50 pages • 1 hour read
Calling for a Blanket Dance
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Themes
Generational Trauma
The main source of generational trauma in this text is violence. Violence is both experienced and inherited by children, and one such act of violence is the narrative’s inciting incident: While returning home from a visit to Everardo’s family in Mexico, Everardo, Turtle, and the young Ever are stopped by Mexican police officers. Everardo is subject to a brutal beating that both his wife and his child witness. Lena, Turtle’s mother, understands the stakes of bearing witness to such brutality, and admonishes her daughter: “You never take an infant around violence” (13). She understands that young brains are not capable of processing this kind of cruelty, and that when they witness a family member (especially a parent) receiving a beating like the one Everardo survives, their minds hold onto the memories as trauma. Additionally, children are not old enough yet to have the linguistic capability to work through and process trauma. It adversely impacts their development and the way that they process emotion even as adults.
Ever does manifest signs of trauma, both from having observed violence against his father and as a result of having been subject to his father’s violent temper. After the beating, Everardo sustains lasting kidney damage, and his own unresolved trauma rises to the surface in the form of violence directed towards his family. As the years pass, Ever grows increasingly angry and withdrawn. He is too young to understand the source of his unhappiness. Because he has been, even during early childhood, surrounded by so much violence, he turns to violent acts as a coping mechanism and as an outlet for his own inner pain. Ever’s violent tendencies are evident in his interactions with his classmates, such as in the scene during which he breaks his action figures into pieces when asked if his father hits him, and in his many angry outbursts.
This inner pain, turned outward in the form of violence, passes to the next generation as well. Ever’s own children grow up against a violent backdrop. They have the additional trauma of a mother who has a (as her own parents did) meth addiction. Ever’s first wife, Lonnie, is herself an embodiment of generational trauma, for she is just one in a long line of members of her family who face addiction, fractured relationships, and inter-generational poverty. The children that she and Ever share, in spite of Ever’s unceasing attempts to provide a stable home for them, do inherit a portion of their parents’ unresolved pain. Ever’s daughter Shandi, in addition to resorting to violence to manage her moods, also engages in acts of self-harm. So too does Ever’s adopted son Leander. Although Leander grew up in another family, he shares with Ever both childhood trauma and the tendency to turn that inner pain into violence. Like Ever, he also struggles to understand the source of his anger. He is reflective though, and after observing: “Still everyday it seemed I woke up hardcore angry. I didn’t know why” (200), he finds a way (with considerable help from Ever) to channel his energy into his visual art.
Resilience and Family Bonds
In spite of this novel’s detailed and in-depth representation of generational trauma, it also provides a rich exploration of the process of healing from generational trauma. Because of this sharp focus on resilience, Calling for a Blanket Dance should be read as a hopeful, forward-looking text. Hokeah locates strength and hope all within the spaces of both family and traditional culture, and these characters find resilience not only through strong familial bonds, but also through their connections to traditional Indigenous cultural practices.
Although generational trauma does run through each generation of Ever’s family, so too does strength and the capacity for healing from trauma. Lena is the family’s matriarch, and through her support, love, and dedicated parenting she does help to provide her children (and their children) with emotional tools and healthy coping mechanisms. However, she also sews quilts that, rooted in Indigenous ceremony and practice, are imbued with healing powers that help to heal not only Ever but his children as well: “The love she had for her family was laced within every piece of thread stitched across her quilts. It was Lena who held us all together” (233). In this way, resilience is tied both to family (Lena herself) and to traditional Indigenous cultural products (the quilts).
Turtle, too, remains sharply focused on family. She works hard to provide stability to Ever and Sissy, in spite of her abusive marriage to Everardo and their impoverishment. At the beginning of the novel, she is working towards purchasing a home, and although she ultimately loses the house and ends up in a rented trailer, she continues to work towards home ownership. That she and her son Ever both end up in homes of their own is a testimony to the resilience that she has managed to pass on to him, in spite of his also having inherited a propensity for anger and violence from his father. That the novel ends just as Ever has moved his family into their new Cherokee home is one of the text’s most powerful nods towards hope and resilience: Readers are left not only with a portrait of pain and trauma, but one of strength, family, and cultural connection.
Cultural connection is another key source of resilience for Ever and various members of his family. This is first evident in his relationship with his grandfather Vincent. At the end of his life, and atoning for years of alcohol dependency, Vincent heals himself in part through teaching grandsons Ever and Quinton about the traditions of the Gourd Dance and its ceremonial regalia. Vincent sees the connection to the Gourd Dance and Kiowa warrior heritage as “the power to heal my grandsons” (56), and the lessons that he teaches them will outlive even Vincent himself. Ever retains his connection to the Gourd Dance throughout his life, joins the military as a way to preserve the legacy of both traditional Kiowa warriors and the generation of Kiowa men who fought for the Allied Powers in World War II, and ultimately instructs his children in the dance, its regalia, and the traditions of Indigenous powwows. In a broader sense, the focus on the Gourd Dance and the idea of healing through reconnection with traditional Indigenous cultures is a moment of inter-textual connection with a previous generation of Indigenous literature: that of the Native American Renaissance, a generation of texts that began with N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969. Momaday shares Kiowa heritage with Hokeah, and Hokeah’s epigraph in this text is drawn from Momaday’s writing. Public discourses surrounding generational trauma are fairly recent, but the idea that traditional, Indigenous ceremonies can help heal Indigenous peoples is firmly located within the texts of the Native American Renaissance.
Ever, as he gets older, heals, and understands himself and generational trauma better, begins to help his own family members to heal from their trauma and to give back to his community in the form of working with at-risk youth. He mentors the young Leander, a teenager whose propensity for violence and struggles in school remind Ever of himself. He encourages Leander to pick up a pencil and draw when he feels anger rising within himself, and through channeling these feelings of rage into his art, Leander begins to find a deep sense of strength and resilience. Leander follows Ever’s model and begins to work with other, younger at-risk boys, and he even notes that he “liked the aggressive kids” at work (199). It is these angry, rage-prone young men with whom he feels the greatest kinship and to whom he can provide the most focused assistance.
The Blanket Dance, one of the text’s final and most powerful depictions of Indigenous tradition, is another source of resilience and communal bonds. In it, a family (or individual) in need spreads out a blanket, onto which various members of their family and community can place small financial donations. These one-and-two dollar contributions add up, and they are a way for the community to support one of their own without overburdening any one member: Everyone gives what they can. In spite of the many struggles depicted in both Kiowa and Cherokee communities in this text, there is also great strength and resilience, and Hokeah encourages his readers to approach Indigenous lives with admiration rather than pity.
Identity Development
Ever’s identity development is another key thematic focal point within Calling for a Blanket Dance. Readers watch his character develop a strong sense of self against the backdrop of generational trauma and violence that he inherits from his father. In spite of Ever’s early childhood difficulties, his character in particular emerges as an embodiment of strength and resilience, and this happens in part because of the way that he develops a sense of individual, familial, and cultural identity.
During his adolescence, Ever still shows signs of being mired in the traumas of his childhood. He is given to violent outbursts, struggles in school and in his personal relationships, and engages in substance misuse that is common in both his family and his community. His first real act of positive self-identification is joining the military, and although it is pointed out to him that the United States military has not always been friendly to Indigenous peoples, Ever sees his service as an extension of Kiowa warrior traditions, as a nod to the Kiowa men who fought in World War II, and as source of stability and healthy habits. He also eschews the idea that states and governments dictate the lives of Indigenous people, and in embracing the military he also embraces agency and self-determination: No one (and no system) is in charge of Ever except for Ever himself.
In addition to Ever’s military service, Ever comes increasingly to build a sense of identity rooted in Indigenous culture. In this way, he maintains the connections first forged by grandparents Lena and Victor. Through working at powwows, but more importantly through participating in the Gourd Dance and by teaching his children about their Kiowa heritage, Ever roots himself into an Indigenous community with traditions going back thousands of years. Here, too, the narrative shares an intertextual moment with texts like N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, for the development of cultural identity is an important piece of that era’s motifs and themes.
In addition to the importance of Indigenous tradition and ceremony to Ever’s identity development, he also finds a greater sense of self through the work that he does with at-risk youth. He helps young men like Leander find alternatives to their unhealthy and ultimately re-traumatizing behavioral patterns and comes to see himself as a strong mentor. Although his first mentorship role is eliminated after the organization he works for loses funding, Ever ultimately finds a job working with young, Indigenous children in need that has a good salary and benefits. This job enables him to help maintain his household after purchasing his own Cherokee home. His interest in helping at-risk young people, and the extent to which that role comes to be central to his identity, also helps Ever find and maintain stability.
Ever will also understand himself as a devoted and caring father. This trait stems from both his mother Turtle and grandmother Lena, but there is a sense in which Ever rises to the challenges of parenting because of his wife’s inability to do so, and because he understands the signs of early trauma in his own children. Ever works tirelessly to support them, teaches them both coping mechanisms to help control their anger and how to see themselves as part of a long tradition of Kiowa and Cherokee people, and gives them the love that he never saw from his father and that his children never experienced with their mother. Ultimately, in spite of his early, traumatic experiences, Ever’s identity is built from strong family bonds, resilience, and a dedication to helping his community.
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