Shell Shaker

Shell Shaker
Author LeAnne Howe
Cover artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Country United States
Language English
Genre novel
Publisher Aunt Lute Books
Publication date
 September 2001
Media type Print (Paperback)
Pages 223 pp
ISBN 978-1-879960-61-9

Shell Shaker is a novel by writer and playwright LeAnne Howe, an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The novel is notable for the way it interweaves two tales of murder involving flawed Choctaw political leaders set over 200 years apart in the mid 18th century and 1991, connected through the peacemaking Billy family. According to the author, "Shell Shaker is a book about power, its misuse, and how a community responds. It's not for Indians only." [1]

Title

A "shell shaker" is a woman who participates in a specific Choctaw ceremony in which empty turtle shells are tied around the dancer's feet. The purpose of the dance is to pray to spirits to carry out a request. The Billy family featured in the novel is descended from the first shell shaker, Grandmother of Birds.

Plot summary

Shell Shaker links two generations of the Billy peacemaking family through increasingly similar circumstances. The early tale, beginning in 1738 in pre-removal Choctaw Mississippi, tells the story of Red Shoes, a historical Choctaw warrior. When his wife of the Red Fox clan of the Chickasaws is murdered, his Choctaw wife, Anoleta, is blamed. Her mother, Shakbatina, forfeits her life to save Anoleta and avert a pending war between the tribes. Anoleta and her family attempt to move on as their tribe spends the next decade deciding what actions to take against Red Shoes as he plays both sides in what would become a war that devastates the people of Yanàbi Town and Anoleta's family.

The later story follows the descendants of Shakbatina, now living in Durant, Oklahoma in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma in 1991. As a fire destroys the land around them, Redford McAlester, Chief of the Choctaw Nation, is murdered, and his lover, Assistant Chief Auda Billy, has been blamed. Her mother, Susan Billy, confesses to the murder while her uncle, Isaac Billy, brings together their scattered family to help in the investigation. As the family gets closer and closer to the truth, involving tales of embezzlement, rape, money laundering, contributions to the Irish Republican Army and Mafia involvement, their lives become increasingly parallel to that of their ancestors. They begin to feel the involvement of spirits long gone, complicated by a strange old woman claiming to be Sarah Bernhardt, who just may be more than she seems.

Characters

18th century

20th century

Major themes

Motifs and images

Literary significance and reception

The novel has been commended for the way it stresses the importance of history in the current lives of a Native American group as they struggle in the quest of decolonization. Taos Pueblo scholar and critic P. Jane Hafen said of the novel in 2002: "Howe seamlessly integrates a history of desperate and gruesome fights for survival with modern Faustian pacts with materialism and wealth. At the heart of the story are generations of Choctaw peoples who preserve with ritual gestures of 'life everlasting'"[7]

Shell Shaker furthermore stands out as one of the few novels to focus on Choctaw history from the point of view of a native author. Ken McCullough has said of the novel "Although there has been significant scholarship on this historical period in the southeast, between the arrival of De Soto and Removal, no one has written a work of the imagination (of this magnitude) set in this period" [8]

The novel presents characters separate from the ideas present in American culture. "The variations in voice among the protagonists show that Howe knows how to imagine different characters, and those figures confirm and challenge stereotypes about Native Americans in a way that can only be productive for all readers." [9]

Writing style and literary techniques

The story opens from the point of view of Shakbatina who narrates the story of her own death. Apart from two later chapters, the rest are not explicitly listed as being told by her, but they are all from a third person narrative. This change of point of view maintains the storytelling aspect of Choctaw tradition while giving voices to the characters themselves, not to one describing them.

Repetition is used throughout the novel, in both situations and quotes, to establish connections between the generations. An example of this is the often repeated "ten thousand feet of intestines hanging from trees in Yanabi Town," the explanation of which is only given at the novel's end. Articles such as the porcupine sash and turtle shells pass down through generations as their imagery passes through the novel. The repetition of the images connect generations to enforce the overreaching themes of time's circular nature and the connection of people.

Memories and flashbacks are also used to establish connections. They become increasingly long and common as the story develops, as the Billy family attempts to piece together the story of the past. Writer Lucy Maddox sees the importance of memory as one of the major purposes of the novel, as it "alternates scenes from present and past, conflating ancestral lives and contemporary ones to produce stories about the ways in which identity is both constructed and understood in a tribal context that makes memory more relevant than chronology" [10]

The Choctaw language is heavily featured throughout the novel, but never without translation. This allows those with no knowledge of the language, regardless of their native status, to fully appreciate the storyline. The importance of the language is established from the beginning, as the novel's opening lines are in the Choctaw language. From there, the novel's important themes are illustrated by the language, including that of the bloodsucker (osano) and the search for the greatest giver, or Imataha Chitto.

The classical trickster character is also used. Grandmother Porcupine serves as both a comic relief while imparting necessary knowledge to those she wants to have it, namely Isaac, Hoppy, and Nick. She claims to be an animal spirit, over 400 years old and a protector of the family. Fitting with the Native American trickster idea, she represents "an openness to life's multiplicity and paradoxes" [11]

Criticisms

One major criticism possible with the novel is the corrupt portrayal of non-Native people. While the French have a favorable portrayal in the character of Bienville, the English are constantly listed as an enemy (the Inklish okla). It is important to note that the only British character, Borden, is a positive one, and is accepted by his wife's family at novel's end. The stereotypical images of the Italian mobsters and Irish gangsters are also questionable. It can be argued, however, in the book, "corruption [is not] necessarily a condition of Americans and American society overall, and if it is, then American Indians are participants, not exempt" [12]

The novel is also extremely graphic in its representations of sex and violence. There are scenes of rape, war and cannibalism that may prove difficult for some readers. The novel, however, has not reached mainline success and has not been featured on any banned book lists.

Allusions and references

Popular culture

History and geography

Choctaw traditions

Awards and nominations

Publication history

Sources, references, external links, quotations

  1. ↑ Howe, LeAnne. "Choctalking On Other Realities." Grinnell Magazine. Winter 1999: 46-51
  2. ↑ Howe, LeAnne. Shell Shaker.
  3. ↑ , Carolyn. "Review of Shell Shaker" http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Critique/review_fiction/shell_shaker_by_leanne_howe.html
  4. ↑ Howe, LeAnne. "Choctalking On Other Realities." Grinnell Magazine. Winter 1999: 46-51
  5. ↑ Hollrah, Patrice. "Decolonizing the Choctaws: Teaching LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker", The American Indian Quarterly 28.1&2 (2004) 73-85 (hosted at muse.jhu.edu, accessed 12 April 2008).
  6. ↑ Howe, LeAnne. "The Story of America: A Tribalography." Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies. Ed. Nancy Shoemaker. New York: Routledge. 2002. 29-48.
  7. ↑ Hafen, P. Jane. Review of Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe. MultiCultural Review 11, no. 2 (June).
  8. ↑ McCullough, Ken. "If You See the Buddha at the Stomp Dance, Kill Him!: The Bicameral World of LeAnne Howe's Shell Shaker." SAIL 15, no. 2 (Summer): 58-69.
  9. ↑ Schurer, Norbert. "Shell Shaker: Women hold the key to tribe's survival in an ambitious work."
  10. ↑ Maddox, Lucy. Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race and Reform. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2005.
  11. ↑ Franchot Ballinger, Gerald Vizenor Sacred Reversals: Trickster in Gerald Vizenor's "Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent" American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1, The Literary Achievements of Gerald Vizenor (Winter, 1985), pp. 55-59
  12. ↑ Steeves, Carolyn. "Review of Shell Shaker"
  13. ↑ "The Choctaw of Oklahoma"
  14. ↑ Reeves, Carolyn Keller. The Choctaw Before Removal. University Press of Mississippi.
  15. ↑ Mississippi Historical Society. Accessed through Google Books 14 April 2008.
  16. ↑ Sargento, Golda. "An Interview with LeAnne Howe."
  17. ↑ Debo, Angie. The Rise and Fall Of The Choctaw Republic University of Oklahoma Press: 1934. 4-5.
  18. ↑ Swanton, John. Source Material for the Social and Ceremonial Life of the Choctaw Indians. The University of Alabama Press. 1931.