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Shell Shaker (2001) by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) is a novel that gives students an opportunity to learn that the history and culture of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma are alive today. Winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award in 2002, the novel deals with two parallel stories that converge in the present, one about the eighteenth-century murder of Choctaw warrior Red Shoes, and the other about the 1991 murder of corrupt Chief Redford McAlester. The novel illustrates how history continues to impact the present-day Choctaw characters and how those characters exemplify the process of decolonization. This article deals with how I teach Shell Shaker in the context of a course on American Indian literatures, but the strategies are useful for the novel in any course.
Although other Native novels responsibly and effectively represent the history and culture of Native nations, particularly those of the "Fab Five"-N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), James Welch (Blackfeet), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), and Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene)-Shell Shaker not only excels in its rendering of the historical and contemporary Choctaws, but the writing also depicts the characters with great warmth, intelligence, and humor. Scholar and critic P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) praises the novel as a fine literary read: "Howe seamlessly integrates a history of desperate and gruesome fights for survival with modern Faustian pacts with materialism and wealth. At the heart of the story are generations of Choctaw peoples who persevere with ritual gestures of 'life everlasting' " (Hafen 2002). Howe's novel is among the wave of contemporary Native authors whose work focuses on issues of sovereignty and the decolonization process as a means of survival.
The opening chapter, "Blood Sacrifice," is just one example of the strong impression the novel leaves with readers, as Shakbatina, a Shell Shaker, narrates her own death as she is bludgeoned by a war club as a sacrifice to maintain peace among the Choctaws and Chickasaws. Detailing every physical sensation, image, and sound as she dies but lives on in spirit is an example of the Choctaw philosophy of "life everlasting," a motif that appears throughout the novel: "the people are ever living, ever dying, ever alive!" (Howe 2001, 5). As the second blow strikes her head, she...