“It Just Seemed to Call to Me”: Debra Magpie Earling’s Self-Telling in Perma Red
Abstract
Debra Magpie Earling, author of the 2002 novel Perma Red, does not appear as a named character in her text, which has been designated as a work of fiction. Yet the content and construction of the novel have been major forces both arising from and shaping Earling’s autobiographical experiences within her immediate biological family and as a member of the Salish-Kootenai community. Intertextual readings of the interviews, short stories, and personal dedications Earling has published before and since Perma Red’s publication powerfully articulate the autobiography embedded in this novel. Eighteen years in the making, Perma Red is an intricate, intimate expression of self-life narration that is Earling’s act of publicly honoring the Aunt Louise she never met but who has lived with Earling daily through family and community stories. Perma Red is set on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana in the 1940s, where turbulent Native-Anglo antagonisms continue to constrict social, educational, and economic spaces for the reservation’s Native inhabitants as part of the colonial legacy. In lush prose, with minimal dialogue, Earling describes Louise White Elk’s difficult, dangerous life and in doing so offers up an eloquent fictionalized eulogy to Earling’s actual Salish Aunt Louise, who died brutally and young on the Flathead Reservation in 1947. In rendering this fictionalized portrait of her biological aunt (whom I refer to exclusively as “Aunt Louise” in this essay, to distinguish her from the fictional “Louise White Elk” or “Louise”), Earling not only demonstrates her characters’ bonds of female kinship through memory as a site of empowerment, but Earling herself becomes a significant “cotagonist” through her storyteller’s memory and voice, constructing her own family history within the continuum of Bitterroot Salish community.