Reviewed by David Lewis
The Bone Picker
by Devon Mihesuah
OUP (Oklahoma University Press)
October 2024, Paperback: 174 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0806194677
While there are several books of Choctaw lore and legends, Devon Mihesuah’s The Bone Picker certainly fills a gap in the telling of them. Previous collections reflected the anthropological view through which many critics have approached Native culture: something to record, preserve and study, but not necessarily to encourage. Intentionally or not, this has reinforced the pernicious narratives that Native Americans have disappeared into the wilderness of history, leaving the continent to the new, mostly white settlers. This assumption of disappearance encourages non-Native critics to judge Indigenous American lore and legends solely within the framework of European fairy tales or gothic horror. I, the adopted white son of my Choctaw mother, have also been guilty of that. While The Bone Picker does share the anthropological texts’ objectives of preservation and education, it also has literary and esthetic aims. In a similar vein to Mihesuah’s mystery-horror novel The Hatak Witches, this collection of stories explores representations and misperceptions of the supernatural entities of Choctaw lore alongside some uncomfortable histories of the Choctaw and Cherokee of Oklahoma.
A good example of misinterpreded figures of Choctaw legend is in “The Lighthorseman and the Shampe.” This piece of historical fiction follows Lighthorseman Wood Nall as he investigates the murder of two Freedmen (freed former slaves of Choctaw citizens). The community blames a shampe (pronounced shamp-eh). Shampes are:
huge, furry lumbering beasts, [who] had followed the Choctaws over the removal trail from the Southeast to Indian Territory in the 1830s. Wood had never seen a shampe, but his uncle had. Wood also had never heard anyone speak of shampes as evil entities, but white people liked to tell each other scary stories. (19)
While this book is a clear indication that Choctaws also like to tell each other scary stories, the implication of that line is that Choctaws have many stories. But when these narratives diverge from Anglo-European expectations, settlers and their descendants almost immediately force them into gothic or horror storytelling structures. Shampes are turned into the Choctaw Bigfoot and Natives only have scary stories that reinforce wild, romantic stereotypes.
That theme carries on in the titular story of the collection, “Hattak Fullih Nipi Foni: The Bone Picker.” The story begins in pre-removal times following Billie and her brother, Teague, whose white step-father imposes English and Christianity on his wife and her children. He disdains Choctaw traditions: in this story specifically, the funerary traditions. When Billie, Teague and their cousins see an elder’s final funeral rites, their cousin Lizzie, who was raised traditionally, explains what’s happening.
“Old man Tushkochaubbee died several months ago,” Lizzie explained after we stopped to listen to the wailing.“His family put him out on a stand in the trees so his flesh could rot. Now the hattak fullih nipi foni gets to finish him while the women cry.
“What? The what?” Teague asked excitedly.
“The bone picker. When a person dies, a picker uses his finger-nails to strip the flesh. Then the picker paints the skull red and the bones get put in a bone house.” (38)
With a mixture of curiosity, fascination and fear the children witness the bone picker stripping Tushkochaubbee’s rotten corpse of its flesh with his fingernails. But when Billie sees him again, years after the removal to what is now Oklahoma, she knows that this disappearing tradition was a vocation. This isn’t a malevolent entity, or a witch endowed with supernatural powers. This is a person with a job that was once a part of Choctaw identity; a person that once inspired respect, only to later appear wild and monstrous to superstitious Christian eyes.
You can take a historian out of the non-fiction section, but you can’t get the history lessons out of their books. Many of the other stories give a glimpse into Mihesuah’s other writings on Indigenous history and politics. The story “Seeds” is a lesson in Choctaw deities, but also draws from her work on the Indigenous Food Sovereignty Movement. Likewise, the story “Ned Christie” pairs nicely with her book, Ned Christie: The Creation of an Outlaw and Cherokee Hero. This desire to teach affects the writing style, which can lean too heavily on expository paragraphs where you can hear the author speaking through the characters in order to bring readers up to speed on Choctaw history, language, traditions or lore.
But that also indirectly highlights the important theme of who teaches history and how they approach it. That subject is tackled directly in the story “Tenure,” which deals with the pretendian crisis: white Americans claiming Native ancestry. This story, like others in the collection, takes the risk of making the villain the main character. Chad, a white academic specializing in the Choctaw removal, invents a Cherokee and Choctaw family tree to claim authority on the subject. I’m almost certain Mihesuah included Cherokee in Chad’s fictitious ancestry as an allusion to the thousands of American pretendians who claim that their great, great grandmother was a Cherokee princess.
After Chad’s ancestry is questioned during an interview at an Oklahoman university, he accepts a job offer in California where there “were few Native faculty.” (103) But as he entrenches himself in his lie, a sharp pain in his head grows stronger. More than a headache, something is probing his mind and looking for a way in. It isn’t gentle. It would be easy to read this as a simple revenge fantasy. Many of the pieces in this collection with villainous protagonists show a thirst for a justice that is rarely served. But they function more as cautionary tales about the importance of trust, honesty and desire.
Following those themes, “Justice” dramatizes the trials for the murder of Choctaw Nationalist politician, Charles Wilson. His killers, Choctaw Progressive politician Robert Benton and a gang of his supporters, are exonerated in tribal courts. Only the black member of their group, Jackson Crow, is condemned in federal court where a supernatural observer appears:
Jackson Crow was sentenced to hang April 27, 1888. The ordinary Choctaw did not care one way or another about Crow. But he had wanted to hear what happened to Wilson. The ordinary Choctaw found the discrepancies between what the witnesses said and what they thought to be fascinating. (67)
Mihesuah has written extensively about this case in her non-fiction book, Choctaw Crime and Punishment, 1884-1907. In this story, she imagines a cruel, playful spirit, here called “the ordinary Choctaw,” laying bare the multi-layered miscarriages of justice in federal and tribal courts. Mihesuah’s personal investment in this piece comes from being Wilson’s great-great granddaughter. That didn’t surprise me. However I was shocked to discover that this is a story about my family history as well. My great-great-great grandfather, Cornelius McCurtain was one of the murderers who walked free. And while Mihesuah doesn’t seek revenge for generational sin, her book highlights the importance of recognizing historical failures of justice, particularly when your family was involved. If I can’t acknowledge this injustice as a part of my family history, that would surely revive some part of the suffering McCurtain caused. Then the crime ceases to be history and becomes a part of the present: a grotesque family inheritance.
The Bone Picker won’t get every reader calling their aunts to learn more about their family’s crimes in the 19th century. But they’ll put the book down with an understanding of Mihesuah’s hunger for truth and justice as well as her passion for Choctaw history, lore and language. There are shapeshifting owls, mysterious white water-people, a transparent entity with a glowing blue heart, a deer man who chases hunters and many more. These stories alone may not stop you from walking through the forest at night, but they’ll definitely teach you to keep your ears open for owl calls. If you hear one, I suggest you run.
About the reviewer: David Lewis’ reviews and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, The Masters Review, Barrelhouse, Strange Horizons, The Weird Fiction Review, Ancillary Review of Books, 21st Century Ghost Stories Volume II, Chelsea Station, The Fish Anthology, Liars’ League London, Willesden Herald: New Short Stories 9, Fairlight Books, Paris Lit Up and others. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog.