Madchild Running (review)

Madchild Running by Keith Egawa. Red Crane Books, 1999

This is Keith Egawa's first novel about American Indians in Seattle. Not about all of them, just those who work at the pseudonymous Urban Native Support Services and their clients.

Both groups have a lot in common. The commonalities are more than their service provider/recipient relationships. The service providers used to be just like the clients. What seems to be happening is that there is a circular pathway where the survivors, who have withstood the traumas of living on the margins of urban society and flight from alcoholism and violence in dysfunctional families in reservation communities, move to become providers of services to people like they used to be.

Survival in fact seems to be what this story is all about. Madchild Running is a story of the descendents of the First People of the salmon fishing cultures of the Northwest and the First People of the Buffalo Hunting Cultures of the Northern Plains who survived the post-Colombian conquest of America. These mad children of Seattle are Northwestern end-of-the-twentieth-century versions of the kind of people living in the degradation of a Gallup shantytown that Leslie Marmon Silko wrote about in Ceremony and the people in Los Angeles that Scott Momaday wrote about in House Made of Dawn.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Indians came into the cities to escape the institutions of the Conquest: the carceral boarding schools, the shantytowns at the edge of the real towns, the economic deprivation of many reservations. They came for many other reasons too--to escape abusive partners, dead-end jobs, and the hopelessness of social atmospheres in which alcohol was rampant.

The 1990 census for Seattle shows that Indians were generally among the working poor; few were in public housing and not many were in the higher socioeconomic levels, but not many were at the bottom of the scale either.

Keith Egawa's protagonist, Levi, and his fellow social service workers are working with those who fall downward--alcoholic men and women, abused wives, abandoned children.

Levi is personally involved with every case that comes along. How can he not be? He is, as the phrase goes, vulnerable. He sees himself and his family in every situation he deals with. There is the alcoholic father who goes out for a loaf of bread and a carton of milk but never returns, the beaten mother, the frightened children. He has been there. His fellow social workers tell him to get some distance or he will burn out on the job. But he doesn't.

Levi narrates several case histories of children and their parents caught up in cycles of despair and destruction. None have any signs of positive resolution. Finally, after one girl, for whom he has put forth special effort to save from destruction, dies a suicide, Levi does burn out. He had invested so much of his energy into trying to save the girl that he cannot continue in his social service work.

The loss is too much; he leaves Seattle, heading to Montana, to the Salish Kootenai Reservation his father came from--his father, who went out for bread and milk one day and never came back.

Madchild Running is a first novel with many of a first novel's problems, but there is the keen edge of an observer with the understanding of an insider who is immersed in the milieu he writes about, which compensates for any shortcomings. Leslie Marmon Silko's irresolute Tayo of Ceremony, and Scott Momaday's silent Abel of House Made of Dawn weren't smooth, finished literary characters. Nevertheless, the two authors became the very center of twentieth-century American Indian literature. Keith Egawa has the potential to be one of the creators of the twenty-first-century mainstream.

In a Parthian turn, Tayo, Abel, and Levi reverse themselves from continuing on into self...