Money, Memory, And Territory In Craig Lesley’s Winterkill

Abstract

Ralph Gifford. CELILO FALLS, 1940. Courtesy Oregon State Archives, Highway Division Records, Photograph #1326. M o n e y , M e m o ry , a n d T e r r i t o r y in C r a ig L e s le y ’s Win t e r k il l D a v id B r a n d e Craig Lesley’s Winterkill (1984) tells the story of Danny Kachiah, a descendant of the ChiefJoseph band of the Nez Perce, who found them­ selves at war over their forced relocation from northeastern Oregon’s Wallowa Mountains. The novel represents this character’s efforts to sit­ uate himself in relation to his cultural legacy and to pass on what he can of this legacy to his son. Whether the setting is the Umatilla Reservation, the Pendleton Round-Up, or the Wallowa high country, Lesley makes the ongoing, complex, and inequitable relations between Euro- and Native Americans a strong thematic focus; these relations must, if the story is to avoid ahistorical idealizations of its Native American characters, form the context in which the father-son rela­ tionship plays out in the novel. I will argue that, in spite of the prob­ lematic nature of a Euro-American writer’s construction of a Native American protagonist, Lesley’s narrative stages a nuanced critique of the Euro-American occupation ofNative American territories and does this without romanticizing Native peoples and cultures. Winterkill represents the ways in which the market forces driving Euro-American occupation have “deterritorialized” the Nez Perce and other northwestern tribes, turning tribal subjects into wage laborers and unequal partners in the guardian/ward relationship with government agencies, as well as the ways in which Lesley’s protagonist “reterritorializes ” or reclaims the territory that has been, from the point of view of the dominant market society, transformed into a stockpile of resources. That is, I will examine Lesley’s treatment of the material and symbolic forms of territorial appropriation, the ways in which he represents his own culture’s forms of “occupation”— as both invasion and use— of the land. At stake in the narrative are the cultural and ecological effects of a historical conflict over different ways of inhabiting the land: the dif­ ference between, on the one hand, a sustainable living to be gained on the interest of local ecologies and, on the other, the unsustainable pro­ duction of ever greater quantities for exchange on the market, or living off one’s ecological capital. These conflicting ways of making a living, in the novel, reflect different conceptions of the land: as territory that is sensual and particular or as an abstract space for the exploitation of resources. Finally, I argue, it is through the medium of stories inextricably 2 6 6 WAL 3 5 . 3 FALL 2 0 0 0 tied to particular places, stories that charge those places with historical, cultural, and spiritual significance, that Lesley’s protagonist locates him' self and his son in relation to their familial and tribal past. Two closely related issues, however, demand our attention if we are to keep from reproducing in our readings of the novel the idealist notions that the novel itself, I suggest, struggles to avoid: first, the eth­ ical and political questions raised by the construction of a Native American point-of-view character by a Euro-American writer; second, the enduring and inadvertently racist association of Native Americans with a “Nature” abstracted from particular territories— a pitfall only widened and deepened in the context of a dual focus on cultural and ecological questions. Both of these issues inevitably arise out of the Euro-American impulse to purge the nature from culture and vice versa; both have to do with a long history of white projections of Indian-ness, a history that reflects white culture’s own perplexities over identity and over its relations to nonhuman nature. Briefly, then, if I discuss Lesley’s representations of contemporary Northwest Native Americans living in a dominant Euro-American market society, I espe­ cially want to resist— as I think Lesley resists— sorting these cultures according to the persistent “logic” of the natural and the cultural, with...