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Conclusion
Inconclusiveness and open-endedness are also a part of Native thought….Many voices, many points of view, full of contradictions and moving variables and kinetic energies which keeps a civilization breathing its life breath. Take away a language and all its possibilities and you distinguish a people, or at least the spirit of people.
Diane Glancy, “Speak the Corn into Being” (WP 70)
In Stone Heart, Diane Glancy reappropriates the journals of Lewis and Clark and regains possession of the story of Sacajawea and her people. Her writing is closely related to the Native American oral traditions due to her use of juxtaposition, second person narrative, and formal strategies including italics and compound words.
The juxtaposition between “two texts of enunciation” manifests Blaeser’s notion that “history forms Native writing” and Ruppert’s idea of “mediation in Native writing.” The juxtaposition provides the historically underprivileged Sacajawea to negotiate what historically privileged explorers spoke of her, her people and the land.
Besides, it also reveals that Glancy refuses to duplicate a hegemonic discourse that seeks to silence the other. It discloses the dialogic reciprocity of the historical known and unknown, which engages the reader in exploring the in-between connections and contradictions to negotiate the significance of the novel.
Her use of the second person narrative contributes to creating a sense of immediacy and involvement that engages the listener-reader in active listening/reading. The “you” narrative not only exhibits Sacajawea’s lack of voice but paradoxically brings out the voice of Sacajawea to the reader’s mind. Besides, the use of “you” narrative shows Glancy’s ambition to give the written the same participatory force as words spoken in the storytelling.
It is also noteworthy that Glancy give the sounds to “the voices of the land”
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with her creative writing strategies. With italics, Glancy imbues the novel with a multiplicity of voices of “those who have walked upon the land.” In addition, Glancy invents “compound words” in the Sacajawea Imaginary to reveal a different way of perceiving the world. Such strategic use of compound words not only subverts the grammatical rules of the dominant cultures; most important of all, it reveals a land-based language that projects a Native worldview and emphasizes the reciprocity between human beings and the land.
This thesis attends not only to the narrative “content” but also to the narrative
“form.” I sought to explain the significance and implications of Glancy’s retelling. My theoretical and textual discussions on the “form” and “content” in Stone Heart aim to contribute to the interpretation of Stone Heart. By interrogating Glancy’s writing strategies and their potential influence on the reader’s perceptions, I come to the realization that it is “history” and “the land” that informs Stone Heart. It is her use of juxtaposition that exposes the reader to a dynamic of mediation, and it is her use of second person narrative that privileges the reader to see with a Native eye.
