Euro-American Realism versus Native Authenticity: Two Novels by Craig Lesley
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Notes
1. The particular problem of Indian autobiography in having "two voices" while purporting to be singly authored is examined by David Murray in Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), pp. 65-97.
2. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry In the Age of Media (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 11.
3. Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), p. 15.
4. Craig Lesley, Winterkill (New York: Dell, 1984), p. 19; hereafter cited parenthetically.
5. The Nez Perce veteran of the 1877 war, Wottolen, told L.V. McWhorter of a comrade in the campaign named Left Hand. See L.V. McWhorter, Hear Me, My Chiefs: Nez Perce History and Legend, ed. Ruth Bordin (Caldwell: Caxton Press, 1952), p. 419. Lesley's account of the death of Left Hand's first wife, Swan Lighting, at the battle of Big Hole is based on White Bird's description of the death of a Nez Perce woman at that battle. See Hear Me, My Chiefs, pp. 376-377, and Craig Lesley, River Song (New York: Dell, 1990), p. 132; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
6. "Chief Joseph's following . . . was reckoned the largest of the five bands constituting the Nez Perce malcontents." McWhorter, p. 177.
7. This is accomplished at the Medicine Tree in the Bitter Root Valley, an intertribal center of reverence and worship visited by the non-treaty Nez Perce during their campaign of 1877 and still used by modern Native Americans. After carrying out ritual actions here, Danny sees his dead ex-wife across a gully near the Big Hole battle site.
8. Lesley's fictional encounter tends to contradict Deward E. Walker's conclusion that "schismatic factionalism ... has served to bring about and even accelerate Nez Perce acculturation." Deward E. Walker, Conflict and Schism in Nez Perce Acculturation: A Study of Religion and Politics (Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 133. The wise woman, Wauna, from the ostensibly Christian reservation faction, has received her calling as result of her participation in pan-Indian political action on Alcatraz Island in 1969. See River Song, pp. 95-96, and D'Arcy McNickle, Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. viii. Thus Lesley's narrative dramatizes both renewal and conservation of the old ways at the Lapwai reservation. The actions of the missionaries from 1833 onwards initiated the rift which the 1863 treaty made permanent. See Alvin Josephy, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 70, 101-103.
9. For the status of The Dalles, before the advent of whites, as "a great intertribal fishing and trading center," see Josephy, p. 10, and Gordon B. Dodds, The American Northwest: A History of Oregon and Washington (Arlington Heights: Forum Press, 1986), p. 10. The dam was completed in 1957 (Dodds, p. 348).
10. See River Song, p. 203. Dodds (p. 277) gives a brief account of the secret development of a plutonium factory for the first atomic bombs in World War II at Hanford.
11. As Stephen Cornell puts it, "other groups in American life . . . may have a sense of history matching [that of Indians] in scope and in the immediacy with which it informs their daily lives. Uniquely for Indians . . . that sense of history is rooted here, in this land, in the geography of their present. Most forms of Indian political action are explicitly grounded in a consciousness of their history." The Return of the Native: American Indian Resurgence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 217.
12. Josephy, pp. 438, 362.
13. "This land here is sacred land—holy land for us. . . . The salmon here were given to us by the Creator, along with venison and roots" (River Song, p. 299).
14. See Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), p. 119.
15. See Merrill D. Beal, Fight No More Forever: Chief Joseph and the Nez...
