The Randomness of Me

This week my class on the literature of social change and civic engagement is reading Dee Brown’s, “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.”

I picked the text because I’m intrigued by the idea of what happens when someone from outside looks in and then tells your story. We read, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” last week, which is a more contemporary example of a person not of the culture telling a difficult story about or from the culture. Skloot does a particularly good job of being an unobtrusive author most of the time. I felt there were moments where her identity came through not as character but as author - those however did not occur as much as say when I was reading, “The Help.” 

Brown too does a more than credible job of keeping himself out of the book - he is an objective observer who at times adopts speech patterns, idioms, and other cultural references of the indigenous people about whom he is writing but only to further the development of the characters. Skloot does the same in an effort not to appropriate but to authenticate the work - much of her text comes form actual interviews. Brown however can’t know these things about his characters from primary source interviews but he could glean them from written accounts from the time.

Wounded Knee and the medical research perpetrated on Lacks were iconic moments in the history of America that unfortunately were, for the most part, swept in to the recesses of our collective psyche - well Lacks’ wasn’t even swept away because it never got in there in the first place.     

As scholars and observers of culture who aspire to make change, it is crucial that we understand the difference between appropriation - which is what “The Help,” feels like and mere story telling that sheds light or reveals hard or hidden truths. How we write these stories tells volumes about how the authors views themselves in relation to their subjects. Appropriation transmutes the subject into object while conveying of story allows the subject to remain their/themselves with no filter or judgement overlaid on their actions. Brown allows the Native Americans he is portraying the space to act and do as they might have in their time. He does do not moralize, chastise or judge their behavior, nor does he attempt to rationalize it to influence his readers’ perceptions of them. He and Skloot, “Let it do what it do,” as Ray Charles used to say.

They allowed their characters to inhabit the full spectrum of their lives without saviors or heroes coming from the outside to save them - unless you consider Skloot to be Henrietta and her family’s “white hope” (but, for that to be true, wouldn’t Skloot have to have seen herself in that light and not as simply another actor in the drama of the Lacks’ family history?). 

Brown too allows readers to draw their own conclusions about what led up to and occurred at Wounded Knee. Like all good literature, both authors used devices to add tension, build drama, and pathos, etc. but they let the story be the story.

Any way - my neighbor told me about this song the other day and I thought I’d share it with you and my class.