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Adoption as National Fantasy in Barbara Kingsolver's Pigs in Heaven and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners Kristina Fagan Pigs in Heaven, by American novelist Barbara Kingsolver, and The Diviners, by Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, are nationalistic fantasies. The novels allegorically reflect the authors' dreams for racial and cultural reconciliation in the United States and Canada, respectively. These fantasies revolve around orphaned characters who achieve, through literal or metaphorical adoptions, cross-cultural identities that include both Native and white cultures. Pigs ill Heaven is the sequel to The Bean Trees, in which a three-year-old Cherokee orphan is anonymously given to a white woman, who then adopts the child and names her "Turtle."l Pigs in Heaven is set three years later, when a lawyer from the Cherokee Nation finds out about the adoption and tries to have the girl returned to the tribe. In a resolution that manages to keep everyone happy, Turtle ends up with an extended family that peacefully mingles Native American and white cultures. In The Diviners, Morag Gunn is a white orphan who knows next to nothing about her birth family. During her childhood, Morag acquires a cultural identity from her adoptive father's invented tales of her Scottish heritage. Later, she has a child with a Metis man, connecting her identity and her daughter 's to that of Native people.2 These two novels strike a deep and perhaps unconscious chord in European settlers and their descendants, because they enact the desire for a nation that combines and reconciles white and Native peoples. In the settler imagination, Native people represent an authentic North American identity. The fantasy of becoming indigenous, or "going Indian;' reflects a longing to be confidently at home on the North American continent. Indigenization also offers a definite break from the Old World.3 One of the most powerful ways to "go Indian" is to be adopted by Native people. This adoption theme has been played out in the writings of Thoreau, in the art of Charles Russell, in the historical figures of Hawkeye and Long Lance, and in innumerable films and novels.4 A popular example of this adoption narrative is the 1990 film Dances with Wolves.5 But while the desire for adoption by Native people is a powerful theme in settler art and literature, the adoption of native children by whites has been a common real-life occurrence. Once again, this practice fulfilled settler desires: 251 252 Imagining Adoption pragmatically, it filled a demand for adoptable children; politically, it responded to white society's desire to control Native people. Kingsolver and Laurence are two white writers who draw on settler fantasies of both being adopted by and adopting Natives. I use the term adoption in a broad sense, to refer to both adultadult and parent-child relationships where the adoptee is taken in and given a home and an identity. Pigs in Heaven is about the literal adoption of a native orphan by a white family, but it is resolved by the "adoption" of that family by a native community. In The Diviners, Morag experiences a lifelong desire for a familial , cultural, and national sense of belonging. This search began with her adoption at three years old, and she repeats this adoptive pattern, looking to each man with whom she is involved for a source of identity. Through her metis daughter, she finally finds a family as well as a connection to indigenous people and hence to an "authentically" Canadian identity. Both orphans, Turtle and Morag, finally become the sites of unions between white and native people. Yet these novels privilege the settlers' point of view. The adoptees are the distillations of and the solutions to national dilemmas, appealing to the hopes and desires of their largely white audiences. The Native is an essential part of that audience's fantasy. However, while the transracial nationalism celebrated by Kingsolver and Laurence helps build the settlers' identity, it does not help and may even hurt Native identity. Novels have often played a role in building the ideal of national unity and harmony. D. H. Lawrence wrote that the friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumpo in The Last of the Mohicans represented the dream of "a new society" and "a new world epoch."6 Huck Finn and Jim were another attempt, in Leslie Fiedler's words, at a"dream of reconciliation."? Such narratives allow readers to imagine their country as they wish it to be. Benedict Anderson argues that nations...

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