Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Bruce J. Degi: Braiding the New Native American Narrative: Michael Dorrié Yellow Raft in Blue Water.

produce. The recent novels Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks carry only Erdrich's name, just as Yellow Raft carries only Dorris' name, yet as Erdrich has stated: We're collaborators, but we're also individual writers. One person sits down and writes the drafts. I sit down and write it by myself or he does, but there's so much more that bears on the crucial moment of writing. You know it, you've talked the plot over, you've discussed the characters. You've really come to some kind of an understanding that you wouldn't have done alone. I really think neither of us would write what we do unless we were together, (qtd in Rouff 85) Their collaboration is an open secret, even if, as I suspect, it has to this point weighed heavily on Erdrich's talents. But the artistic collaboration within their own family exists, and beautifully mirrors the subtle, yet wonderfully apt, central metaphor in Yellow Raft: that of braiding hair. This remarkably simple, and all but mundane act of a mother braiding her daughter's hair (or vice versa)

—a personal collaboration in this delicate bit of personal grooming

—serves as the novel's soul, and ultimately becomes its message. Thus, in the final paragraph of the novel, Father Hurlburt, the reservation priest, unknowingly establishes the theme that now illuminates everything that has come before in the novel: 'What are you doing?" Father Hurlburt asked. As a man with cut hair, he did not identify the rhythm of three strands, the whispers of coming and going, of twisting and tying and blending, of catching and of letting go, of braiding. (372) Father Hurlburt is an outsider, a "man with cut hair," who can not understand the ultimately sociological significance of hair braiding

—of twisting and tying and blending and catching and letting go

—in the lives of these three Indian women. Thus we see, and the end of the novel, the first issue that the novel confronts: how do non-native Americans begin to understand native Americans? And the second 25