In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Unearthing the Chumash Presence in The Sharpest Sight
  • Melody Graulich (bio)

The world was like that, full of hidden, half-forgotten things.

Louis Owens, The Sharpest Sight

He had arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now.

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“Tangled, mixed, interrelated.” In these three words police deputy Mundo Morales succinctly sums up Louis Owens’s representation of the racial history of California. “Indians, Mexicans, gringos, mixed-bloods” are all “caught up” in the story of migration, dispossession, erasure, and survivance that is The Sharpest Sight (197). Throughout the novel Mundo ponders his family’s role in this colonial story, knowing that the “Morales[es] used to own all this place, . . . given it by a Spanish king” but recognizing that his family is not an innocent victim of the “gringos,” that their dispossession is part of a larger pattern:

And it belonged to the Indians and we sold it for a quart of whiskey, Mundo thought. That’s all it had taken Dan Nemi’s grandfather to get his cattle onto the grant and begin the takeover that, in only ten years, would make him sole owner of all the Morales land. Back when it was illegal for a Mexican or an Indian to testify against a white person in court.

(42–43) [End Page 1]

While Owens’s second California novel, Bone Game, exposes the history of the Ohlone, who lived, and live, on the northern coast of Monterey Bay, The Sharpest Sight is set in the coastal foothills at the southern end of the Salinas Valley, Owens’s childhood home, which, as Hoey McCurtain points out, “all used to be Chumash country, you know. Everything you see. And now there ain’t no Chumash here at all, and we’re here. . . . Us Indians are a mixed-up bunch. It’s like somebody took a big stick and stirred us all up” (19).

Attention has been paid to the Choctaw mythology and history in the novel; to Owens’s satirical references to canonical writers; to his use of “blended mythologies” (Dwyer 43); to his style, which “conjoins indigenous and alien cultural materials” (Taylor 221); but no one has explored how Owens, attentive to the interplay between land, local Indigenous identities, and intersecting tribal histories, crafts the novel on remnants of Chumash culture through nature symbolism and landscape descriptions that reference Chumash stories and through the Chumash material objects Cole and his brother dig up.1 The Chumash also surface in the (erased) genealogy of one of the novel’s main characters. Mundo knew he “was part [generically] Indian, though no one in the family had ever liked to admit it. Pure Castillian, they had always pretended” (197). Not until the novel’s end does he find out that he is descended from the Chumash. Hoey turns out to be wrong that “there ain’t no Chumash here at all” as Owens subtly counters the age-old story of the “vanished” Indians.

In this novel so self-consciously about “design” and interrelationships, Owens drops brief references to the Chumash into the landscape of the text for the reader to unearth. An early passage establishes the model for the reader.

[Cole McCurtain] would think about the people who had made [the arrowheads and stone figure], trying to imagine their lives in the coastal hills. Chumash, a people who seemed to have vanished into the pale hills the way the river disappeared into the sand. He’d heard that there were a few of them left somewhere, but he’d never seen one of them. And then he and Attis, who were Indians too, sort of, came to dig up what those vanished people had made. It was funny. He would [End Page 2] try to understand the convergence, what strange design could have brought Choctaw blood so far from Mississippi to find these Chumash things.

(53–54)

Cole’s brother, Attis (both, at this point in the novel, “sort of” Indians), found the arrowheads and the “white stone doll . . . as crudely formed as the arrowheads were fine, its face and limbs merely suggested by the carver” while digging a cave behind their house (53). (In...

pdf