Savages and Citizens: Revisions of the Captivity Narrative in Gardens in the Dunes and The Heartsong of Charging Elk

Abstract

The subgenre of the outlaw dime novel exemplifies some of the most pernicious associations of space and masculinity. This subgenre personifies the “closing” of the American frontier in the bodies of the renegade (anti-) heroes who robbed their way into a highly mythologized history that sanitized—at the same time as it excoriated—the brutality of US land claims. But the closing of the frontier looks different from the other side of the equation, the catastrophic loss of many Indigenous nations’ homelands during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Much like the celebrity outlaw novels that celebrated and critiqued the outlaw heroes of the “Old West,” the “Indian captivity narrative” was a popular subgenre that mythologized the threat and the promise of the wilderness as the defining moment in US national identity formation. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999) and James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000) adapt and rewrite the Indian captivity subgenre by displacing the white captive of the traditional narrative with a Native captive and consequently redefining the national identity being reflected and formed in captivity. This racial displacement is emphasized by a movement away from a feminizing of the captive and toward an emphasis on masculine performance as an expression of social authority and agency in the face of external affronts to the national sovereignty and personal autonomy of the Native “captive.”

[R]eductionism in all its forms … begins with the lure of binarism, the compacting of meaning into a closed either/or opposition between two terms, concepts, or elements. Whenever faced with such binarized categories (subject-object, mental-material, natural-social, bourgeoisie-proletariat, local-global, center-periphery), [Henri] Lefebvre persistently sought to crack them open introducing an-Other term, a third possibility.

—Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places