The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell - The Power of Women Native American Literature - P.E.M. Hollrah

Review by Jo-Ann Episkenew
Hollrah contends that gender complementarity rather than gender hierarchy was the foundational principle of Native American cultures in that they understood that both genders are of equal importance to the survival of the collective. She goes on to argue that, even though the colonizer culture has had some limited success in imposing its patriarchal ideology and hierarchical thinking on contemporary Native America, the principle of gender complementarity is still accepted more often than not. To most Indigenous women, it is not our men but colonialism that is the enemy. To support her argument, Hollrah examines the work of four major Native American writers—Zitkala-_a (Yankton Sioux), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe), and Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene)—along with their personal and cultural contexts. Although they write at different points in history and belong to different cultures, all acknowledge and respect the power of Native American women and provide numerous examples of their convictions in both their writings and their lives. In her first two chapters, Hollrah provides readers with a thorough discussion of the historical and cultural context of the importance of women in contemporary Native American literature. This is followed by a review of scholarship. In each subsequent chapter, she considers the writers, their individual and cultural contexts, and their works. Hollrah concludes her book with a discussion of Native American women as warriors based on an inherent intellectual sovereignty that makes feminist theory either redundant or irrelevant.

Hollrah makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship of Native American literature; however, her study would be even stronger if her review of scholarship did not stop at the 49th parallel. Although she does include an article by Bill Asikinack in her bibliography, she omits any other Indigenous Canadians whose scholarship would be germane, most notably Emma LaRocque (Cree/Métis), Janice Acoose (Anishinaabe/Métis), and Kim Anderson (Cree/Métis). Hollrah also has some difficulty with her analysis of Erdrich and Alexie’s personal and cultural contexts. Her discussion of Erdrich’s context as Anishinaabekwe is comparatively brief, probably because Turtle Mountain, with its large Métis population, is not representative of Anishinaabe culture. And, she has difficulty with the concept that Alexie’s Spokane people are neither, or both, matrilineal and/or patrilineal.

Nevertheless, “The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell is an important addition to the scholarship about Native American, and Canadian, literature in that Hollrah succeeds in explaining why feminist theory does not apply to Native literature.