There was a little explosion of publishing by Native Americans in the 1930s, and Oskison is not by any means the most famous author of that group. That would be either John Joseph Mathews (Osage) or D'Arcy McNickle (Salish-Kootenai). I chose to go with Oskison because Mathews' and McNickle's most famous books both seemed as though they would be depressing. But after reading all the other books that I've gone through so far, I realized that "depressing" is just something you've got to deal with when reading classic Native American literature. So I read Mathews and McNickle too, and I'll discuss all three in this post.
First, Oskison and Brothers Three. Oskison was born in 1874, which makes him roughly a contemporary of Will Rogers (actually five years older), and the two of them did know each other. There are a couple of references to Rogers in Brothers Three, for example, when the middle brother, Roger (aka Bunny, aka the Herdsman) is asked about his roping ability. He says,
"I was fair. It was fun to rope when this country was full of Texas cowboys; we used to get up what we called roping contests, first prize five dollars. Ask old-time peelers like Will Rogers where they learned to twirl the twine."
I don't know a lot about Oskison's history. I am not aware of a biography of him. According to a short piece on the Oklahoma Historical Society web page, Brothers Three is autobiographical, which it certainly feels like, but I don't know how closely it follows Oskison's family. It is the saga of the Odell family, part Cherokee, and the three sons of that family who grow up to lead very different lives. The father of the family, Francis Odell, is a white man who comes to Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) to seek his fortune and marries Janet Keith, the daughter of a part-Cherokee family already established there. They set up a farm and have three sons, about five years apart: Timothy Keith Odell, known as Timmy or Bud; Roger, mentioned above; and Henry, sometimes called Mister. The book is divided into three sections, each about 150 pages, one section for each brother -- but they proceed in chronological order, so the "Timmy" section goes from 1873 when Tim is a baby until 1919, Roger's section (called "The Herdsman") begins in 1920 when Roger is already 43, and the "Mister" section focuses on Henry's life from 1927 until 1933, when he is about 51, but includes some flashbacks to his early life as well.
I had a hard time finding a copy of Brothers Three, and having read it I can kind of understand why it was never reprinted. Although it was "widely considered to be his best work," it isn't very good. A lot of melodrama, a lot of cliched characters, even though they're supposedly based on his family. Most of the female characters are awful; the best, mother Janet, dies young, and the second best, May (Tim's wife), who was my favorite character in the book, is described as plump, "broadened," solid, thick, "grown sluggish," "too independent," "heavy-handed," etc. Other women are immature, stupid, "a liability," and so on. But the male characters are equally bad -- Tim and Roger both have major character flaws -- and yet they're let off the hook by the author, presumably because they are based on Oskison's real brothers. Henry, the youngest, is probably meant to be Oskison, and so he is the most intelligent and easiest to like, but he has plenty of issues too -- he revives the family fortune on the stock market, but then gets carried away and loses it all in the Crash of 1929 and afterwards.
It's interesting the way the characters' Cherokee heritage is interwoven in the story. It isn't a major plot point -- it's sort of off to the side, especially since the pater familias, Francis Odell, is white. But when the little boys go to visit their mother's parents, they look forward to eating conahany...
...the great dish of whole-grain hominy which was set on Grandma Keith's table at every noon meal--corn grains treated with ash-hopper lye, swollen with long soaking, and cooked slowly with flavoring of meat stock, nuts, and herbs--a traditional Cherokee dish.
I googled conahany and couldn't find it, but after reading some articles about traditional Cherokee foods, I feel confident that Oskison was referring to a version of kanuchi, a soup made of hickory nuts poured over hominy.
Cherokee heritage becomes important again when whites start moving in to the Territory, leasing land from Indians.
They belonged to the shiftless, drifting class, given to windy talk and indiscriminate "borrying." ...They were contemptuous of the Indians, and promised to hasten the movement for making the Indian Territory into a "white man's state." ...Their dirtiest tow-headed moron child of fifteen was taught to feel superior to such boys as Timmy--to any child however slightly "tainted" by Indian blood.
Timmy is less than one eighth Cherokee. His mother's father is described as "a quarter-blood" while his mother's mother is "only an eighth part Cherokee," so that would make Janet 3/16ths Cherokee and her children 3/32s. (Oskison himself is described as one-eighth Cherokee in the biographical sketch.) And Timmy's father, Francis, is white -- he just arrived a little earlier than these shiftless folks and married a part-Cherokee woman. It's easy to understand Oskison's anger at those who felt having Indian blood made one "tainted," but a little harder to understand how his white father could be considered so much better than these other whites. Perhaps because he was from England (both Francis Odell and Oskison's real father).
Cherokee heritage also becomes important in Timmy's affair with the beautiful half-Cherokee Es-Teece. And Henry remembers being nursed by a Cherokee woman when his mother was too sick to care for him. (John M. Oskison's mother died in 1878, when Oskison would have been only about four years old; in the book, the boys' mother Janet dies when Henry is seven, presumably to make it seem more likely that Henry would have clear memories of her.) Henry also notes that in California where he went to college (at Stanford -- Oskison did too, becoming the university's first Native American graduate), Black people were more accepted than Indians. Fortunately (I guess), he implies that he was able to "pass" as white.
By the end of the book I was fed up with the whole Odell family, which is, I'm sure, NOT how I was supposed to feel. But I also found myself wondering what really happened, to the Oskison family. Were they able to save their farm? Did they actually have a farm? John M. Oskison died in 1947 -- wonder what happened after 1935, when this book was published. On Find-a-Grave I discovered that Oskison did have two brothers, William and Richard, but Oskison was the middle boy, not the youngest, and the boys were about three years apart, not five. Also, their mother was married before and had two children with her first husband, and their father remarried after their mother's death and had a set of twins, but only one survived and his second wife died young too. All of that was whitewashed out of the novel in order to make it more of a traditional (marketable?) tale. But I'd rather read the real story.
All the works by Cherokee authors that I've read have been about people who are mostly white, with just that little bit of Cherokee heritage that they spend their lives trying to understand. John Joseph Mathews was, likewise, only about one-eighth Osage -- his mother was white. But the family had, to quote Wikipedia which is quoting something else, "an active interest in Osage culture," and Mathews ended up embracing that culture. So he made his antihero, Chal, more Indian than himself, with a "mixedblood" father like Mathews' own, but an Indian mother instead of a white one.
Still, Chal is definitely caught between cultures, with both Indian and white friends. When he goes off to college at the University of Oklahoma, he is annoyed with his two Indian friends who also go, because they keep acting "Indian," which means, among other things, being silent around other people and getting offended by white fraternity antics. But after those two drop out of school and go back home (one to alcoholism and the other "back to the blanket"), Chal has his own troubles with white society, and he keeps needing to wander in the countryside, away from people. He has some success when he drops out of college to join what later became the Air Force, but when he eventually leaves the military, his life seems to fall apart. The Osages have all become wealthy with oil money, because they leased their land but not their mineral rights, but this money does not bring joy, at least not to Chal and his friends. (The story of the Osages is quite interesting -- they actually bought their own reservation in Oklahoma after they were forced to move there from Kansas. I heard in a podcast that they chose the land because it wasn't good farmland, so that no one would ever bother them again, but then it turned out to have vast oil reserves. Oh well.)
Chal continues to feel the pull of the traditional life, especially since his old friend Sun-on-his-Wings has embraced it fully, but also to be ashamed of Indians who do not act "civilized," in his view. For example, when his father dies, he is both moved and embarrassed by some of his Osage relatives who chant the "song of death" in front of white people. Once he is out driving with some white friends when they pass his house, and his white friend Nelson points it out.
Afterward, he believed that Nelson had known and had pointed out the house with a purpose, because just as they were passing, two tall, blanketed Indians came out. One was an old man and the other was still in middle age. They came quickly, regally out of the house, and behind them was Chal's mother, watching them leave.
"Ha ha ha ha ha ha," laughed Nelson, "look, who's that, ole Kick-a-Hole-in-the-Sky and Rain-in-the-Face -- come to see you, Chal?"....
It would happen that Circling Hawk and his Uncle Fire Cloud should come out of the house at that time. Every time they came to town they came to the house; came in without knocking and walked back to the picture of John [Chal's father] hanging in a large, ornate frame which Chal knew to be very bad taste. Standing there looking up at the picture, they would chant the song of death. He wished they would stop it, it made his mother very sad, and when he heard it he felt as though he wanted to cry. Besides, they might come some time when he had someone there visiting him.
Finally, I read The Surrounded by D'Arcy McNickle, published in 1936. McNickle was born in 1904, so he is the youngest of this group of writers, and was an enrolled member of the Salish-Kootenai tribes of the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, where The Surrounded is set. He was actually Cree-Metis through his mother, but she found refuge in the Salish community after fleeing Canada after the Metis leader Louis Riel was captured, and so her children became Salish-Kootenai as well.
So finally we are out of Oklahoma -- but it's not unfamiliar territory, because the Flathead Reservation was also the setting of Cogewea, the Half-Blood, which I read in July. In fact, it feels very reminiscent of Cogewea. At the beginning of the novel, Archilde, the main character, returns to his father's ranch after a year or so of making his living as a fiddler in the white world. I kept feeling like I was back on Cogewea's ranch, but the family dynamics in The Surrounded are much harsher than hers. Archilde's father, Max Leon, is from Spain (McNickle's real father was an Irish American handyman), and he and Archilde's Salish mother Catherine, usually called the Old Lady, are estranged (McNickle's real parents divorced when he was nine). The father lives in the main house, taken care of by one of his adult daughters, and the mother lives in a separate cabin on the ranch, reminiscent of Cogewea's grandmother living off in a teepee (in fact, Archilde's mother muses at one point that she wishes she were in a teepee instead, but it is too much trouble to change now).
At first I didn't like the novel. None of the characters were happy, and none were sympathetic. But gradually they begin to relate to each other a little more -- Archilde makes friends with his young nephews, his father arranges for him to study the violin with one of the priests in town, he and his mother spend time together -- and as they begin to like each other more, I began to like them too. And as that happens, terrible things are set in motion. Archilde and his mother take a hunting trip together which ends in disaster, and the rest of the book is spent waiting for the repercussions of that trip to play out in full. As things got worse and worse, I liked Archilde and the other characters more and more. There isn't really a villain, with the possible exception of Sheriff Quigley, and maybe the Jesuit fathers who meant so well and did so much damage to the book's people.
So it's ultimately a very sad book, probably the saddest of the three. Sundown is sad too, but you always have the sense that Chal could possibly change his life, if he would only try. Archilde, in The Surrounded, is simply doomed. He is "surrounded"; he has nowhere to go. McNickle is perhaps the most political of the three writers (with Mathews a close second), but he earns his claims -- they arise organically out of the story, and you believe them. McNickle was in fact a Native American activist, and also worked at the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the 1930s and 1940s when the Bureau was really trying to make changes in the way Indians were treated. The Surrounded was his first book and he went on to write several others, both fiction and nonfiction.
The more I read, the more I want to read. There are biographies of both Mathews and McNickle, neither of which our library owns (of course), but I could buy them online. I could read more by all three authors. I could read Killers of the Flower Moon. And of course I could read my next book for the Challenge -- probably in October.
