Cedar In Future Home Of The Living God Summary

The second authorizing principle for the narrators of LeadFeather and Future Home of the Living God is their experience of History. When Vizenor says in Manifest Manners that the “historicism of tribal cultures and the indispensable linear representations of time are …simulations of manifest manners”, he points out the native perception of history is rather cyclical, interconnected and recurring (Vizenor 61). With this claim, Vizenor not only rejects the linearity but also condemns the progressive western view of history. Both Stephen Graham Jones and Louise Erdrich allow their narrators to experience this fluctuating, ever-changing, recurring character of history. In Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich places Cedar into an uncertain,

apocalyptic reality, where “the world is running backward” ( Erdrich 3). By saying that the word is going backward, Erdrich flips meaning of past and future, allowing her narrator to escape the traditional linear view of history and granting Cedar to encounter the interconnectedness of time and history. Just as in native oral tradition, the narration of the Future Home of the Living God lives in a mythical, eternal moment of the present. There is no before or after, only the collision of yesterday and tomorrow in the omnipotent present. By claiming that “Life might skip forward, sideways, in unforeseen directions” and that “that there was never a story moving forward”(55), Erdrich creates an environment where Vizenor simulations simply cannot exist. Trough this almost mythical reality, Cedar is initiated into the native worldview and, after liberated from a false view of human history, becomes equipped to transmit native perspectives.
In Leadfeather, Stephen Graham Jones, reveals the interconnectedness of time and history, through Francis’s transgenerational connection with Doby Saxon. By creating a transcendent connection between Doby and Francis, Stephen Graham Jones, creates a double reality in which present and past appear simultaneously. In this double reality, the consciousness of the two characters merge, and they will be able to transmit dreams, emotions, and memories across time and space. From the moment Doby starts to read the old letters, his life's becomes united with the life of Francis. For example, when Dally Takes Doby to the museum, Doby sees the objects on display in two separate timelines:
“...old. Like you can remember a time when it was n’t.Like that parfleche with the beads, stained down at the corner: you know you’ve seen that riding around some woman's neck” (Jones 89).
By emphasizing the difference in the visual perception of these objects, Stephen Graham Jones points out that Doby shows two realities. In his own reality, he encounters the object at the first time, but through the connection of Francis’s consciousness, he remembers the objects from distant past. However, the transmission of memories does not only work in one way. When Francis arrives in the town of Browning, he is already equipped with Doby’s future memories: “He’d grown up here. Somehow. Knew what was here now and what had been here before”(Jones 104). This passage points out, that, just as Doby, Francis lives in a double reality. His memories of Browing come from Doby who not only knows every inch of the town but whose identity is so tightly intertwined with the place, that it is able to transfer through time. As a result of this transgenerational connection, the Indian agent encounters a flexible, recurring ever changing the character of history and gains the right to hold the scepter of narration.
Cedar and Francis earn the third emblem on the narrative authority by their personal struggles. While Gerald Vizenor claims that “the manifold anxieties and desires that arise the from the tension announced in the binary of savagism and civilization” are only simulations of true native identity, works of earlier writers, such as D’Arcy McNikkle, N. Scott Momaday, and Leslie Mormon Silko, suggest that native identity is tied to crisis and inners struggle (Vizenor 61). In Future Home of the Living God, Cedar’s identity struggle is based on her fear of conventionality, while in LedFeather, Francis’s adversity is embodied by his loneliness and isolation. Just like in earlier novels, where the main characters have to cope with alienation, transgenerational trauma, cultural isolation, and guilt, Cedar and Francis have to face with their owns shadows. Cedar’s first struggle in Future Home of the Living God is her false sense of identity. Although Cedar‘s adoption and upper-middle-class childhood, eliminated identity struggle in her early life she can not run away personal crisis. Treated special, “like an Indian princess”, Cedar becomes a theoretical native; a native whose identity lies in the romanticised indigenous of white culture. When arriving at college, she experiences what does it truly mean to be a native, her false sense of specialty sinks into the bottomless lake of ordinary:
“I became ordinary, then. Even worse, I had no clan, no culture, no language, no relatives. Confusingly, I had no struggle. In our talking circles, I heard stories. Addictions. Suicides. I had no crisis in my life,…, so I invented one” ( Erdrich 5).
The former quote, however, not only points to Cedar’s fear of becoming ordinary, but also his fear of loneliness and isolation. Fears that are inherent in every native individual, fears that arise from experience of multiculturalism and the conflict of colliding realities. On the other hand, she not only experiences isolation through her theoretical nativeness but also through her pregnancy. In the apocalyptic time, when everything is in reverse evolution, Cedar faces cultural isolation and atrocity. Although she shares the news of her pregnancy with her Potts family, she becomes isolated from her adopted parents, her community and the father of her child.
At a time when pregnant women become a commodity, a high price for survival, she is forced to hide from the eyes of the world, locked in, lonely her house at the end of a forgotten road in South Minneapolis with the only connection between her and the outside world is her journal and Zeel, her Catholic magazine. With planning cedar in the midst of cultural isolation, Erdrich basically recreates a native isolation in a miniature scale. The apocalyptic atmosphere, the chaos, the dehumanization of people, is a symbol of “apocalyptic” colonization, when an unknown power, in Cedars case the Mother, reshapes the rules of society. Therefore Cedars experiences as a cross-blood pregnant woman balancing on the edge of time, allow her to gain insight into the true native perspective.
Like Cedar in Future Home of the Living God, Francis also acquires some narrative authority through his personal struggle.

In many ways, when he arrives at the reservation of the Blackfeet, Francis experiences reverse colonization. In an environment where he does not speak the language, is unfamiliar with the culture and the people, just as the natives, he faces an alternate reality. He not only faces the feeling of loneliness and isolation, but also experiences the same poverty, hunger, and helplessness as the Blackfeet on the reservation. After he holds back the portions of winter meat in hope of proving his agency to Collins and soldiers, his arising guilt condemns Francis to isolation and loss of his identity. In hope of redemption, he assumes he must become an Indian:

“Heaven and Hell were to be excluded in this Pagan landscape, as he suspected they would be, then perhaps the fitting equivalent to Hell for a white man would simply be to be forced to live life as one of his subjects” (

Jones155).
By this passage, Francis reveals that his assimilation to Blackfeet culture, his change of name, participation in native ceremonies serve as punishment for causing the death of six-hundred “Piegans”. As he picks up practices such as using a knife and stick for accounting, and de decides to slaughter the government cattle, Francis slowly detaches himself from the identity of the Indian agent. His assimilation becomes completed when he decides to accept the new nickname given by Yellowtail. Although it might seem that his new nickname provides Francis with narrative authority, Considering Gerald Vizenor’s words, that “recognition of tribal pears” and “the use of tribal nicknames” is only a simulation of native identity, Francis’s agency, must lie in something deeper than his assimilation. In his personal guilt. Francis’s "espitolic" confession to his wife, Claire not only give authenticity to his story but also put him in the shoes of a (prodigal son) who by his resentment and apology becomes authorized to share the story of the wronged.
As the former paragraph prove narrative authority can come from many different aspects of identity.

Although Francis and Cedar are far from the being a native, they earn the scepter of narration trough their connection through language, view of history and inner struggle. On the other hand, since the Gordian Knot of native identity is so complex that even the most skilled ethnographer would fail to define what does it mean to be a “true” native american. Therefore, claiming that there is only one reliable native perspective not only seems oversimplistic and exclusionary. As in the Case of and Francis, the interaction with a native culture not only provides sufficient authority to share the story but also provides the reader with a revolutionary perspective. A perspective that shines a new light on the jewels of the literary treasure box, and helps to value and appreciate the native culture from a different viewpoint. It helps the rather realizes, that “native perspective” not necessarily have to be nationalized or politicised. That true native works of literature, authentic treasure boxes, can be valuable in

themselves.