Cedar Hawk Songmaker
If that name sounds like a Native American name, then this must be the work of Louise Erdrich. Erdrich made her reputation introducing white America to the world of those whose living offspring can trade their ancestry (theoretically) back to centuries before those snotty descendants of the Mayflower. Cedar Hawk Songmaker is yet another Erdrich’s memorable female characters with a deep connection to the indigenous tribes of North America, but in this case her world belongs to the white well-intentioned liberals watching in horror as America has finally become the theocracy it has been threatened to become since the 1980’s. This daughter of adoption and hope for a better future than one with a living god in the Oval Office finds herself pregnant in this near-future (or perhaps recent-present) dystopian vision of America and, what’s worse, the pediatrician is worried the fetus may be at risk for serious genetic complications. But an ultrasound will be required.
Mary Potts Almost Senior
Cedar’s birth mother sports a very indigenous name, but here’s the kicker: Songmaker has nothing to do with her. But more on that later. That name is a mouthful so most people just call her “Sweetie.” Addictions to sex and drugs are the origination point of Sweetie’s decision to give up Cedar for adoption, but in the years since she has managed to straighten out her life and move on from those problems and even give birth to another daughter which she kept, Little Mary. Her name, by the way, is such as to distinguish her from her mother with whom and Little Mary live: the 100-plus-year-old Mary Potts the Very Senior.
Little Mary
Cedar’s younger sister is a self-described Gothlolita, a true child of the cosplay/anime subculture making the internet such a fabulously fun playground for millions of men around the world. She is not nearly as naïve on the subject of Cedar’s innocence as her mom, recognizing from the eyewitness testimony of her own eyes that Sweetie’s description of Cedar as neither promiscuous nor a drug user are entirely accurate.
Sera and Alan Songmaker
Yes, despite the entirely natural assumption that Cedar’s full name derives from her biological ancestry, it turns out that full Native American impact all the way through the name is partially provided by her very white and very non-indigenous parents. Deriving wealth from inheritance of a robber baron has produced liberal guilt in both adoptive parents and they have to carry out correctives to the sins of the past by donating money to liberal causes which would have caused those family members who built their wealth on exploitation of everybody else to die of a heart attack on the spot.
The Songmakers are presented through what may seem like a conservative perspective of privileged liberals in their relative ineffectual political ambitions, but that would be a misinterpretation. Their passive, middle-of-the-road approach to liberalism should instead be juxtaposed against the state of America in which they live: a dystopic right-wing dystopia attained by radicalized conservatives stimulated to react against liberal passivity.
