Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature

By Amy T Hamilton

Peregrinate: To travel or wander around from place to place.

The land of the United States is defined by vast distances encouraging human movement and migration on a grand scale. Consequently, American stories are filled with descriptions of human bodies walking through the land.

In Peregrinations, Amy T. Hamilton examines stories told by and about Indigenous American, Euroamerican, and Mexican walkers. Walking as a central experience that ties these texts together—never simply a metaphor or allegory—offers storytellers and authors an elastic figure through which to engage diverse cultural practices and beliefs including Puritan and Catholic teachings, Diné and Anishinaabe oral traditions, Chicanx histories, and European literary traditions.

Hamilton argues that walking bodies alert readers to the ways the physical world—more-than-human animals, trees, rocks, wind, sunlight, and human bodies—has a hand in creating experience and meaning. Through material ecocriticism, a reading practice attentive to historical and ongoing oppressions, exclusions, and displacements, she reveals complex layerings of narrative and materiality in stories of walking human bodies.

This powerful and pioneering methodology for understanding place and identity, clarifies the wide variety of American stories about human relationships with the land and the ethical implications of the embeddedness of humans in the more-than-human world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781943859658

Book preview

Peregrinations

Walking in American Literature

AMY T. HAMILTON

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

Reno & Las Vegas

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

www.unpress.nevada.edu

Copyright © 2018 by University of Nevada Press

All rights reserved

Jacket design by Teresa Wingfield

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Hamilton, Amy T., author.

Title: Peregrinations : walking in American literature / by Amy T. Hamilton.

Description: Reno : University of Nevada Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-943859-64-1 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-943859-65-8 (e-book) LCCN 2017038765 (print) | LCCN 2017057836 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Walking in literature. | American literature—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PS169.W25 H36 2017 (print) | LCC PS169.W25 (e-book) | DDC 810.9/35873—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038765

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Stephen and Andrea Hamilton

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction—Walking at the Intersection of Literature and Materiality

A Brief and Partial History of Walking in the United States

Material Ecocriticism

Walking in American Literature

1. Paths in the Wilderness—Walking Bodies and Material Agency in Early American Indian Captivity Narratives

Mary White Rowlandson’s Pilgrimage Through Captivity

Adventure and Social Critique in Sarah Wakefield’s Captivity Narrative

Captive Bodies and Trans-corporeal Ethics

2. By This Song I Walk—Land, Movement, and Memory on the Navajo Long Walk

The Long Walk

Walking and the Diné Worldview

Diné Memories of the Long Walk

The Long Walk in Contemporary Diné Poetry

Walking and Survival in Diné Bikéyah

3. Peripatetic Philosopher—Walking, Rhythm, and Material Nature in Mary Austin’s Desert Writing

Euroamerican Nature Writing and Walking

Indigenous Traditions and Austin’s Philosophy of Rhythm

The Land of Little Rain’s Rhythmic Desert

Knowing and Living with the Land

4. Crossing the Storied Desert—Bodies on the Border in Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway

Walking in Chicanx and Mexican Cultures

Walking in the Borderlands in The Devil’s Highway

Bodily Suffering in the Material Desert

Peregrinación as Symbol and Experience

Aztlán and Border Legends as Alternative Ways of Knowing

Reading and Writing the Land

5. Walking Between Worlds—Material and Metaphorical Maps in Louise Erdrich’s Novels

The General Allotment Act and Anishinaabe-akii (Anishinaabe Homeland)

Roads and Paths—Centering the Margins

Story Routes

Epilogue—Walking for Survival

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

This project has been under construction for more than ten years and has benefited from the insight and generosity of many people along the way. I began thinking about walking and literature at the University of Arizona while I prepared for my comprehensive PhD exams. At UA Daniel Cooper Alarcón, Larry Evers, Judy Temple, Edgar Dryden, Luci Tapahonso, and Annette Kolodny were exceptional teachers, mentors, and readers. Their guidance in the early stages of the project was invaluable. To Annette, especially, your intelligence and meticulous attention to detail have made me a better scholar, and your warmth and friendship have made me a better teacher and mentor. I look forward to our next Proustian tea!

Northern Michigan University (NMU) has supported this project with several much-appreciated research and travel grants and, most significantly, a yearlong sabbatical. Former College of Arts and Sciences dean Michael Broadway has been a staunch advocate for my scholarship, as was the late head of the English Department Ray Ventre. We miss you, Ray. Our current department head, Lynn Domina, has sustained NMU’s tradition of supporting research and continues to look for ways to champion faculty. Thank you, Lynn. I am also deeply grateful for the English Department’s administrative assistants, Lori Rintala and Angela Rasmussen, whose patience and professionalism are second to none.

NMU has provided me with an outstanding community of smart, accomplished, and kind colleagues. My thanks to all of them, in particular Lisa Eckert, Alisa Hummell, Lupe Arenillas, David Wood, Jon Billman, April Lindala, Rebecca Ulland, Grace Chaillier, Alex Ruuska, Shirley Brozzo, Wendy Farkas, Jacquie Medina, Elizabeth Monske, Chet Defonso, Russ Prather, Jim McCommons, Patricia Killelea, Sandy Burr, Jaspal Singh, and Rob Whalen. Thank you to Faith Kirk and Nels Olson for keeping an eye on the home front and for many years of friendship. I am grateful for the opportunity to teach so many bright and engaged NMU students. My special thanks to my former students Kyle Bladow, Ashley Goedker, and Tyler Dettloff. You continue to teach me so much.

I am also deeply indebted to my intellectual communities in the Western Literature Association, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Association for the Study of American Indian Literature. My colleagues in those organizations have listened to multiple conference papers about walking and offered much-appreciated feedback and inspiration. P. Jane Hafen encouraged me to think about walking in Louise Erdrich’s novels, a casual hallway conversation that eventually led to chapter 5 of this book. Michael Branch, Joni Adamson, and Melody Graulich have been kind and encouraging mentors and role models. My conference pals have become true friends and colleagues. Special acknowledgment is due to Jennifer Ladino, Erin James, Chadwick Allen, Lisa Tatonetti, Joanna Hearne, Christina Roberts, Susan Bernardin, Amanda Gradisek, Nicolas Witschi, Suzanne Roberts, Jim Bishop, John David Miles, Kyhl Lyndgaard, and Rebecca Lush.

Also essential to the development of this project were the contributions of incredibly gifted and generous readers over the years. My never-ending gratitude to Brianna Burke, Tom Hillard, Eric Chilton, and Matt Burkhart for their insightful and careful reading, their unflagging support, and their friendship. Thank you, too, to my writing-accountability partner Caroline Krzakowski for keeping me on task and inspired. To my comadre Kim Hensley Owens: how amazing that a summer-camp friendship has turned into a lifelong personal and professional collaboration. Thank you, Kim, for the thousands of letters, mix tapes, phone calls, emails, texts, Facebook posts, video calls, and, best of all, visits over the years. Special thanks and recognition are due to my dear friend and colleague Lesley Larkin, who has read every word of this book more than once and is an unfailingly compassionate, intelligent, and supportive presence in my life.

Randi Tanglen, Susan Hardy Aiken, Martin Reinhardt, Chuck Hannaford, Alex Mendes, Talitha Arnold, and Margaret Noodin all offered valuable insights at crucial moments in the drafting process. Thank you.

I was lucky enough to spend my sabbatical year in Santa Fe, researching, writing, and reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. My love and thanks to Lucy Ranney, Darren Smith, Kate Reynolds, Greg Smith, Devi Schmidt, Jenny and Justin Kaufman, Erica Micander, Allison Monson, Nina Bunker Ruiz, Ari Gilder, Jenny Ramo, Orit Tamir, Kevin Brennan, Kate Noble, Aaron Boland, Karles McQuade, Kathleen Nakamura, Barbara Hansen, Tannis Eberts, the members of my brilliant Santa Fe book club (Johanna, Ruti, Lily, Brooke, Gabby, English, Liza, Sarah, Meghan, Veree, Alana, Rebecca, and Tereza), and so many others.

The staff at the University of Nevada Press has been a joy to work with. Former director Joanne O’Hare offered instrumental feedback and guidance for this project and others. And my sincere appreciation to the current director, Justin Race, for his interest in and enthusiasm for this book and for responding to my emails faster than just about anyone I know. Thank you, too, to editorial manager Jinni Fontana and to my eagle-eyed copy editor, Annette Wenda. And many thanks to my two anonymous reviewers. Your comments and suggestions made this a stronger and smarter book.

Finally, thank you to my family. To my sister and brother-in-law, Maria Hamilton and Ville Sneck, who are wonderful friends and the world’s best tia and uncle. To my mother-in-law, Sandy Uchytil, whose love and support have been such a blessing. And to my smart and witty aunt, Karin Tompkins (Karen Pettee, in the introduction), who wrote the thoughtful and loving letter that provides a frame to this book. Most of all, thank you to my parents, Stephen and Andrea Hamilton, to whom this book is dedicated. There is not space enough here to express my profound gratitude for your unfaltering support. Thank you for your love of the more-than-human world and for taking me walking. Thank you for housing my family during my sabbatical and for providing me with a room of my own to write this book.

Above all, thank you to Chris, James, and Sammy Uchytil. It is all for you.

Introduction

Walking at the Intersection of Literature and Materiality

THE STORY OF THIS BOOK begins with a walk. On March 15, 1976, the year of the US bicentennial, George Hormell and Scott King departed Portland, Maine, and began a four-month 3,281-mile walk to Santa Monica, California. Along the way, the two young men established a new record for long-distance walking and collected money for the American Cancer Society. They also carried with them a handwritten letter from kindergarten teacher Karen Pettee to her infant niece—me. My aunt had read about Hormell and King in her local newspaper and contacted them before they embarked on their walk. At the time, my aunt and her family lived near Portland and I lived with my parents in Santa Monica. In her letter, my aunt explains the significance of the walk and of her writing:

There are several reasons why all this is so special for you. First, your mother’s birthday is the Fourth of July and, this year, that is the big day to celebrate our nation’s bicentennial. Secondly, the men who are bringing this letter to you just happened to plan to leave from a point very near our home and complete their trip very near where you now live. Last, but not least, any money donated during the long walk will be given to the American Cancer Society. That means a lot to your mother and me because we lost our mother (your grandmother) to cancer, two years ago.

So, Amy, I hope this letter arrives safely and that, someday, you will enjoy it as a special symbol of the year 1976. (2)

Over the years, I have revisited this letter many times. I have always viewed it as a meaningful item that connected me—no matter how peripherally—to something as grand as a cross-country walk. It also functioned as a vital tie to the grandmother I never knew. How amazing, I thought, that this letter traversed the span of the United States in someone’s pocket and in so doing linked me with members of my family who lived at a remove or were no longer living at all. Reading the letter now, as a scholar of American literature and ecocriticism, I am intrigued by its role as a reminder of my individual connection to walking in American history and literature and by the ways it encapsulates so much about how walking is woven into the fabric of the country. My aunt offers three points for the future Amy to contemplate: the intersection between America’s founding and our family, the intersection between Hormell and King’s walk and our family, and the intersection between Hormell and King’s cause and our family. These intersections speak to the long history of walking in the United States, a history in which walking has generally been framed in terms of physical endurance, masculine identity, and national identity. However, if this story is about movement across the North America continent, it is also bound to myriad other walkers, both men and women, European and Euroamerican, Indigenous, African and African American, Mexican and Chicanx, Asian and Asian American, and more.¹

The stories of my own family, like those of many American families, are filled with movement: from my many-times-great grandfather who traveled from New York to California in search of his fortune in 1847 and later served in California’s seventh legislature, to my great-grandparents who immigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1902, to my mother who moved from Maine to California and later took a solo motorcycle trip across the United States and back, to my parents who moved from California to New Mexico when I was eighteen months old, and to my own story of living in New Mexico, Washington, Arizona, and now Michigan.

I have not always thought of myself as possessing a legacy of movement. In fact, as a person who grew up in the American Southwest, I have more frequently understood my relationship to land to be about a particular place, a particular landscape. Memories of the high New Mexico desert are visual, of course, but they are also always material. When I close my eyes I can feel the desert sand under my feet and smell petrichor, the sweet aroma of desert rain. I am of the desert in a way that is emotional, intellectual, and physical. However, the American Southwest is not an empty landscape available for a white woman like myself to claim, no matter what personal connections I experience. For me, being attached to the desert also means a responsibility to recognize and engage with the natural and cultural histories that shape it and to consider how those histories and cultures are tied to human interaction with nonhuman nature.² That human interaction, both my own and that of the many peoples who walked this land before me, is an engagement rooted in physical movement, in peregrination.

Peregrination has a long list of definitions. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term is chiefly theological and can mean the course of a person’s life viewed originally as a temporary sojourn on earth and hence as a spiritual journey, esp. to heaven; a pilgrimage; an act of traveling or going from place to place; a course of travel; a journey, esp. on foot. Also occas.: an account of a journey; or a comprehensive or systematic investigation of study; a discourse. In later use: a literary wandering or digression. These definitions demonstrate the multiple ways of understanding walking. Peregrination is a metaphor for the course of a person’s life, a spiritual journey, the physical act of travel, an account of travel, and a scholarly investigation. Thus, this project is a peregrination about peregrinations. In On Foot: A History of Walking, an examination of walking in Western traditions, Joseph Amato asserts, Walking is talking. It can be understood as a language, having its own vernacular, dialects, and idioms. Expressing intentionality, walking conveys a wealth of information about the walker’s identity, importance, condition, and destination. . . . [W]alking is a clear revelation of identity (4). The language of walking is written in the American trails and paths left by the feet of generations upon generations of walkers, and it is traced into the literatures of the United States. Walking in American literature, as peregrination suggests, offers us a way to recognize the links between discursive practices and the physical reality of land and bodies, links that broaden our understanding about how meaning is created.

Rather than understanding walking as a means to an end, simply the way to get somewhere else, this book considers walking as a worthy site of investigation itself. Rebecca Solnit states, Like eating or breathing, [walking] can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic (3). While she does go on to suggest that imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces it passes through on two feet (4), Solnit understands meaning as something that is created by human minds. So although I concur with Solnit’s contention that walking is meaningful, I argue that what walking means arises not simply out of a human investment or interpretation, but out of the very act of walking itself, both the physical experience of the walker and the relationship between the walker and the more-than-human world they walk. If walking has meaning, that meaning is tied to something more than human imagination. In this book, I examine walking in terms of both cultural tropes and stories and the physical interaction between human bodies and the land itself, looking particularly at those walkers whose journeys have been ignored or dismissed and how walking creates meaning at the nexus of narrative and experience.

A BRIEF AND PARTIAL HISTORY OF WALKING IN THE UNITED STATES

Walking across the land of what is now the United States has always informed how people experience the land and the sorts of stories that they create. Indigenous oral traditions are filled with stories of walking, movement that reflects migration, spiritual identity, and trade. And the land itself is crisscrossed with trade routes and migration paths, physical signs of human narratives. For example, in her collection of essays, The West Pole, author Diane Glancy (Cherokee) suggests that for the Cherokee, the agency of travel was renewal (2). Storytelling, she contends, says that we began in chaos and forever make cover for the waters over which we exist. And that migration trails still have to be walked. Because in migration one becomes strong. That is the point of migration (32). Migration and storytelling work together, Glancy suggests, to strengthen community and to participate in the remembering and continual remaking of culture.

Many American Indigenous creation stories involve movement. In the Laguna Pueblo creation story, which Native American studies scholars have grouped with similar stories as emergence narratives, the people move through several lower worlds before climbing through a hole in the earth into the present world, where they migrate south until arriving in their traditional homelands (Marmon and Corbett 2). Another common Indigenous origin-story trope is the earth-diver narrative, which also reflects movement. In the Haudenosaunee earth-diver story, Sky Woman falls from the sky to a world of water, and animals devise a plan to dive to the bottom of the sea to find mud to build her land on which to live. But each animal returns empty-handed until at last the muskrat returns with a handful of mud that grows to create a vast land on the back of the turtle (Brooks 2).

The Cherokee origin story is also a story of migration and movement, and, as is the case for many Indigenous origin narratives from oral traditions, it exists in many forms. In a version of the Cherokee origin story originally recounted by an unnamed Cherokee to an Englishman named Alexander Longe in 1717, the storyteller relates:

[We] belonged to another land far distant from here, and the people increased and multiplied so fast that the land could not hold them, so that they were forced to separate and travel to look out for another country. They traveled so far that they came to another country that was so cold. . . . Yet going still on, they came to mountains of snow and ice. . . . [We] passed on our journey and at last found [ourselves] so far gone over these mountains till we lost sight of the same and went through darkness for a good space, and then [saw] the sun again, and going on we came to a country that could be inhabited. (qtd. in Conley 2)³

In this story, movement marks the beginning of the Cherokee as a discrete people. Noting that migrations like the one in this narrative are precipitated by separation and grief, Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) contends that while much was lost in these stories, the accounts provid[e] a possibility for community healing through the principles of peoplehood: an engaged relationship with their new homeland, a rededication to the ceremonial history of the People, [and] the renewal of kinship and familial ties (52). The stories themselves offer these healing principles. In [the Cherokee] tradition, Glancy argues, people do not simply speak about the world, they speak the world into being. What we say is intricately intertwined with what we are and can be. To the Cherokee people, all things in the world have a voice—and that voice carries life. Storying gives shape to meaning (West Pole 66). Glancy suggests that storytelling is both making and remaking the world in each telling and that the different pieces of the world themselves have a voice and take part in their own creation.

These origin stories reveal and create the vital links between the people, the land, language, and movement. As ecocritic Joni Adamson argues, stories and experiences of walking reflect thousands of years of human engagement with and movement across the land and should be brought to bear on understandings of place and sense of place (Ancient Future 8). The sheer volume of Indigenous stories that involve walking suggests that movement serves a vital function for these communities, conveying a model of living in adherence with the teachings of the land, moving with the seasons and with the flow of animals.

Later, Indigenous walkers were joined by French trappers, Spanish conquistadores, Puritan settlers, western pioneers, Chinese railroad workers, African American slaves, and scores of others moving across the American land. Their footsteps multiplied and broadened the paths pressed into the earth, and their stories were filled with their own walking bodies. Solnit writes, Walking has created paths, roads, trade routes; generated local and cross-continental senses of place; shaped cities, parks; generated maps, guidebooks, gear, and, further afield, a vast library of walking stories and poems, of pilgrimages, mountaineering expeditions, meanders, and summer picnics (4). Yet even as the kinds of walking and the footsteps themselves increased, the movement of Euroamerican settler-colonists quickly pushed other walkers off the path of American literature and history. Walking in America became associated primarily with white men.

In interviews given around the time of their walk, Hormell and King aligned themselves with the tradition of masculine Euroamerican long-distance walking, a history with roots in exploration and the frontier. In a Los Angeles Times article printed soon after their arrival in Santa Monica, Hormell says, We want to bring a message of pride to the American people. . . . The true meaning of our bicentennial has been lost in commercialism and our purpose is to make everyone aware of the hard work of the settlers who paved the way for all of us to enjoy the freedoms we have (qtd. in Smith). Hormell’s statement repeats the tenets of Manifest Destiny and a long history of imagining the origin story of America as the struggle of rugged Euroamerican men claiming and taming the American land, a narrative that is complicated by the experiences of women and people of color. A contemporaneous article that appeared in the Portland Press Herald also links Hormell and King to the triumphant settling of the West by relating the physical troubles the men encountered and their determination to persevere. Though King’s feet became badly infected while they were walking through Pennsylvania and he had to ride in a car for a few days as Hormell walked on alone, King told the reporter, We’d been bragging so much about the trip that there was no way we could have turned back (qtd. in Gevalt).

Hormell and King express sentiments identified by Wallace Stegner eleven years after their walk: The interior West was not a place but a way, a trail to the Promised Land, an adventurous, dangerous rite of passage. Like Hormell and King, Stegner is interested in the experience of Euroamerican explorers and pioneers crossing the plains to find a new home in the mythical land of plenty. When he argues that the West is largely a civilization in motion, driven by dreams, he evokes visions of frontiersmen compelled to walk into a threatening wilderness by a powerful myth, just as Hormell and King overcome the difficulties of walking in order to live up to the image they had created for themselves (21). Walking is framed in this story as the means by which Euroamerican men surveyed the land in their quest for self-definition; in pacing off the American land, Euroamerican men placed survey stakes around their own identities and the identity of the nascent nation.

The story of American walking as a masculine tradition of conquest and domination of the American land is a compelling national origin narrative, filled with adventure and triumph over the odds. Stories of Euroamerican exploration and movement on the frontier often include descriptions of men on foot, braving the dangerous land with nothing but their own fortitude. In Regeneration Through Violence, Richard Slotkin locates this narrative in the nineteenth century, embodied enthrallingly in representations of Daniel Boone crossing the Cumberland Gap, as one of the foundational American stories. Slotkin traces the development of archetypal American men walking out to confront the dangers hidden in the American land: the rogues, adventurers, and land-boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land (4). The story of male prowess on the frontier was popular throughout the nineteenth century as Euroamericans pushed ever westward and sought to develop a particularly American story, one distinct from and superior to narratives of European masculinity.

Nineteenth-century American philosophers and poets connected intrepid American male walking to a rich tradition that extends back in time through Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the European romantics all the way to the Greek philosophers, and links walking to reason and inspiration. In 1851 Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, "Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow, as if I had given vent to the stream at the lower end and consequently new fountains flowed into it at