53 pages • 1 hour read
A Council of Dolls
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Themes
Cultural Erasure and Forced Assimilation of Indigenous Americans
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of racism, child sexual abuse, religious discrimination, physical abuse, emotional abuse, child abuse, substance use, death, illness, and addiction.
Much of A Council of Dolls revolves around a conflict between Indigenous cultures and what the text refers to as white culture. For generations, the US government forced Indigenous Americans to adopt the language, religion, and customs of what had—through conquest and colonization—become the dominant culture. This process is called forced assimilation. It works, in part, by stripping a group of its methods for preserving its own cultural institutions, as well as pushing them to adopt the cultural institutions of those in power. This inability to preserve their culture leads to its erasure, depriving future generations of many aspects of their heritage. Through the protagonists’ main conflicts, both internal and external, A Council of Dolls illuminates the ways in which the US government and white society oppressed Indigenous Americans through forced assimilation and cultural erasure and depicts the lasting, harmful impact of these tactics on individual identities.
The tactics of forced assimilation and cultural erasure depicted in the text include both formal and informal mechanisms and are reflected in both external and internal conflicts. Examples of formal mechanisms include the US government prohibiting the performance of Indigenous ceremonies, outlawing Indigenous languages, and forcing Indigenous children to attend boarding schools. Informal mechanisms include things like widespread prejudice and the whitewashing of history. Allusions to Columbus Day and Thanksgiving show how society has rewritten history to manipulate attitudes toward Indigenous culture.
Cultural erasure, as a means of ensuring one society’s power over another, has long been a tactic of war, oppression, and colonization. Sissy’s father tells her, “We’ve had forces working to get rid of our culture and beliefs, our way of living, for many generations now” (37). He explains that he wasn’t allowed to speak his native language at school, and over time he forgot more and more of it. This creates a barrier between older and younger Indigenous generations and limits their ability to preserve their history and customs. Cora’s school administrators don’t merely take her clothes and personal belongings; they burn them in front of her as a symbolic destruction of her culture. The Oahe Dam project didn’t only force residents off their land; it also flooded the landmarks that represented their heritage.
For the novel’s protagonists, this conflict involves history and politics, but it is ultimately about personal identity. Sissy’s father says indoctrination “will do worse than take [her] land” (13); it will “steal [her] spirit” (13). Indoctrination is portrayed as something even worse than land theft because it affects one’s inner spirit and identity. It causes the individual to deny and eventually forget the beliefs, values, and shared history that define who they are at their core. In one mechanism of indoctrination, Catholic priests are installed on reservations, like the one who refused to help the girl impregnated by her father during Lillian’s childhood. The administrators at Cora’s school treat her customs as uncivilized. The priest at Lillian’s school urges students to turn their backs on “dangerous miscreants like Sitting Bull” (127), whom he depicts as a criminal who rebelled against a righteous and just power.
Jack and Blanche respond to these external conflicts by rebelling openly against them. Jack is punished and imprisoned until his spirit breaks. Blanche’s punishment is so harsh it kills her. Cora and Lillian, on the other hand, learn to rebel in secret. This promotes their survival but leads to internal conflicts. Jesse’s main internal conflict is an identity crisis. It’s fueled by the intergenerational trauma that culminated in Lillian’s tragic death—trauma that stemmed from the conflict between accepting assimilation and rebelling against it. For Jesse, opening herself up once again to the voices and magic of her dolls parallels a reconnection to her ancestral heritage. This connection helps mend her fractured identity and reverse the cultural erasure that traumatized her ancestors.
The Enduring Impact of Historical Injustices on Indigenous Americans
A Council of Dolls employs a nonlinear narrative structure. Each section depicts a separate period of time, representing three generations of women, but the first three move sequentially backward in time. They contain overlapping portrayals of the three protagonists, which emphasizes the contrast between their childhood selves and adult selves. Lillian is first depicted as an adult in Part 1, narrated by her daughter Sissy, and then as a child in Part 2. Cora is shown as a grandmother in Part 1, a mother in Part 2, and a child in Part 3. By first characterizing them as adults and subsequently as children, this structure draws attention to the cause-and-effect nature of their changing characters, inviting readers to question what made them change so drastically. Then the novel answers that question by revealing the childhood events and circumstances that traumatized these women, including oppression from outside their communities and abuse from within their own families, ultimately demonstrating how the effects of trauma can be perpetuated for generations.
Lillian’s character epitomizes this message. As an adult in Part 1, she’s portrayed as deeply flawed. Her temper controls her and she is both verbally and physically abusive toward her husband and daughter. However, Sissy recognizes there’s also a loving, nurturing side to her mother. At times, subtext hints that Lillian’s flaws are a response to traumatic experiences. Other times, she tells Sissy stories about her childhood that draw the connection more overtly, like her story about the baby in her community conceived of incest and born with a hole in its skull. This story prefaces her next action—pushing a sewing needle into the head of Sissy’s doll, Ethel—which otherwise seems inexplicable as well as cruel.
The revelations of Part 2, narrated by Lillian in her childhood, help contextualize the opposing aspects of her character in Part 1. Prime examples include emotional abuse at the hands of Sister Frances and the death of Lillian’s sister, Blanche. The most telling—and ironic—source of Lillian’s trauma is her father, Jack. He has an addiction to alcohol and is abusive toward his wife and children. Lillian is a kind and self-sacrificing girl, as evidenced by her choice to give her beloved doll to a dying child, and she hates and fears her father, due to his abusive nature. The situation’s irony comes from the fact that readers have already seen her future and know what she doesn’t yet know: that she will treat her own daughter the same way her father treats her. The author complicates this relationship by using Part 3 to show how hardships traumatize and change Jack from a kind and hopeful child to a broken-spirited, bitter man. The purpose is not merely to demonstrate the cyclical nature of abuse but also to explain it.
The traumatic experiences that change the novel’s characters for the worse, including Jack’s abusiveness, all relate to historical injustices against Indigenous Americans, including theft of land and resources, massacres, forced assimilation and cultural erasure, and more. Trauma’s lasting impact, in general, is an important part of the thematic message. However, the novel looks specifically at the traumas experienced by Indigenous Americans because of the historical injustices they endured and because of the ways in which those traumas impact future generations. The fact that Jesse didn’t live through the same forms of oppression as Lillian and Cora doesn’t mean she hasn’t been harmed by them. After many difficult years at Carlisle, Cora says, “In the past my little-girl motto would probably have been something like: Live! These days it is the less ambitious: Endure” (195). Her words embody the damaging effects of oppression and injustice that permeate the lives of Lillian, Sissy/Jesse, and countless other Indigenous Americans.
Ancestral Connections and Indigenous Traditions as Sources of Healing and Resilience
Mona Susan Power has said about A Council of Dolls, “This story is very much about healing. Not that healing is ever complete. It’s a process, but you really can make huge leaps” (Greenblatt, Leah. “After a Long and Painful Absence, Writing Her Way Home Again.” The New York Times, 7 Aug. 2023). Part 4 begins with Jesse in a state of isolation and internal conflict resulting from both personal and intergenerational trauma. Her journey toward healing, in which she embraces the traditions and beliefs of her Dakhóta heritage, symbolizes a reversal of the cultural erasure that began splintering her identity long before her birth. By opening herself up to things sacred and unseen, like the voices of her dolls, Jesse makes huge leaps in treating the wounds of the past, reinforcing the book’s call to restore a way of life that promotes balance and connectedness.
As an adult, Jesse realizes it isn’t the norm for girls to have dolls that are alive. The fact that she, her mother, and her grandmother all did establishes a meaningful connection between their three generations. The symbolic role of the wounded ancestor spirit expands that connection, enabling Jesse to view it as a link to the shared history of her entire family line. Cora’s narration portrays the spirit as a relative who would never hurt her—as a comfort and a source of relief when pneumonia made it hard for her to breathe. Ethel describes the healing role of ancestors in terms of emotional wounds and intergenerational trauma: “You’re not the only one they’re hoping to heal this time around, but a whole chain of you, carrying awful stories that get handed down from one generation to the next; harmful stories and mean thoughts that invade your mind, wreck your health, like you’re all drinking poisoned water” (280). Jesse’s ancestors offer wisdom and guidance as Jesse confronts these wounds, and because the connection between ancestors and descendants doesn’t go in only one direction, Jesse’s healing “flows backward and alleviates the suffering” of those who came before her (285). This manifests in the scene under the moon in which the spirits of Jesse’s mother, grandmother, and wounded ancestor appear by Jesse’s side and then move on to rest.
It is not only Jesse’s connection to her ancestors that restores her. She draws on other traditional customs and beliefs that, for many years, her skepticism kept her from embracing. She opens her mind to the spirits of the natural world and hears the moon speak to her, something she never knew was possible. She draws on the oral traditions of storytelling as the dolls share all they know about the past. From their stories, she’s able to comprehend her mother’s tragic life and death as part of what made it so hard for Lillian to love and nurture her daughter. Jesse also draws on the Dakhóta language, which she’s learning through an online class. Dakhóta words help her see the world and her place in it differently. The language, like each aspect of her cultural heritage that she’s now embracing, is like a puzzle piece that had been missing from her identity. By restoring the pieces, she can move forward in her journey to become whole.
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