It is November, time to set aside frivolous reading and return to serious stuff, like the Classics Challenge, which I am far from finishing. I began the month with four entries left to read, so I'd better get busy. I'll try to read two or three this month and catch up. Today's selection, my ninth, is The Man Who Killed the Deer: A Novel of Pueblo Indian Life by Frank Waters, first published in 1942. It fulfills category #8, "A classic about an animal, or with an animal in the title." These categories are so interesting, some of them. I probably would not have chosen this book if I hadn't been trying to find something about an animal, and I assumed the deer in the title would not be all that important. But it is very important to the story, and although it is probably already dead on the first page, it reappears in various forms throughout the book. It helps to make one of the author's main points:
And he knew now that there is nothing killed, nothing lost, if one looks far or deep or high enough to see how its transmuted meaning is imprinted for all men to read and understand.
Sorry, guess that should have been marked as a spoiler.
Frank Waters had some Cheyenne ancestry through his father and grew up in Colorado, but he is writing here about Pueblo Indians in New Mexico, where he lived for many years. So this is an outsider writing about Native Americans, but an outsider with some knowledge.
I have mixed feelings about this book. I wanted to read it, because it really is considered a classic, and I'm glad I read it, because it is a good story overall. But I kept having that feeling of the author being outside the culture, especially after reading several books by Indigenous authors about their own cultures. Waters kind of fades in and out, sometimes seeming to be right there with his characters and other times seeming to observe them from a distance. Of course, he is writing to a mainly white audience and trying to explain Indian culture to them, so I guess it makes sense. But sometimes the distance makes the Indians in the book seem too "other."
The man who killed the deer is Martiniano, a Pueblo Indian who was removed from his tribe and sent to an "away school" (a boarding school) to teach him a trade and try to turn him into a white man. So this is another story about a victim of the damaging "kill the Indian to save the man" philosophy, similar to other books I've read this year. He was trained as a carpenter, but there are no jobs for Indians, so he returns to his people (at the famous Taos Pueblo, though that isn't specified), but he does not fit in with them either. They fine him small amounts of money for holding on to certain white customs, such as not removing the heels from his boots, and they will not let him use the pueblo's thresher, so he has to thresh by hand, making him late for deer-hunting season. So he kills a deer out of season, is caught by the white rangers, resists arrest, and ends up being fined $150, which a local white trader pays for him.
That's the set-up, and the rest of the book is devoted to Martiniano's gradual rehabilitation, as he learns to find his place in the world. The deer he killed is an important part of this process, showing up periodically, sometimes to annoy him, sometimes to warn him. It isn't clear whether he's really seeing the deer or whether it's just his guilty conscience, but it doesn't matter -- it serves the same purpose either way. The deer was my favorite character in the novel and I kept waiting for it to show up again. Martiniano is a generally likable character and there are others as well, but I felt as though I could never get too close to any of them. Except the deer.
The novel is based on a true story -- Martiniano is based on a real person called Frank Samora. And according to Frank Waters' obituary, the novel influenced the U.S. Government to return Blue Lake (called "Dawn Lake" in the novel) to Taos Pueblo. In the novel, the government returns Dawn Lake to the pueblo in the last chapter, so I'm not sure of the timing of all this.
For 1942, this is extremely progressive literature, and it apparently played a valuable role. Frank Waters was later criticized for writing a book about Hopi religion that was very popular among college students in the 1960s, and he seems to have been a major force in the mystification of Indian culture that became so prevalent. I just don't know how to judge him -- I don't know enough about him. I'll just say again that this was a good book, an interesting book, that left me with just a touch of that uncomfortable "other" feeling, as though perhaps the author is not handling his subject matter quite appropriately. But I did like it. And I particularly liked the deer.
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