Guns and Razors Horses and Medicine A Search for Masculinity in the Blackfeet World
In the modern world, Blackfeet culture would come in for quite a severe lashing on the Oprah Winfrey show. ... With such favors being bestowed on him simply by being a man, the Blackfeet man has a heightened sense of his maleness. Perhaps in an attempt to justify such favors, the Blackfeet male must continually attempt to be the perfect man – almost superhuman in his exploits; unflinchingly brave in the face of adversity; connected spiritually with his animal helper; and capable almost untiringly of being a model of a heroic, culturally responsible individual. ... In their daily lives, and in their spiritual, these characters search for a higher level of masculinity, an almost perfect ideal of the Indian man. ... Fools Crow and the unnamed narrator in Winter in The Blood are both men who constantly search for a reason to celebrate their manhood. ... ” He moves through a secular landscape searching for his masculinity, and finds instead an antidote for the sterility that is the winter in his blood. ... His search for manhood is more traditional, based on war exploits, marriage, wealth, and his desire to be a hunter, visionary and a healer. ... This sexual tension is relevant to the study of the books recurring theme– the narrator’s insecurity about his masculinity. In Winter in The Blood, the narrator worries intermittently about his physical adequacy as a man, and searches for a woman who has stolen his gun and his electric razor –potent symbols of male sexuality and masculinity. These motifs underline the narrator’s search for the meaning of being a strong Indian male, and as that strong Indian male, to have an intimate emotional relationship with a woman. ... But deeper than that search for his identity is his search for his maleness. ... For the unnamed narrator, ending up like Long Knife would be the ultimate defeat of his search for his manhood, and a defeat of his search for a cultural heritage that will complete his existence. Another character in the novel, Larue Henderson, represents to us the kind of person that a Blackfeet male would be ashamed to be. ... The narrator spends a significant amount of time in this novel searching for those very same symbols of manhood, and his search for them he is confronted with several instances of his insecurity. ... While on the search for his masculinity the narrator is confronted with several challenges to his manhood. ... As the narrator moves along in his search for Agnes, he has a revealing thought. ... Altogether, he is not sure what his search for her is about. ... The gun and razor are gone forever, and even though he has spent the entire novel searching for them, his search for his manhood remains incomplete until he comes to terms with his Native American roots. ... The narrator’s search is hilarious; it is also ironic and purposefully chosen. The quest for the gun and the razor are almost mythical non-adventures, but in this search he moves through a secular landscape within which he is separated not only from the people he meets but also from him family and culture – the only antidote against the sterility that is the winter in his blood. Although the novel is set in contemporary times, it manages to grasp on to the things that the Blackfeet culture holds dear. ... Although he doesn’t achieve the kind of deep personal growth that a real vision quest achieved for the Blackfeet male in the past, it does allow him some modicum of self-improvement. ... He later clarifies that this experience with the cow does not give the narrator an indication of how to conduct his later life, but does provide him with some understanding of his place in his Blackfeet world. ... He has just emerged from a conversation with Yellow calf that has revealed his pure Blackfeet parentage. He has returned from a futile search for his manhood, and now he is lying a pool of mud, struggling to save a cow that doesn’t even belong to him. ... The Blackfeet consider the vision quest amongst the most important rites of passage that separate boys from men. ... In the ancestral time girls were not usually eligible for such a quest because it was thought they regularly experienced a connection with the ancestral world on their monthly ‘moontime’ (menstrual cycle). ... As the Blackfeet Piegan literature explains: The religious life of the Blackfeet centers upon medicine bundles and their associated rituals. ... A young man, often under the tutelage of an older medicine man, goes out to some lonely place and fasts until he has a vision.