Essay Questions

Deconstruct Amelia’s ideology of religion (precisely immediately after Harley’s demise).

Amelia expounds, “Life settled into a flatness after we lost Harley. But all three of us rebelled in our own ways. Me, I retreated into silence. The nuns all thought me slow and backward because of my silence but they had no idea how well I was learning their ways and their language. I did everything they asked of me in a slow, methodical way, uncomplaining and silent. I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear anymore.” Here, Amelia illustrates her antipathy towards Christianity. According to her, the nuns, who are emblematic of Christianity, ruin her existence through double standards which encumber Amelia from leading her Native life. The nuns teach Amelia that it is regressive to have long hair, yet Jesus’s hair was long. Amelia’s tactic specifies her plans to mutely rebel against the nuns.

Provide a psychoanalytic explanation for the hole which Amelia attempts to fill after Ben’s demise.

Amelia elucidates, “When they took him from me I felt something—a warm thing, pliant, round, and complete—leave with a silent tug, and when I walked back into the Regal lounge all that was left was a hole. No cold, no numbness, no ache, no pain, just a hole. I walked over to the bar and started to fill that hole. I was drunk for years. Years. Time, when you don’t consider it, has a slipperiness, an elusive quality you feel in the hands but shake off fast like water, and I was in the pit a long, long time.Because I was John One Sky’s sister and Ben Starr’s woman they let me go.” The hole is figurative of Amelia’s punishing depression. She becomes an alcoholic as a means to deal with her terminal desolation. Losing John is very excruciating considering that he is her foremost lover. She presumes that drunkenness would aid her conquer the torment she weathers as a result of losing her lover, but it denigrates her life wholly. Drunkenness does not rectify depression; it magnifies this unfortunate state.