Tell Me, Grandmother: Traditions, Stories, and Cultures of Arapaho People (review)

I learned to tolerate white culture because it was my growing up environment but my Arapaho ancestry took over at birth, and never felt like anything but an Indian. During the fourteen years of assimilation into the white man’s way of life, my mind, body and spirit became more and more Arapaho. (19)

Autobiography holds a significant place in American Indian literatures. Eastman, Bonnin, and Standing Bear penned life stories for popular audiences, as did Mourning Dove, Sara Winnemucca, Copway, and Apess. If we include “as told to” stories (from the iconic Black Elk Speaks to Son of Old Man Hat and Lakota Woman), the rich corpus of orations, and the many fictional works that are explicitly autobiographical, the life story is, indeed, an enduring genre of American Indian letters.

This also is a literature with a purpose, often intended as much for non-native as native, and crafted to contest toxic stereotypes produced by colonialism. Away the savage, and enter the fully developed human being, heir to a complex cultural tradition, and able—if allowed—to participate meaningfully in American life. I am an Indian and an American, to paraphrase Charles Eastman.

Enter Virginia Sutter’s Tell Me, Grandmother: Traditions, Stories, and Cultures of the Arapaho People. Part life story, part history, intended for Natives and non-Natives, Sutter’s autobiography also seems designed to reconnect the author with her Northern Arapaho heritage by, in a sense, recontextualizing her lived experiences through Arapaho history and culture. This is accomplished, or attempted perhaps, by imagined conversations with Goes In Lodge, Sutter’s paternal great grandmother, a historical figure who “provides” Sutter with critical insights that the author then communicates to the reader.

Imagined conversations with her ancestor/historical consultant distinguish what otherwise can be read as a fairly conventional story of separation and loss, followed by healing and renewal, and ultimately affirmation of the therapeutic power of homeland, Native cultural values, and tribal community. Born during the Great Depression, raised by non-Indian relatives (her mother was white), Sutter struggled with school, though not so much with academics as with the racism in her Wyoming classrooms, and the rigid discipline of the BIA boarding school at Haskell, which she attended for just one year. From there came a variety of odd jobs, a stint in the U.S. Navy, marriage to a non-Indian, children, travel from Texas to Hawaii, and, finally, in 1969 a return to the Wind River Indian Reservation. This was at the behest of her father, a Northern Arapaho man who had been largely absent from her life up to that point.

Again, according to literary convention, return to a reservation community rekindles an interest in Native culture. In a particularly telling passage, she asks, “Grandmother Goes in Lodge, when did I realize I was Arapaho, and Indian? This is a question you never would have understood, or asked. . . . You were fortunate to come into this world knowing who you were” (47). Once back home, Sutter establishes close relationships with elders, particularly women, suffers through an unhappy second marriage (this time to a Native man), opens a reservation business, becomes just the second woman elected chair of the Northern Arapaho Business Council, raises her children, and earns several academic degrees. The book ends, however, with Sutter working for an Indian nation, but not her own, apparently successful in reconnecting with her culture, but disillusioned by the realities of tribal, family, and community politics.

All of this sounds pretty familiar, even a tad pedestrian, particularly given Sutter’s writing style, which tends toward the cliché, and is more than a little wooden. “We are all children of Mother Earth, free to seek our own path,” she writes, “as the four leggeds, the fish, and the fowl are free to seek their own way.” Sounds a little New Age-ish to me.

Struggles with composition undoubtedly result from working with these imagined conversations. They dominate the...