Early Indigenous Literatures

The devil and the child wrestle over the space of the home.

Throughout this part of the story, the devil infringes upon the domestic space--the stove around which the two struggle is mentioned repeatedly as the center focus. Where before the two Native women sat in consort around the stove, the devil comes in and disrupts the child's involvement by chasing after her. However, the devil markedly cannot understand the language the women speak, thereby demonstrating that the child's ability to be in-the-know linguistically is critical to her ability to outsmart him. At this moment, all seems lost as the girl must abandon her spools and her suffering is invisible as the devil literally sets his sites on her.

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