Abstract
Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon (1994) connects sexual and racial traumas, economic disenfranchisement, and settler colonialism, situating incest against a background of land dispossession and genocide, specifically Cherokee removal and allotment. Thus, the protagonist’s individual experience of sexual abuse becomes emblematic of the treatment of Indians by the US government in a historical context. Underscoring how the traumatic effects of incest are connected with the historical trauma of land loss, the novel offers harsh critique on the harm done to the Indian population, in particular the women, on and off reservation. Bell testifies to the legacy of American Indian historical trauma through a literary technique reminiscent of Native storytelling as a form of literary activism, challenging stories that erase Native Peoples’ past and present presences from historical memory and creating new stories that not only bear witness to past struggles but also to American Indians’ current lives. Ultimately, through an appeal to the reader as witness, Bell’s story performs a belated witnessing to the trauma of incest that draws on the collective wounding of settler colonialism, reminding readers not only of the harm of injustice and oppression but also of resilience and resistance through the protagonist’s storytelling.
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Notes
- 1.
The novel analyzed in this chapter was discussed in a published essay of mine, “Trauma and Storytelling in Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no.5 (2018): 562–77, but the framing of it here is different because of my subsequent understanding of Caruth’s expansion of her theory of trauma.
- 2.
The Cherokee Removal between 1836 and 1839 refers to the forced relocation of thousands of members of the Cherokee nation from their lands in Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee to the Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma). It is part of the infamous Trail of Tears; the forced displacements of tens of thousands Native Americans by the US government (1830–1850). The General Allotment Act or The Dawes Act of 1887 regulated land rights within tribal territories in the US during the Allotment era (1887–1907). In her contribution to Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Bell notes that “Before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, it was Indian Territory, promised to the tribes forcefully removed from the southwestern United States” and that “[t]he removal and its consequences distinguish the writing that comes out of tribal communities of Oklahoma from the literature produced by southwestern or northern native writers” (1996, 340). Bell’s own novel not only spotlights Oklahoma Indians’ dispossessed condition but also “their stubborn survival” (1996, 338), and specifically the effects of removal and allotment on Cherokee women in terms of repeated sexual violence and abuse.
- 3.
In fact, Irene Visser suggests that “Intergenerational trauma, memories and experiences incurred by later generations, further testifies to trauma’s ‘belatedness’ and nonclosure” (2018, 126).
- 4.
The American Psychiatric Association in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, DSM-V, mentions that “The risk of onset and severity of PTSD differs across cultural groups as a result of variation in the type of traumatic exposure (e.g. genocide), the impact on disorder severity of the meaning attributed to the traumatic event (e.g. inability to perform funerary rites after a mass killing), the ongoing sociocultural context (e.g., residing among unpunished perpetrators in postcolonial settings)” under the rubric “Culture-Related Diagnostic Issues” (American Psychiatric Association 2013, 278), but does not specifically cover American Indian historical trauma (AI HT).
- 5.
The discourse of trauma is, in Dian Million’s words, “a powerful thesis for explaining the relations between present pain, circulating within many disparate behaviors and cycles of tragedy … connected to a promise for justice, since it locates blame for the historical acts of colonization to present conditions in Indigenous lives” (2013, 93).
- 6.
For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal that almost half of Native women have experienced sexual violence (Black et al. 2011, 20). As Sarah Deer (Muscogee (Creek) Nation) has observed, “the crisis of rape in tribal communities is inextricably linked to the way in which the United states developed and sustained a legal system that has usurped the sovereign authority of tribal nations” (2015, xiv), and “[a]ll other challenges faced by tribal nations are linked to the history and trauma of rape” (2015, xv). In fact, as she puts it, “trauma and victimization create a cyclical sense of despair and desperation, indeed, a very continuation of the colonization process” (2015, 45).
- 7.
See also Deer, who claims that such a “‘rapeability’ factor” has its origin in the US’s “long history of anti-Indian and anti-woman policies (2015, 9), and Andrea Smith who observes that “the program of colonial sexual violence establishes the ideology that Native bodies are inherently violable—and by extension, that Native lands are also inherently violable” (2005, 12).
- 8.
- 9.
Her stepfather has threatened Omishto not to tell her mother “how he keeps after” her, saying her mother will be heartbroken if she does (Hogan 1998, 20).
- 10.
As Duran et al. remark, “For American Indians, the United States is the perpetrator of their holocaust. Whereas other oppressed groups have a place to immigrate to escape further genocide, Native people have not had this option” (1998, 345).
- 11.
American Indian Studies scholarship and literatures can partly be seen “as a sustained critique of [the] disavowals of Native identities and histories and a necessarily political reclamation of tribal rights in America” (Strehle 2014, 109).
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Rodi-Risberg, M. (2022). Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon: Trauma, Settler Colonialism, and Storytelling. In: Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96619-5_4
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