The Women's Warrior Society (review)

Lois Beardslee has a thing for the formally educated, libraries, Chevy cars, and a whole litany of observable truths about being on the "Other" side of Indigenous tracks, not to be mistaken for the wrong side but from the breath of a finely tuned she-wolf. In rousing narration Beardslee digs at and licks the wounds left by "Abusers" who are "born of tradition, tradition of history, tradition of eminent domain, manifest destiny, slave-holding" (8). Burnt wood comes to mind, as her writing beckons dark and porous images like charcoal from ashes of the abused. I had not heard of Lois Beardslee prior to accepting the opportunity to review her book. I thought of other "warrior women" works I've read, including the late Paula Gunn Allen's The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), Andrea Smith's Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), and Asian American author Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1977). Beardslee is among these writers but not of them, given her own mix of narratives and raplike lyrics professing what is relevant now as it was in the past:

One would think that those Indian mothers and fathers and all of those other family members would get used to the idea that their children had to be improved and adapted to meet the needs of the dominant society. One would think they could let go. But it didn't work that way. Those mothers, they cried empty-heart-and-arm cries echoing into the nights and against the trees across the lake and against the stars above the prairies and against the sun and the wind and the empty spaces that used to be filled with the future. They clawed and they grasped and they lunged and they wept and they clung until their fingernails tore every time their babies were wrenched away from them and tied to the back haunches of a horse, or heaved, writhing, onto a horse-drawn wagon, shoved into a plane, a train, or the dark and soul-less Indian-child eating bowels of a public school bus.

(6–7)

Her politicized and reflexive efforts offer a strong sampling of Native and non-Native relations based on character types found on reservations, particularly the Ojibwe lands of her ancestors, and in urban communities, yet other characters appear in her work as if by coincidence. Among Beardslee's portraits is that of a Jewish male who has done or had Indian women; she calls it "Wimen Warriors Are Not Born, They Are Made." Beardslee says he said:

"I grew up in New York City. Nothin' f . . . 'in scares me. My great-grand-parents were immigrants. They homesteaded. Made something out of that land in upstate New York that the Indians couldn't even hold on to . . . I got an Indian bitch to marry me anyhow. I'm the boss now . . . You know, even if people don't know how ignorant and unsophisticated they are, you can straighten them out. You can trick them, tell them anything, and they don't act like they suspect anything. Don't even know you're persuading them. That's why I like living here in New Mexico. It's like shooting fish in a barrel. They need me."

(30–31)

Perhaps it is this heavy carbon scribing that qualifies this book as "experimental fiction." Quite honestly, she had to have actually met this person, having produced so accurate a shadow persona for us to ponder. Beardslee's steadier portraits are of warrior women themselves at a tribal library described in "OK, These Wolves, They Walk into a Library." This is where she releases her imagination and attracts light, starting her vignette with "OK, these three Indian women warriors walk into a bar. Shiiistaaa! You can still visualize that, can't you? You are so indoctrinated with that concept it always works" (54). Following suit, she admonishes conditioned...