Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Inspiring and Sad Female Native American Robinsoniad In the Newbery Medal winning novel Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), a Native American named Karana recounts how at the age of twelve she ended up alone on her home island and then, apart from some wild dogs and other creatures, lived there for eighteen years. Author Scott O’Dell’s Afterword reveals that he based his novel on a real historical native woman called “The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island,” that she lived off the Californian coast on one of the Channel Islands southwest of LA and Catalina, and that she was eventually found and taken to the mainland and put in the Santa Barbara Mission. Because no one spoke her language so she could only tell her story partially by using gestures, O’Dell is imagining almost everything in the story, including Karana’s native name. In that context, O’Dell writes an authentic feeling, absorbing, and moving novel relating how Karana survives for years there, like a female indigenous Robinson Crusoe. How she gets food and water and shelter, dries abalone, makes a dress from cormorant feathers, deals with hostile wild dogs, survives a hurricane and an earthquake, hunts a devil fish, hides when otter hunters show up, and generally deals with being the only human being on the island. O’Dell writes convincingly in Karana’s first-person voice, as when she describes things like the arrival of a big western ship (“At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings.”) and its use of a canon (“A puff of white smoke came from the deck of the ship. A loud noise echoed against the cliff. Five of our warriors fell and lay quiet.”). I wonder when Karana is telling her story. It’s not a present-tense first-person story (that trend not having been in vogue when O’Dell wrote the novel), so, unlike something like, say, The Hunger Games, it’s obvious that the story is being told long after the events occurred, as the first line reveals: “I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.” However, the novel ends without any indication of how Karana would have learned enough English (or Spanish) to tell her story so well. [In fact, the historical woman Karana is based on died of dysentery just seven weeks after arriving at the Santa Barbara Mission.] Anyway, it feels like a mature survivor’s story of her youth. It is a sad book, both in Karana’s isolation and more largely in the plight of her tribe and all Native Americans, partly because of the restraint with which O’Dell has Karana tell her story. She rarely expresses the strong emotions she must be feeling and never says anything like, “Another case of white people taking our resources and killing our people.” The novel packs a strong emotional punch as a result. However, I’d maybe have liked a bit more of a righteous polemic on that score! But after all Karana is ignorant of the larger world, being born and raised on her island, and is only aware that people live on the mainland. (view spoiler)[One of the saddest moments comes at the very end when, after eighteen years alone on the Island the Blue Dolphins, a ship with a Spanish missionary shows up there, and she chooses to live with people rather than to go on living alone, and she proudly dons the special, beautiful cormorant feather skirt she’s painstakingly made, and the missionary and his people make her an ankle length dress to wear instead, and she resolves to wear her own dress once they get to the mainland, but we suspect it won’t be so easy for her henceforth, and it’s clear that the white people care nothing for her culture and will impose their own on her. (hide spoiler)] O’Dell writes some potent early second-wave feminist stuff on gender roles and their limitations: “I wondered what would happen to me if I went against the law of our tribe which forbade the making of weapons by women—if I did not think of it at all and made those things which I must have to protect myself.” Despite being all alone, it takes an effort of will for Karana to do what she needs to do to survive. Another important theme running through the novel concerns the human exploitation of animals, and Karana’s change regarding that is remarkable. (view spoiler)[The tragedy of Karana’s people derives from the insatiable human greed for otter skins. The other saddest part of the novel for me—sadder even than the deaths of her stupid and fated father and of her quick and foolish little brother—is the death of the dog Rontu. In the early part of the story, Rontu probably helps kill Karana’s brother, and she resolves to kill every last wild dog on the island, but after she has shot the big dog with an arrow, she suddenly decides to save his life and then tames and befriends him. “Why I did not send the arrow I cannot say. I stood on the rock with the bow pulled back and my hand would not let it go. The big dog lay there and did not move, and this may be the reason. If he had gotten up I would've killed him. I stood there for a long time, looking down at him, and then I climbed off the rocks.” Partly as a result of her relationship with Rontu, she decides at one point to never kill any more animals (apart from abalone and fish!) for food or clothes, regardless of whether or not they are her friends. (hide spoiler)] I have no idea how accurate O’Dell’s depiction of Karana and her people is, but he did research the lives of Native Americans in the Southwest Museum of the American Indian and manages to tell an absorbing, page-turning, authentic-feeling story with mostly only one human character on stage, the last member of her lost tribe, and makes us care about her. View all my reviews
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