A Council of Dolls

Lillian Holy Thunder is the narrator and protagonist of Part 2. Her Dakhóta name, which translates to Gathering of Stormclouds Woman, aptly reflects her intense personality and volatile moods and foreshadows the metaphorical storms she brings to the lives of her husband and daughter. In childhood, Lillian is characterized by the observations of her doll, Mae: “The girl is pensive, serious, also imaginative. Her thoughts are as noisy as the doll’s, and very often angry or disappointed. Lily wonders why she’s expected to walk through life with her arms tied behind her back; at least that’s how it feels” (242). As an adult, she’s characterized by her daughter’s doll, Ethel, who describes her as “a roller coaster [they’d] all have to ride if [they] didn’t want to crash” (250). Ethel explains that Lillian’s love for Sissy and Cornelius is destructive because she has no love for herself. This lack of self-love is symbolized by the literal hole in her heart when she was born, which became part of her earliest sense of self. It healed, physically, but trauma prevented her from healing emotionally. As an adult, her emotional wounds manifest in her simultaneous dislike of being touched and of being alone.

Lillian’s earliest external conflict revolves around fear and hatred of her father. His abusiveness engenders resentment in her and yet, ironically, shapes her own abusive parenting style. She’s also angered by her sense of the injustices imposed on Indigenous Americans and by her experiences of prejudice, which are epitomized in her personal conflict with Sister Frances. Lillian’s anger and suffering create a defensive, me-against-the-world mentality, which informs her character’s motivation to fight racism and cultural erasure through advocacy work. It also informs her motivation to make her daughter tougher. She tells Sissy: “Real life is ugly a lot of the time, and you have to protect yourself, so no one ever hurts you like that Rooshian farmer hurt his daughter, or like that man in the park wanted to hurt us” (49). Part of the tragedy of Lillian’s story is that these efforts to strengthen her daughter become a source of further trauma.

Protagonists’ character arcs often move toward transformation through triumph over personal flaws. In a sense, Lillian’s character arc does the opposite. The contrasts between her portrayal as a child in Part 2 and as an adult in Part 1 demonstrate that she’s changed for the worse as she’s grown older. As a child, she believes her doll being alive is a sign of her own magic. She’s empowered by this belief. Later she tells Sissy: “When mission ladies gave her to me one Christmas, it was like being touched by magic. Then the magic went away” (215). This observation exemplifies the sense of loss that contributed to Lillian’s changing character. However, the nonlinear structure has the effect of reversing Lillian’s character arc, moving her from jadedness to wonder and innocence. Moreover, Lillian’s arc doesn’t end with her death: Her spirit is present in Jesse’s adulthood and speaks to her through Ethel. Her messages to Jesse indicate transformation in a more positive direction, enabling her to give love to both her daughter and herself.

Cora is the narrator and protagonist of Part 3. As with the other protagonists, the circumstances of her birth are used to characterize her. Cora says of the blizzard raging at her birth: “[T]he storm arriving alongside me as if we were twins. […] my flesh was warm and I was able to sit quiet, but always there’s a frozen distance between me and the ones I love” (133). Pairing Cora’s sense of self with the blizzard also develops the book’s message that connection to nature is an important part of Indigenous American identity. The frozen distance she describes can be viewed as a metaphor for the conflicts and hardships that will scar her and her descendants.

Conflict between Indigenous people and the US government is central to the text, and for Cora, born in 1888, this conflict is very much a part of her life. She witnesses the aftermath of the shootout that killed Sitting Bull and many other Dakhóta and Lakhóta men, and she hears the details of the Whitestone Hill Massacre from her doll, who lived through it. Her experiences are largely shaped by Cultural Erasure and Forced Assimilation of Indigenous Americans at the hands of the US government. Part of her role in this conflict is to preserve the knowledge of her people’s history and culture. She does this in several ways, such as rebelling secretly against assimilation at school and supporting Jack’s open rebellion. She also preserves knowledge symbolically through her doll, Winona. In the sense that Winona represents Cora’s inner self, sharing her memories of the Whitestone Hill Massacre symbolizes the oral tradition that keeps their culture and shared history alive.

Cora’s motivation stems from the conflict between cooperating with assimilation and rebelling against it. She characterizes herself as always being “of two minds and strategies: learning when to fight and when to surrender” (134). Sometimes, surrendering is a means of survival and therefore a form of resilience. When she chooses to fight, she finds ways to still protect herself, like when she volunteers to review students’ letters so she can help them avoid censorship. For those whose nature is not so cautious, like Jack, Cora’s goal is to be supportive. She tries to give him enough love and encouragement to keep his spirit from breaking in the face of overwhelming adversity. She shows this same love and support to Sissy, who draws on it to overcome her trauma, demonstrating the power of ancestral connections and Indigenous traditions as sources of healing and resilience.

Jack is Cora’s husband and Lillian’s father. Like with Lillian’s character, Jack is first portrayed as a deeply flawed adult and then as a more sympathetic child. In his youth, Jack’s motivation revolves around the conflict between Indigenous people and the US government and the conflict between surrendering to assimilation or rebelling against it. He tells Cora: “We’re meant to be together to help restore our world” (185). Jack sees rebellion against forced assimilation and cultural erasure as a way to restore his people’s autonomy and way of life.

Jack’s character is developed and revealed largely by the interpretation of other characters—namely, the narrators. Their differing portrayals convey his character’s complexity. Lillian fears and hates her father, so she depicts his meanness, showing him drinking, insulting his wife, and endangering his children. Cora knows a different side of him and tells their children, “Your father is the most intelligent man in the entire state. […] His mind is strong, but his heart is weak. Or maybe it’s the opposite—he has a strong heart, but his mind lets him down. You don’t know all that broke him. Don’t judge.” (111). The presence of these significant contrasts in his character serves to emphasize the effects of the traumatic experiences that changed him for the worse. Jack’s trauma and subsequent meanness stem from historical injustices against Indigenous Americans. The fact that Lillian later embodies the very things she hates about Jack reveals the enduring impact of those injustices.

Jack’s character arc, defined by his youthful passion and motivation, the breaking of his spirit, and his abusive parenting, supports one of his functions in the novel. Like Lillian, his experiences of loss and disillusionment from circumstances outside his control have lasting negative effects on his personality. Showing the connections between these different parts of his life encourages sympathy and understanding for those affected by intergenerational trauma rather than condemnation.