A World without Fathers: Patriarchy, Colonialism, and the Male Creator in Northwest Tribal Narratives

… I realize this cannot be heaven.

All these old-time Indians are doomed …

All of them are going to start drinking booze. And their children will drink booze. And their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren will drink booze. And one of those great grandchildren will grow up to be my real father … The one who abandoned my mother and me …

That’s what’s going to happen to me …

It makes me angry. I want to spit and kick and punch and slap. I want to cry and sing, but I cannot use my voice.

—Sherman Alexie, Flight: A Novel, 66–67

I

One of the more puzzling and disconcerting features of recent American Indian fiction is the veritable disappearance of nurturing father figures within American Indian families. Indeed, over the years, their disappearance has often been stereotypically associated with absence: an apparent willingness of American Indian men to divorce themselves from their inherent responsibilities as fathers. Thus, they eschew the social practices of childrearing across generations and help create a cyclical and disturbing pattern of single-parented, female-headed households.

In such modern American Indian fiction as Janet Campbell Hale’s The Owl’s Song (1974), W. S. Penn’s Killing Time with Strangers (2000), and, more recently, Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007), the main characters have notably diminished, if not nonexistent, relationships with their often missing fathers. The protagonist of Flight, who has never met his father, is forced to shuffle from foster home to foster home. He repeatedly laments his lack of a meaningful heritage and past resulting from his biological father’s neglect. In The Owl’s Song and Killing Time with Strangers, the protagonists, Billy and Pal, respectively, have limited relationships with their fathers that are characterized by alcoholism, physical abuse, and emotional abandonment. The fathers have expressed their inability to become positive role models for their sons. Thus, the critical question the reader almost invariably asks at the end of each of these novels is: Why do fathers from tribes that have been mostly viewed as patriarchal, in which men, for the most part, are widely regarded as indispensable for the well-being of their families and as guardians of the sociocultural and religious ritual practices of their tribes, have dysfunctional relationships with their children, especially their sons?

Perhaps the two most prevalent theoretical answers to this question are sociohistorical: the absence of American Indian fathers came about as a consequence of predatory colonialism, in which American Indian tribes and families were forcefully uprooted and relocated onto reservations that were alien to them and their millennia-old sociocultures or were merely fractions of the land they used to occupy. Hence, their metaphysical lives, their religious ritual practices, which are profoundly attached to specific geographical places, were irreparably disturbed and damaged. Conversely, the less common theory is that the American Indian writers are composing pieces that emphasize the importance of successful cultural inheritance through the presence of the male creator in the text as well as the example of incomplete cultural inheritance provided by the failed father figure.

However, it is first best to understand the sociohistorical aspect. Individuals within the specific tribes were deeply affected by the socio-historical upheaval, particularly the devaluation of the extended family, the extermination of wild game, and the resultant diminution of men as valuable warriors and hunters. Indeed, the rampant alcoholism and self-destructive nihilism that characterize much modern American Indian fiction is the most apparent result of predatory colonialism.¹ The socio-psychological results of predatory colonialism have generally become the major focus for historians, anthropologists, and literary critics. They often examine how the invasive actions of colonialists affected American Indians, focusing on outstanding examples from discrete regions of North America where specific tribes once dwelled and from which they were harmfully removed.²

One of the more famous books that studies the sociohistorical impact of colonization upon American Indians is Ramón Gutiérrez’s When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991). As his title indicates, Gutiérrez studies indigenous tribes from the...