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Reviewed by:
  • Sacred Wilderness by Susan Power
  • Penelope Kelsey (bio)
Sacred Wilderness
Michigan State University Press, 2014
by Susan Power

SUSAN POWER’S SACRED WILDERNESS is a tour de force of hemisphere-spanning mythologies of the Middle East and Americas. Set in contemporary Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the Ramsey Hill neighborhood, Power’s narrative hinges on the fate of one Candace Altman Jenssen, a Mohawk woman who has lost her way from Kanien’kehaka territory and who inspires the aid of several supernatural beings, including the Virgin Mary and the Hodinöhsö:ni’ Mother of Nations.

The granddaughter of Ruby Two Axe, a Kahnawake Mohawk woman who walked away from her community after losing her father to the Quebec Bridge disaster in 1907 and her husband to a freak high steel accident twenty years later, Candace is raised by a secular Jewish father from age seven, after her spiritually bereft Mohawk mother commits suicide. With no anchor to ground her in Mohawk culture, Candace becomes unmoored in non-Native society, exceling at presenting the right fashion and affect and winning the admiration of many men in college, including Barry, a Harvard law student and her eventual husband.

Fast-forward to the present, where Candace is lost in an enormous mansion which is resplendently decorated with imported European furniture and which houses a Native American museum, including an inherited False Face mask that vibrates with palpable rage after decades of neglect. Lost as to how to lessen the emptiness in her life, Candace calls the Minneapolis American Indian Center and asks for help in hiring an American Indian housekeeper. The person who answers this call is Gladys Swan, an Ojibwe-Dakota woman in her sixties, who pities Candace for her angst, which registers even from a distance. Once Gladys arrives in the Jenssen household the action of the novel launches, reaching a crescendo with the advent of Maryam, a supernatural personage who literally beams down from the heavens to the verdant parkway neighborhood where Candace lives. Maryam informs Candace that she has been sent on a mission by one of Candace’s ancestors, Jigonsaseh, a clanmother and mother of Ayowantha.1 Jigonsaseh chooses to send Maryam in her stead, as Candace is more spiritually attuned to her Jewish heritage, having been robbed, in essence, of her Mohawk identity by her grandmother’s break from her Kahnawake family.

Candace initially decides to ignore Maryam, being frightened by her presence, and this decision results in blinding migraines and an episode of [End Page 199] stigmata that lands Candace first in the ER and subsequently in the psych ward, where she finally fesses up and shares with hospital staff the otherworldly cause of her bleeding palms. While committed, Candace confronts her superficial lifestyle and the ways in which her material obsessions have masked a much graver malaise, and she also accepts Maryam’s ministrations and thereby Jigonsaseh’s teachings. When Candace returns home, she is able to reunite with her husband and honestly discuss their estrangement from each other, and its source in his dissatisfaction with his career and Candace’s intergenerational grief. Together they decide to begin a “new chapter,” with Barry leaving day-trading to devote himself to his true passion, acting, and Candace working full-time for foundation boards supporting the arts.

What makes this rather dramatic reconciliation possible is the delivery of Jigonsaseh’s message via Maryam. In Power’s novel, Jigonsaseh is the Mohawk mother of Ayowantha, a young man who incarnates in the early contact era to renew the Peacemaker’s message and who is an unparalleled mediator capable of literally charming weapons from his enemies’ hands. Jigonsaseh is mother to twins, Ayowantha and Shawiskara, and Maryam’s recounting of Jigonsaseh’s narrative confirms both the fated demise of Ayowantha at his brother’s hands and Ayowantha’s timeless message of peace. Power deeply entwines the narrative of Maryam and Jigonsaseh, suggesting a universal ur-text of divine mothers and prophetic sons and, thus, portraying Maryam as the perfect medium for the message. The novel, in fact, ends with Maryam’s assumption by climbing heavenward up a large white pine presumably (back) to Sky World.

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