Summary
By this point in the narrative, most of the central characters have converged in the town of Blossom. Lionel has dropped off the elders and returned to his apartment to watch television. Charlie has checked into the Blossom Lodge, and, unbeknownst to him, so has Alberta. Both Charlie and Alberta flip idly through the television in their rooms and end up watching the same Western movie, in which Charlie sights his father playing one of the Indian roles. At the electronics store, Bursum is watching the same Western projected onto hundreds of TV screens, and in his cabin, Eli is reading a Western novel. Back at the asylum, Babo is watching the Western as well and catches sight of the four Indians on screen. Dr. Hovaugh, also watching the same movie, sees them as well.
Charlie and Eli's backstories continue. Readers learn that Charlie grew up in Canada after his parents returned from Hollywood. When he was fifteen, his mother died, and a short time later, Portland decided to return to Hollywood, taking his son with him. However, Portland's efforts to find acting work proved unsuccessful. He and Charlie ended up working at a restaurant called Remington's where they parked cars while dressed up in stereotypical Indian costumes. Then Portland got a job at a strip club called the Four Corners where he played a stereotypical Indian in a racist skit. Eventually, Charlie became so frustrated that he left Hollywood and returned home alone.
Readers also learn that Eli did once bring Karen back to the reservation for the Sundance festival, but his family showed their disapproval of the relationship. He was hurt and angry, and this contributed to him avoiding the reservation.
In the creation story narrative, Changing Woman is now alone on the island. A ship approaches and she swims out to it, where she is greeted by men named Ahab and Ishmael. They are searching for a white whale. When Changing Woman introduces herself, they decide to call her Queequeg instead. They eventually sight a giant black female whale named Moby Jane. She destroys the ship but makes friends with Changing Woman. She carries Changing Woman on her back in a pleasant and somewhat sexualized idyll until Moby Jane drops her off in Florida. As soon as Changing Woman comes ashore, she is seized by two soldiers, and introduces herself as Ishmael.
When Coyote learns that Changing Woman/Ishmael has landed in Florida, he thinks that the story has reached a happy ending. This irritates the narrator, who decides to begin the story again.
Analysis
This section explores the power of consuming narratives and how they can shape the ways in which individuals see the world. While there is a brief nod to literature in the form of the cheap Western novels that Eli reads as a guilty pleasure, King focuses mainly on film as the dominant mode of popular narrative in the 20th century. Especially in terms of representing Native peoples, the genre of Western films is a hugely prominent way in which white individuals have come to an idea of what they believe Indians to be like. The fact that so many different characters are watching the same movie in different spaces reveals the pervasiveness of this kind of cultural mythology. Even people who don't actively seek out these kinds of stories end up being exposed to them in one form or another.
This widespread exposure is dangerous for a number of reasons. The Western genre focuses on conflict and violence between whites and Indians, rather than cooperation or collaboration. Even more importantly, that violence always has a predictable outcome in which the Indians are vanquished and the dominance of the European settlers is asserted. When the elders discuss "fixing" the film, they refer to altering the story so that the outcome is no longer so stable. This possibility of changing the story by inserting additional characters into it mirrors King's project of writing novels that shed light into the complexities of the Indigenous experience. The narrative about what it means to be Indian, or what Indians are capable of doing, can be altered or expanded, but the result is often surprising or disconcerting to audiences who are used to hearing and seeing a very formulaic and predictable story.
The disruption of a well-known narrative is also clear in the second part of Changing Woman's story. Ishmael and Ahab are the two central characters from Herman Melville's famous novel Moby Dick. The novel also features a friendly Native character named Queequeg and so when they insist on calling Changing Woman by that name, they are trying to insert her into that story. They have an idea of what a Native person should be like, and they aren't interested in anything outside of that idea. Ishmael and Ahab are also representative of a model that seeks to dominate and control the natural world. Ahab is famously obsessed with hunting and killing the white whale, and this attitude contrasts with a traditional Aboriginal mindset of seeing oneself as interconnected with the natural world.
The traditional Moby Dick story is also subverted in several ways: the whale that appears is black and female, and there is an implied lesbian relationship between her and Changing Woman. All of these identities position Moby Jane as being a potential threat to the power and control of the white male characters, and cast a new light on why they are determined to exterminate her. Throughout the novel, while King's primary focus is the politics of Indigenous identities, he is also interested in connecting that identity to other marginalized individuals. Moby Jane is able to break the ship, thus suggesting that much like the Indians in the Western movies, groups that are lacking in power can still be highly capable.
