54 pages • 1 hour read
LeAnne HoweShell Shaker
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Koi Chitto, The Bone Picker”
Gulf Coast
Hask Kaf, December 1738
After Shakbatina’s death, her husband, Koi Chitto, has traveled to various places, visiting family and friends. At the end of the day, weary from his travels, he lights a fire. Soon, an alligator joins him, mesmerized by the fire. When it refuses to return to the water, Koi Chitto realizes “it must obviously be a gift” (loc 1914) and kills the alligator. As he cooks the meat, an elderly woman approaches him and Koi Chitto realizes it’s a porcupine spirit, warning him that he must return to Yanàbi Town because “[t]rouble is coming” (loc 1914).
Koi Chitto thinks the spirit is exaggerating, as “[p]orcupine spirits are the nervous types, prone to fits” (loc 1926). He knows he will need to return to Yanàbi Town for Shakbatina’s bone-picking ceremony, but believes he still has three months before that happens. That same night, however, Koi Chitto dreams his daughter is dead, and realizes that “[s]omething is very wrong. He must reach Yanàbi Town, his daughters are in danger” (loc 1937).
He stops to visit cousins at the village of the Houmas. There an old friend of his father’s offers him a canoe to travel more quickly and tells Koi Chitto that “the Houmas are preparing for war” (loc 1937). She also offers her grandson to him as a “traveling companion” (loc 1948). As they travel, Koi Chitto reminisces about his life with Shakbatina. During their journey, they encounter the Attakapas, cannibals, who fire many arrows at Koi Chitto and his companion but miss. They stop at another village that has been devastated by the Inkilish okla, before finally reaching Yanàbi Town.
The members of Yanàbi Town and “the surrounding towns of Kunshak, Abeka, Chickasawhay, Yowani, and Concha, all allied towns among the Choctaws” (loc 1992) are preparing for a bone-picking ceremony. Koi Chitto consults with his friend and Shakbatina’s brother, Nitakechi, about the messages he has received in his dreams and from the porcupine spirit, and Nitakechi claims that Shakbatina “wants you to pick her bones” (loc 2003) even though, traditionally, “a husband must not pick the bones of his wife” (loc 2106). The men also discuss what should be done about Red Shoes, and Nitakechi claims that Red Shoes’ time is almost over, that “the Intek Aliha are cooking a special meal for him” which “should cure his hunger pains” (loc 2003).
Koi Chitto next prepares for the bone-picking ceremony. He begins by bathing, then “denies himself warmth, food, clothing, and shelter” (loc 2016). He then “smokes the dreaming tobacco that will open his mind” (loc 2016) and drinks “a concoction that is used as an emetic” to “purify himself” (loc 2027). These all combine to allow Koi Chitto to enter his many memories of his life with Shakbatina. Finally, he slips into unconsciousness after “the thing he seeks comes to him” the “na tohbi” through which he “will become his people’s sacrament” (loc 2039). Finally, Koi Chitto emerges on the third day; he covers himself with bear grease, confident that he has purified himself and has the knowledge he needs for the ceremony.
During the ceremony, Koi Chitto hears the beat of the drums as well as “the internal drumming of the plants and trees” (loc 2050). He examines Shakbatina’s corpse, which had been prepared as was common for Inholahta. Koi Chitto begins his chant and his dance, declaring himself “the Bone Picker, dancer of death” (loc 2072). Shakbatina joins him, their bodies entwined, and Koi Chitto vows that he “will be with [her] always. […]. Until the nothingness becomes everything. Until everything becomes nothing” (loc 2083). She begs him to “[r]elease [her] now, so [she] may watch over [their] people” (loc 2083). Koi Chitto then “tears Shakbatina’s skull and spinal column from the rest of her bones” releasing her spirit (loc 2083).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Penance”
Durant, Oklahoma
Tuesday, September 24, 1991
Auda is grateful that her mother has forgiven her, and she and her mother speak to the people who have gathered outside their home. Susan assures them that Auda “is innocent of all charges” (loc 2105) and that the Choctaws are “going to take back our tribe, our lands, and kick out the gangsters” (loc 2105). They plan a meeting with everyone at the Blue Creek Grounds that night.
Auda consults with Gore, and realizes that all the papers documenting Redford’s corruption have disappeared. However, she made copies of everything and sent them to Tema’s agent. She and Gore also discuss a central controversy: whether Native Americans should try to be successful in White culture, or whether they should stay within the tribe. Auda knows there is no clear answer, telling Gore, “I’m proud of both my sisters—an actress and a Wall Street broker. I’m proud of all the Indians who are musicians, filmmakers, lawyers, and scientists. I want Indians to do whatever they are capable of. But it’s foolish to believe that tribes, and tribalism, don’t suffer as a result” (loc 2199).
Auda’s aunts, Delores and Dovie Love, who are “[n]ot blood relations, but Indian-way aunts” (loc 2123) arrive. Gore is excited; Delores and Dovie are famous, former celebrities well known among Native Americans. They help Tema and Adair with the cooking, and Auda and Susan go to the clinic to repair Auda’s teeth, broken when one of the arresting officers punched her.
Before they leave, Auda looks for her pet rabbit and has a vision in which she is Shakbatina’s daughter, listening to her mother’s conversation with Jean Baptiste Sieur de Bienville, and Auda finally realizes that Shakbatina is her ancestor. On their way to the clinic, Isaac is arrested and Hoppy is assaulted, but Susan tells Auda to go to the dental clinic, that it is important for her to continue with her routine and “show the police, the tribe, the whole town that they’ve made a mistake” (loc 2432). However, when she gets to the dental clinic, she realizes something is wrong, but not before the hygienist jabs a needle in her arm. As the hygienist leaves, Auda is immersed in another vision: “Her father is standing beside the river bank. He yells, ‘Anoleta, go back” (loc 2465) and she runs to the chief’s cabin. Auda realizes she is dying.
Chapter 8 Summary: “A Road of Stars”
Yanàbi Town
Winter Solstice, 1738
Anoleta dreams. She is strapped to a table, and a woman in a white mask pulls out her teeth. Although she “wants to ask the woman if she is Filanchi okla or Inkilish okla” she is instead “catapulted across the night sky onto fichik tohbi hina, the white star road” (loc 2484). She asks her mother for help, and when she awakens, Red Shoes is standing over her.
Anoleta allows Red Shoes to believe that she welcomes him, that she too misses him, wants him. However, Anoleta is planning to kill Red Shoes. As she prepares, she watches men she calls the Blackrobes perform their ceremonies, a Catholic mass. Usually Anoleta ignores them, but this time she answers their petition that she become a Christian by arguing that it is the Choctaw who are “[l]ife everlasting” (loc 2569). Her sister, Haya, then drinks the communion wine before tossing the cup back to the priests.
Jean Baptiste Sieur de Bienville visits Anoleta and Haya, and Anoleta is angry that she must admit that he was right all along about Red Shoes. Anoleta has never liked Jean Baptiste, and refuses to believe that he was her mother’s lover. Haya tries to explain why they still love Red Shoes, even though he has betrayed them. She tells Jean Baptiste that Red Shoes “doesn’t know that he has become corrupted. He’ll never believe that, even if someday he causes us all to die” (loc 2643). Anoleta is careful not to reveal her plans to either her sister or Jean Baptiste.
Chapters 6-8 Analysis
The first chapter here provides the reader with a great deal of background into the bone-picking ceremony of the Choctaw. Howe’s description of the ceremony aligns with historical evidence of such ceremonies and indicates the complex ways the Choctaw understood the connections between life and death. During the ceremony, Shakbatina’s husband Koi Chitto proclaims he is “the Bone Picker, dancer of death, transformer of life, the one who brings sex, the one who brings rebirth” (loc 2072). For the Choctaw, life and death are not opposites but part of a spectrum.
The ways that the lines between life and death are collapsed are reflected in the way that time moves in the story. During the ceremony, and in the days preceding it, Koi Chitto is immersed in the past, present, and future, often all at one time. He is reunited with Shakbatina as a young, vibrant woman, relives her agonizing death, and sees her as the protector of her people far into the future. Similarly, Auda experiences herself as existing in the present, accused of murder, as well as in the past as Shakbatina’s daughter. Although the story initially indicated whether the reader was in the 18th or 20th century, as the story progresses, these times and characters collapse into each other.
Through this collapse, Howe argues that the problems and issues faced by Shakbatina and Koi Chitto are the same problems faced by Auda and the other members of the Billy families. The people are divided in each case and threatened by their own internal politics and outside forces: the mafia for Auda, and the Inkilish okla for Shakbatina. In fact, this section represents an increase in the tension of the stories: The reader knows that Koi Chitto and those he cares about are facing a war, an internal one caused by Red Shoes as well as the inroads made by the colonizers, both French and English. Similarly, Auda must face the consequences of Redford’s death both externally in a court of law and in the reactions of her neighbors and friends.
Howe introduces a complication of modern Indigenous life, the issue of assimilation, through the conversation between Auda and Gore. Auda tells Gore, “We, the Choctaw people are the assets of our tribe” but if “all the Indians are off doing their own thing, tribalism will die” (loc 2175-2187). Gore initially rejects this assertion, but Auda explains that though she is proud of all the Choctaw who are successful in the dominant culture—all the “musicians, filmmakers, lawyers and scientists”—that she “wants Indians to do whatever they are capable of. But it’s foolish to believe that tribes, and tribalism, don’t suffer as a result” (loc 2200). There is no easy resolution to this problem, and it is one that the characters continue to wrestle with throughout the text.
Though this seems like a modern issue, Anoleta’s exchange with the Catholic provides some sort of resolution. For the Choctaw, the tribe cannot disappear; it is always there, even if it seems as if it is gone. Indeed, Anoleta’s encounter with the Blackrobes demonstrates the how the colonizers misinterpreted and misunderstood the Indigenous people. The priest tells Anoleta that she can only have eternal life through Jesus Christ. However, Anoleta explains, the Choctaw “are life everlasting” (loc 2567). Nothing in their world is ever truly gone: “Alive we use the animals. The animal is consumed. In death, the people are consumed by the animals” (loc 2567).
Anoleta tries to make the priest understand that they also understand what it means to be eternal, one every bit as valid as that espoused by the priests. Furthermore, their conception of mercy and forgiveness is also complex and multivalent as evidenced by Haya’s explanation of their love for Red Shoes, despite the harm he has caused. Though all the characters agree that Red Shoes must be stopped, and Anoleta herself plans to kill him, none of them are happy about his impending death. They know that “he doesn’t know that he has become corrupted” (loc 2637-2648).
