The Entropic World of the Washo: Fatality and Self-Deception in Rabbit Boss

SA N FO R D E. M A R O V IT Z Kent State University The Entropic World of the Washo: Fatality and Self-Deception in Rabbit Boss To lose touch with the land is to lose touch with the heart. Thomas Sanchez, Rabbit Boss Beginning and ending with starvation so extreme that survival itself is in question, Rabbit Boss (1973), by Thomas Sanchez, delineates the hopeless confrontation between a Native American culture and the various stages of the white civilization that ultimately subjugates it. Structured serially with four narrative lines developed achronologically in parallel, it describes the decline of the Washo people from their natural state in an intimate relation with their land to a sickly remnant whose imminent demise is implicit in the grim concluding paragraphs of the novel. Sanchez traces the decline through four generations, beginning sensationalistically with the horrors ofstarvation, cannibalism, and murder among the Donner party near Lake Tahoe early in 1846, and ending with the death of a fourth-generation Washo close to the same site in the mid-1960s. His sympathy throughout is entirely with the Washo as a grossly abused dis­ placed people, and from one episode to the next, the white culture is represented as the invading and barbaric one. Although his one-sided moral judgment inevitably pushes this fictionalization of history well into the area of romance and melodrama, a complex of pervasive motifs, facts, and symbols interwoven through it projects the lives of individuals and generations with epic force, and the futile struggle of the Washo is conse­ quently magnified into a universal one. 220 Western American Literature To a large extent, of course, Sanchez ennobles the Washo, and even the most degraded of them, living on the fringes of the white communities where they are detested, has his and her instances of nobility and selfless­ ness. However decadent some of them may be in their ordinary moments, they rise higher than they have fallen as they return briefly to the native source within that redeems them. Individually and collectively, they are a tragic people as Sanchez portrays them, tragic because their wretchedness in the face of an inescapable fate is exacerbated by their own weaknesses and by a code that makes them closer akin to Coyote the trickster than to conventional heroes and heroines. That the end of their ordeal may be seen from the very beginning is foreshadowed in the early thoughts of the shaman-like Rabbit Boss himself, traditional leader of the mass jack rabbit drives, revealed as he awaits the return of his eldest son, Gayabuc, who has just witnessed the bloody action at the Donner camp. Bitter over the lack of food for his people during the winter, he observes that the season cannot be defeated but only watched and accommodated; the winter must be imitated by filling the mind with thoughts of warmth as the body itself becomes cold. “Deceit is survival,” he believes. “You must look like the tree in the snow, dead and buried, but deep within the roots remain warm in hope, for spring always does come, winter always must pass, things do get better.”1 If such thoughts, however, have enabled him to cope with winters of the past, they have lost their effectiveness in the present season. The optimism that evolves from associating one’s life with the cycle of the seasons is a delusory one; for the Rabbit Boss warm thoughts have lost their power: “The cold had penetrated his roots, and now he met each day like the stone” (10). Soon afterwards, Gayabuc arrives beside him; he is a young father who is expected to have returned with fresh meat with which to celebrate the “babyfeast” for his own newborn son. But his hunt has been a failure; he has made no kill, which bodes misfortune for the life of the new infant. Gayabuc, with the overpowering scenes of white cannibalism painted vividly and indelibly in his mind, tells his father, “There will be no baby­ feast for Gayabuc, for anyone. . . . I have seen the way before me and followed it as I was taught, but my eyes have now seen new things, things for...