John Sayles has contributed a socially conscious, artful cinematic oeuvre that is far from standard operating procedure in American moviemaking. He has also contributed a canon of socially conscious, artful novels that mine the American historical vernacular. Since much of that American historical vernacular is a study of exploitation, violence, and heartlessness, those elements are front and center in Sayles’s fiction.
Sayles’s writings are usually mentioned as ancillary to his filmmaking, just as I’ve instinctively done here: citing Sayles the filmmaker and then Sayles the novelist. That ordering—instinctive or not—does a bit of a disservice to one of the most powerful writers of our time.
The locus of To Save the Man (Melville House), his newest novel, is Pennsylvania’s real-life Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1890. The school is an exercise in psychotic paternalism, where Native preteens and teens—boys and girls both– are coercively uprooted from their families and homes to begin a full-fledged immersion into the ways of the white man’s burden, forcibly stripped of what is deemed their inferior heritage and steeped in the civilizing embrace of Americanism. The novel’s title is culled from one of the school’s noxious maxims: To save the man, we must kill the Indian.
Some students run away, some fall victim to disease, and there are scattered suicides. Some stay and graduate. It is the complicated psychology of a subjected people vis-à-vis their colonizers.
To Save the Man adroitly strips away longstanding misconceptions, beginning with the very notion of the Indian (the appellation employed by whites and accurately used throughout the novel) itself. The Carlisle student body is made up of young people from different nations, separated by geography, culture, and language—to the point where communication is often not possible. In one of the book’s many fascinating revelations, there is a real-life codified Native sign language that allows for cross-national communication. This is in addition to a polyglot student body that also encompasses Spanish, French, and some Latin—all deemed irrelevant by the school, which zealously enforces a fanatical English-only policy.
The particular strength of the novel is the matter-of-fact, flesh-and-blood renderings of the characters: young people torn away from their homes and learning how to cope in this “wooden box” of a school, pressed into a bizarre school production of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha—a white, ersatz version of Native lore.
Antoine LaMere, one of the student protagonists, is of course dubbed La Merde by an older student, attesting to that universal teen ingenuity that spans all eras and cultures. One of the female students–selected for the (supposed) honor of serving tea to the almost all-white faculty–is forced to endure one teacher’s prattling on about the “dormant minds” of Indians and “their twisted path of barbarism” and yearns to dump hot tea all over the offending teacher. There is also the teasing and rivalry that occurs when various nations are all squashed together.
Sayles juxtaposes the Carlisle narrative with the growing urgency of the messianic movement that swept the larger Native world, which involved the utilization of what was called the ghost dance and the promise that “all the red people will be lifted into the air by the sacred dance feathers in their hair, then set down on this new earth, where they will sleep for four days. When they awake the buffalo will have returned, and all their dead friends will be there—” It is the fervent, heart-rending hope for deliverance among people defeated, brutalized, and facing annihilation. The novel’s horrifying, graphic denouement—as in real life—is the US army’s brutal, indiscriminate killings at Wounded Knee and the murder of Sitting Bull. And, not incidentally, the final military triumph of white “civilization” against the Native peoples.
It is impossible to read To Save the Man and not be reminded of the daily news barrage that brings dispatches of limitless brutality and ignorance. (Of course, the daily news barrage has always brought dispatches of limitless brutality and ignorance.)
There is a good amount of fiction these days that is self-consciously “edgy” or imbued with pseudo-profundities. Sayles’s fiction is imbued with real profundities and—sadly–more relevant than ever. He occupies a vital, discrete literary perch.
