A Society Based on Names: Ray Young Bear's Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives
In "Native American Indian Identities: Autoinscriptions and the Cultures of Names," Gerald Vizenor affirms that "the cultures of tribal identities are heard in names and stories."1 In Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives, Ray Young Bear uses names and stories to explore tribal identity.2 Published in 1992, Black Eagle Child is a complex text, both autobiographical and metafictional, that highlights issues of personal, cultural, ethnic, racial, national, and tribal identities as it employs paratactic constructions to explore the state of living between two cultures. In a self-conscious narrative that pays close attention to language and the disparate codes of discourse in intercultural settings, Young Bear's use of proper names merits careful scrutiny. Young Bear peppers his poetry and prose with proper names both partial and complete, names gleaned from the competing cultures of literature, music, politics, and commercialism, names garnered from both the dominant U.S. culture and the Mesquakie culture. Together with the citations from popular culture, the scattered names serve both to represent the bombardment of cultural codes that constitute late twentieth-century life and to highlight questions of identity.
In his own discussion of identity, Vizenor asserts both that "Native American Indian identities are created in stories, and names are essential to a distinctive personal nature"3 and that "Native American Indian identities bear the memories and solace of heard stories; the cultures of tribal identities are inscrutable creations."4 While Black Eagle Child may [End Page 127] seem an inscrutable creation on a first reading, a close reading of the text can help trace out how names are essential to personal identities and how identities bear the memories and solace of heard stories.
From the beginning of Black Eagle Child, names are related to tribal identity. As the first-person narrator explains,
Although our foreheads were not misshapened with cedar slats from childhood to denote tribal class, our Black Eagle Child society was based on names. Our ancestors' bones did not have glittering jewels inlaid in their teeth to tell us of social structures; instead names were carried from one fortunate or unfortunate generation to the next.5
Names denote identity and status within the Tribal Settlement and names—clan names, personal names in all their variations, names of commercial products, false names—pervade the narrative. In a metafictional narrative that struggles with the question of subjectivity, the name of the narrator/protagonist itself becomes a contested site of identity.
The first-person narrator, Edgar Bearchild, has a name that is an obvious play off the author's name: Young Bear. Various versions of the protagonist's name compete in the text. He is "Child Edgar Bear,"6 "Childish Bear,"7 "Principal Bear"8 and more. Imposing a definitive name can be a gesture of control, authorized by metaphysical practice and implying knowledge of the object. Employing different versions of a person's name undercuts that control and challenges the belief that the self is unique or always the same.
That Young Bear gives a version of his own name to his protagonist brings to mind the questions Derrida raises in Passions about what it means when you have given your name to X and what it may mean if X does not want the gift of that name.
What returns to your name, to the secret of your name, is the ability to disappear in your name. And thus not to return to itself, which is the condition of the gift (for example, of the name) but also of all expansion of the self, of all augmentation of self, of all auctoritas.9
In this autobiographical narrative, the character Edgar Bearchild can be read as an expansion of the self, of all augmentation of the self, of Ray Young Bear, the two sharing and contesting all auctoritas.10
Bearchild recounts that he...
