Perma Red
Nearly twenty years ago, I read a novel about mid-twentieth-century Native life western Montana that shook me with its vivid descriptions of place, its unsettling scenes of poverty and institutional Indian schools. Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red (originally published 2003) was beautiful in its intensity, startling and raw. It captured the harsh conditions of life on the Flathead Indian Reservations in the 1940s. And then it went out of print. Happily, the good folks at Milkweed Editions rectified the situation and Perma Red returned to print in the fall 2022; and I eagerly revisited the story that wowed me all those years ago.
In the two decades between readings, I had forgotten the degree of the violence that punctuates so much of Perma Red. I remembered its haunting quality, but not the viciousness of so many of its scenes and characters. This is the coming-of-age story of a Salish woman, Louise White Elk, who lives on the reservation with her younger sister and grandmother following her mother’s death. Louise’s adolescence becomes a pattern of flight: she flees the nightmares she experiences at the Indian school only to be returned to the nuns by the Indian agent and Indian police. From a young age, her life is entwined with that of Baptiste who, despite his French name, follows the old Salish ways, knows the old stories. Yet, as she comes of age, other men pursue her as well: a wealthy white man, a broken cowboy, an Indian cop. As time passes, all four enter a dangerous, bloody dance in which Louise claims agency where she can, usually with the one thing she has: her body. In fact, the novel’s title refers to the derogatory term by which Louise is known; a term alluding to her red hair and the color associated with prostitution. Perma Red explores the ways Louise, even as a teenager, responds to the dismal choices her life offers with resilience as she clings to survival in a world that seems destined to kill her and so many other Native women.
Perma Red depicts the heartbreaking ways life on the reservation limits Native characters, particularly its women. The theme of disappearing Native women, Earling’s novel shows us, is not a new one. It is an old story. There are many ghosts that haunt Perma Red’s narrative. Against the backdrop of dead and disappeared Native women, this story emerges through various perspectives: Louise, Baptiste, and Charlie Kicking Woman (the Native police officer). The perspective shifts from third-person (with Louise and Baptiste’s chapters) to first-person (with Charlie’s). Perma Red begs the reader to answer many questions: What is real? What is metaphor? Why is Charlie the “I” of the story and not Louise, since it is, truly, her story? For me, as a non-Native reader, sitting with questions is much of the point. There are many things in Perma Red that I know I miss, living outside the Salish traditions it undoubtedly references. Yet it is precisely this feeling of existing outside, of not understanding, that I think makes Perma Red so powerful, at least in part.
The characters in Earling’s Perma Red are each flawed and human. The story, as it unfolds, reflects, time and again, the ways in which these characters attempt to survive despite straddling multiple worlds. The agony and self-harm, the avarice and addiction, that readers witness are all, it seems, violent symptoms of this divide. Both the Native and non-Native characters suffer to find love, belonging, wholeness; none avoid the curse of life on the reservation, it seems.
This is a bold story full of original voice. Perma Red will transport its readers to the majesty of western Montana and it rugged landscape, but will also challenge and haunt. Some of Earling’s masterfully written scenes will leave the reader questioning what just happened and why. Like other novels by Native American writers, Perma Red explores the pain but also the resilience of Native people as they live — like Louise with her red hair and Charlie with his white man’s job — between two worlds and attempt to survive as best they can. What’s more, Perma Red reveals the many perspectives of Native experience that exist in any given moment. Novels like this are important to read and keep in print.
Bibliography:
Earling, Debra Magpie. Perma Red. Milkweed Editions: 2022.
