• Français
• English

“I’m going to go and fix a hole in my roof.” “What is that, some kind of metaphor?” “Probably.”

1In the novel Watershed, published in 1996, Robert Hawks is a hydrologist who left behind a family marked by the Civil Rights movement and settled for a new life in the fictional Plata reservation, in order to study its water network. Despite his commitment to political neutrality, he gets unwillingly roped into another network, of a different order: that of the uncovering, by the Plata Indians, of a conspiracy covering the building of a dam that diverts contaminated water towards the reservation. Hawks, as the one person who knows perfectly how to navigate the area, is confronted with the necessity of putting knowledge to action, and with the impossibility of neutrality, even as an outsider, to different “sides” represented in this fight. His professed impartiality cannot resist the moment of crisis, and the levels of epistemological, metaphorical and political semiotics are shown to be collapsing in the text, in the narration, and outside of it. This happens through a drawing in of the reader into a frenzy of hermeneutical activity, typical of conspiracy stories, in which the closure between signifier and signified is always delayed. It may be linked to and analyzed through the concept of “différance” theorized by Jacques Derrida in his 1967 essay, but also through the repurposing of this concept by both Native American and African American literary theorists. In this work, that would on the surface be considered as less experimental than the likes of Erasure, The Water Cure and Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Everett still performs a multilayered and metafictional staging of texts and the relationship to and between texts, by putting the reader to work, and making everything a system of signs to be read; the result is a map of the political structure of the United States, enclosing the shameful past of colonization and genocide, and the subsequent organization of the land.

2The borders between fact and fiction are equally blurred from the very beginning, in a roundabout subversion of the reader’s contract: the acknowledgements page at the very beginning of the book denies any resemblance to real events. Instead of an acknowledgement, the first paragraph is therefore a rejection:

The Plata reservation and the Plata nation presented in this work are fictitious and are meant to bear no direct or indirect resemblance to any existing place or people. None of the characters are real, nor are they based in any way on existing individuals. The landscape of Plata mountain is also complete fiction, including, and especially, the hydrologic data presented1.

3Insisting in such a manner on the gap between fact and fiction casts suspicion upon the statement, thus forcing the reader to question not only the text and the preliminary statement about the text, but also her own interpretation of the text she is going to read: any clue that would be reminiscent of any sort of real event should apparently be dismissed, resisted, and set aside, under suspicion of interpretive fallacy. The following paragraph immediately contradicts the alleged rejection of real-life inspiration, and even provides the reader with a bibliography and clues as to what the novel shall be referring to, setting her on a wild-goose chase of bait-and-switch that perpetually differs the moment of fixation of meaning: “I would also like to thank Ward Churchill and Jim Wander Wall, authors of Agents of Repression: the FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (South End Press, Boston, MA, 1988) for sending me to some documents I found helpful”. Again, the multifaceted qualities of references invite second-guessing: not only does the author quote a very specific book, this book is itself about the uncovering of areas of history that have been buried by national narratives, tying organizations, events, and the attribution of underground activities to the United States’ governmental agencies; it also worked as a starting point, “sending me to some documents I found helpful” towards texts that are not included, and functioned as a buried background, a matrix to the narrative that is going to unfold. As trout is lured to the surface by the fishermen Hawks and Everett, we are meant to understand that clues are as likely to be red herrings as not, but also that the division between the written sign and everything else is not as sharp as it could appear. Cultural practices, such as the peyote ceremony, as well as dreams, signal by their presence both the ubiquitous process of interpretation and its open-ended nature.

4Figures of sign interpretation are scattered throughout the novel to the point of being the object of its intrigue, on a spectrum that ranges from rightful distrust of authority and government figures, to the ambiguous figure of the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend, whose apparent craziness is only a way of questioning Hawks’ reliability as a locus of interpretation and memory. The figure of the map as a tool to orient oneself in the landscape is therefore paradoxically questioned and reinforced in the same move. Although Hawks is not a member of the tribe, he is nonetheless the one the Plata Indians will turn to for his scientific expertise of the mountain. The process of initiation to secrets previously unknown is not presented in the novel as something that happens all at once, but rather as a meandering journey. This journey encourages the reader to mistrust the culturally entrenched tendency to dismiss minority calls for awareness as discourses of paranoia and conspiracy, a tendency that allows us to preserve peace of mind, the status quo, and a self-serving impression of neutrality.

5This performance of a gap between the discrete and the continuous, between texts, between reader and text, between the author and the community described, displaces the question of authenticity, and of who is allowed to write about Indian experience, and Indian defining political struggles, thus infusing the literary object with political stakes, not by virtue of its content itself but by its very existence and resistance to categorization. The binary that has functioned as a tool of discrimination and an imperative for Indian or Native American literature has been seen as limiting by authors and critics of Native American literature; the issue is one Everett himself grew to be familiar with and even enacted in his parody of the American literary scene, Erasure. Semantic and political confrontation between different orders of meaning are at stake in Watershed, and this confrontation as process becomes the locus of the novel, parallel to the different levels of texts, paratexts, and levels of reality, which gives the opportunity for a reflection on the nature of signs itself, as Henry Louis Gates theorized in his work The Signifying Monkey regarding a specifically African-American way of signifyin(g)2.

6In Watershed, however, the performance of distance between Hawks and the fictional community serves as a reminder of the author’s refusal to tell the inwardly-focused story of “what it means” to be a Plata Indian. This is replaced, instead, by what it means to write about a community other than one’s own, keeping an awareness of unbridgeable distance. The emphasis on the heterogeneity of the text as mirror to the unbridgeable identification with the other is done through juxtaposition, within the narrative, of excerpts from treaties, medical records, articles of laws, scientific reports, short explanations on fishing techniques, speeches by both the colonizers and colonized, and other historical documents. Being presented with these extracts, after the warning from the acknowledgement section, drives the reader into behaving in an investigative manner; hoping that by using the key given and the map of textual history, she will be able to draw links between the narrative and the excerpts from both “actual” texts (the treaties, laws, and speeches mentioned in the acknowledgments as belonging to public records) and fictional texts presented as legitimate primary sources within the narrative (the medical records of Louise Yellow Calf’s mother, for instance). The evidential paradigm outlined by Carlo Ginzburg and its relationship to activities of falsification is therefore a useful basis of analysis of Watershed as a work of metafiction, that draws attention to the violation of binding texts, such as treaties, and the complicated relationship between myths, stories, history and the hierarchy between communities in contemporary United States, through the staging of the contractual gesture implicit in the interpretation of signs, and through pondering the value of texts. This paper therefore aims at studying the ambiguity in conspiracy theories, figures of paranoia and the difficulty of interpretation as exemplified by the novel; it sets the groundwork for a fictionalized version of the critical approach defended by Christopher Teuton in his book Deep Waters, a critical approach that depends on not taking the oral/written binary for granted but going beyond the reification of oral tradition by outsiders. To apply Native American criticism to a text written by a non-Native American is indeed an approach that would fit the ethos of the novel itself. The rejection of the binary between oral and written word but also the inclusion of non-word-based practices imbued with meaning will lead to a study of the revival of the blood/memory diptych first invoked by N. Scott Momaday, through a reintegration of the land and the inscription of it into the text. The work of Chadwick Allen, expanding on Momaday’s trope, allows us to bridge concerns of signifying and meaning with these of divisions in the lands, and of contractual words3, but also of authenticity. Hawk’s position as an outsider, far from being a threat, allows for legitimation of the texts and the possibility to go beyond the injunction to authenticity that rests on authors, by performing the Native American bodies of work and relationship to the land as worthy of intertextual allusion and reactivated interpretive work, as well as fully part of American history and American present, not merely as a one-dimensional avatar of an uncomfortable past. It is a force of disruption, in the sense that Gates intends: “To revise the received sign (quotient) literally accounted for in the relation represented by signified/signifier at its most apparently denotative level is to critique the nature of (white) meaning itself, to challenge through a literal critique of the sign the meaning of meaning4”.

7This contract between the reader and the text, between Hawk and the events he bears witness to, allows for another pattern to unravel, that of the treaty and fiduciary paradigm: it foregrounds the treaties and their importance as binding, contractual documents to be reclaimed as such, and therefore the hollowed-out relationship between signs and concrete facts. The land in Watershed must be remembered and the texts inscribed into it reawakened, as we remember the words, betrayals, and dismissals that cover it, and as we learn to make our way in the strange world of rightfully paranoid America.

“But simply a need to know”: verifying conspiracy theories

8Contrasting with the abundance of extracts from various non-fiction texts, the intra-diegetic universe of Watershed is surprisingly devoid of books: no one ever reads, or explicitly references books inside the narrative, aside from Robert Hawk in the beginning of the novel: “the book I was reading was putting me surely to sleep5” (14). The title is not mentioned, a fact which is intriguing in itself, but its proclaimed soporific quality juxtaposed with the prominence and relevance of dreams and their interpretation within the narrative makes it worth noticing: references and investigation are linked to the realm of oneiric narratives, where everything is meaningful and has a counterpart in reality. The intertextual references within the story are activated by the frame of the evidential paradigm introduced by the novel in the acknowledgements, and the mystery at its center in the beginning, specifically the identity and purpose of Louise Yellow Calf, whom the narrator picks up in his car during a snowstorm and drops off on Plata Mountain. The cliché that outsider readers hold in mind, that of the meaning names are thought to hold within Native American culture, is here put to use towards a reference, not to an actual personal or familial story of a referential “yellow calf” but to a character in a novel by James Welch, himself member of what has been called the Native American Renaissance: Sylvester Yellow Calf, in The Indian Lawyer (1990). Sylvester, who is a very successful lawyer from a Blackfeet tribe, left his community behind in order to work for a firm and run for Congress, but became embroiled into a scheme hatched by a convicted criminal from the inside of a prison. The novel ends with his return to his tribe, where he will do pro bono work. One may find different echoes of this story in Watershed. First, that like Sylvester Yellow Calf, Robert Hawk left behind his community of origin and is living amongst people who are strange to him; second, that on the level of the structure of the novel and the ethos it demands towards texts, politics and stories, the character of a lawyer serving as background to a book where the betrayal of performative texts are prominent may be significant, especially given the fact that it is the lawyer’s namesake, Louise Yellow Calf, who triggers Hawk’s exit from his political retreat.

9The reports that we presume are written by Robert Hawks, since no sources are given for any of the italicized texts besides the references alluded to in the acknowledgment section, mention the organization and nature of the soil and the layers of minerals in the Plata reservation, as well as the history of the delimitation of the area and obligations assigned to its dwellers. It serves to establish a vision of the land that is exclusively perceptible, mediated, and predetermined by its construction in the fields of science, politics and law. Far from depicting the landscape by imbuing it with a sense of the sublime, it also gives the reader a strictly mathematical, cartographic, scientific point of view on the territory, that of an expert, and one that requires effort from a layperson to convert into intelligible pictures. Robert Hawk, as outsider, can only access the reservation through these points of data, which in turn serve to reaffirm the distance that exists between the reader and that landscape.

During the field study, 23-27 September, examinations of the geology, hydrology, and soil-erosion processes were made of the Plata Mountain watershed. Observations of the Plata and Silly Man Creeks were made from Rural Route 13 above the confluence of the Silly Man and Red Creeks, from the mining road numbered A-28 traversing north-south along Silly Man Ridge and from various locations along the two main creeks.
The study revealed that at least four major plateaus make up the Plata Mountain watershed. The presence of these terraces, and observations of the deposition pattern within the terraces, indicate at least two, and perhaps more, periods of downcutting and aggradation. The oldest plateau consists of undercut banks and ridges and is more pronounced in the eastern portion of the watershed, facing west to the opening of Tick Canyon. Tick Canyon streams and flood events meet and cut into Plata Canyon, and join Plata Canyon and Creek. Traces of an older, alluvial terrace can be found at higher elevations within the adjoining canyons of Skinner, Dog, and to a lesser extent, in Hell-hole watersheds, where there are apparent cycles of aggradation as well6.

10This in-depth study of the landscape as meaningful to Robert Hawk is what allows him to become part of the Plata community, by running away from the standoff between the men and the FBI through paths only he knows: “I know this mountain better than anybody. They can’t keep up with me” 7. Instead of the insider being the one who guides the outsider thanks to his knowledge of the land, the outsider and his systematic, scientific accounts of the territory are what allow him to become the guide, and the line of escape for the people who are trapped inside. Time and again, throughout the narrative, Hawk behaves as a detective that interprets the clues in the land: “I looked at the nearby cottonwoods and I couldn’t see any signs of high-water marking – no lines, no wrinkled bark, nor did the ground around his house show any sign.” 8

11Within the paratext itself, this repetition of networks on different scales is present in the description of the functioning of the brain:

Each and every cranial nerve is attached to some part of the surface of the brain, but these fibers also extend deep into the nucleus of the brain, the center of gray matter. The nerves emerge from the brain, pass through tubular prolongations and leave the skull through foramina at its base, on the way to their final destination9.

12In this passage, information and the processes of encoding, decrypting and moving it, are again embodied (this time literally), in the same way as Hawks interpreted signs of the water, and traces on the ground, and the same way as we are supposed to draw links between paratext and diegesis; metaphorical, literal and physical levels appear to be coexisting on the same plane without a specific hierarchy that would make one or the others closer to the real.

13The juxtaposition of the sections of paratext that form a system of journals, reports of different nature, within a broader proliferation of intertextual references and the real historical background of the standoff at the Pine Ridge Reservation between members of the AIM and the FBI in 1973, weaves a pattern of evidence akin to footsteps in the ground. The organization of the paratext itself can be seen as significant if one studies it in parallel to the narrative itself: indeed, Robert Hawks’ political re-awakening is mirrored by the progressive disappearance of geological extracts and the inversely proportional increase in quotes from treaties and allocutions by people who were put in charge of Native American “welfare” throughout history.

14The conspiracy outlined in the novel is validated by the work of Hawk as a scientist and an outsider, and makes possible for it to remain meaningful as opposed to a simple product of postmodern paranoia. Watershed, in its functioning around and for a necessary ethos of the reader as detective, enacts a reintroduction of political relevance of discourses, signs and texts in a world where historically and in literature everything seems imbued with an ironic distance that deactivates the potential for action. The threat, in this world, would be the pervasive scepticism directed at the evidence of any wrongdoing by governmental organizations. The FBI agents and police officers in the novel hold no particular role except for their function as signals towards the broader scheme in action, and the desire to stifle any investigation of that scheme. In the context of the 1990s, when rumours of secret areas in the United States where experimentations were being conducted were in full swing, Watershed invites the reader to be sceptical towards this impulse to label any recognition of pattern as paranoid:

I didn’t believe what he was telling me, but I didn’t know why I didn’t believe him. The government was doing secret experiments, like the Tuskegee thing, all the time, and I realized that that was the scariest part of all, that in spite of knowledge of past transgressions, I still resisted belief in a new one, somehow believing that my country was somehow me, maybe. But it wasn’t my country10.

15In A Culture of Conspiracy, Michael Barkun already described the idea of conspiracy and the analysis of fringe ideas in terms of geographic mapping: “Mapping fringe ideas is a difficult undertaking. Familiar intellectual landmarks are unavailable, and the inhabitants of these territories tend to speak languages difficult for outsiders to penetrate”11 (XI), creating a universe “governed by design rather than randomness” where “pattern is believed to be everywhere”. The overdetermination of the map of conspiracy is reinforced by the dynamic of red herrings, fishing, and baits that traverses the text. Fishing in itself, an activity in which territorial problems, resources and water disputes converge, may be seen as another flattening of different levels of meaning: the very practice of fly fishing relies on a case of mistaken identity, the use of a bait luring the fish to bite it. “it looks just like a bug. If I was a trout, I’d bite it for sure.” 12

“With all good faith and sincerity”: from broken treaties to dead letters

16Watershed thus highlights the paradox at the heart of the United States’ legal relationship to its indigenous people: it uses an abundance of text to emphasize the betrayal, time and again, of the laws, texts, promises, made to Native American population, whereas writing culture was being used at the same time as proof of cultural superiority. Andrew Jackson’s letter is presented in the novel in an excerpt that makes the double-speak appear jarring to the reader:

you may rest assured that I shall adhere to the just and humane policy towards the Indians which I have commenced. In this spirit, I have recommended them to quit their possessions on this side of the Mississippi, and go to a country to the West where there is every probability that they will always be free from the mercenary influence of white men13.

17The fact that this extract belongs to his private correspondence14 makes the paternalism of the thought it expresses more roundabout than if it were to come from a speech delivered to the American Indians themselves. The deception runs deeper than simply lying to the tribes to convince them to go someplace else. Andrew Jackson’s denial of the tribe’s ability to choose for themselves and see their own interest in the letter makes their ability to enter into an egalitarian exchange or a contract always already void. Euphemizing his policy under the guise of “recommendation”, Jackson positions himself in his words as the benevolent leader who knows best. Any agreement derived from such an imbalance in positions of power is bound not to be upheld; Chadwick Allen expanded upon the analysis of treaties as paramount in the efforts by Native American writers and activists to be on equitable terms:

The treaty making process implicitly recognizes the sovereignty of indigenous nations; specific treaty documents explicitly vow that imperial or settler governments will uphold that sovereignty. Since it operates within a paradigm of nation-to-nation status, the discourse of treaties, like the discourse of declarations of war or declarations of independence, provides one of the few interpretive frames within which contemporary indigenous minority activists and writers can stage formal dialogue with dominant settler interests on (potentially) equitable terms. (…) Once disavowed, treaty documents and the events of treaty making could be transformed into mere abstractions: platitudes of good faith, understatements of treachery – with no concrete relevance. In contrast, Maori and American Indian appropriations and redeployments of treaty discourse work to re-recognize and, in the process, to revalue the discourse of treaties. Treaty documents are neither “transformed” nor “transfigured” by these activists and writers, and the authority inscribed in treaties is generally not questioned. Instead, this disavowed discourse is reified – reclaimed from impotent abstraction and once again rendered concrete15.

18The haunting of the present narrative by traces of the past that demand interpretation, and therefore reactivation of their potential for relevance, mirrors the demand that text as it is presented in the novel be taken in all its pragmatic and performative dimension, and that it be held accountable. Various instances of binding speech are present in the paratext of the novel, in order to show how they have been first used to motivate the tribes to “play fair” with the authorities that were displacing them, then violated in one way or another.

Of elks and brains: oneiric logic

19The networks of semiotic interpretation in Watershed follow the rhythm of Derrida’s principle of “différance”. In the same way, as oral culture as a concept was constructed in the West, the binary between orality and literacy is problematic here, “a hegemonic privileging of speech over writing in the West”16, as it would offer a guarantee of authenticity and immediate access to the supposed truth of Native American “culture”. As Teuton explains,

Derrida’s critique of logocentrism is persuasive. When we shift our attention to Native America, however, a more powerful influence is exerted by the concept of graphocentrism. As my discussion of the history of writing argues, the technology of writing has historically been the West’s central means of classifying cultures as either civilized or uncivilized17.

20Teuton would settle for “a third way for Native American forms of signification”, “graphic modes of communication” that would allow language to be always used in movement, through the gesture of interpretation in the moment of contact with the text. I would argue that Watershed, as a novel performatively written from the outside about a fictional tribe, and a text refusing to bridge that gap in an artificial appropriation of “meaning” of Native American culture. “These aren’t my ways, Hiram”, Robert insists when he is being invited to take part in the peyote ceremony:

The thought of experiencing a vision was exotic to me, as I had, I imagined, a typical if naïve fascination with the spiritual life of these people. I felt like a tourist, but guilty as I didn’t want my curiosity to seem frivolous or vapid18.

21One might argue instead that in Watershed all manifestations of cultural practices and points of encounters between communities or individuals, and between their discursive universes, hinge upon the potential of inscribing meaning and the position of the reader/participant in these manifestations, much as they would towards a specific text. Cultural practices therefore signify in Watershed, and by doing so, and by proximity with the abundance of fixed historical and scientific texts, they allow for a reassertion of the necessity to locate meaning outside of them in the relationship between interpreter and signifier, through the figure of Hawk, a figurative master of crossroads19 in the novel thanks to both his job and his position in the narrative.

22As much as the fact that the various quotations have no source or framing, turning them into disembodied voices rising from the past in order to haunt the present and nudge the reader and narrator away from the binary of what is over and what is still happening, the episode of the elk, both real and oneiric, that Robert encounters and the function of this dream in the progression of the narrative may be studied as a manifestation of this impulse to find a middle-ground beyond mutually exclusive interpretations. Dreams as a privileged location of interpretation allow to construct a relationship to memory that highlights the specific framing of a passage near the end of a novel. Hawk first discovers a clearing in which a dead elk is buried under the snow, and where the ground looks suspicious; then only does he dream of an elk guiding him, not towards a clue, but towards a journey of his spirit outside of his dream-body. The two sections, enacting a signifying process in the form of repetition and difference, are striking in the manner in which Hawk apprehends the scenes before his eyes: contemplative within the dream, investigating in reality. In both, one may note an emphasis on an ideal bird’s eye view, and stepping outside oneself: “I hadn’t detected it in the aerial photographs”, “and then I was outside of myself and looking into my own big, glassy elk eyes”. Layers of meanings superimpose to finally coalesce into making Robert Hawk notice the signs that something is not quite right in the clearing he discovers.

I tried to get my bearings when I realized I could see the top of the mountain. What I also saw was an unnatural clearing some hundred yards away. It was near the tree line, so I knew immediately why I hadn’t detected it in the aerial photographs. I left my camp intact and walked to the clearing. Aspens were downed and pushed to the side in an area that must have been thirty yards square. I tripped over something under the snow, then, kneeling and brushing through, I found a dead elk. It was a big bull and its face, the glassy eyes hollow and still alive looking, startled me a little and disturbed me greatly. I fell back a couple of steps, then turned away from the sight. I observed the middle of the clearing and saw that the snow was thinning there, melting evenly across the surface; the center was already crusting over, just like snow looks over a septic tank. I took out my camera and snapped pictures of the clearing and of the dead elk, then marked the spot on my map. […] When I tried to get some sleep upon returning home, I was troubled by a dream. In it, a rust-brown elk staggered across a pristine mountain meadow surrounded by graceful aspens, with knot eyes all gazing outward. The meadow was striking, covered with penstemon and mariposa tulips sticking their yellow faces toward the sun, and with spurred lupines. The hooves of the elk fell heavily among the flowers and I walked toward it, but it didn’t notice me, couldn’t notice me. I recognized the glassy empty eyes and I realized that the eyes stuck into the bark of the aspens seemed more alive than the elk’s eyes. I was crying in the dream, following the zig-zagging path of the elk. I looked at the clear blue sky and thought what a beautiful day it was, how warm and glorious, and I found my feet falling effortlessly into the tracks of the elk. I staggered with him, my shoulders slumping, my breathing beginning to race. I felt my heart hot in my chest. And then I was outside of myself and looking into my own big, glassy elk eyes20. (my emphasis)

23The location of these two moments, right after a speech from the era of the Wounded Knee massacre that can be identified thanks to the mention of two of its prominent leaders (Man Afraid of His Horses and Red Cloud), makes the twice-occurring mention of an elk relevant to the larger historical conflict that Watershed is steeped into and that makes past and present lines converge in the shoot-out at the end of the novel. The intrigue concludes with a concentrated echo of the Pine Ridge action, or “Wounded Knee incident”, when Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, site of the 1890 massacre. Black Elk, a medicine man and Oglala Lakota, was an eyewitness to the massacre and testified at length about its unfolding; his account and teachings inspired followers of the AIM in the 1970s. This blurring of the boundaries between the iterations of the events of Wounded Knee, making it a locus of conflict between the historical and the fictional, as well as between the realm of the dream and that of the real, operates through discrete signs, clues of something greater beyond the text, such as the presence of Leonard Peltier, a real member of the 20^th century Wounded Knee episode. Watershed, as a retelling, a form of fictional repetition of this episode, multiplies inside its narrative the examples of episodes told twice where what seem to matter are the gaps and differences between the first and second iterations.

24While mentions of Robert Hawk’s grandfather and his activist past are peppered throughout the narrative, the story of Bunchy Cooke’s death, that occurs after his grandfather’s medical licence was rescinded for taking care of a member of the Black Panthers, is where the scientific textbook excerpt about the brain that we studied earlier is displaced into the diegetic section:

Bunchy Cooke was shot in the back of the head twice by .38 caliber slugs fired from two different police service revolvers. The projectiles passed through the occipital bone into the occipital lobe, across the parieto-occipital fissure, through the lobe, and lodged in the limbic lobe above the corpus callosum. The second one travelled just a bit farther and came to rest in the calloso-marginal fissure. Bunchy Cooke died on some street in Atlanta while an ambulance was detained at the police blockade. My grandfather no longer practiced medicine. Bunchy Cooke no longer walked among the living21.

25The factual account of the event omits grammatical connections and juxtaposes the different pieces of the puzzle, leaving the reader with the burden to ponder consequences and links between signs.

26At the end of the novel, the past, present and future, the impersonal and the personal, bleed together in the person of Robert, who feels the grief of intergenerational trauma as he allows himself to embrace his legacy and take action, moving the different strata of American history and fiction together onto a single plane: “I kept feeling my grandfather, hearing his voice, remembering the sound of that report from his gunshot that rainy afternoon” 22 (my emphasis). The use of the word “report” here, as evocative of both sound and text, slight delay and immediacy, functions as an almost-but-not-quite enshrinement of the way sound and writing are linked, both bringing visions of the echo of a suicide and of a written word, a trace, that keeps living on in spite of the efforts to silence it.

Conclusion

27Watershed, as a novel written by an outsider about a specifically Native American event, affirms the necessity to remain on the outside. By approaching the narrative through the mediation of texts, stories written by Native American writers of the first and second Renaissances, it goes against the externally imposed stereotype of Native Americans as having a privileged, unmediated link to the Earth, and of their culture as specifically “oral”, which stereotypes have served to fetichize and discount them; it eschews the danger of the “authenticity injunction”, or “gymnastics of authenticity” (Jace Weaver), by which White critics have denigrated the idea and importance of Native identity and cultural specificity in favour a universalism. The juxtaposition and merging of texts of different natures, and the fact that signs of a nature different from the written words, are all levelled up and put on the same geological and interpretive plane, blurs the limits between legitimacy and reinforces the myriad ways it is possible to manipulate, cheat, and misinterpret signs. The position of Robert Hawks as fluent in civil rights semiotics and therefore interpreter of situations of oppressions creates an interstitial space where a form of solidarity is made not only possible, but necessary, by rendering the demands signs and texts still make of us.