Mary TallMountain’s “Snatched away” is the ninth story of fourteen in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers, that I’ve been working through this year. It, like the previous three, was published in the 1980s, in 1988 in this case.

Mary TallMountain

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell provides minimal information about her. He gives her heritage as Athabascan, Koyukan and Russian on her mother’s side, and tells us she was born Mary Demoski in Alaska in 1918, and died in 1994. Wikipedia’s article on her describes her as “a poet and storyteller of mixed Scotch-Irish and Koyukon ancestry” (Koyukon being Alaska Native Athabascan). Later in the article Wikipedia also mentions her Russian heritage.

Wikipedia provides more background, though not as much as on some of the other writers I’ve read in this anthology. She didn’t start writing until she was in her 50s, which means the 1970s , and she was part of the Native American Renaissance. However, the works listed seem to be primarily poetry, and there’s no discussion of her prose writing. It describes her main themes as being Native and Christian spirituality, including a connection to nature. It also tells us that she was given up for adoption when she was 6, by her tubercular mother, who knew “she would inevitably die” from the disease. It was not a happy experience for TallMountain. Her step-father was abusive, and she was forcefully dislocated from her culture.

TallMountain’s whole life was a challenge – from the unsurprising alcoholism, given her difficult childhood, to serious health problems, including cancer and a stroke.

“Snatched away”

“Snatched away” is told through the eyes of a white man, Clem, who has an Athabascan partner, Mary-Joe, and two children, though this is only slowly revealed. The framing story takes place over a day, in the 1920s, as Clem manoeuvres his way down the Yukon river, meeting rivermen and reflecting on his life. Through him, TallMountain tells of the culture of Athabascan river people whose survival depends on their river, fishing and hunting skills:

Quick dark silhouettes against the greens of alder and cottonwood, the Indians were part of sky, river, earth itself: they wove their dories through tumbling water, poled schools of darting salmon, strode like lumberjacks. Born rivermen, Clem thought with respect. Still, the river was a tough customer. In the seven years he’d been here, ten men and boys had downed between Nulato and Kaltag.

The river might be tough, but it is nature, and its spirit and theirs are entwined. The more problematical thing is the impact on their lives and culture of the arrival of white people, particularly with their diseases like small-pox and tuberculosis.

TallMountain doesn’t gloss over or romanticise life, before or after the arrival of the whites. Rather, she tells it as it is. Early in the story is a scene, told in flashback, in which Clem spends an afternoon on the riverbank with locals, young Andy, who had later drowned, and Little Jim. They see a bundle rolling fast down the river and, on his asking what it is, Clem is told it’s a “Baby. Throwed away”. A common practice in the “old time” for imperfect babies, with a “bum leg” maybe, or “head mashed”, it happened less now, but women will still do it, he’s told, if the baby is “too bad”.

Death pervades the story, actual or intimated – from the babies and the drownings to the aforementioned diseases – but its handling is unsentimental.

From the opening paragraph describing the Yukon as being in a “fierce, frowning mood” to the end when Clem’s “words are snatched away by the wind”, it is the river that controls the story. Its power and potential to both sustain with fish and birds and to kill, and its associated spirituality, are evoked through the people Clem interacts with on his journey – like the consumptive Floyd out hunting mallard and Willy the fisherman who “looked as if he had always been there” and who tells Clem “you got to watch that river” – and through Clem’s physical struggle to keep his boat upright and on course. The river is a living thing, and should never be underrated. Nor perhaps, should be the Woodsman, an Athabascan bad spirit about which Clem asks Willy. It’s a joking reference, but with a tinge of something else all the same, given soon after this Clem senses “something besides fish alive, out there in the river”.

There is clearly an autobiographical element to the story, with Clem’s partner, like TallMountain’s mother, contracting tuberculosis and the local doctor offering to adopt the children, just as Tallmountain had been. Clem is bothered, but philosophically believes “it will all work out in the wash”. Will it? Much is left open in this story.

Like many of the stories in the anthology, “Snatched away” is at least partly about the intersection of cultures. TallMountain, like many of the authors, is of mixed heritage, and in the little I’ve found about her on the Internet, she was comfortable with that. In fact I found an Interview with her in which she describes herself as an “inbetween”*, by which she means having “a connection between two different cultures” to which must be done justice. As Clem fights his way down the river, he thinks about his own heritage and background, as well as of the Athabascan people. As he tires, he sees the faces of his wife and children “wavering” in the mist. But, his specific pronouncement about “Indianness” just after this – “what difference now, how much the blood is mixed” – felt sudden and a bit out of the blue.

It may be that TallMountain was more poet than storywriter, but I did still enjoy the story, even if more for its gorgeous writing about the river and its people than for its narrative coherence. And it has been anthologised more than once, which says something.

* Joseph W. Bruchac III, “We are the inbetweens: An interview with Mary Tallmountain”, Studies in American Indian Literatures, Series 2, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1989), pp. 13-21

Mary TallMountain
“Snatched away” (orig. pub. 1988)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 65-74
ISBN: 9780486490953