Notes on Piercy, Erdrich, and Ownes


Piercy
Marge Piercy's poem "Sand Roads: The Development," which we didn't get a chance to discuss in class, prompts us to ask some questions extremely pertinent to the rest of our discussions so far. She sets at odds with each other the year-long residents of Cape Cod and the "vacationers" who come to Cape Cod in the summer. In regard to the differences in land use between these two populations, what does Piercy have to say? She establishes the vacation homes themselves as emotionless traps (" . . . an occasional / bird with a broken back twitching / on the deck under a gape of glass") (lines 12-14). Her residence, on the other hand, welcomes various animals and supports an effluence of organically grown plants and produce. But, yet, she feels a certain guilt, as she asks for forgiveness at the end of the poem. For what is she asking forgiveness, and of whom?

Erdrich
Natasha's notes to be added . . .

But while we're waiting for Natasha's notes, here are some of the ideas we discussed:
We considered the weighty theme of rape, of people and of land. Mauser is potentially involved in both. How do his tactics for dealing with the land he owns, and his regard for this land, correlate (or not correlate) to his attitude towards the women depicted in the story, Ira and Marlis? What is Mauser "looking for" after he receives his check? From what we know, what did he always "look for" and depend on in Ira? What was Ira looking for? We discussed Ira's "cage" idea that she suggested Mauser employ when he started to get angry. We thought in the story that she might figure somehow as Mauser's conscience or his guardian, echoing the "cage" image that she suggests Ira use. He explained that he needed her and that he hoped her psychology degree would help him, ultimately. But, perhaps in a way he viewed her as a captor, a jailor. What indications of this possibility do we see in the text? Also, we examined cycles of destruction in the text, such as the cycles that naturally take place on land (seasonal growth and decay) and those that are "human-made" cycles, such as the "tearing down a parking lot to build another parking lot" idea that we discussed a few weeks ago. Nature, as we see through Moen's activities, has her own cycle, and for this Mauser does not show any respect (even though he initially tells Moen he'll allow Moen to stay on the land until the crop comes in, which is the end of a stage in the cycle). Mauser prematurely enacts the end of this part of the cycle by destroying the sunflowers before the end of their maturity, before harvest-time. There is also the idea suggested by the title that money may in fact be meaningless and that other aspects of life have more value. Mauser tries to construct value (in building houses and transforming land) and he also tries to construct a certain historicity for himself and his company (thus, the "Mauser and Mauser" name). We also discussed juxtapositions between white and Native traditions of land use and appreciation in regard to the dynamic between Ira and Mauser (and we acknowledged that we might be extrapolating here). Remember, finally, our hypotheses regarding Mauser going to a bar called The Library and Ira going to an actual library; what does this say about where each is seeking, at the time, knowledge, and the problems and inversions perhaps associated with this?

Owens
The final text of the first half of our course was Louis Owens's "The American Indian Wilderness." The piece brought many of the ideas we've discussed together, into collision, in fact. He reveals the emotional progression of his own attitudes to "wilderness," as a result of the events of one early fall day during his time with the U.S. Forest Service. The simple part of the story is that Owens went to destroy a shelter on the White Pass, a shelter that after many years had "collapsed like a broken bird wing under the weight of winter snow" (448). After sufficiently dismantling and burning the shelter, Owens walks back down the mountain and meets two sisters, for whose people the area of the White Pass was for centuries part of their ancestral land. He immediately realizes the wrong that he had committed by destroying the shelter, which the sisters' father had built. From a perspective of safety, he realizes that destroying the shelter was probably the right thing to do, but from a different perspective, he worried deeply about what he had done, the kind of colonial act in which he was now complicit. "Gradually, almost painfully," he writes, "I began to understand that what I called 'wilderness' was an absurdity, nothing more than a figment of the European imagination" (449). In class, in reflecting on this realization of Owens's, we puzzled over the possibility that our perception of an "environmental crises" (about which Owen makes a bold claim a few lines below the above) depends on a distinct theory, and valuation, of past and future. Also, Euro-American culture has, historically, believed inherently and thus supported decisions (regarding land and people) rooted in ideologies of "purity" and "contamination" (we discussed this in regard to the "one-drop rule" that had such dramatic and horrific consequences during the era of slavery -- and in fact after -- in America). What does this kind of paradigm have to do with the established distinction between "civilized" places and "wild" places and the ways in which we have put forth government policies and have established federal bodies specifically to "protect" and police the distinctions between these? Indeed, as we discussed in class, "civilized" cultures have a habit of "museum-ifying" the past and a habit of keeping records and writing histories as strategies for establishing the value of the past. What does this have to do with Owens's realization? Finally, we discussed how there is little nuance between the "two side of the coin" of hunter/prey, for example, or protector/protected, or civilized/wild. What danger lies in such a binarized perspective?