Early Indigenous Literatures

The child is unsettled upon returning home.

In this scene, we see the child's return home as unsettling precisely because her space has been made strange to her. Rather than simply being a comfort, the return home balances the contradictions of liberation (through the image of her riding her horse freely across the land in previous pages) to the new processes of surveillance in which she can no longer roam undisturbed. Regardless of if she perceives the man himself to be a surveilling force, the "gnawing at [her] heart" now follows her across her home, where she must balance these sometimes bitter changes. I draw particular attention here to the feelings of freedom the girl feels while riding her horse and juxtapose it as well with the image of the rider in Howe's "Fleeing a Massacre," who is both in and out of control. Consider reviewing Howe's painting if you have not to consider the use of horseback riding as another specifically Yankton site of contestation and liberation.

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