Indian Affairs by Larry Woiwode

First published: 1992

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1971

Locale: Northern Michigan

Principal Characters:

• Christofer Van Eenanam, a part Native American Indian graduate student of English who is writing his dissertation on the poetry of Theodore Roethke
• Ellen Strohe Van Eenanam, Chris’s wife of seven years
• Beauchamp Nagoosa, Chris’s Indian friend, a poet and a petty thief
• Gaylin, a young Indian from the local village, an arsonist

The Novel

Indian Affairs describes the internal and external events experienced by Chris and Ellen Van Eenanam as they live under primitive conditions in her grandparents’ hunting lodge in the wilderness of northern Michigan during a freezing winter in 1971. The novel is subtitled Book Two: The Native Son, identifying the work as the second volume of a planned trilogy by Woiwode. The first part, What I’m Going to Do, I Think, Book One: The Boy, published in 1969, tells the story of Chris and Ellen’s courtship, marriage, and honeymoon at the same hunting lodge in Michigan. Much of the background of the characters in Indian Affairs is provided, and although the second volume may be read independently of the first, familiarity with What I’m Going to Do, I Think greatly enhances the reading of Indian Affairs.

By the end of the first novel, Chris has decided that in order to provide financially for his wife and their expected child, he will not return to the graduate school where he has been studying mathematics. The child, however, arrives prematurely and dies shortly after birth. Indian Affairs opens with the couple returning to the hunting lodge in the dead of winter; six years have passed since the action of What I’m Going to Do, I Think. Chris has returned to graduate school, this time to study English literature, and plans to finish his dissertation on the poetry of Theodore Roethke. Ellen intends to write a personal journal that explores her feelings about the death of their child and their continuing childlessness.

Shortly after their arrival, Chris and Ellen learn of a fire that has burned down a shack in a small Indian village nearby. This is the first in a series of mysterious fires—apparently the work of an arsonist—that occur throughout the novel. Along with this mystery, Ellen and Chris have another: a prowler, possibly a peeping Tom, has been stalking about outside their cabin at night. A gang of young Indian toughs has repeatedly been threatening Chris because he has refused to buy them the liquor that are too young to buy for themselves. Ellen is lured to secret “women’s lib” meetings, held at the local library, by an oddly interested stranger.

As the plot relies on these events for its forward movement, the internal lives of the two main characters, and especially of Chris, are explored. Chris speculates philosophically on the nature of life, death, and of nature itself, inspired by the poetry of Roethke. Chris’s friend Beauchamp Nagoosa has provided him with peyote, a hallucinogenic substance, with which both Chris and Ellen experiment. Chris’s encounters with the local Indians, his studies of the historical and persistent injustices suffered by Native Americans, and his exploration of their current ways of life lead him to come to embrace his own Native American heritage. His final thought in the novel, a line from Roethke, is “I’ll be an Indian.”

Ellen, brought up by her grandparents from a very young age after her own parents were killed in a mysterious “accident,” comes to understand that her beloved Christian Scientist grandparents are extremely prejudiced anti-Semites and that her father was most likely Jewish. She believes that this conflict may have driven her parents to suicide and that, most likely, the automobile “accident” was actually a deliberate and calculated act. By the novel’s end, Ellen has, like Chris, realized that she must come to terms with her family history and her ethnic heritage.

The climax of the novel is reached after the mysteries of the prowler and the arsonist are solved and after Chris has achieved a tentative truce with the local roughnecks. He has finished his dissertation, and Ellen has completed her journal. She is pregnant. On the day they are to leave for New York to begin a new life, they stop to attend the funeral of Jimmy Jones, a local Indian who was killed in the most recent house fire. Because Jimmy is a war veteran, an incongruous color guard from the American Legion attends the funeral and honors the deceased with a twenty-one-gun salute. The genuine terror of the Indians at the sound of the gunshots, the sight of men, women, and children falling to the ground as they must have done at Wounded Knee, evokes images of Judgment Day and so horrifies and moves Chris that he feels a sudden sense of conviction that settles his life: the absolute surety of the resurrection of the dead, of the life of the world to come. This, finally, is the only way that justice may be truly had for all.

The Characters

Christofer Van Eenanam is a hero alienated from the world—even, it seems, from his own wife. The final pages of What I’m Going to Do, I Think strongly suggest that the character is leaning toward suicide; there is a distinct emptiness in Chris Van Eenanam’s soul at the end of the first novel. By the time Indian Affairs opens, six years later, Chris has given up working for the “Establishment” in a brokerage firm, a period of his life that now is a source of embarrassment to him. His choice of English literature over mathematics as a field of study further reflects this change in his temperament. He feels the need to understand himself, to explore his heritage, and to find some deeper meaning to his life. Woiwode’s often disjointed plot line and the obscurity of Chris’s reasoning help to render his sense of confusion and of aimlessness throughout the novel.

Woiwode renders the conflicts in his main character’s life in a number of ways. Almost immediately, the uneasy relations between Chris and his wife are dramatized. Chris has apparently been drinking more than Ellen would like, and she disapproves of his buying liquor for underage locals. Chris’s thoughts ramble widely, now focused on cutting down a tree, now following a train of thought that leads to a childhood memory. From the beginning, Chris is established as a complex, confused, self-centered young man.

It is not until the final pages of the novel that Chris begins to feel a sense of self, as the threads of all of his experiences and interests come together. Finally, he feels that he has found some meaning in his life. He is reconciled with his now-pregnant wife and with his Indian heritage, which he finally acknowledges publicly and has come to accept. He also finds spiritual satisfaction, not in the doctrines of any established religion but in the certainty of the resurrection of the dead. Belief in this fundamentally Christian doctrine, whether or not it is arrived at through association with the Christian church, Woiwode suggests, is the only way in which the great evils and injustices of the world may be reconciled with the belief in a loving God.

Ellen, Chris’s wife, is seemingly as self-centered as her husband at the novel’s opening. She is still obsessed with her childlessness, and she appears to resent Chris for this reason. She is unable to break the emotional stranglehold that her grandparents—particularly her grandmother—have over her. Ellen’s disenchantment with Chris reaches a climax with the discovery that the mysterious prowler, Peggy, is one of Chris’s former lovers who seems to have a kind of “fatal attraction” for him.

Beauchamp Nagoosa is a Native American who is a poet and a thief. He is by turns sympathetic and nonsympathetic. At times a poet in love with nature, indignant at the exploitation of the Native American by whites, he exploits that same history to justify his own stealing and “squatting” in a house that does not belong to him. He eagerly takes the teenaged daughter of a neighborhood prostitute into his bed. Beau demonstrates both the best and the worst traits of modern American Indians.

Gaylin, a young man from the village, takes on the role of temporary son to Chris. Chris acts as Gaylin’s “guide” when the boy first experiences the effects of peyote. Chris teaches Gaylin to build a teepee in the traditional manner, an episode that turns out to be as much an initiation rite for Chris as it is for the boy. These experiences compel Chris to rediscover and accept his own Native American heritage.

Critical Context

Woiwode’s first novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think, published in 1969, was an enormous critical success for which he received a William Faulkner Award and an American Library Association Award. He was also awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1971 and 1972. Woiwode went on to publish other successful works, including the novels Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) and Born Brothers (1988) and the collection The Neumiller Stories (1989). He has also published a volume of poetry, Even Tide (1977).

Although twenty-three years have elapsed between What I’m Going to Do, I Think and its sequel, Indian Affairs, the two novels are intimately related. Many of the characters, themes, and story lines of the second volume appeared in the first. Indian Affairs, although more complex, is also more obscure than its predecessor, a literary trait of Woiwode’s that has been alternately praised and criticized. For this reason, the book has received mixed reviews, and a reading of What I’m Going to Do, I Think may be necessary for a complete understanding of Indian Affairs.

Bibliography

Nelson, Shirley. “Stewards of the Imagination: Ron Hansen, Larry Woiwode, and Sue Miller.” Christian Century 112 (January 25, 1995): 82-85. Nelson interviews Hansen, Woiwode, and Miller, focusing on the role of religion in their works and on readers’ reactions to their novels.

Woiwode, Larry. “Homeplace, Heaven, or Hell.” Renascence 44 (Fall, 1991): 3-16. Woiwode explores the positive aspects of writing within a specific, detailed regional landscape and how such specifics are inherently universal. The author also gives a personal account of the circumstances surrounding his decision to move his family to North Dakota and provides some insight into his religious beliefs. Sheds some light on Woiwode’s Christian ethics and thus on the philosophical meanderings of Indian Affairs.

Woiwode, Larry. “An Interview with Larry Woiwode.” Interview by Ed Block, Jr. Renascence 44, no. 1 (Fall, 1991): 17-30. Woiwode discusses the circumstances of his conversion experience. He also declares the central importance of the family as an expression of values in his work and discusses his use of fragmentation to encourage a sense of struggle within the reader. Includes a brief reference to Indian Affairs: “It’s a comedy.”

Woiwode, Larry. “The Reforming of a Novelist.” Interview by Timothy Jones. Christianity Today 36, no. 12 (October 26, 1992): 86-88. Jones gives a brief background on Woiwode and Indian Affairs before the interview proper. Woiwode answers questions regarding his own Christianity and the role of faith in his fiction.

Woiwode, Larry. “What I’m Going to Do, I Think.” Library Journal 94 (February 1, 1969): 579. The author gives a brief summary of his background. He cites Leo Tolstoy as the single greatest influence on his writing and states that his intention in writing is not to be deliberately obscure but “to tell the truth as clearly as I can.”

Woiwode, Larry. “Where the Buffalo Roam: An Interview with Larry Woiwode.” Interview by Rick Watson. North Dakota Quarterly 63 (Fall, 1996): 154-166. A revealing interview about Woidwode’s homecoming and its effect on his writing.