Milton lacks or feels himself to lack, but who also had been dating his ex-girlfriend. Milton's jealousy and enmity toward Matthew is of the kind that only very similar people can share--both are sensitive, artistic, writerly souls trapped inside the harshness of the juvenile detention center--to the extent that part of me wondered if the two wouldn't prove to be the same person in the end.

Milton's detention center is a strange and frightening place, where a mysterious woman paints skulls at night and a freakish Dr. Strangelove type rules with an iron fist. Its cruelty verges on the fantastical, and the swamp that surrounds it seems to be filled with creatures and spirits. Parts of it, of course, are recognizable, drawn no doubt from the same experiences supporting troubled youth that inform The Removed and Where the Dead Sit Talking: the rancid food and forced isolation, the stultifying effects of institutionalization of childhood creativity. But in Milton's telling, these aspects become heightened into pure dreamland horror: the novel moves toward a shared escape, in which Matthew and Milton move through a literal underworld where they encounter, among other things, the spirit of Salvador Dali to guide them.

To me, the most interesting thing about The Devil is a Southpaw is the prose. I wonder how people will take Milton's Grand Guignol-isms, his general wordiness and clumsiness. To me, I thought this was all very recognizable. Though Milton is supposed to have written this novel as an adult, I recognized in it something I see often: the language of a talented and creative teenager who has limited control over his style and vocabulary. It's not supposed to be "bad," per se, but the language here is meant, perhaps, to show the fine degree of difference that separates the genius and talent of Matthew--who, as we learn, grows up to be an acclaimed but trouble painter--and the mere creativity of someone like Milton.

I can tell you that reading the prose of teenagers reorders your brain, and after a while you must take a break from it to regain clarity; I felt the same thing while reading The Devil is a Southpaw. It's a bold move, to write a book in prose that is ostensibly flawed in the same ways as its narrator. To me, the voice works as a reflection of Milton. What it means in the end for the novel as a whole is another matter--though Hobson make some gestures at other voices--a second half written by Milton in a more sober, reflective mode, and an interview with the adult Echota--but I walked away thinking that it all remained too claustrophobic in the end. There's really no getting around or outside of it--and maybe that's the point.

Two Books about Cherokee Removal

Our grandfathers followed a stick to northern Georgia. It was an old migration. The Great Spirit led us here. How can the soldiers drive us from our land? Maybe it was because we worshiped the Earth instead of God, Reverend Mackenzie preached. Maybe it was because some of us had black slaves, Reverend Bushyhead said. Maybe it was because of gold and our cornfields, the men said.

Maybe the Great Spirit just calls us to the beyond where he lives. Maybe he's going to show us another world.

But who wants another world?

The Trail of Tears looms large in our memory as one of the country's greatest moral crimes: thousands upon thousands of Native Americans, uprooted from their homes in the Southeast, and forced to march for months to what is now Oklahoma. And yet, I think Diane Glancy's novel Pushing the Bear is the first time I've seen anyone try to show, in art, what the trail was like for those who underwent it, how they suffered to leave their homes behind, how they became sick and weak and died, how they had to hurriedly bury their own before being rushed off to the next unfamiliar place. Glancy's novel, which focuses on a group of Cherokee from North Carolina, takes a multivocal approach, trading first person narratives at a half-page clips. By taking a wide view, Glancy shows a fundamental diversity among the Cherokee, who brought with them their resentments and rivalries with other bands, who brought traditional religions and Christianity, who brought different ideas about how best to respond to the forced removal. It's not not a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, but the Cherokee of Pushing the Bear do not manage to come together in inspiring ways. A crisis, Glancy tells us, has a way of prying open all our divisions.

The two central voices of the novel are a married couple, Maritole and Knobowtee. Maritole loses everything and everyone on the trail, beginning with her cabin: she is allowed to return briefly to fetch a few items and finds, chillingly, a white family has already moved in. On the trail, she gives birth to a baby who dies, and then loses her mother and father; her brother fled to the woods and will never be seen again. When she needs Knobowtee the most, he abandons her, failing to provide any comfort or companionship. We learn that Knobowtee, a widower, has married Maritole for her farm, and now that Maritole no longer owns a farm, what is the foundation of their relationship? Maritole becomes close to a white soldier, who shows a puppyish interest in the Cherokee in their ways, but their relationship invites the scorn of the other Cherokee, driving her further to the margin of the march. "I gave him my life in the dark," Maritole says of her first sexual liaison with the soldier, "I let him feel my hurt. My wounds inside. I would always be cut in two. Part of me in North Carolina. Part of me in the new land. I held open my wounds for him to soothe."

It's Maritole who coins the title phrase: in periods of madness and distress, she feels as if she is pushing away a giant bear that nibbles at her. The bear is a symbol of the march itself, a beast that would devour her whole if she let it, and which requires constant effort and attention to push away, though of course, it always comes back. Over the course of the march, Maritole and the marchers begin to approach a zen-like resignation, not of defeat, but of openness to the possibility that their lives can be rebuilt anew. "Maybe that was the Great Spirit's lesson," one Cherokee writes, "I could receive and lose in the same breath. The burden the white man carried was that he didn't know the lesson yet." This, to me, may be the central truth of Pushing the Bear: that those who are unable to believe that history might work on them, rather than others, are in a dangerous place.

We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers, the old and the young, lurking in the shadows of tall trees at night, passing through the walls of abandoned buildings and houses, concrete structures, stone walls and bridges. We are the ones watching from underwater, rising up like mist, spreading like a rainstorm, over fields and gardens and courtyards, flying over towers and rooftops and through the arched doorways of old buildings with spider cracks in their walls. We reveal ourselves to those who will look. It has been said we are illusions, nightmares and dreams, the disturbing and tense apparitions of the mind. We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.

Diane Glancy's Cherokee find themselves, at the end of the novel, facing a new life at Fort Gibson in modern-day Oklahoma. The characters in Brandon Hobson's The Removed may be their descendants, Cherokee living in an Eastern Oklahoma town called "Quah" (a lightly fictionalized version, one might guess, of the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah). As its name suggests, Hobson's novel asks the question: is Indian removal a historical process that is completed and over? Or does it live on, in some form or another, to today?

The Removed centers on the Echota family, whose name evokes the Treaty of New Echota, made between the United States and the Cherokee prior to the Trail of Tears. Sixteen years prior to The Removed, the eldest Echota brother, Ray-Ray, was shot and killed by a white police officer. In the present, we see through alternating first-person narratives--a method that recalls Pushing the Bear, though without Glancy's brisk switching--how the murder continues to effect each member of the family today. Mother Maria has agreed to serve as an emergency foster parent for a young Cherokee boy whose wisdom and sense of humor remind her of Ray-Ray. The boy, Wyatt, makes an even stronger impression on her husband Ernest, who becomes convinced that Wyatt really is Ray-Ray reincarnated, and it's hard to say he's wrong. The arrival of Wyatt reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer's in Ernest, who suddenly finds himself reconciled to his memories and whole for the first time in years. Daughter Sonja spends her time seducing a single father named Vin, a pursuit of singular and baffling obsessiveness that makes little sense--until it's revealed that Vin is the son of the cop who killed Ray-Ray.

The most interesting section, though, belongs to son Edgar, whose disillusionment and despair have led him into a life of addiction. Edgar imagines--or perhaps is--followed around by an aggressive "red fowl" whom he nursed as a chick and who has turned against him. A symbol of drug addiction, maybe? Edgar decides at the last minute to return home for a yearly bonfire in Ray-Ray's memory, but he finds himself waylaid with his friend Jackson in an eerie town known only as the "Darkening Land." Is this a real place, or a limbo-like place where, it's suggested, suicides live? Edgar's friend Jackson says he's making a video game about Jim Thorpe, and keeps wanting to capture Edgar's "Indian" likeness as a reference. This, we learn later, is a lie; Jackson has designed a video game that allows players to hunt Indians, and the line between the holograms who are the targets and real Indians like Edgar is frighteningly blurry. It's a bit of a groaner when we learn that Jackson's last name is Andrews--Jackson Andrews, get it?--but I think that, through the skillful creepiness of the setting, Hobson earns it.

How many ways can one be removed? Ray-Ray's death gives us one way. Addiction, provoked by poverty, might be another. There is a suggestion, too, that the foster system encourages a kind of removal; Hobson brought his longtime professional experience with the Oklahoma foster system to bear in his (excellent) novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, and does so again here. All of this suggests that Indian Removal is a process that plays out again and again, when Native Americans are ground out of the systems that identify them as dependents or threats. And yet, the novel gives us visions of reconciliation and restoration, too, in the arrival of Wyatt, the living memory, and in the way that Sonja is forced to abandon her quixotic and half-baked plan of revenge. The final voice threaded with Maria's, Edgar's, and Sonja's is that of Tsala, a 19th century Cherokee folk hero who fought against removal and saved the Eastern Band of Cherokee (and who appears briefly in Pushing the Bear as "Tsali"). Tsali, like Ray-Ray, was a martyr, but his spirit could not be conquered.

Maud's Line by Margaret Verble

Maud began to feel a growing hatred for who she was and where she lived. She was sick to death of dirt, sick of chickens, sick of guns and snakes, and, most of all, sick of dead bodies gnawed by animals. Her only chance for escape had been that bright blue canvas rocking her way. She cursed Booker out loud. She stormed at his character until she remembered he'd left her a letter. She just didn't know what it said. But that didn't really matter. He hadn't come back for their wedding. That told the words.

Maud Nail is a Cherokee woman living in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. She's just turned eighteen, and several of the local boys have their eye on her, but she's drawn to Booker, a traveling salesman whose bright blue wagon tokens a wider world. Booker is drawn to Maud in turn, but he has entered her life at a moment when many changes come in to complicate things. First, her father disappears, implicating himself in the murder of a pair of white farmers who have been known to have designs on the Nail allotment. Her brother Lovely has become what my relatives would call "touched," seeing visions of the dead, and Maud fears that the culprit might be a case of rabies, brought on by the carcass of a dead dog deposited in the house by the aforementioned farmers. One by one, the men in Maud's life leave, first her father, then Lovely, and then finally Booker, leaving her alone on her allotment to fend for herself, and to face the prospect of an unexpected pregnancy.

One interesting thing about Maud's Line is that it tells a story about Native life that is adjacent to a more familiar one, the killing of the Osage that's depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon. Verble makes a single off-hand reference to the Osage driving around in Cadillacs. Maud is Cherokee, not Osage, and her allotment holds no oil, and yet it is the target of white mischief all the same. The machinations of the white farmers are a backdrop to a much deeper story about individual determination, and--since, after all, they are quickly murdered--less integral to the story than I was first expecting. But the novel also presents a lot of interesting and subtle suggestions about the way that early 20th century Cherokee did and did not fit into the larger systems of white society that surrounded them. The disappearance of Maud's father and brother, for instance, seem to take place in a context in which itinerancy is more expected, and where her uncles are always "laying out," that is, shacking up at the house of their current love interest. There's a kind of fluidity and freedom in Maud's life that I suspect would seem unacceptable in white households of the time. When Booker leaves, it's because (he says) he struggles morally with the way she lies to protect her father from the sheriff, but I get the sense, too, that he is reacting to something in her way of life that is to him both unfamiliar and difficult to put into words.

Maud's Line is competently, briskly written; it is bracingly forward about violence and sex. There's a hardbitten realism to it--I expected, for example, that the murder of the white farmers would turn out to be a deeper mystery, but we learn in the end that Maud's father really was involved. Later (spoiler alert spoiler alert), Lovely commits suicide, forestalling any idea that the novel will be about pat reconciliations or restitutions. Still, in the end, Booker does come back, though perhaps a little dimmer in our eyes, and a little less the worldly traveler that we once saw him as. In the end, Maud leaves with Booker, headed to a life of motherhood in Oklahoma's version of the city, and to do this she must abandon her allotment, that portion of land afforded to her by her citizenship in the Cherokee nation. It's a moment of great ambiguity, and only possibly a happy ending.

The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday

What he saw, not once but recurrently, was a dark, impending shape on a dark field of the sky. It seemed very slowly to revolve and approach. At a certain distance it was seen to be a beast, massive and indefinite. It was disintegrated, distorted, changing. The head was twisted in a severe, unnatural attitude, as if the neck were broken. It described a terrible mutation and suffering, a pain so great so to have become desperation and rage, and profound helplessness. There were faint blue facets upon the grotesque head and limbs, elongated like the quick strokes of a brush. But these only intensified the darkness of the thing and gave to it the illusion of light within, of a deep, steady, central life. The sky beyond was murky and splotched with light, not points of clear bright light, but random forms like beads of amber in which were ancient and delicate debris. And closer, the eyes of the beast glinted and were pierced with dull opalescence, and the great misshapen mouth gaped and flamed. Set had the terrifying conviction that when the beast drew near to him, within reach, it would crack open with pain and all its shining, ulcerous insides, its raveled strings and organs, its slime and blood and bile would fall and splash upon him, and he would dissolve in the hot contamination of the beast and become in some extreme and unholy amalgamation one with the beast.

Locke Setman--Set--is a successful artist living in the Bay Area. He has a beautiful girlfriend, a thriving  career, a loving adoptive father. One day he gets a cryptic message from Oklahoma: his grandmother, from the Kiowa side of his family that he knows little about, is dying. He rushes to Oklahoma out of curiosity and compulsion, but he's too late. His grandmother, who he never had a chance to meet, is dead. But there is another woman there, a beautiful young medicine woman named Grey, who gives him the bundle of bear medicine that is his birthright. Returning, stymied, to California, his life begins to fall apart. He suffers a series of nervous breakdowns; he becomes violent. His artwork is better than it's ever been, but unsellable. He comes to understand that he must return to Oklahoma, to Grey, that a life that he thought he was severed from by the fact of his adoption. It's only this return by which he might rescue himself.

Momaday's House Made of Dawn is a book that means a lot to me. The first time I read it--in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico--I was captivated by its slipperiness, its difficult language and shifting genres, though it is only through teaching it and letting the book unfold as an experience over many readings that I feel like I understand it. I was reluctant, a little, to read Momaday's only other novel, The Ancient Child, because what if it wasn't as good? There is something a little more recognizably written and human about The Ancient Child, perhaps because it's a novel of the 80s and not the 60s, but it shares with House Made of Dawn the qualities that make it both a challenge and a joy. 

At bottom, there's a story I recognize: a Native American, alienated from his heritage and culture by the forces of political modernity, becomes whole by traveling to the place of his ancestors. That's the story of House Made of Dawn, too, though in both novels Momaday gives us protagonists who have multiple heritages, different tribes and European heritages overlaid into the same identity, so it's not a simple matter of tracing back one's blood. The central myths of the novel are about bears. There's the Kiowa story about the boy who was transformed into a bear and chased his sisters into the sky; his scratching of a great tree created what's now known as Devil's Tower and the sisters become the Pleiades. But there's another story, too, from the Piegan tradition, in which a little boy appears in the village out of nowhere, and then leaves. His appearance, we're told, is so strange and hard to understand that the villagers suppress the memory: it must have been a bear that visited them. The madness and despair that stalk Set are like the spirit of the bear that transforms the boy against his will--simple enough--but the Piegan story undermines the story of the bear, and suggests perhaps it is only a way of smoothing over a deeper and more troubling truth.

Then there's Grey, who flouts most literary expectations for "medicine women" by being beautiful and young. Grey's status as medicine woman is depicted as a kind of holy innocence; we are told over and over again that she "never had to quest for visions"; they simply come upon her. She's a skilled horse rider, who can snatch a match from the ground on horseback without falling, and in one pivotal scene she ties the hands of a man who tries to rape her with barbed wire and circumcises him. For the most part, Grey's visions bring her back to the Wild West, where she becomes the lover of Billy the Kid. This is so strange, but clearly important; Billy is a significant character in the story, and he exists in a kind of timeliness with Grey where he is able to converse with her about the famous circumstances of his own death. Grey is in love with him--are we supposed to read this as a suggestion that even Indigenous people can fall in love with the myths of the American West? I'm still wondering what it is that Billy is doing in this novel, but I love him here; I love the way the pieces refuse to fit neatly together. I do see that Set's return to Oklahoma means that Grey must learn to let Billy go; I see that she's not just a magical healer for Set (like, for example, the medicine woman Ts'eh in Ceremony) but someone who herself must find a way to live wholly.

One last thing that stuck out to me: Set is an artist. The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that it has trouble conceptualizing Set's art, because it really isn't interested in it as art, but rather as a symbol for a way of seeing. The novel is separated into sections called "Lines," "Planes," and "Shapes," pointing toward the fleshing out of vision, of visual elements coming together into a whole. It seems to me that Set's art picks up some of the yearning to see that characters profess in House Made of Dawn; I was reminded of the white woman Angela wanting to see "beyond the mountain," which I read as a kind of modernist desire to see beyond the intervening stages of art, words, interpretation. What interests me and troubles me about The Ancient Child is the way it adds myth to the list; myth points to the deeper truth of what happens to Set and Grey, but it can never be real, it can never satisfy. The novel ends with Set, gone on a pilgrimage to Devil's Tower, encountering and becoming the bear, the real, at last.

Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah

"Kiowas always wear red on the left," I told them. I wanted to teach them about their culture. I knew Turtle and Lila were always busy with work. I didn't know how much time the spent at the gourd dances.

"What color do Cherokees wear?" Ever asked.

"Cherokees don't have a color."

"Mom is not going to like that," Quinton aded.

"No, I mean in the gourd dances there are two colors. Red for Kiowa and blue for Comanche."

"My dad's a Comanche," Quinton said. He was almost to the end of his popsicle.

"Your dad is Kiowa and Comanche," I told Quinton.

"Do Mexicans have a color?" Ever asked.

"No, Mexicans don't have a color."

"How come I saw three colors on a big blanket at my house?" Ever asked. "Red, white, and green."

"That was a flag, Ever."

Ever Geimausaddle is like a lot of people growing up in Oklahoma, the crossroads of Indian culture in the United States: a mix of cultures. His mother Turtle is Kiowa and Cherokee and his father Everardo is Mexican. Though Everardo is an abusive brute, made bitter by a beating he receives at the hands of Mexican border agents, Ever himself has a large, rich extended family to support him during what turns out to be a coming of age made difficult by poverty, addiction, and violence. Calling for a Blanket Dance is a polyphonic novel, a collection of stories that capture a snapshot of Ever's life from childhood to adulthood, each one narrated by a different person in his life--mother, auntie, cousin, girlfriend, son.

The central story, to me, was the one narrated by Ever's most distant relative, Opbee--the niece of his grandfather Vincent. In this story, the title "blanket dance" is performed at a powwow for Ever and his family, in which they are surrounded by dancers, symbolizing the support of the larger community--who also toss cash onto their blanket. Later, Opbee realizes that a quilt she's purchased from Ever after the powwow is one knit by his grandmother Lena for her great-grandchild. Opbee travels around the area searching for the blankets, sold out of necessity, to re-purchase them and collect them so they can be returned to Ever and his children. There's a neat symbolism to the quilt, itself a woven object, and the act of "knitting up" committed by Opbee, who literally ties together the loose strands of Ever's life and gathers them back together. One of the strengths of Calling for a Blanket Dance is its insistence that all the strands of one's life and heritage are important. The passage above, from when Ever is a child, is pretty funny, but it also captures some of the difficulty of navigating the many facets of one's identity--Mexican, Kiowa, Cherokee, Comanche, each with its own gifts, and its demands.

Calling for a Blanket Dance is interested, too, in the ways young men grow up. Men like Ever's father Everardo and his grandfather Vincent never grow out of their destructive patterns, or, as in the case of Vincent, who gives up alcohol to late to save his health and his life, grow out of them too late. Ever, too, must fend off the allure of gang violence and drug addiction; his first wife, Lonnie, is ravaged by meth. Ever seeks a refuge in the army, but even this proves to be a false start; discharged, he returns home. Ultimately, it's fatherhood that saves him, first by adopting a troubled teen named Leander (whose casual and sarcastic voice is one of the novel's best artistic strokes) and then having children of his own.

Funnily, Calling for a Blanket Dance covers some of the same ground as Brandon Hobson's novel of the Oklahoma foster system, Where the Dead Sit Talking. But the comparison reveals the limitations of Calling for a Blanket Dance. When, in Hobson's novel, Sequoyah imagines grinding his thumb into the face of his sleeping roommate, we believe him; we are convinced that he may lash out in violence he cannot control. When Leander feels like lashing out, we are certain that social worker Ever's solution--"When you get angry, I want you to draw"--will help Leander channel his impulses into positive behavior. There's never any other narrative possibility; though marginal characters like Vincent and Lonnie may suffer, we are sure that Ever and his immediate family will be knit back into health and safety. When, in the final story, narrated at last by Ever, he camps out overnight waiting for a crack at a foreclosed house being distributed by the Cherokee Nation, is there any doubt that he'll receive one--or that, in a gesture toward the possibility of loss, that he'll be the last person in line to get one? Still, the many voices of Calling for a Blanket Dance are a difficult feat, and are what make it worth reading.

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

No matter what, I could not bring myself to think of Rosemary any less. Little by little, the days were like thieves, stealing parts of me, including any courage I had to confront my feelings toward people: my growing interest in Rosemary, my hatred for Nora Drake, my friendship with George. At night I began to think more and more about my mother, as her court hearing grew closer. I worried about her release. I worried about her remaining locked up. And I worried the days were taking my feelings, how the more I thought about everyone, the more dead I felt inside.

Sequoyah is fifteen years old, Cherokee, caught up in the faceless indifference of the foster system. His mother is in prison, perhaps up for parole soon, but in the meantime he's been placed with the Troutts, a well-meaning couple who live out in the sticks of rural Oklahoma. Life with the Troutts, at least, is better than life in juvenile detention, or some of the other foster homes that Sequoyah has been in and out of. He finds a friend in George, another foster kid who prefers to write messages than to speak, and who clearly has some kind of autism. But it's the Troutts' third foster kid, an older girl named Rosemary, who really captivates Sequoyah. Like him, she's Cherokee, she's disaffected, she's not like other kids. "I feel a weird connection to you," she tells him. "I mean like you're a lost soul from a thousand years ago who's here to deliver something to me."

Maybe that sounds heartwarming, or worse, banal, but it's not. What Rosemary and Sequoyah really have in common is that they've both been deeply damaged by troubling childhoods, and they are both strange, dark, and prone to antisocial behavior and violent thoughts. We come to understand that people are actually afraid of Sequoyah; when George wakes up bleeding from his mouth during a bad sleepwalking spell, he assumes that it's Sequoyah that has hit him in his sleep. When Rosemary's girlfriend (perhaps in both senses) Nora tells her that the way Sequoyah looks at Rosemary is creepy, are we sure that she's wrong? Sequoyah's affection for Rosemary is both a desire to be with her and a desire to be her; he sneaks into her room when she's not around and wears her clothes. Rosemary, for her part, steals money and things and disappears for days; she gives and then cruelly retracts her affection for Sequoyah and talks openly of suicide.

What I liked best about Where the Dead Sit Talking, I think, is that Hobson manages to make Sequoyah and Rosemary poignantly empathetic, rather than repulsive or frightening. We see quite easily how they've been shaped by their difficult circumstances; Sequoyah literally bears scars on his face from an episode of his mother's negligence. As teenagers, they feel real; in the afterword, Hobson talks about how the book was inspired by children he knew working in Oklahoma's foster system. In fact, one of my biggest reactions to Where the Dead Sit Talking was jealousy: I've been working on my own book about disaffected teens, and I wish I had Hobson's talent for detail. Time and time again Hobson has Sequoyah, Rosemary, George, or even some rando at their shared school, do or say something that I bookmarked to steal--or, I should say, for inspiration.

Where the Dead Sit Talking is a grim book. It's narrated by a slightly older Sequoyah, looking back at this transformative experience in his life. We know from the beginning that things haven't gotten better for him; the book's first line is "I have been unhappy for many years now." Sometimes he'll interrupt the narrative to let us know how a particular character dies: "on October 12, 1999 of mysterious causes," or, "who later died on January 19, 2003 of strangulation." These asides are never justified or explained; we're not meant to think something as gruesome and manipulative as that Sequoyah has become a serial killer or anything. But he is someone who grew up surrounded by loss and death, who sees death. On a narrative level, Where the Dead Sits Talking avoids overarching narratives in favor of something more vignette-like. When climactic things happen--the one moment of grand violence in the novel is the one moment that feels a little off--they both grow out of and interrupt the persistent ebb and flow of hope and despair that characterize the life of a foster child like Sequoyah.

This is the fourth year in a row that I have dedicated January to reading books by Native American authors, and Where the Dead Sits Talking is one of the most rewarding discoveries from the experience. Sequoyah's Cherokee identity isn't exactly central to the narrative, but neither is it incidental. Looking back, I was struck by his desire to be like his "great-grandfather," who saw spirits in every thing. It's not such a big leap from there to a teenager who yearns for the mystical experience of a soulmate like Rosemary: "My great-grandfather claimed to have met a beautiful spirit woman... Her eyes were fire. She held my great-grandfather's gaze, kissed his hands, and fell into a long, deep sleep with him." Perhaps we are invited to see a connection between the kinds of displacement that the Cherokee suffered and the displacement that kids in the foster system suffer. Maybe not. But at the very least, Hobson reminds us that displacement--alienation, isolation, and loss--have many forms, and each is more enduring than we might hope to believe.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, Sundown by John Joseph Mathews, and Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan

This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves).

Like many people, I hadn't heard of the Osage Murders until recently. Earlier this year, when I read Cimarron, Edna Ferber's story of white settlement in the Oklahoma territory, I thought the detail about the Osage growing rich on their oil deposits was a fanciful fiction, a Tarantino-style literary justification for people who had been marginalized in the real world. But as David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon makes clear--and as Martin Scorsese's movie adaptation, out this week, will make even clearer--the story is true, and underappreciated: after oil headrights made many among the Osage tribe rich, they were subjected to a spate of horrible murders by covetous white settlers.

Grann's book focuses on the story of Mollie Burkhart. Like many Osage women at the time period, Mollie is married to a white man who lives off of her wealth. Her sister, Anna, is shot and killed; Anna's death is followed by the murder--by bomb--of another sister and brother-in-law. These murders were just a few of the many that took place in what's now known as the Osage "Reign of Terror," but their startling nature and obvious connection to one another made them the focus of the FBI's investigation. The FBI is, for Grann, the story's second thread, a watershed moment in the transition of the Bureau from a group of ragtag cowboys to an efficient, professionalized institution under the control of J. Edgar Hoover. What the FBI, led by a rangy Texan named Tom White, uncover is a conspiracy of elaborate scope. The deaths in Mollie's family are ultimately traced back to her own husband, Ernest, working under the guidance of his uncle, a powerful cattle rancher named William Hale.

Killers of the Flower Moon is, to some degree, more interesting as a story than it is a book; it has the breezy efficiency of many similar pop history books, though I can imagine the prose is a shade better than many of its equivalents. Its greatest moments are journalistic ones, as with the stunning final chapter in which Grann's research reveals that the scope of the conspiracy among Oklahoma's white settlers was much larger than initially imagined. Though Hale is--spoiler alert--convicted and sent to prison, Grann is able to identify a handful of powerful bankers and operatives with bloody hands who were never apprehended. The story is simply a story of racism write large, a system of depredation that goes above and beyond Hale to the very nature of white settlement in the Oklahoma territory.

Killers of the Flower Moon offers a kind of double revelation: as Grann uncovers the further secrets of the Osage murders, so too he uncovers a part of history that has been hidden from view for too long. In the 1920s, the Osage murders were front page news, but in the wake of the Great Depression and the drying up of the Osage oil feeds, they were largely forgotten. Grann's book and Scorsese's movie will, I imagine, move the story into a kind of public consciousness that will be difficult to dispel a second time; the Osage murders will go from a thing that nobody knew to a thing that everybody knows. What more can you ask for from a popular history book?

If I had my way, I'd direct people's attention to the system of allotment that facilitated both the Osage's incredible wealth and the murders that attended it. The 1887 Dawes Act split many tribal lands into small "allotments" which could then be claimed by individual Indians, who supposedly would be transformed by the virtue of property ownership into real Americans. Of course, when the land was divvied up, there was usually a big chunk left over that went into the ownership of white settlers. In this case, the allotment had the ironic effect of giving individual Osage "headrights" over the vast oil reserves that made money through lucrative leases. And yet, the money was control as the Osage, being considered by the government incompetent to handle their own affairs, were put under the authority of guardians. A guardian might be a trusted community figure or, as in Mollie Burkhart's case, a husband, and in most cases the murders were orchestrated by these guardians in order to ensure the headrights passed to them.

It was a system of such obvious and vicious racism that it shocks us today, but other vestiges of injustice remain as relevant as ever. Consider, for example, the threat posed by the judicial determination that the murders took place outside tribal land, moving the case out of federal courts and into local courts where men like William Hale could bribe, threaten, and kill their way to possible acquittal. And then consider a case like McGirt v. Oklahoma from last year, at the heart of which was the very question of whether Oklahoma tribes have jurisdiction over crimes committed against them on their own lands. Killers of the Flower Moon, both book and film, may bring the Osage murders into a kind of sustained historical consciousness, but whether we'll absorb the right social and political lessons from them is another matter.

Away from the activity of Progress which had become so important, he felt a pleasure which seemed to be absent when he was in town. On the few occasions when the pounding hoofs of his pony flushed a small flock of prairie chickens, he would come to the realization that he didn't see them in large flocks any more; that it had been years since he had heard the familiar booming carried across the April prairie. When he came to little blackjack-covered ravines that reached out like feathered fingers into the prairie, he didn't seem to miss the band of deer bounding away; their white tails bobbing and seeming to float away among the black boles of the trees. Had he seen one lone frightened buck, he might not have missed the band, but there were no more deer, and he was not acutely conscious of their absence. Sometimes as he rode along, a golden eagle would sit high on a limestone escarpment, watching him, and the redtailed hawks were always present and seemed to taunt him as usual about being earthbound; circling low and screaming weakly their contempt.

Before it was stolen from them, or dried up and blew away, how did the Osage get their riches? What must that have been like for a people a single generation away from mass white settlement? Part of that story can be found in Sundown, a novel by the Osage writer John Joseph Mathews. Sundown is--to my understanding--regarded as one of the first English-language novels published by a Native American, along with D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, which came out in 1936, two years Mathews' novel. Like Archilde in The Surrounded, and like Mathews and McNickle themselves, Challenge Windzer, the novel's protagonist, is part-Native and part-white, an inheritance that at times leaves him torn between two modes of existence, feeling as if he fits into neither. Chal is a teenager when the oil boom begins in earnest, and part of what makes Sundown such a fascinating text is that it represents a contemporary, though fictional, account of the real-life stories that Grann has resurrected.

Challenge's father John names him for the "challenge" he hopes he will represent for his people against those who would oppress them. John is pro-allotment, a big believer in progress, a word that means turning "away from the blanket" and embracing business and industrialization. He is enthusiastic about Chal's decision to play football for the University of Oklahoma. But Chal's experience at school is a tortured one: not knowing how to act or speak, he grows a reputation for being taciturn. How can he explain, for example, why is it is such a desecration for an Osage man to be struck with a paddle, as his frat brothers do to him in a hazing frenzy? A couple of Chal's friends from "the Agency" drop out, despite being football stars, unable to handle the difficulty of the experience: one turns to the bottle and the other returns "to the blanket." Chal tries to muddle on, yearning for the ability to do as his peers do, to dance and flirt and sweat for grades.

Chal is a difficult protagonist to follow. So much of the novel's drama derives from his inability to act, but neither can he articulate his difficulties--he's like Hamlet, if Hamlet didn't know how to make a speech. Chal's life is largely a series of unmade gestures. When the first World War breaks out, he moves from college to flight school, where excels as a pilot, but his social relations are much the same; he longs to speak or act, but can't find the words, and so every episode just sort of... ends. But neither can Chal take part in the Osage rituals he sees among those who still live in the traditional fashion. He longs for the Osage hills of his youth, filled with animal life and a proper canvas for the size of his imagination. But when he returns home, he finds the land largely diminished by the oil derricks, which have depleted the waters and repelled the animals. This is his father's progress, a sacrifice whose rewards his father can't even enjoy--he's killed by white men who covet his headrights.

His father's death marks a final blow for Chal, who descends into a life of hard drinking and carousing, one that's ironically made possible by the flow of payments from his oil headrights. What Sundown suggests, I suppose, is that the trouble for the Osage didn't begin with the murders. Rather, the murders are themselves the consequence of devastating social changes, brought on by white settlement and a belief that old ways could be discarded in favor of an elusive "progress" that turned out to be another settler trick. 

Ben still noticed how few Indians were visible on the streets of town, a couple of dark men, perhaps, sitting on the running board of a car. He said nothing about this to anyone, but he knew the Indians were going home. They'd become peyote men with long hair and some of these were still the richest people in the world. They'd entered a house of fear and closed the door, become invisible once again. But out in the country, their homes and barns were strung with lights in hopes that no secrets would hide in the darkness. In other circumstances, the lights in the night's black country would have been beautiful. But these were lights of terror, and farther out, the fires could be seen scattered around the dark hills while people went to the roundhouse and the peyote lodge and sang and drummed, and the drumming joined the early rains, and it was felt in the topsoil and subsoil of earth. It filled up the hollow dark nights when the moon was swallowed by earth's hazardous shadow.

So, Killers of the Flower Moon is a book about recovering a lost history. But as with all lost histories, they're not lost to everybody: as the Osage contributors to the film make clear, the Reign of Terror has never been forgotten about their communities. Linda Hogan's novel of the Reign of Terror, Mean Spirit, came out nearly thirty years before David Grann's book. Hogan is Chickasaw, not Osage, but Mean Spirit suggests that the memory of this bloodthirsty period remains strong among the Native American groups who call modern-day Oklahoma home. And, in fact, Mean Spirit tells almost exactly the same story as Killers of the Flower Moon, only lightly fictionalized: the villainous cattle baron is John Hale, rather than William Hale. Anna Brown becomes Grace Blanket, an Osage woman shot to death in the book's opening chapters, while her children--who, as her inheritors, are the next to be threatened--look on in fear.

Amazingly, Hogan seems to have decided that the story described in Killers of the Flower Moon didn't have enough characters: Mean Spirit is so crowded with people it's almost Dickensian. Uncharitably, you might say it's kind of a mess; I found myself unable to remember who was who and how they were all related. It's a mistake, I think, not to have streamlined the story a little. More than once, when someone was killed--or revealed to be a villain, in league with Hale and the other oil-grabbers--I felt nothing, because I had barely processed who that character was or was pretending to be. I actually found myself wondering if it was better or worse to have read Killers before reading Mean Spirit. Perhaps it would have been clearer to approach the story on its own terms rather than as a slightly recombinated version of history. Or maybe it would have made it all even more inscrutable.

That said, the great strength of Mean Spirit is the detail that Hogan adds to the plainness of history. Consider this passage, which follows the bombing of a house that kills Grace's sister Sara (Hogan spares the husband figure, here a half-Indian named Benoit, not a white guy named Bill, so that he can be fingered for the murders):

Benoit was still in jail and people continued to find pieces of Benoit and Sara's blown-apart life. A mattress remained on top of a tree and some hawks built a nest in it. One of the cattle grazers who leased Indian land filed a lien against Benoit's estate for the cost of a calf that had been hit on the skull and killed by a flying cast iron skillet. Treasure-hunters traveled in far and wide to search the land for possessions that had blown free of the explosion. A silver cuff link was found beneath the steps of a farmhouse a quarter mile away. One man, out scavenging the woods that autumn with a war surplus metal detector, found a nightgown hanging neatly over a tree limb. It was his wife's size. He took it home.

One addition I really liked is the character of John Stink, an Osage deaf-mute who is mistakenly buried alive. When he emerges from his burial--the Osage place rocks only loosely over the bodies--he assumes he's become a ghost. The only thing is, everyone else assumes that he's a ghost too, and they go on for months or years like that. I was delighted, too, to discover in the book's acknowledgements that John Stink was a real person, though he seems to have had little or no connection to the Reign of Terror. Also added are a series of "Watchers," people from the "Hill tribes" of Osage who still choose to live in a traditional manner, who come down to hang out outside the house of Grace Blanket's family. It wasn't clear to me that the Watchers ever really did any protecting, but the symbolism is powerful: when the oil seeps up through the land like blood, it is the traditional Osage who have no need for money or motorcars who watch over their wayward relatives.

Hogan also replaces Tom White, the Texan FBI agent who led the investigation into Hale, with a Lakota FBI operative named Stacey Red Hawk. Like the Watchers, Red Hawk's role in the actual plot felt elusive to me, but his role is more symbolic than it is principal: he widens the perspective of the novel from an Osage story to something that implicates Indians of all tribes, and Indianness in general; even Stacey Red Hawk, toward the novel's end, has abjured the Bureau of Investigation, humbled by the simplicity and depth of the lives lived by the Hill Osage.

Mean Spirit is more comic than Solar Storms, the other Hogan novel that I read. And it's very different in this way from Sundown, which is almost completely humorous. Perhaps it's a difference of stakes--the Osage writer and the Chickasaw--but perhaps it is a difference of historical perspective, too. John Joseph Mathews, like Chal Windzer, may have looked around at a world that seemed intent on destroying the Osage one way or another, either by recruiting him into the white capitalist world of oil barony, or assimilating him at the end of a fratboy's wooden paddle--or by just plain shooting him, exploding him, or poisoning. At times, Chal seems unsure whether the life of the Osage can survive. Hogan, perhaps, has the luxury of writing with the knowledge that, while the Reign of Terror brutalized families and ended dozens of hundreds of lives prematurely, the Osage live on, as the rest of us are all getting to see right now as well.

Cimarron by Edna Ferber

His past, before his coming to Wichita, was clouded with myths and surmises. Gossip said this; slander whispered that. Rumor, romantic, unsavory, fantastic, shifting and changing like clouds on a mountain peak, floated about the head of Yancey Cravat. They say he has Indian blood in him. They say he has an Indian wife somewhere, and a lot of papooses. Cherokee. They say he used to be known as "Cimarron" Cravat, hence his son's name, corrupted to Cim. They say his real name is Cimarron Seven, of the Choctaw Indian family of Sevens; he was raised in a tepee; a wickiup had been his bedroom, a blanket his robe. It was known he had been one of the early Boomers who followed the banner of the picturesque and splendidly mad David Payne in the first wild dash of that adventurer into Indian Territory. He had dwelt, others whispered, in that sinister strip, thirty-four miles wide and almost two hundred miles long, called No-Man's-Land as early as 1854, and, later, known as the Cimarron, a Spanish word meaning wild or unruly.

Yancey Cravat is a living, breathing avatar of the Wild West: fearless, adventurous, a crack shot with an enormous head like a buffalo. The five years he spends cooped up in Wichita are the worst of his life, but he stays to woo his wife Sabra, the scion of a well-to-do Kansas family. When the territory that's now Oklahoma is opened at last, Yancey is among those "boomers" who race across the border to drive a stake into their chosen lot; and though he's outwitted by a clever madam, he brings Sabra and their son Cimarron to the newly established town of Osage anyway. Sabra, for her part, is mortified by their new life, by the filth and want of Osage, and by the Indians lurking around. The Indians, in fact, are one of the greatest points of disagreement between Sabra and Yancey: she refuses to have anything to do with them, but he uses his newly formed newspaper--the Oklahoma Wigwam--to advocated for better treatment of the Osage, the Kaw, the Cherokee, and others.

Cimarron has the same skeleton as Ferber's Giant, cast back several decades in time. Yancey is like Texas rancher Bick Benedict; he has the West in his bone. Sabra is like Benedict's new wife Leslie, cast into a world that frightens her, one she doesn't understand, though Sabra bucks against Yancey's designs more than Leslie ever does.

With whom are we to sympathize? On one hand, we admire Yancey's high spirits and his advocacy for the Indians, and Sabra's race repulsion makes her an unpleasant character. But Yancey's adventurousness makes him a bad husband: when the "Cimarron Strip"--the Oklahoma panhandle--is opened up, Yancey insists on taking up his family and heading farther west. When Sabra refuse, he goes anyway, and is gone five years, while she stays at home running and growing the newspaper. Though Yancey returns, it's never for long; he's gone to Alaska, or to war in the Philippines, or in France. The spirit of the west begins to look a little selfish; it looks like recklessness and abandonment. Sabra, on the other hand, represents a kind of feminine and civilizing principle. She stewards the newspaper and helps birth Oklahoma's version of "society." Yancey's name is floated time and time again for governor, but it's no surprise that it's Sabra, actually, who becomes a congresswoman from the newly minted state. If Yancey represents the spirit of the west, it's people like Sabra who made sure that the West was more than a spirit.

Is Cimarron a subversive book? Yancey is so larger-than-life; it's hard not to see him as another bit of mythmaking about "How the West Was Won." Cimarron traffics in some embarrassing racial stereotypes: the shiftless Indian, the Jewish peddler. Don't get me started on the fawning "black Isaiah" who accompanies them from Wichita, and then suffers a death of grotesque cruelty at the hands of the Osage. Part of me wonders if the effect of a character like Yancey, who enters in the land run but scorns the government policies of theft and depredation that made it possible, serves mostly to assuage the guilt of "Boomers." But Yancey's cruelty and recklessness go far in puncturing those myths as well. In the end, Cimarron struck me as a more straightforwardly Western novel than Giant, but you can't say it doesn't have its complexities.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Life was finally starting, Newt thought. Here he was below the border, about to run off a huge horse herd, and in a few days or weeks he would be going up the trail to a place he had barely even heard of. Most of the cowpokes who went north from Lonesome Dove just went to Kansas and thought that was far--but Montana must be twice as far. He couldn't imagine what such a place would look like. Jake had said it had buffalo and mountains, two things he had never seen, and snow, the hardest thing of all to imagine.

Okay, first of all: Three-fourths of Lonesome Dove doesn't even take place in the town of Lonesome Dove on the Texas-Mexico border. The whole point of the massive novel is leaving Lonesome Dove. Two aging Texas Rangers, garrulous Gus McCrae and stern Woodrow McCall, decide to give up their livery stable, which has led to a too-easy life, to lead a final cattle drive all the way from Texas to the Montana, arriving in the rich grasslands with their thousands-strong herd before other homesteaders and ranchers get there for them. Along for the ride are a motley crew of cowpokes: young Newt, who hasn't figured yet out figured out that he's Call's illegitimate son; Deets, the black tracker of preternatural skill; Jake Spoon, an unreliable gambler and womanizer; Lorena, a former prostitute in Lonesome Dove who sees Jake as her ticket to a better life in San Francisco; Dish Boggett, a talented cattle driver who is madly in love with Lorena. The story of these cattle drivers intersects with others: the Arkansas sheriff and his deputy who are looking to hang Jake Spoon, the sheriff's wife, who absconds with a group of rough-and-tumble buffalo hunters, and Gus' old flame Clara, long since settled on the Platte with her now-disabled husband.

Gus is the central character of Lonesome Dove. He's a skilled ranger and lawman, but he prefers to talk, and his incessant joking and chattering is the bane of his laconic partner, McCall. In fact, Gus gives the first couple hundred pages of Lonesome Dove, the part where the "outfit" is making plans for their cattle drive, a kind of broad comic quality that make the sudden death of a young Irish cowboy by a nest of water moccasins even more unsettling. It took me a long time to adjust my expectations for the novel; the juxtaposition of its comic tone and the brutality of the trail felt to sour to me, at times. The nadir of this, for me, was the introduction of a mysterious and barefoot young girl, with almost feral outdoor skills, who takes up with the hapless deputy Roscoe and who is--spoiler alert--almost immediately killed off in the most brutal manner, and not alone. But as the novel goes on, Gus' humor begins to seem more like a reasonable response to a life filled with unpredictable cruelty. The Irishman, the girl, are buried, and the cattle drive moves on.

Lonesome Dove seems, in many ways, like the quintessential western. For one, it's truly epic: 850 pages long and covering several thousand miles, as well as a couple dozen different character viewpoints. It's a snapshot of the American West at a moment when it seems empty, Native Americans driven back, the buffalo thinned out to near-extinction, but before the great droves of settler wagons and cattle drives that Call and McCrae know are coming. Sometimes, the Western tropes are a little too strong. I didn't like the depiction of Blue Duck, the unusually vicious Comanche outlaw who kidnaps Lorena and sells her to a group of Indians and Comancheros to be beaten and raped. Though Lonesome Dove makes some gestures toward ambivalence about Native Americans--Gus is supposed to have a more compassionate demeanor toward them than many of his peers--but Blue Duck seems like a monster straight out of American myth, the kind that has long been used to justify genocide and displacement. And I was troubled by the character of Lorena, too, who is headstrong at first, and who becomes terrified and helpless after her ordeal. Vicious Native Americans, helpless damsels.

But ultimately, I was engrossed by the vividness of the characters, and the sweep of the novel's great drama. The novel gets stronger, I think, the farther the outfit goes, and the wider its scope becomes. It's sort of a marvel, actually, that the novel doesn't falter as it brings in the Arkansas sheriff, July Johnson, or the story of Gus' old love Clara, a headstrong woman who has lost two children and whose husband now has been rendered braindead by the kick of a horse. But the novel is something like Gus and Call themselves: stifled by the lazy, talk-heavy life of a Lonesome Dove horse trader, and needing the great open space of the West in order to thrive. By the time the cattle drive arrives in Montana, it has become a legend in its own right, but the costs have been great: lives lost, men buried in unmarked graves in impossible to find places. Every real Western needs to have a measure of ambivalence about the West, and this is Lonesome Dove's. Has it been worth it, to reach Montana? Is the myth worth the men it leaves behind?

Earthworks Rising by Chadwick Allen and Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe

For many who either seek or stumble upon them, burial mounds signal loss, herald doom: dead Indians, dead savage civilizations, dead pagan pasts ground to dust and now overgrown in brush, obscured by weeds and trees. And yet for others burial mounds announce regeneration, the possibilities of reclamation and renewal; they continue to connect and bloom. Native individuals, families, communities, and nations rise up against narratives of loss and doom to reclaim and repatriate, restore and reactivate. On their lived experiences and felt knowledges. On their abilities to dream intensely. But there are no easy divisions, no clear-cut binaries of Indigenous and settler in the twenty-first century (if there ever were), and there are no easy escape routes out of dominant ideologies and worldviews.

Two weeks ago, I got to visit Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, a place I have long wanted to go: a green bluff overlooking the Mississippi, the monument is dotted with Indigenous earthwork mounds, some in the shapes of birds and bears, some perhaps over two thousand years old. In most cases they're no more than a few feet tall--you might miss them completely if they hadn't been cleared of trees and neatly mowed--but where else in what is now the United States can you see human architecture that old? To walk around them is to connect with a deeper past, and reform a present understanding of the land. Photographed from above, the bird and the bear appears, but on the ground, no effigy can be seen totally at once; you have to walk around and experience the shifting perspective of the earth to really "see."

Effigies like these have, from time to time, captured the imagination of modern writers and artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Chickasaw scholar Chadwick Allen's Earthworks Rising is a new critical work that examines some of the ways that Native American mounds and earthworks have been used in art and literature. His scope is vast, taking in non-Native works like Alice Walker's novel Meridian and 20th-century pulp novels like Mog the Mound Builder and The Horror From the Mound by Conan the Barbarian creator Robert Howard. In non-Native imaginations, earthworks tend to speak of vanished races, whose creation of the mounds is shrouded in irrecoverable mystery. No one knows why they were created, we are told, and no one knows what happened to those who made them. (Of course, we do know, because their descendants--Choctaws and Chickasaws and other Native nations--are still around.)

By contrast, the Indigenous works Allen explores offer interpretations of the earthworks that emphasize the possibility that they are still sites that produce meaning, for Native peoples and through Native epistemologies. Allen devotes chapters to the work of visual artists Jimmie Durham and Alyssa Hinton, whose brightly colored photo collages of burial mounds are contrasted with the kind of clinical cross-sections you might find in a museum gallery. Literary sources include Allison Hedge Coke's Blood Run, a poem cycle in which the Mounds themselves--and associated elements like the River and Trees--are allowed to "speak," not as mute or ghostly voices--like the Indian curse unleashed in The Horror from the Mound--but as interlocutors that connect the present to the past and the future both, and sit at the axis mundi between earth and sky. Allen's methods are a mix of recognizably academic cultural criticism and more Indigenous ways of knowing. I rolled my eyes a little at Allen's reliance on numerology to understand the structure of Blood Run, but an anecdote where Allen watches on as Choctaw scholar LeAnne Howe records a song she hears being sung by a "little girl" in a burial mound seems beyond my powers of judgment or evaluation.

Attention woman, listen to my remarks. The gravediggers are wrong. Not all the ancient burial mounds were stuffed with beloved leaders. Some contain bad people who were given everything in death that they had coveted in life. Shell beads, copper, axes, knives, pottery bowls, baskets, animal skins, blankets. There were times when good people followed the bad ones into the spirit world to care for them. Like the parent of a spoiled child, they were there to give things to the band ones. Make them comfortable so that they would not want to leave their resting place and harass the living. But when the mounds were opened by gravediggers, these flawed spirits escaped like flesh-eating flies. They passed through many changes. Always becoming predatory. Put your dead chief in a mound so he will be protected from escaping again. Give him everything in death he wanted in live. That way he will never leave it again.

Howe figures large in Allen's book, as a colleague who helps guide his thinking about the mounds themselves and their significance. On more than one occasion, Allen describes traveling to a significant earthwork site with Howe, walking around it, laying down upon it and feeling its physical presence. I'd read a couple of Howe's works--the excellent play Savage Conversations and the baseball novel Miko Kings--but not Shell Shaker, which Allen analyzes at length. Shell Shaker is a novel about two murders, which take place at different points in time but which are presented as analogs of one another: in the present, Choctaw vice chief Auda Billy's apparent murder of the chief Redford Macalester. In the past, the murder of Red Shoes, a Choctaw warrior who played the English and French off of each other and who ended up igniting a bloody war between the colonial powers, Choctaw factions, and neighboring tribes.

Redford, like Red Shoes before him, begins his career with noble ambitions that are corrupted by greed and violence. The casino he brought into the Choctaw Nation has brought economic prosperity, but also an alliance with the mafia, from whom he has been embezzling money in order to send to the Irish Republican Army (!). Like Red Shoes, he has become too much warrior and not enough peacemaker, and his belief that he can play one side of hostile forces off the other threatens to bring a lot of violence. Moreover, his ego has made him into a monster: when the book opens, we see him raping his longtime assistant and former lover Auda.

Auda, like Redford, has an analog in the past, named Anoleta. Like Auda, Anoleta is accused of Red Shoes' murder, and Auda's mother Susan--like Anoleta's mother Shakbatina--takes credit for the deed to spare her daughter's life. The parallels don't end there: Auda's two sisters each have an analog, as do her father, her uncle, her cousin. Howe gives us a sense not so much of the past repeating itself as a kind of mythical story that emanates in different temporal registers; past and present are brought together and made the same, thus rejecting traditional notions of Indigenous disappearance or disintegration. It was too much for me, frankly. Howe juggles the two time periods, and the numerous figures between them, with careful dexterity, but I found myself easily lost, wishing that the two stories had been simplified. The particulars of the Choctaw Civil War that Red Shoes ushers in were especially opaque to me. I had a much better time with the present narrative, whose magical realist elements and focus on generational ties reminded me of Louise Erdrich, and not merely, or even particularly, because of the novel's Indigenous themes.

In one memorable scene, which looms large in Allen's analysis of the novel, Auda's aunts are kneading dough in the kitchen when it turns into mud. And not just any mud: the rich black earth of the family's ancestral Choctaw homelands, in Mississippi. In visions they are instructed to take the dead chief Macalester's body to Mississippi and bury it in a mound for safekeeping, along with the embezzled cash. Far from being the burial of an honored person, the mound becomes a way to keep a troublesome spirit from making more trouble, and perhaps from reappearing in a different time, in a different guise, the way that Red Shoes reappears as Redford Macalester. There's some resonance here with the despised "curse" narrative of The Horror From the Mound that goes unremarked upon, but both Allen and Howe depict the act of burying Redford in a mound as a sort of kindness as well as a defense. By reintegrating Redford into the land, they are not merely imprisoning him, but bringing him back into the fold--bringing him home.

Along the railings at Effigy Mounds National Monument, you can see prayer ties, little scraps of cloth tied there, that mark it as a sacred site. Not a site of death or disappearance, of a vanished mystery, but a living place that still speaks to Indigenous people who visit it. I really got a kick of reading both Earthworks Rising and Shell Shaker, which helped me see these mounds a little more fully, a little more clearly.

Miko Kings by LeAnne Howe

"You know, just about everyone in America believes Abner Doubleday invented baseball."

"A myth," says Ezol, touching the water glass absentmindedly, then pushing it away. "How plausible is it that white people, who live by the clock and sword, would invent a game without time, one that must be played counter-clockwise?"

The 1907 Miko Kings out of the town of Ada are the greatest Indian baseball team that ever lived. They are anchored by Blip Bleen, the Indian Territory's most powerful hitter, and Hope Little Leader, their tenacious and brilliant pitcher. Their ultimate test: a nine-game series against the Seventh Cavalrymen out of Fort Sill, the very same U.S. Army outpost that keeps the warrior Geronimo imprisoned or own show, and whose supporters have not forgotten Custer's Last Stand. The symbolism isn't lost on anybody, but for many the game is reenacting these in even more literal ways, like the gamblers who stand to take over the Miko Kings if they lose the ninth game. The game comes at the pinnacle of the allotment era of U.S.-Native relations, when everything that the Indians own has begun to pass into white hands.

I loved LeAnne Howe's play Savage Conversations, which imagines a relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and a the spirit of a "Savage Indian" killed by her husband, the president, in Minnesota. There are many echoes of the play in Miko Kings, especially in the way history becomes instantiated in a spirit or apparition: the story of the Miko Kings is collected by a Choctaw journalist who is visited by the ghost of Ezol Day, the brilliant young postal clerk and lover of Blip Bleen, who was a witness to the climactic series nearly a hundred years prior. Ezol insists to the journalist that baseball is an Indian game, and that its strangeness--"a game without time, one that must be played counter-clockwise"--has its echoes in the same Choctaw language and philosophy that allow her to time travel to the future and converse with her descendant. A large section of the novel's middle is designed to represent Ezol's first-hand diaries and correspondence, down to the childish script, along with cuttings from newspapers and photographs.

Miko Kings echoes Savage Conversations, too, in its interest in bodily mutilation, as in the sections where we see an aged Hope Little Leader, languishing in an old folks' home in the 1960s and missing his hands. The story of how Hope lost his hands, we suspect, will turn out to be the same story as the final game against the Seventh Cavalrymen. And though the novel has an essential optimism, I think, centered on the metaphorical possibility of returning through time, the loss of Hope's hands seems to suggest an irrevocable loss that mirrors the loss of land, the loss of place, the loss of community. Losing these things, Howe suggests, we lose a part of ourselves.

There are a few too many ideas in Miko Kings, I think, in too little space. I was never quite able to mentally incorporate the story of Justine, Hope's beloved, who becomes a Black nationalist militant in New Orleans. And the skipping between narrative points of view--from Hope to Ezol to the Kings' owner to a journalist interviewing Justine--took some of the power away from the frame narrative, which comes out of the narrator's research into the Kings and her own past. But Miko Kings is bold and inventive, and it seems silly to complain that it is too full of riches. I hate conceding that there's anything cosmic or profound about baseball people, because baseball people are annoying about that sort of thing. But Miko Kings persuaded me.

The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday

I remember coming out upon the northern Great Plains in the late spring. There were meadows of blue and yellow wildflowers on the slopes, and I could see the still, sunlit plain below, reaching away out of sight. At first there is no discrimination in the eye, nothing but the land itself, whole and impenetrable. But then the smallest things began to stand out of the depths--herds and rivers and groves--and each of these has perfect being in terms of distance and of silence and of age. Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

The Kiowa people, as their stories say, came out of the Rocky Mountains and into the Great Plains hundreds of years ago, settling in central Oklahoma by a hill called Rainy Mountain. The hallmarks of Kiowa culture were developed along the way: their religion, centered on a figure called Tai-me, their ways of hunting, the horse prowess that helped them, along with the Comanches, dominated the southern plains for a century and a half. When his grandmother died, N. Scott Momaday--a Kiowa who grew up not, like his grandmother, near Rainy Mountain, but in New Mexico--decided to follow the footsteps of the first Kiowa to his grandmother's home, and The Way to Rainy Mountain records his observations.

But Momaday's travels and reminiscences only make up a third of the book. "The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices," he writes. "The first is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice." The first vignette, for example, begins with Momaday's father's voice telling the story of the ancient Kiowa emerging into the world through a hollow log. On the opposite page, the historical voice tells us, "They called themselves Kwuda and later Tepda, both of which mean 'coming out.'" And below that, Momaday records his own impressions of coming out into the plains for the first time, the beautiful and simple description I have excerpted at the top of the page.

"There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout," Momaday writes, "a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself." The three voices, woven together, have a remarkable cumulative power. When they seem markedly different, they seem to suggest that the present and the past can rhyme, and that even though our language puts us at a great distance from our ancestors, something between us remains unbroken. When the voices seem strangely similar, as happens more and more later in the book, as Al Momaday's stories of the past combine with Momaday's own memory of his grandparents and great-grandparents, the past seems somehow literally present--transubstantiated. And while, as David Treuer notes in Native American Fiction: A User's Guide, claims about modernist writers drawing from oral culture are often cant, one can see how the voice of legend has influenced the style Momaday uses here and in A House Made of Dawn. Al, like N. Scott, has a way with words, and more: the book is illustrated with very impressive black-and-white drawings by Al himself.

I was touched by The Way to Rainy Mountain. Clearly the book emerges from grief, grief over the loss of Momaday's grandmother, but a loss, too, of a living link to the past at a time when the Kiowa language and culture are at risk of disappearing. Wouldn't it be a shame if the "historical voice" were the only one that remained? But Momaday's pilgrimage to Rainy Mountain, and the threading of voices together into a single tight braid, seem like a preservative and hopeful act. 

Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford

Granny held tightly to the roof outside the rolled-down window and muttered something in Cherokee that Justine couldn't understand. Lula's shouting only goaded John Joseph. He pressed the car faster up the big hill into town. The wind whipped in the windows, and Justine forgot for a minute what would happen when they got home and the real questions and the crying bean. She couldn't know how in a few months she'd be flooded with a crippling love for another human being that would wound he for the rest of her days, how her insides would be wiped clean, burdened, and saved by a kid who'd come kicking into this world with Justine's own blue eyes, a full head of black hair, and lips Justine would swear looked just like a rosebud. For now, that little car filled with three--almost four--generations flew. And when they dropped over the top of the hill, Justine threw her hands up, her mouth agape in wonder.

Justine lives in the Sequoyah Hills of Oklahoma with her mother Lula, a fanatic Pentecostal, and her grandmother, who keeps the old ways of her Cherokee upbringing alive. She's not allowed to bare her arms or legs, but that doesn't keep her from being victimized--it never does, does it--when she's raped by an older Choctaw man at the age of fifteen. Her daughter Reney grows up ping-ponging across the Red River between the oil-scarred fields of North Texas where Justine's cowboy husband Pitch lives, and Oklahoma's Indian Country, where--I'm sorry, but it's a cursed phrase to type--four generations of powerful women reside over one roof.

That's selling Crooked Hallelujah short: it's never glib, but I found it often stepped right up to the edge of cloying. To its credit, the novel is attentive to the ways that Lula's Holiness Church traumatizes Justine and Reney in turn, even as it holds that the power of love between mothers and daughters is sacrosanct. I was interested in the way charismatic Christianity colors the dynamic between these women, for good and bad, and veils in some way the connection to the Cherokee heritage represented by the aging Granny. A healthy respect for the ways of the heartland is at the heart of the novel, and not just the ranchers, cowboys, and oilhands: several key scenes take place at a Dairy Queen, and everyone seems to constantly be drinking Dr. Pepper.

But mostly I found Crooked Hallelujah to be too scattered to really enjoy: third-person narratives are interrupted by first-person ones, and I had a hard time telling Justine and Reney in these sections, and even sometimes Lula. But I absolutely did not want to be distracted by the first-person narratives of ancillary characters, even when, like Pitch's callous, aging father, they provide some of the novel's more challenging and interesting moments. I couldn't stand the section from the point of view of Justine's neighbor, a wayward young man who loses his mother before becoming fast friends with a lesbian couple who move in down the street. What's that about?

An even more baffling choice--although perhaps the best choice in the novel--comes at the end, when the novel suddenly becomes a work of dystopian fiction. The hyperrealism, the sentimentalism, give way to a vision of ecological collapse: the oil fields of North Texas where an older Justine is still living are beset by earthquakes, fires, horde of locusts. These things have their foreshadowing in more mundane catastrophes--a tornado and a brushfire--in the book's earlier chapters, but nothing prepared me for the final chapter, in which Reney and her new husband must decide whether to force Justine to leave her home, which has become the epicenter of the End of Days. Is it a testament to the power of love to overcome everything? No, it deserves more credit than that. But it does open up, at the last available moment, a possibility for what the novel might have been, a possibility I think I might have liked more.