"Look for the Color Red": Recovering Janet Campbell Hale's The Jailing of Cecelia Capture

For many activist Native women of this hemisphere, the concern with "home" involves a concern with "homeland." Even when Native women activists no longer reside on their ancestral land bases (though many still do), they continue to defend the tribal sovereignty of their own communities as well as communities of other indigenous peoples.

—Inés Hernández-Ávila, "Relocations upon Relocations: Home, Language, and Native American Women's Writings"

In the 1980s, a number of Native feminist writers took up urban life in their work: Paula Gunn Allen in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), Linda Hogan in her poetry, Wendy Rose, Beth Brant, and Joy Harjo, among others.¹ The woman in Harjo's well-known poem "The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window," from She Had Some Horses (1983), is not unlike Janet Campbell Hale's Cecelia or Allen's Ephanie, whose negotiations of the cityscape are complicated by issues of gender—motherhood, sexism, relationships with men, and being "at home" in a new domestic space. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985) is one of these early urban Indian texts: unlike Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), which depict scenes in the city, Hale's book primarily takes place off the reservation, outside Indian Country as it is traditionally conceived.² The novel begins as protagonist Cecelia Capture has been arrested for drunk driving and welfare fraud. The remainder of the novel narrates Capture's memories of the events that have led up to this moment—her childhood on the reservation and her decision to move to San Francisco-from the perspective of her jail cell.³ Hale's novel is interesting for a number of reasons: the scant attention it has received (although nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the book has fallen into relative obscurity); its decisive break with the reservation novel tradition; its articulation of the urban experience during a formative political period—namely 1960s San Francisco; its consideration of the intersection of gender and race; and its redefinition of Indian identity in the spaces outside the reservation. Hale's protagonist attempts to maintain her indigenous identity in the city; however, she seems reluctant to join the San Francisco Indian community and she especially avoids the "Sidewalk Indians."⁴ What saves her from a tragic end is her memory of the takeover of Alcatraz in 1969, an event that symbolizes the possibility of Indian agency, and, I would argue, female power, in the city.⁵

Initial reviews of the novel were mixed, and few critics since have discussed the work.⁶ Ernest Stromberg argues that Cecelia Capture has not received much critical attention, because it lacks "explicit signifiers of 'Indianness,'" which he defines as "traces of specific oral traditions, symbols from the Native culture, and articulations of an indigenous spirituality and worldview" (102). Stromberg writes, "While the novel features an Indian protagonist, there is little else that is explicitly Indian, in ways we might identify as 'traditional,' about the novel" (103). Frederick Hale charges that Cecelia Capture is "detribalized" in the urban space, that she has "no tribal vision" (52; 61). Accordingly, one's proximity to "tribe" seems to determine how much "tribal vision" one might maintain. In Mixedblood Messages, Louis Owens describes the features that make Indian novels sellable: "First, a novel should be immediately recognizable as 'Indian,' which means it must very visibly present signifiers conforming to publishers' and readers' expectations of what 'Indian' is" (70). Among the signifiers Owens names are a reservation setting, poverty, and alcoholism (71; 72). He criticizes Hale's writing as falling into what he calls the "Chief Doom" school of literature (72). While Owens contends that novels like Hale's are not "explicitly Indian," I believe the novel is "explicitly Indian," given the setting and experience of Hale's protagonist. By the end of the novel, Cecelia Capture's decision to pursue a legal career in order to work for her tribe is a clear indication of her "Indianness," or at least of...