Home is More than a Place: Indigenous Diaspora and Identity in Susan Power’s Roofwalker
For many Americans, there is a sense of pride in being able to trace one’s family line back to the land that they came from, as a point of obsession for many. The common cliche “Home is where the heart is” is emblazoned across the thresholds and entry rooms of many a North American home. But what can be said for those who, thanks to American intervention, have no land to trace back to? The history of the Indigenous peoples of America is a long and complicated one, fraught with violence and pain, in the name of Manifest Destiny and demand for resources. The forced relocation and separation from historical homes has lead to a massive diaspora amongst the Indigenous communities of the United States. As it often does, it falls to the storytellers to reconnect the people to their traditions and histories, even if they are now told from a new home. In her work Roofwalker, Susan Power uses shared storytelling and mythos to tell ancestral stories in a new land, joining the two and creating a new home for Indigenous identity off of the Reservation, and the lands that were lost to them.
It is nearly impossible to compress the full impact of colonial action on the Indigenous peoples of America. Forgoing the forced assimilations of Residential schools, and the very literal kidnapping of Indigenous children to fill them, we may never have true numbers for just how many people lost their lives as the colonizing Euro-Americans moved across the land. In regard to the land itself, it is important to discuss, even briefly, the most devastating remnants of the original colonizing: The Reservation system.
Put most simply, this was a removal of entire tribes of Indigenous peoples from territories that were desirable to the Western settlers to less desirable land. The most well-known and bloody result of this was the Trail of Tears. In this event, five Indigenous tribes from the Southeastern United States (Seminoles, Creeks, Cherokees, Chocktaws, and Chicksaws) were removed from their ancestral lands across the Mississippi to what is present day Oklahoma. These so called “Civilized Tribes” had remained in their native lands as long as they had as they had made changes and shifted their cultures to better blend with the colonizing Westerners. These tribes shifted to a more agrarian way of life, as opposed to their hunting and gathering history. They arranged their politics more similarly to the republic that was the United States. Some even subjugated other minorities, owning slaves and plantations. It became painfully clear that “Whites wanted their land, not their assimilation” (Huntzicker). Once these Indigenous peoples were removed to the Oklahoma territory and their lands resettled, the work of putting down permanent roots in the vein of their colonizers would need to begin again.
The Reservation System, in general, was a broken and imperfect one. Beyond just the physical suffering and loss that accompanied relocating tribes to these areas, there were the issues that arose once they had made their way there and settled. To paint with a rather broad brush: the lands were not ready for the number of peoples who would come to make their forced homes on top of them. One doesn’t have to go far to find stories, scholarly and otherwise, illustrating the suffering that has been found on these slivers of allotted land. For example, “The jobless rate for American Indians and Alaska Natives peaked at 28.6 percent in April 2020. That was nearly double the seasonally adjusted rate of 14.7 percent for the total population” (“Unemployment rate”). These rates are not specific for Reservations in general, but are symptomatic of the problem. On Reservation land, Indigenous peoples are cut off from the rest of the world and left to fend for themselves, often resulting in crime and high unemployment.
It should come as no surprise, then, that as time has gone on more and more Native Americans have moved away from the Reservations seeking an improvement to their quality of life. In fact, “approximately 78% of people who identify as Native American were living away from reservation or trust lands as of the 2010 U.S. Census” (Comfort). While the Reservation life is far from perfect, it is a centralized place of culture and connection. As people have been forced again to move from the lands of their peoples, and the history and culture there, the scabbed over wounds of the original diaspora are continually opened and re-opened.
Though history has attempted, successfully in many cases, to separate the Indigenous persons from their lands and so remove them from their histories, culture and the connection to it refuses to be lost in the ongoing struggle. “For many Indigenous peoples, their traditional lands are archives of their histories, from the deepest of time to recent memories and actions” (Lepofsky). It becomes then, the job of the Indigenous person to reinsert these histories, these cultural touchstones, into the new lands that they occupy. To reshape the land they call home now, away from both ancestral lands and the Reservation itself. To do so, it falls to artists and authors, like Powers, to place cultural history and referential touchstones into these new homes and new worlds.
Susan Power’s Roofwalker exists as a literary personification of this division of two things: of The Reservation and life outside it, of Story and of History. In an essay Power’s penned about being a Native American in the 21st century, she states:
We’re often told, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” and we have, a hundred years followed a hundred years and extermination failed. I’m a citizen of the country my ancestors inhabited before the so-called Founding Fathers moved here and learned from the Six Nations Confederacy the intricate political system that governs us now. If I’d been born a hundred years ago I wouldn’t be a citizen yet because, well, you know, that’s the way it is when you play Manifest Destiny with loaded dice. (“Native”)
We can see the balance that Power takes to acknowledge that she is Indigenous first, and then she is what we call American. She does not reject the painful truth of the history of Indigenous people, but has embraced it as a part of the story, and knows that she must work within its confines to move and change.
While Power specifically makes use of her identity as a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and her life lived in Chicago as a young girl, it is important to note that there is a wide and deep breadth of Indigenous experiences with location and connection to it. Pulling from a wide pool, with many different backgrounds and identities, there can be difficulty in centralizing a message. In his essay Christopher Tetuon breaks down three primary geographical locations that are often recurring in Indigenous writing: The Symbolic Center, City, and Reservation. While the City and the Reservation are more concrete ideas; the City where Western/the colonizer laws and ideals are upheld and interacted with, and the Reservation where Native and Indigenous law and tradition is interacted with, the notion of the “Symbolic Center” is more abstract. Tetuon defines it as the following:
Literally, it is the place – the landscape or range of landscapes which a people uses to define its place of origin….The Center is where myth is tied to place; where the patterns of cultural meaning form….[It] is a matrix of cultural processes which collectively describe a tribal critical tradition that may account for the growth, change, and continuity of a community within specific environments and places. (48)
This more nebulous center takes a myriad of forms in different works by Indigenous authors. In Power’s own work, Grass Dancer, it is emblematic of the moving powwows.
As the location of the entries from Roofwalker that are discussed here take place in what is arguably a “Symbolic City” where Power is raised, where does that leave the location of the center that Tetuon places with the same importance as the Colonial center and the Indigenous one? In Power’s story, the center has become the individual and their physical home. Since the community itself has been spread apart, the world changed to one that does not reflect the centers of before, each person, each family, must now forge their own.
Power starts her collection with “Stories”. These are highly fictionalized, magical realism short stories that take place in various parts Chicago across different people(s). In the titular story of the collection, the main character is a young Sioux girl born in Chicago. Immediately she is not like her mother, father, or visiting grandmother: she is born with hair “the color of the devil” (Power Roofwalker 6). She is the manifestation of the other: the separation from the tribal land into the new city. Her two younger brothers, born years later, do not bear the same bloody, red hair as her. Instead, they are “as dark as our parents and Grandma Mable, unburdened” (Power Roofwalker 8). Her brothers are born of the city, in the city, and have taken on the identity of this new place. The raised, ugly would, the bleeding scar that is symbolic of the red hair, of the time not yet settled has faded from them.
Her Grandmother, on a visit to the home after the main character’s father leaves her mother for the Reservation with another woman in tow, teaches her different words in Their language. This move seeks to pull her into, not out of, the community she would have been enrobed in on the Reservation. To preserve the culture, to move it here to “familiar objects” (Power Roofwalker 22) instead of abstract thought and memories. These stories, and the main character’s grandmother herself exemplify the thirst for culture and connection the main character has. She “not only listens intently, but also unquestioningly believes” (Whited 128) the tales that are told to her. She takes them into her heart, longing for more and more of them. The main character, emblematic of the choice to stay instead of return to the Reservation, seeks to be filled with her history to replace the physical space.
These stories are largely unknown to the colonizer audience, though not only to them. Beyond the words that the narrator’s grandmother tells her, she also tells her myths and stories of her tribe. The Roofwalker itself is one of these, defined as “a kind of angel” (Power 24) by her grandmother. She goes on to explain that the Roofwalker eats dreams, and when he did so they would come true. And so she makes her great dream something she hopes The Roofwalker will eat: the return of her father to their family since he has become lost. While this desire, and the young girl seeming to jump from the roof of her house to fall into the unseen creature may be construed as something more like magical realism, it is not so. In reference to her longer work ” Power has said firmly that the novel is not magical realism but rather a realistic view of her people’s spiritual beliefs” (Diana 7). She does not intend to weave some mythical story, but instead to educate on exactly what it is her underrepresented culture believes in. In this way, she is broadening the center, to include those who are not directly of her people. The specific environment and place as defined now includes others. She may not expect them to believe the same story, only that they know the belief of their neighbors.
That is not to say that all the characters of the titular story stay in the Literal and symbolic city to create a new Center. The narrator’s father makes a choice between his life in the city, with the family he had grown and placed there, and returning to the reservation. He tries to convince his family that it is for “politics”. When the narrator’s mother says to take the family along, he declines. “These days Pine Ridge is dangerous, Indians fighting Indians and the FBI just complicating everything. I can’t take you back there” (Power 11-2). It becomes clear that it is not some life-long desire to heal his people that pulls him away, but a pretty, younger, woman who he drives off with. Arguably, it is the symbolic city that has seeped into him that causes him to cast his family aside, and the city with it. The colonizer’s idea for what is more, new, and shiny, instead of the family and the people that have cared for him draws him away from them.
This battle between the City and the Reservation and striving to find a happy medium between the two, is also reflected in “Beaded Soles”. Here it is not a wandering husband seeking to return to the Reservation, but a mourning mother seeking to leave it. The Reservation, literal in this case, has not been kind to her and her family over lifetimes, as they are seen to be unlucky traitors due to one of their line involved in the killing of Sitting Bull. After the unfortunate loss of her child, stillborn at birth, she asks her husband to move to Chicago after pamphlets arrive advertising relocation. In her mind, “Chicago would wash me in a clean light. Chicago would never know I was a Bullhead….and the sun would be so bright on my head I wouldn’t have a shadow to fall forward or behind” (Power 103). In the story of this narrator’s life, Power does not romanticize the traditions and the old ways of thinking of the Siox people. She acknowledges them, and that they are forever a part of both the literal and Symbolic Reservation. But that is also a reason why return is impossible for some. The narrator and her husband are outcasts of the outcasts, and in a small unit cannot simply blend back in. Where “The Roofwalker”’s father seeks the anonymity of going back to the tribal lands, here the narrator seeks the anonymity of the city.
In a further parallel to the fleeing father, it is revealed in the story’s conclusion that the narrator’s husband has been unfaithful to his wife. In a dramatic turn, she ends up stabbing and killing him in a passion as she discovers them. He seeks even with his last breaths to blame all that is wrong on The Symbolic city, saying that they never should have left the reservation. But the narrator knows that it “wasn’t Chicago or Relocation” (Power 109) that killed him. For her it is the manifestation of the sin of her ancestors; the part of the Reservation that is inescapable. As much a curse on her bloodline directly, the murder of Sitting Bull by a colonizer deputized fellow Indian blends the incomplete nature of both staying and leaving in this story. Instead, the narrator paves her own way forward, as the young girl in Roofwalker has. Prison is inescapable, as she has committed a crime against both the City and the Reservation in murder. But she is given the tools to continue her traditions even in incarceration, beading the soles of her husband’s funerary moccasins. The tragedy has allowed her peace to re-center, and to collect the part of her old life that work for her.
While the tales that Power tells in the “stories” section of Roofwalker are not based on actual events, there is a sense of realness to them. This is because even amidst what a western audience would call magic or supernatural, there is a grounding in reality. The young girl “The Roofwalker” is told the stories of dream eating sprits and she takes them at face value. The narrator of “Beaded Soles” fantasizes about her beloved dead son and husband reunited and dancing amongst a storm of clouds, the beads she is sewing onto the moccasins to bury him in meant to catch the lights from the lightning so she may see them. Diana refers to the importance of story tradition in Power’s Grass Dancer, but her notes are applicable here as well:
In discussing, Power challenges readers to resist a mainstream U.S. cultural assumption that truths based on story traditions are less credible than those scientifically proven: an “old wives’ tale,” rather than a superstition to be dismissed, is instead in a Sioux context a source of valuable knowledge. (13)
The blending of this radical acceptance of Indigenous story into their everyday and reality allows for the location of the Symbolic Center to be focused on a person and their environment, instead of a literal center point. While the importance of the whole community remains, in “The Roofwalker”’s grandmother, and the cruel community that casts out the “Beaded Soles” narrator simply for her bloodline, the focus has shifted. If the modern Indigenous person looking to reconnect to their roots is a single person, than they should feel confident that they can do so on their own. These narrators have shown that the history of the whole can reside in the single, and so any land can be the land that “landscape” that defines their origins.
In relation to origins: the second half of Power’s work consists of what she has called “Histories”. These are events pulled directly from her own life, living in “isolation” in Chicago. Here, we can see her as the living, breathing actualization of the red-haired girl from “Roofwalker”: collecting her culture through stories and myths, to absorb it into her skin and make her own place.
In the story “Museum Indians” the narrator, Power, sees her culture as preserved and held up as something past and unalive. Artifacts of her tribal family, and in fact her very literal blood one, are on display at the Field Museum in Chicago. They are placed here in abstract of who they belonged to, or where they truly came from. The little girl herself looks at these displays as “dead Indians” (Power Roofwalker 163). One of these disembodied mannequins wears a blue beaded dress that was made by and belonged to the narrator’s great grandmother. Pulled from its proper place, amongst the family and those that would tell its story, it is instead on display.
It is not the dress that serves to bring the most pain to the narrator and her mother, but something less directly personal: a small Buffalo stuffed and displayed across the hall from the humanoid figures. Sacred to the Indigenous peoples of the plains, the trapped beast is emblematic more of the culture, than just this family. The stat of how the larger Indigenous people are treated versus just them. The narrator recalls her mother’s words as she looks upon the stuffed beast:
“…It makes me angry to see you like this.” Few things can make my mother cry; the buffalo is one of them. “I am just like you,” she whispers. “I don’t belong here either. We should be in the Dakotas, somewhere a little bit east of the Missouri River. This crazy city is not a fit Home for buffalo or Dakotas.” (Power Roofwalker 164)
The narrator’s mother sees in the buffalo herself: trapped in the glass of the large city, a being out of place. Unlike the buffalo, however, she has made a choice to be there. She has difficulty reconciling the leaving, abandoning the Buffalo and the spirit of her people that it represents. She romanticizes the Reservation of her memories and has internalized the disconnect from the literal land as one of her cultural heritages.
In comparison, her daughter is “a city child, nervous around livestock and lonely on the plains” (Power Roofwalker 164). And yet, this city child has learned to hold the heart of her great-grandmother and her beadwork in her heart the same way as the light-polluted city. The young girl wishes to free the poor dead beast, and her family beads not for herself, but for her mother who needs them to feel whole. The very presence of the stories that have filled her, told to her by her loving mother who venerates both, makes her feel full enough. Indigenous enough. The city that sprawls before them are the plains of her people, because she is there. Because her mother took them there, to provide the physical safety and home that can be changed, to protect the spiritual one inside of them. In this way, Power has made Chicago her Symbolic center. The museum, while something of a graveyard for her heritage, is also a haven for items and its history. To have to visit relics that belong to her family is a devastating thing, but in a history of forced relocations, to have any at all can be a hidden gift of its own.
Powers continues the “city girl” metaphor for herself through to the collection’s final story, “Chicago Waters”. In comparing herself and her relation to place with her mother, who still calls North Dakota her home despite not having lived there for at least the life of her daughter she states: “But I am a child of the city, where landmarks are man-made, impermanent. My attachments to place are attachments to people, my love for a particular area only as strong as my local relationships” (193). Power, and the multitude of Indigenous peoples of her generation and after, never saw the land that they are meant to feel disconnected from: never had a chance to develop the diaspora of their parents and the parents before them. For her mother, the Reservation and North Dakota had already become her ancestral land, generations removed from that which was stolen by colonization. Whited makes the tie between the urban and indigenous identities most clear in her essay in saying “Urban environments and reservations or tribal lands, in both the fiction and non-fiction of Power, are never entirely separated from one another, and to be in an urban setting does not inherently separate one from an Indigenous identity or community” (127). While the instinct to say that to be away from open land and the natural world that is so synonymous with the western conceptualization of the Indigenous American is strong, it is incorrect. Real Indigenous peoples like Power herself, not the characters she has written int he stories, have reclaimed the land they live in as sacred. And that, for them, has become enough.
In her 2013 collection of essays and reflections Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses in multiple ways the relationship that Indigenous people have with the land, their removal from it, and how they may return to it. In reflecting on the nature of being Indigenous and place, she herself as a member of the Potawanami Nation, she states:
I want to envision a way that an immigrant society could become Indigenous to place, but I’m stumbling on the words. Immigrants cannot by definition be Indigenous. Indigenous is a birthright word. No amount of time or faring changes history or substitutes for soul-deep fusion with the land. (213)
Power seeks to answer this same question in her writing: can one be Indigenous if they exist in a place that their birthright, their ancestry, did not start in? If as a whole, as Kimmerer seems to indicate, the Indigenous peoples of the United States has been forced to become an immigrant in a new place, can they still be Indigenous? Or has the diaspora become, in fact, too large, so that they can never connect to new land as their ancestors did. Power, in her own rooting in Chicago, would argue that it is very much a possible thing.
In her short story collection The Roofwalker, Susan Power seeks to recognize, and reconcile, the diaspora she feels as an Indigenous person, living in America. As nearly 3 out of 4 Indigenous peoples, she is living not on land that is on a Reservation or owned by Indigenous peoples. And yet, Power uses her writing to reclaim the land that IS her home as Indigenous land for the very fact that she lives on it. Power uses the symbolic trifecta of City, Reservation, and Center, to reaffirm her connection to her Indigenous identity, and provide a blueprint for other modern Indigenous peoples who seek to do the same.
Work cited after this page break
Macabress Manuscripts 