Response to "A Half-Breed's Dream Vacation," by Tiffany Midge
A
Half-Breed’s Dream Vacation, by Tiffany Midge, is an ironic, absurd, and
disturbing story that reads as a poetic travel log. The story, which details an eight-day visit
to the reservation from which the narrator’s mother hails (as well as a road
trip), suggests a world in which all is a simulacrum and all is absurd; and that
behind every action there lies a history of confusion, re-appropriation, violence,
and cultural misunderstanding. The
narrator seems to struggle to find meaning within this twisted and absurd
cultural imagery, searching for un-ironic pride and cultural value.
The irony with which the narrator
describes her trip permeates the bulk of the story’s description. The tone is often flippant and disengaged,
overly-clever perhaps, as when we read a description of the town of Poplar’s
Independence Day celebration:
Crepe-paper floats are sailing through
Main Street carrying 500 years of forgiveness, 216 years of red-blooded
American pride, and 100 years of a prospector’s wet dream. Smokie the Bear is lumbering behind a Dodge
Dakota four-by-four filled with buffalo robes and Indian princesses waving
sparklers. The Poplar Junior High
marching band is creeping behind the pioneer’s horse-drawn wagon to the tune of
the motion-picture theme song “Eye of the Tiger . . . BIA agents in ten-gallon
hats are dishing out miniature flags to a congregation of undercover AIM
activists posing as nuns and
cheerleaders (69).
We can see the abundant cultural myths and markers here –
buffalo robes, horse-drawn wagons, cheerleaders, Smokie the Bear, etc., and note the way in
which the narrator lists them all, absurdly mashed together, both telling every
story and telling no story at all.
Nothing, furthermore, is exactly what it seems, as we see with the BIA
agents (Bureau of Indian Affairs) who are disguised and in contact with the AIM
(American Indian Movement) activists. As
R.J. Tudor points at as well, she makes frequent mention throughout the text of
vehicles with Indian names, such as Dakota, Winnebago, and Apache, as we see
above (Tudor 200). Similarly, elsewhere
in the text, we see the appearance of other bizarrely commoditized elements of Indian
culture, such as “Indian bow, arrow, and knife set, wrapped up in a slick
package of artificial African leopard skin,” on sale at a souvenir shop near
the Crazy Horse memorial.
The flippant
and disengaged manner in which the speaker describes these events is made even
more obvious by the tone which she adopts when writing a postcard to her fellow
workers back home:
“Hey guys! Today I witnessed 500 years crammed into a mini-segment of 60 minutes. Andy Rooney would love this! After today, I know for sure that the melting pot is definitely melting. Perhaps we should recycle it and repair the Liberty Bell. Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. (69)
However,
this disengaged and ironic tone is far from merely humorous (though it is that
too) and is not nearly as disengaged as it may first appear. As Tudor points out, “She suggests that an
ironic view of life may be the only way to survive as a “mixed-up halfbreed” in
a mixed-up world” (Tudor 200). The pain,
suffering, poverty, misery, and boredom that we see throughout the text are
very real, even when engaged within an ironic manner.
At times the narrator leaves the
irony to the side. We read for instance, of “Alice Brought Plenty,” (note even
here the clever use of names that sound “Indian,” such as one might come up
with after a vigorous viewing of Dances
With Wolves), who “arrives at the house delivering years of regret. Her shoulders sag from balancing buckets of
accumulated tears. Her mother’s tears,
her grandmother’s tears, her sister’s tears, her own tears” (70). The description which follows, telling of how
Cousin Cookie “repairs her damaged heart,” is neither disengaged nor ironic,
but rather lyrical and incredibly moving:
Cookie gathers the fragments patiently, tenderly, as if she’s collecting fragile and valuable pieces of glass. Alice stands waiting at the door while Cookie repairs her damaged heart. With surgical grace, Cookie bastes the brittle splinters using her own regretful years as a guide. She stitches Alice’s heart with strands of her grandmother’s hair. The needles she uses are slivers of her children’s bones. She knots the ends of the threads with mercy, with blood. The vessels are secure the chambers sealed. (70)
The narrator
also spends a great deal of this story in detailing ways in which the outside
world misunderstands the Indians. In a
particularly humorous example, a “cow-chip” lottery (a sort of bingo in which
the winner is chosen based on the first square on which an animal defecates) is
confused by the outside world with a holy shrine and a national security
matter. Oliver Stone, Jane Fonda, Mother
Theresa, Elvis and Phil Donahue all make
an appearance and get involved in some way.
This very postmodern method of bringing
in such a cast of characters succeeds in heightening the sense of misunderstanding
and confusion between cultures, making what is truly absurd even more so.
Sadly,
much of life on the reservation seems merely boringly cyclical and
repetitive. “Ennui covers the most
hopeful of days with a blanket of apathy.
Nobody knows what to do” (72). What
they do, in this case, is head off on a road trip, where they see a familiar
cast of fear and misunderstanding and commoditization, “A once magnificent past
. . . reduced to Hallmark cards postmarked galaxies away” (72).
All of
this notwithstanding, there are moments of grace within this story, moments in
which time seems to stop and that which is false, commoditized, and depressing
seems to fall away. We see one moment
toward the end of the story—in the midst of a wild and seemingly degraded
celebration, in which everyone eats “fry bread” (basically just what it sounds
like—an incredibly unhealthy food, often consumed on reservations, which became
popular in tandem with the destruction of the traditional native diet and the “commodity”
welfare distribution of white wheat flour), drinks Coca-Cola, and the male
dancers “are wearing Ray-Bans” while “The jingle dancers are chiming and
clanging years of accumulated Copenhagen-chew top lids.” In the midst of this very postmodern
spectacle of hybridized “authenticity,” we see a “solemn ceremony” that rings
with peace and calm, and which is described by the narrator with nary a hint of
irony:
A tall Indian man with elk teeth dangling
around his neck and deer antlers crowning his head slowly marches to the center
of the arena. Everyone watches, waits,
listens to him offer a prayer to the spirits that preside. He shakes a tortoise rattle over his head to
each of the four directinos. He sings a
holy song in a barely audible whisper. He
leans down toward his moccasinned feet and tentatively, slow, slow, slowly
plucks the fallen feather from the sawdust as if he’s recovering sharp glass
amid water and graciously returns it to his owner. The dancing resumes” (75).
Works Cited
Tudor, R.J. Review of “Outlaws, Renegades, and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed” by Tiffany Midge
World Literature Today , Vol. 71, No. 1 (Winter, 1997),
p. 200
Response to "Indian Boarding School: The Runaways," by Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, the author of the
poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” is a member of the Turtle Mountain
Band of the Chippewa Indians, and one of the most important authors of the
Native American Renaissance. Interestingly,
her father was a German-American, and her mother’s heritage was both
French-American and Ojibwe. Both of her
parents worked at an Indian boarding school, creating what we might see as a
very interesting take on this subject, considered by many to be a shameful
attempt to “Americanize” the children of Indian nations, thereby eradicating
Indian culture.
In
an interview with Henry Louis Gates in the PBS series Faces of America, Erdrich discusses the cultural (and legal)
importance of family history and land, both themes with which she engages in
this poem, as she does in many of the other poems in the collection from which
it has been borrowed (the name of the collection is Jacklight). In particular,
this poem examines the attempts by a student at an Indian boarding school to
run away—that is, to run home, even
in the seeming knowledge of the fact that to run away is a futile act that will
result in (further) punishment.
Movement
is an important theme in this poem, as it has been of course in the turbulent
history of Native Americans in the United States, forced to leave ancestral
lands for reservations (at times forced to move again when reservation land was
seen to contain a valuable resource). In
particular, the movement we see here is an attempt to move home, for while the
poem refers to “runaways,” the imagery tends toward destinations rather than
points of departure. Furthermore, the
process of heading home is unsteady and filled with peril—it is a dangerous and
lurching journey. We read:
Home’s
the place we head for in our sleep.
Boxcars
stumbling north in our dreams
don’t
wait for us. We catch them on the run. (26)
Movement in this poem is depicted
as a painful process, an examination of old wounds and scars, so familiar to
the speaker as to be intimate. These old
wounds are drawn across the very land itself, depicted like a physical body,
something almost human. These wounds
too, so intimate and well-known, serve as proof of a past, a map which, when
read properly, can lead the speaker home.
The
rails, old lacerations that we love
shoot
parallel across the face and break
just
under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars
you
can’t get lost. Home is the place they
cross. (26)
This
movement toward home, however intimate and well-known, is still doomed from the
beginning of the voyage. From a physical
and literal standpoint, this is because this voyage is a thing of dreams—“Home’s
the place we head for in our sleep”—and reality awaits the sleeper upon
wakening—“We know the sheriff’s waiting for us at midrun / to take us back.” Furthermore, even considering that this act
of running away is being re-lived in a dream, we see that the power of the law
is strong, and that failure in the face of such power is a distinct and all too
possible outcome. From a more
metaphorical standpoint, however, we see perhaps a retelling of the words that
make up Thomas Wolfe’s oft-repeated book title—You Can’t Go Home Again—and can understand from this that attempts
to return home, to truly return to a primordial home, are always doomed in
light all that has been faced and defaced in the time of one’s absence.
While
this return to home is perhaps impossible, in the face of wounds, changes, and
a violent and powerful authority, there are means to reconstructing home. Dreams, we see, provide a powerful narrative
of return, futile though it may be, and the very act of remembering has a
certain power as well. Remembering, we
see, brings with it understanding, though this clarity is perhaps fleeting:
Our
brushes cut the stone in watered arcs
and
in the soak frail outlines shiver clear
a
moment, things us kids pressed on the dark
face
before it hardened, pale, remembering
delicate
old injuries, the spines of names and leaves. (27)
It is these moments, when “frail
outlines shiver clear,” which are perhaps the most important for the speaker’s
return to home, for these are the moments in which she can take some real
action, “remembering / delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves”
(27).
See Also
Faces of America: An Interview with Louise Erdrich Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
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