Chapter Five
The Sound of a Human Voice
Chapter 5
The Sound of a Human Voice: Island of the Blue Dolphins
From the first page of Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins, a
perceptive reader, familiar with the conventions of the desert island story, will
be aware of a new perspective. Two Native American children, Karana, the
narrator, and Ramo, her brother, sight a ship approaching their island. Karana
knows what a ship is, although she has never seen one. Ramo does not.
Between them, they search for ways to describe it: 'a small shell afloat on the
sea,' 'a gull with folded wings,' 'a small cloud,' 'a red whale,' and, at last, 'a
canoe, a great one, bigger than all our canoes together.' 1
Most readers in the U.S.A. or Britain in 1960, when the novel was first
published, would have been more familiar with the view from the ship: of an
island coming into view, offering adventure. In the conventional desert island
tale, it is likely that the ship would have happened on the island by chance,
probably by storm and shipwreck. The island would have been uninhabited, or
populated by savages. These conventions had implications within the
imperialist message of these stories. They suggested that the discovery and
colonisation of other lands was an accidental or, at least disinterested,
process, and that were no other people with a prior territorial claim, or at least
no other people whose rights needed to be respected. 2
The Island of Blue Dolphins, however, is home to Karana's people, a
small tribe of Native Americans, who live by hunting and gathering in the
village of Ghalas-at, the only village on their small island. The ship is crewed
by a neighbouring people, the Aleuts, and captained by Captain Orlov, a
Russian. He has come with a definite purpose, to hunt the island's sea otters
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and harvest their pelts. In an uneasy confrontation on the beach, Captain
Orlov and Chief Chowig, Karana's father, argue and haggle. Eventually, they
strike a bargain, and Chowig allows Orlov and the Aleut a free rein to hunt in
return for a share of the proceeds, to be paid in trinkets and weapons. But,
when the hunting is over, the dispute on the beach is renewed and fighting
breaks out between the islanders and the hunters. When Orlov sails away, he
leaves behind on the beach the dead bodies of Chief Chowig with most of his
young warriors, and a single abandoned chest of 'beads and bracelets and
earrings.' 3
Following the slaughter on the beach, the tribe has too few men to survive
and eventually a ship arrives to take Karana's people away. In the transfer to
the ship, Karana and Ramo are abandoned on the island. Within a day, Ramo
is killed by a pack of wild dogs, and Karana is left alone, 'a girl Robinson
Crusoe' 4 in O'Dell's words, for the next eighteen years until another ship visits
the island.
Karana is as solitary as Crusoe, and she faces the same problems of
physical and psychological survival. Otherwise, her situation could not be
more different. Despite his initial doubts and despair, Crusoe grows in
confidence as he builds a home, hunts and farms, subdues and possesses
the island and establishes his own 'kingdom'. Karana, on the other hand, has
to live with the memories and ghosts of her family and friends, and with the
knowledge of how different her life might have been if the Aleut ship had
never landed. Crusoe fulfils his masculine destiny to achieve power and
wealth. Karana grows to womanhood without the possibility of marriage or
children. As we learn in O'Dell's afterword, her tribe ends with her.
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The full extent of the tragedy is not apparent until O'Dell's 'Author's Note'
that follows the main narrative. Here we learn that the story is based on
historical fact. Karana was 'known to history as "The Lost Woman of San
Nicolas" ' and lived alone on the island, off the west coast of the U.S.A., from
1835 to 1853. When she was brought to the mainland she could make herself
understood only by signs, for no one knew her language, 'The Indians of
Ghalas-at had long since disappeared.' 5
The classic desert island story is a story of finding a voice. Whether for
Crusoe himself, for the Walkers in the English Lake District, or for Mafatu on
his South Sea Island, the island is a place of self assertion and independence,
of becoming. For 'The Lost Woman of San Nicolas', on the other hand, it is a
place of ultimate loss: loss of community and even of her ability to tell her own
story. By changing the viewpoint of the desert island story, O'Dell reveals how
the assertion of European and American power over the world's islands
affected their indigenous peoples. In Karana's story, O'Dell introduces his
readers to the victims of imperial expansion, to people who were cheated and
displaced, whose lives were taken and whose cultures disappeared.
Island of the Blue Dolphins offers a profound critique of the conventional
desert island story. For the first time in children's literature, it tells the story
from the point of view of indigenous people. More than that, it sets out to
question the masculinist and individualist assumptions that are inextricably
part of the imperialist credo. It is a story told by a girl, which criticises the
warrior ethos, and the exploitation of animals and the environment. Most of
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all, it emphasises the importance of community and family as against the self
sufficient individual. 6
There is a contradiction in O'Dell's enterprise. The voice that O'Dell
creates for Karana as the means of conveying his message can never be the
voice of the original 'Lost Woman', for that is lost for ever. Rather, Karana's
voice is one that is necessarily shaped by O'Dell's own concerns about
human attitudes to each other and to the environment. But O'Dell's admission
of this, in contrast to Sperry's claim of a Polynesian origin for his story, creates
an authentic and responsible space of possibility. He implies that the story
may not be not how it was, but how it might have been. 7
Further, through the simplicity in which he tells the story and the
relationship which he creates between Karana as narrator and the child
reader, O'Dell appeals to aspects of modern childhood, especially the
sentimental ties of friends and pet ownership, and mobilises them in defence
of the exploited. In Island of the Blue Dolphins, there are many examples of
the kind of dramatic action that both Price and Sperry regarded as essential to
keeping a child's, particularly a boy's interest. These include frequent hunting
scenes. But these do not merely provide excitement; they are also a cause for
reflection and consideration of our attitude to animals. 8
O'Dell uses a first person narrative to tell Karana's story, and he creates
an intimate relationship between Karana and the reader. She speaks in a tone
of sadness and resignation, recalling events from a distance, as if to a friend,
beginning 'I remember the day…'
9
In the first chapter, as she and Ramo
watch the approaching ship, she describes her younger brother affectionately
but critically as she might to a girl her own age. When Ramo asks her if she
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has ever seen a red whale, she says she has, but adds an aside to the
reader, 'though I never had.'
10
This sharing of confidences between narrator
and reader extends to the knowledge of her secret name, a revelation which
is prompted by Karana's memory of her surprise at the way her father greets
the Russian captain:
I was surprised that he gave his real name to a stranger.
Everyone in our tribe had two names, the real one which was
secret and was seldom used, and one which was common, for if
people use your secret name it becomes worn out and loses its
magic. Thus I was known as Won-a-pa-lei, which means The
Girl with Long Black Hair, though my secret name is Karana. My
father's secret name was Chowig. Why he gave it to a stranger I
do not know. 11
This passage places Karana's relationship with the reader on a complex
level. It also illustrates the simple but effective techniques that O'Dell uses to
acknowledge Karana's cultural distance from the reader while maintaining
empathy with her.
Karana grants the reader knowledge of her secret name: knowledge that
otherwise would be known only to her family and close friends. This
admission moves the reader from stranger to intimate. At the same time, it
places Karana in the care of the reader. Her admission to the reader is the
equivalent of her father's to Orlov, and, in the movement of tenses in the
passage there is a hint of the Chief's fate and the eventual fate of the tribe.
She says, 'my secret name is Karana', but 'I was known as Won-a-pa-lei' and
'my father's secret name was Chowig' [my italics]. Her existence in the tribe
and her father's secret name are placed firmly in the past, and their loss is
closely associated with her father's foolish admission of his secret name. The
passage establishes the reader as Karana's chosen confidant and implicitly
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assumes that the reader will show her story the respect that Orlov denies to
her father.
The use of the notion of the secret name is also a way of pointing up
cultural difference. Having a secret name and an everyday name is itself a
different way of doing things. It also suggests that the reasons for different
ways of behaving may not be immediately apparent. They are 'secrets' known
only to those that use them and will require a close and respectful relationship
with their possessors to be understood. This is an idea that is within the grasp
of the child reader, who will know the importance of both keeping and sharing
secrets. The reader will also be aware of the related truth that how we see
ourselves and are known to our closest friends (the secret name), is not
necessarily how everyone else may see us. The notion of the secret name
thus encapsulates the ethos that underpins ethnographic study; that study of
a society or culture must begin from within that society, and puts it in a way
that a child can understand.
The manner in which O'Dell uses the concerns of childhood as a constant
reference is apparent from the tone of the narrator's voice. Karana as narrator
must be assumed to have already experienced all the events that she
describes to the reader and, by the time she is telling her story, must be at
least thirty years old. Yet the narrator's voice seems to begin and remain at
the age of the girl we meet at the opening of the story.
This is part of
Karana's tragedy, for, being alone without her tribe, she is denied the
significant experiences of adulthood, particularly marriage. But it also means
that the narrator and reader remain as peers throughout the story, with the
same interests and preoccupations. This is particularly important for the way
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in which O'Dell uses Karana's and the tribe's relationship to animals to
characterise cultural difference while maintaining the reader's empathy.
The defining feature of the culture of Karana's people, distinguishing them
from the Russian captain at whose behest the Aleuts slaughter the sea otters,
is their relationship to the environment and, in particular, to animals. To the
Russian captain, the sea otter pelts are a commodity to sell and make a profit
from. To Karana's people, the sea otters are part of an environment which
they rely on for survival.
The island itself is described by Karana as being shaped like a fish and
the name that the tribe gives it, the Island of the Blue Dolphins, makes clear
that the tribe recognises the prior claim of the creatures upon it. Within four
pages of opening the book, the reader is aware that Karana and Ramo share
their island home with a wealth of other animals: gulls, dolphins, whales,
lizards, flies, cormorants, otters and crickets are all mentioned.12 It is apparent
that the tribe depends on its environment, especially the animals, not only for
its food, but for its cooking utensils, tools, weapons, clothes and shelter.
Both Price and Sperry's books show an appreciation for the ingenuity and
versatility of what might have been called 'primitive' technologies. O'Dell gives
extensive description of these techniques, but he goes further still in the
portrayal of cultural difference. O'Dell makes little use of exotic terms and
names. And these, presumably, he has coined himself, since there was no
extant language to work from. He concentrates rather on conveying the idea
that the whole way of thinking of the tribe was conditioned by its natural
environment.
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His use of simile and metaphor is sparing throughout the novel, avoiding
the kind of comparison that Sperry makes which bring modern cultural
references with them. Where Karana uses figures of speech, they often show
animals and people as sources of mutual reference. People's behaviour and
appearances are described in animal terms. Karana describes Ramo as
'foolish as a cricket'; with eyes 'black like a lizard's.' Animals are described as
behaving like people. Karana describes young sea elephants: 'They follow
their mothers around, waddling on their flippers like children learning to walk,
making crying sounds and sounds of pleasure that only the young make.' 13
The careful account of the island's flora and fauna that Karana gives to
the reader shows her extensive knowledge. This knowledge is born of
necessity, rather than idle curiousity or scientific interest. 14 Her preoccupation
with survival when alone is a continuation of the tribe's own struggle for
existence on the island. This is not a life in harmony with nature, but nor is it
one that glories in human domination.
15
Rather it is one that acknowledges
the importance of animals to human survival and culture. 16
From the beginning of the novel, Karana's attitude to animals is different
from that of others of her people. 17 She regards at least the sea otters as her
friends. This is an attitude which makes an immediate link with O'Dell's
modern child readers, whose experience of animals would be mainly in
sentimental terms as pets. Because of Karana's interest in the otters as
individuals, O'Dell is able to dramatise the thoroughness and cruelty of the
Aleut hunters:
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At dark, the hunters brought their catch into Coral Cove, and
there on the beach the animals were skinned and fleshed. Two
men, who also sharpened the spears, did this work, labouring
far into the night by the light of seaweed fires. In the morning the
beach would be strewn with carcasses, and the waves red with
blood. 18
The mention of carcasses and blood is significant. Although many animals
are hunted and killed during the novel, even by Karana, often the deaths are
passed over lightly or they happen off the page. The evisceration of bodies
and the disposal of carcasses are rarely mentioned. Such descriptions might
threaten the reader's empathy with Karana when she is responsible for the
deaths. They would also be a distortion of Karana's own point of view for, to
her, such details would be matters of little concern. O'Dell reserves the
description of animal pain and suffering for those moments when he wants to
show Karana's own discomfort at what an animal is enduring. Karana kills
many of the wild dogs with her spear and arrows but it is only when she
decides to spare the leader of the pack after wounding him that an animal's
distress is shown or its wounds described.
In the case of the Aleut hunting of the sea otters, O'Dell is also
concerned to show how the prospect of trinkets encourages even Karana's
people to think of the sea otters in terms of profit:
Many of our tribe went to the cliff each night to count the number
killed during the day. They counted the dead otter and thought
of the beads and other things that each pelt meant. But I never
went to the cove and whenever I saw the hunters with their long
spears skimming over the water, I was angry, for these animals
were my friends. It was fun to see them playing or sunning
themselves among the kelp. It was more fun than the thought of
beads to wear around my neck. 19
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Cleverly, O'Dell uses aspects of the world of childhood - play, friendship
and fun - not only to link Karana to the reader, but to offer an environmental
critique of hunting for profit.
Karana's impulse to make friends with animals develops through the
novel. It stems from her loneliness after Ramo's death but is intensified by her
growth to womanhood, and her gradual acceptance that she will not be able
to marry and have a family of her own. Instead she creates a surrogate animal
family. With this family around her, her yard seems 'a happy place,' but she
remembers her sister Ulape and wonders whether she is married and 'the
mother of many children. She would have smiled to see all of mine, which
were so different from the ones I always wished to have.' 20
Karana's new relationship with animals marks a radical departure from her
tribe's way of life. As her family grows she gradually rejects hunting as a
means of obtaining necessities. In the past, the women of Ghalas-at were
forbidden to make weapons. As part of her struggle to survive, Karana makes
them, but with difficulty, and she feels her inadequacy in comparison with the
men of her tribe. Her lack of strength and skill contribute to the failure of her
most ambitious hunting expeditions.
21
But it is not lack of strength and skill
that are finally the important factor in these failures; it is a lack of
determination, a gradual waning of the will to kill.
Although some of Karana's hunting is for food or clothing, the main
reason for her need to make weapons is to attack the wild dogs. Her conflict
with them is partly self defence. It is also revenge for the death of her brother
and revenge for the attack of the Aleut and the red ship. She is convinced that
the leader of the pack is a dog left behind by the Aleuts. 22
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Karana's urge to hunt and kill gradually diminishes in proportion to the
expression of her maternal instincts towards the animals of the island, and the
sparing of the wounded leader of the pack when he is at her mercy is the
beginning of Karana's coming to terms with what has happened to her.23 Her
adoption of the dog, which she names Rontu, marks her symbolic
reconciliation with the Aleuts. This assumes a human dimension when the
Aleuts return to hunt again and she makes friends with a girl who
accompanies the hunters. However, the reconciliation only takes place
between the young women, unknown to the men. It is more an affirmation of a
female culture of nurturing and sociability, in opposition to a male culture of
violence and competition, than a declaration of forgiveness for the Aleuts as a
tribe. 24
Karana realises that she has made a new relationship with the animals of
the island. She recognises how strange her behaviour would seem to her
tribe, yet does not waver:
If Ulape and my father had come back and laughed, and all the
others had come back and laughed, still I would have felt the
same way, for animals and birds are like people, too, though
they do not talk the same or do the same things. Without them
the earth would be an unhappy place. 25
Karana's relinquishment of the behaviour and beliefs of her own people is
dramatised for the reader by her experience in the place she calls the Black
Cave. This is a cavern on the south coast of the island, accessible only by
canoe. Inside, on a ledge, in the gloom, she finds a skeleton playing a flute
made of pelican bone, surrounded by figures made of reeds and gull feathers,
with eyes made of abalone shells. She eventually realises that the skeleton is
one of her ancestors, 'and the others with the glittering eyes, though only
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images, were, too.' But this knowledge does not comfort her. She is trapped in
the cave for the night by the incoming tide, and spends it 'sleepless and
afraid.' She leaves at the earliest opportunity and vows 'never in all our days
to go there again.' 26
Subsequently, the reader may regard the episode as a premonition of
Karana and the tribe's fate, with the skeleton as a familiar token of mortality.
Nevertheless, the episode is reminiscent in tone of Mafatu's discovery of the
savages in Call it Courage, particularly in the use of black as a dominant
signifier. Here too, the reactions of the native protagonist seem to fit more
closely with western sensibilities than with the known beliefs of indigenous
peoples. The reader's understanding of Karana's alarm and fear relies on the
sinister
associations
of
darkness
and
skeletons,
and
the
implied
consequences of the disturbance of tombs that belong more to the modern
western world than we may assume they do to Karana's. Furthermore, Karana
turns her back on her ancestor who is associated, through the gulls' feathers
and the pelican bone flute, with the death of animals, as if she is rejecting
these tokens of savagery. All these reactions, of course, identify Karana more
closely with the modern western reader. 27
In Karana, O'Dell creates a female Robinson Crusoe, whose stay on the
island does not lead to mastery of her environment, but to spiritual revelation,
to a 'reverence for all life', expressed by reconciliation with her human and
animal enemies and a life lived in harmony with nature rather than by its
exploitation.
O'Dell's story uses two old ideas. One was a view of the island
experience, which, although still present in Robinson Crusoe, had largely
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disappeared from the desert island adventure in the nineteenth century. This
was a view, rooted in religious discourse, of the island as a hermitage: a place
where solitude and the ascetic life brought spiritual insight and a new
relationship with the world.
28
O'Dell marries this view with an equally
venerable one, which regards women as having an affinity with nature and the
wild. This had been rediscovered in adult literature by Rachel Carson and
Sally Carrighar in their wild animal stories in the 1940s and 1950s. These
works and others, according to the critic Vera Norwood, represent a distinct
female vision of the natural world, viewing it in domestic and familial terms;
picturing nature as a household and women as the protector of the home and
its residents. 29
Island of the Blue Dolphins sees women as the source of the values of
community, of cooperation and nurture as against male individualism,
competition and conflict, and uses the image of mother and homemaker, so
honoured in post Second World War Britain and America, as a standard to
rally opposition to the imperialist exploitation of people and the natural world.
Yet neither of these notions is necessarily a good basis for ideas of social
change. Both the hermitage and the family household can be seen as refuges
away from the centres of power, rather than means to challenge them. And, in
the novel, there is a delicate balance between resignation and indignation,
between accepting the world as it is or withdrawing from it, and seeking to
change it. This can be seen, first of all, in the way that the narrative treats
male arrogance and violence.
Karana's narrative draws the reader's attention to a pattern of brutal
confrontations between male animals. A young sea elephant challenges and
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gores to death the ageing dominant male in the herd. Then two pretenders to
the leadership of the wild dog pack seek a fight to the death with Rontu, the
old leader of the pack. These animal struggles for dominance are preceded by
the human confrontation between Chief Chowig and Captain Orlov.
30
They
are followed by a storm in which, even in the sea's turmoil, Karana sees the
clash of opposing warriors. As two great waves meet one another off the
shore, she relives the fight on the beach between her people and the Aleuts:
Like two giants they crashed against each other. They rose high
in the air, bending first one way and then the other. There was a
roar as if great spears were breaking in the battle and in the red
light of the sun the spray that flew around them looked like
blood. 31
Karana, as narrator, makes no explicit comment on these episodes. The
human and animal combat causes opposing feelings in her, and consequently
in the reader. There are, on the one hand, fear and disgust and a desire to
intervene. But, on the other hand, there is resignation. This is, after all,
nature's way and the way of the world. In the battle between the forces of
Chowig and Orlov, Karana can do nothing except ineffectually throw stones.
In the struggle between the old and young sea elephants, she has an
opportunity to hit the young bull with an arrow, 'But I hoped that he would win
the battle and I stood there and did not move.' In the fight between Rontu and
the two pretenders to leadership of the dog pack, she has two opportunities to
intervene, but she decides that, 'If I stopped it, they would surely fight again,
perhaps at some other place less favourable to him [Rontu].' Here, Karana
accepts that, however cruel, the violent ways of nature must take their course.
And, in her view of the world, the worlds of nature and human relations are
inextricably entwined. 32
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The view of gender behaviour in Island of the Blue Dolphins is thus as
conservative as that of Call it Courage, but approaches from the opposing
point of view. Although it rejects violence and conquest and affirms love and
community, it leaves the conventional assumptions of gender characteristics
intact. Men are identified irrevocably with one set of behaviour, women with
another; and it is men who are finally in charge.
Another way of looking at the balance between change and acceptance in
the novel is to look at the relationship of island and mainland. Although
Karana has made a new way of life on the island, it is a life that is based on
the frustration of the more conventional life that she would rather have led (as
wife and mother) and she finally realises that, however much she values her
new life, she cannot live without the sound of a human voice. She allows
herself to be taken off the island. Although Karana creates her own island
community of animals and humans governed by tolerance and mutual
respect, it is, like the island communities in Swallows and Amazons and South
Sea Adventure, only temporary. Once she leaves, it can be kept alive only in
her memory and through the reader. Yet the story generates a powerful
empathy with Karana and an appreciation of the deep loss she feels as she
looks back at the island:
For a long time I stood and looked back at the Island of the Blue
Dolphins. The last thing I saw of it was the high headland. I
thought of Rontu lying there beneath the stones of many colors,
and of Won-an-ee, wherever she was, and the little red fox that
would scratch in vain at my fence, and my canoe hidden in the
cave, and of all the happy days. 33
This is an empathy which may turn to sorrow and indignation, especially
as the reader discovers in the 'Author's Note' that the island has become the
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base for the United States armed forces, a bastion of the world of the male
warrior that Karana had rejected. 34
It can be said that O'Dell leaves his readers to make their own choice for
change or acceptance, a choice that, within the story, Karana had no power to
make. Karana is offered as an example of a woman before her time, whose
individual experience offers a revelation of a new way of life beyond the
beliefs of her own people and their conquerors. Although she relinquishes her
new way of life because of the force of circumstances and her own human
needs, she stands as an example of dignity in suffering and defeat. She
attracts the sympathy of her readers and may even enlist them as advocates
of her vision of a new relationship with the natural world.
As O'Dell revealed in his Newbery Award acceptance speech, Island of
the Blue Dolphins was written out of his revulsion for cruelty and selfishness.
In the speech, as in the book, he highlights the crimes of imperialism, the
exploitation of the environment and, in particular, the cruelty of boys. He talks
of himself and his friends, riding out into the sea on logs, 'like young
Magellans'. He talks, in more graphic terms than in the book, of what he and
his friends did with the animals they found on their expeditions into the hills. 35
In the speech, he also implicitly identifies Karana with Antonio Garra, the
forgotten leader of an Indian revolt against the whites in California in the
1850s and with the passive resistance of the Tarascans, an indigenous
people in Mexico, against the Conquistadores. Describing Garra's dignified
death by firing squad on a trumped up charge, he remarks, 'If Antonio Garra
had killed fifty Americans or ten, his name like Geronimo's would be
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remembered, but he belonged to a peaceful tribe…whose lives are unknown
because they went in peace. Karana belonged to such a tribe.'
36
These are
sentiments which would have had a powerful reverberation in the U.S.A. in
1960, at the beginning of the non-violent resistance phase of the Civil Rights
Movement.
In his Newbery Medal acceptance speech O'Dell offered Karana as a
kind of gentle revolutionary, and implied that the struggle to change ourselves
offers a new kind of adventure, a different and more profound transgression of
our limits:
Once, in Defoe's day, we were cunning manipulative children,
living in a palace of nature. In her brief lifetime, Karana made
the change from that world, where everything lived only to be
exploited, to a new and more meaningful world. She learned first
that we each must be an island secure unto ourselves. Then,
that we must 'transgress our limits,' in reverence for all life. 37
This final statement is interesting for the use that O'Dell makes of the
word 'children'. He uses it derogatively, suggesting that children are cunning,
manipulative and thoughtless. He also uses it in connection with the
movement of history, suggesting that those who lived in the past, explorers
and natives alike, were like children in comparison to those of us in the
present, who should know better. Earlier in his address, he describes
childhood and youth as 'a closed world of selfishness and cruelty where
everything, whether of fur or feather, whether it creeps or walks or flies, is an
object of indifferent cruelty.'
38
And, in comments about the novel in other
places, he suggests that Karana grows out of her childish attitude to nature as
she becomes an adult.
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All this is contrary to the way that childhood and the past are used in the
novel. The Island of Blue Dolphins relies on a dialogue between past and
present, between the nineteenth century indigenous heroine of the story and
the modern child reader. O'Dell's notion of a 'new and more meaningful' world
as it is presented in the novel is compounded of a respect for the relationship
of indigenous people with their environment and an appeal to the modern
childhood of family, pets and special friends.
However, the way that O'Dell describes childhood in his acceptance
speech and the way that it is shown in the novel may not be contradictory.
They may be merely gender specific. The childhood that O'Dell describes in
the acceptance speech may be male childhood, whereas the childhood of the
novel is, of course, female childhood. Perhaps O'Dell believed that the
greatest difference to be found in attitudes to other animals and people is not
that between past and present, or between native and explorer, or between
adult and child, but between male and female.
Endnotes
1
O'Dell (1987) 1-3.
2
Loxley 1-2, 102; Phillips 32-4.
3
O'Dell (1987) 52. This kind of transaction, the sale by indigenous people of
the right to exploit their natural resources for an unfair return, had been an
acknowledged part of the relationship between the expanding European and
American economies and the rest of the world. The alleged willingness of
Native Americans to sell land for beads was part of the folklore of the
American west. In that lore, although the unfair bargain was a source of
American guilt, it also formed part of the justification of the displacement of
Native Americans by European immigrants. It seemed to prove that
indigenous people were too ignorant to be aware of the potential riches they
possessed or to harness them for their own advantage, so their dispossession
was necessary for progress, and, ultimately, for their own welfare.
18
Chapter Five
4
The Sound of a Human Voice
O'Dell (1987) 182.
5
The 'Author's Note' itself is carefully constructed to emphasise the desolation
of Karana's fate. The final three paragraphs, which include the author's
acknowledgements to the Southwest Museum and the San Diego Museum of
Man, tell us that it is only there that we can find the few remaining traces of
Karana and her people. The penultimate paragraph suggests that even the
island itself may disappear: 'It is now a secret base of the United States Navy,
but scientists predict that because of the pounding waves and furious winds it
will one day be swept back into the sea.' O'Dell (1987) 182-3.
6
O'Dell insists on the importance of community to Karana. She makes a
success of living alone on the island but this is not enough. When the white
men come in their ship at last, she leaves with them, despite her thoughts of
happy times on the island in the past: 'I thought of many things, but stronger
was the wish to be where people lived, to hear their voices and their laughter.'
O'Dell (1987) 175.
7
At the same time, the reader's knowledge that the 'Lost Woman' could never
tell her story in the way that Karana does, can only add emotional weight to
the story that is told. O'Dell delays this revelation to the last possible moment
for maximum dramatic effect.
8
Johnson 115, 119.
9
O'Dell (1987) 1.
10
O'Dell (1987) 3.
11
O'Dell (1987) 5-6.
12
O'Dell (1987) 1-4. As the story progresses, other animals make their
appearance: shellfish, sea bass, wild dogs, sea elephants, seals, pelicans,
foxes, devilfish (octopi) and a variety of birds.
13
O'Dell (1987) 1-2, 80-1.
14
When Karana mentions the behaviour of the young sea elephants, she is
describing her attempt to kill a sea elephant and to use its tusks to make
spear points.
15
The Island of the Blue Dolphins is no tropical cornucopia. It is windswept
and barren in places. Life in the winter and early spring is especially harsh,
and the tribe relies for food on the gathering of roots and abalone. There is
constant competition for scarce resources. The suspicion and tension
between the Aleut and Karana's people during the hunting is exacerbated by
the tribe's refusal to share a school of sea bass which have been fortuitously
thrown up on the rocks. One of Karana's overriding concerns when she is
alone on the island is to control or destroy the pack of wild dogs which has not
19
Chapter Five
The Sound of a Human Voice
only killed her brother but also raids her food stores, O'Dell (1987) 10-4, 41-2,
46, 53, 75-6.
16
The novel begins and ends with references to the island's animals. And,
during her lonely stay on the island, when sheltering in a cave, Karana
discovers the figures her ancestors had cut in the stone: 'figures of pelicans
floating on the water and flying, of dolphins, whales, sea elephants, gulls,
ravens, dogs and foxes.' This is an inventory of some of the animals that
Karana describes to the reader in the course of the novel and affirms the way
that the history of her people is bound up with the island and its animal
population, O'Dell (1987) 89.
17
Russell and Maher offer different interpretations of Karana's and her
people's relationship to their environment. Maher identifies Karana with the
ways of her people in making an 'ethical use of nature' in contrast with Orlov's
'promiscuous killing', Maher 218. Russell argues that the natives of Ghalas-at
condone the slaughter of animals for mere material gain and display no
special ecological sensitivity.' He stresses Karana's break with her people,
Russell 27. My reading seeks to recognise the distinctions that O'Dell draws
between hunting for survival and hunting for profit, and to recognise Karana's
explicit rejection of the ways of her tribe.
18
O'Dell (1987) 16.
19
O'Dell (1987) 16.
20
O'Dell (1987) 153. For Karana's awareness of her unmarried state, see also
O'Dell (1987) 35 and 177. As Karana describes the animals around her, the
reader becomes aware of her interest in the behaviour of young animals and
their relationship with their mothers. The names that she gives to the two
nesting birds that she adopts reveal her longing for the fate that might have
been hers if the red ship had never come to the island. She calls the male bird
Tainor 'after a young man I liked who had been killed by the Aleuts. The other
was called Lurai, which was a name I wished I had been called instead of
Karana.' O'Dell (1987) 80-1, 113-4, 148-9.
21
Trying to paddle her canoe away from the island Karana recognises that 'I
was not nearly so skilled with a canoe' as the men. She fails to kill a sea
elephant and is injured in the process. Her attempt to hunt a large devilfish,
'the best food in the seas', fails after an exhausting struggle. She kills her
quarry but hasn't enough strength left to lift it from the water, O'Dell (1987)5455, 61, 80-5, 103-4, 116-24.
22
O'Dell (1987) 91.
23
Karana cannot explain why she does not kill him, except perhaps for his
helplessness: 'The big dog lay there and did not move and this may be the
reason. If he had gotten up I would have killed him.' But, immediately before
this act of clemency, she had also spared a group of pups defended by their
mother in the back of the wild dogs' cave. Her description of the stillness of
20
Chapter Five
The Sound of a Human Voice
the dog also reminds the reader of her descriptions of the deaths of her
brother, 'he lay very still', and her father, 'Others fell and did not get up. My
father was one of these.' She may be, even in that moment, linking the dog
with the family she has lost. O'Dell (1987) 23, 47, 93-5.
24
The friendship of the two young women is established in terms of female
compliments about appearance and dress and the exchange of jewellery.
O'Dell (1987) 137-9, 141-4.
25
O'Dell (1987) 156.
26
O'Dell (1987) 127-9.
27
My reading here follows Russell 30. Maher offers a different interpretation,
for which there seems to be little, or no, textual evidence: that the cave is a
'symbol of origins', marking Karana's 'rootedness' to the island: Maher 220.
28
O'Dell, unsurprisingly, had a life-long admiration for St Francis of Assisi.
Russell 9. The life and legends of St Francis, particularly regarding his
relationship to the natural world, had much in common with other saints
whose hermitages were on islands: St Cuthbert of Iona, for instance.
29
Quoted in Lutts 10-1. One of the nineteenth century children's
Robinsonades, Robina Crusoe and Her Lonely Island Home, published in the
Girls Own Paper in 1882-3, concerned a female castaway who had a dog
shipwrecked with her and had repugnance for killing the islands animals.
30
O'Dell (1987) 82-5, 107-11, 19-24. The narrative seems to be suggesting a
direct correlation between human male behaviour and animal male behaviour:
perhaps that the desire to dominate is inherent and natural in males. This is a
theme that is touched on elsewhere in the novel. Karana describes Captain
Orlov when he arrives on the island as standing 'with his feet set apart and his
fists on his hips and look[ing]…at the little harbour as though it already
belonged to him,' O'Dell (1987) 5. The confrontation between the Captain and
the Chief can be compared to the meeting of Captain John and Captain Flint
in Swallows and Amazons and Hal and Omo on Bikini in South Sea
Adventure. The theme of male arrogance is also touched on in Karana's
humorous description of her young brother's reaction to being left alone on the
island with her after the ship leaves with the rest of the tribe. When he realises
that he is the only man on the island, he declares himself Chief and gives
himself an imposing, and ridiculous new name 'Tanyositlopai', which, as
Karana comments, 'is a very long name and hard to say,' O'Dell (1987) 42-4.
31
O'Dell (1987) 168.
32
O'Dell (1987) 23, 84, 109.
33
O'Dell (1987) 181.
21
Chapter Five
The Sound of a Human Voice
34
O'Dell (1987) 184. O'Dell rather melodramatically emphasises his point by
stating that 'scientists predict that because of the pounding waves and furious
winds it will one day be swept back into the sea.'
35
O'Dell (1961) 101.
36
O'Dell (1961) 102-3.
37
38
O'Dell (1960) 104.
O'Dell (1960) 101.
22