Narrative Possession in Stephen Graham Jones's <em>Ledfeather</em>

Abstract

Narrative Possession in Stephen Graham Jones's Ledfeather Leah Pennywark (bio) that one time an elk had found a white man lost and dying in the storm, and they'd talked to each other, and finally the elk, because it knew the man needed to live, to be warm, it took pity and laid on its side and let the man cut it open and crawl inside, and stay warm like that even though the snow piled up all around them for days and days and even years, only when the man finally crawled out again, everything was different, because that elk you crawl into, it's not the same one you crawl back out of, right? —Jones, Ledfeather 209 About halfway through his speculative novel Ledfeather (2008), Stephen Graham Jones describes two horses tied together, one dead and one alive, the latter "always running from the dead thing it was tied to" (100). The seemingly dead past haunts the living in Ledfeather, bound to the present and future through a doubled sense of possession within the context of Blackfeet heritage, land, and narrative form.1 Correspondingly, Indian Agent Francis Dalimpere careens between the 1880s and late twentieth century as he tries to escape his past. Francis's character and the central concerns of the novel arise from the historical events of the nineteenth century that continue to reverberate into the present on the Blackfeet Reservation in northern Montana. Like the living horse, Francis strives to free himself from the dead who haunt him and the landscape that ensnares him, taking the extraordinary measure of possessing Jones's other central character, a Blackfeet boy named Doby Saxon, in the twentieth century. Francis makes a deal with a Piegan man named Yellow Tail: in penance for his role in the deaths of six hundred Piegan by starvation, Francis will live as a Blackfeet one hundred years in the future. He travels [End Page 89] forward in time inside not an elk, as in the above epigraph, but a moose. The rest of the novel takes place at the end of the twentieth century on the same land and centers on Doby, who is a descendant of Yellow Tail. Doby, like Francis, is haunted by the past and struggles to overcome the historical trauma of the Piegan. During the winter of 1883–84, several hundred Blackfeet starved to death. A letter from Inspector Benedict to the secretary of the interior in July 1883 states, "Indians suffering much from want. Nothing for them to subsist upon but what is furnished by the Government," and "[cattle] stockmen complain of depredations by the Indians." By November, another official, Inspector Howard, would note that the reservation was in an "exceedingly destitute situation." He goes on to worry that the thousands of cattle surrounding and on the reservation will not be safe as a result. A few days later he reports in another letter that "[a]lmost nothing of this year's goods has arrived" and that "[n]o annuity goods have arrived." Reports by an Inspector Barr the following fall claim that there is no record of "suffering last winter from want of food" but that it appears that many deaths nonetheless occurred from starvation, even though the agency doctor reports only four. He also writes that the trees have been stripped of bark so that the softer portions could be cooked and eaten and that there were some "irregularities" in the reservation agent's, doctor's, and farmer's relations with the tribe, particularly in connection to the disbursement of food and goods.2 Jones's story, rooted in the events of this winter on the reservation, searches for a relationship between the past and the present in which the present does not rewrite the past, nor does the past continuously haunt the present. In Ledfeather, both of these fraught relationships are entangled with the colonial narrative of assimilation and land rights. To control the narrative of the past is to possess it and remake it in a particular image. But to be haunted by the past, to be possessed by it, is to lose agency and futurity. Possession as ownership and possession as haunting...