34 pages • 1 hour read
Ella Cara DeloriaWaterlily
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
The family returns home, and they bring “many pieces of woven goods, flannels and calicoes” (134).They learn of a “scandal,” in which a young woman runs away with a “philanderer” (135), and he leaves her within a few days. Now the woman is dishonored. Blue Bird warns Waterlily against following her example.
Waterlily is ashamed and decides to stay a perpetual virgin, a respected vocation in the tribe. This does not come to pass, as Waterlily ends up getting married. However, her older cousin, Leaping Fawn, does remain a perpetual virgin. At one point, Leaping Fawn is accused of not being a virgin, so the family holds a Virgin’s Fire ceremony to clear her name. During this ritual, virgins come sit around a fire and can be called out for not being true virgins. Leaping Fawn passes the test.
Gloku dies, but the family decides to “keep her ghost” (140). In order to do so, they must maintain a “ghost bundle” (141)until the family is ready to let her go at the ghost feast. The ghost dreamer cuts hair from Gloku’s head, ties it in a skin bundle, then puts it in a larger, ghost bundle. As the months pass, members of the community give Gloku gifts, which become part of the bundle. Leaping Fawn becomes the custodian of the bundle, and she must tend to it. The bundle hangs in the tipi, which becomes a ghost lodge because Gloku’s ghost is still present. Leaping Fawn must always keep food in the bowl below the ghost bundle. When the camp moves, they must take the ghost bundle along with it.
Chapter 13 Summary
The following summer, the family gets ready to hold the “final ceremony” (147)for Gloku right before the Sun Dance. Two of Black Eagle’s horses, which he wants to offer up at Gloku’s ceremony, are killed by “spiteful tribesmen” (148).
Waterlily is “bought” (149)during the preparations for the final ceremony. Sacred Horse’s two mothers bring two horses bearing gifts and leave them outside Rainbow’s tipi, thus stating his desire to marry her. Waterlily does not know Sacred Horse, and she wrestles with the decision of whether or not to accept his proposal. She ultimately decides to accept, as the two horses will replace Black Eagle’s killed horses.
The community holds the ghostkeeping ritual. It begins with a private feast, then a ritual in the tipi with the ghost healer. It ends with a public feast and a redistribution of all of Gloku’s possessions and the gifts she received throughout the past months.
Sacred Horse’s mothers come for Waterlily, and she says goodbye to her family. Waterlily meets Sacred Horse, and she gradually becomes less nervous around him. He kills a deer for them on their first night together.
Chapter 14 Summary
Waterlily adjusts to her life with her new camp circle and must learn to behave appropriately in each new relationship. With some, she has “joking relationships” while others are “formal relatives” (164). She gets close to her mother-in-law, Taluta, even though their relationship is supposed to be more formal. After three months, Waterlily grows homesick and longs for her “relatives of birth” (175). Her family is supposed to visit her, but the trip is delayed because Rainbow’s father is sick.
A woman in the camp circle begins calling Waterlily “daughter,” and this makes Waterlily feel as if she can relax and be informal around this woman. She becomes Waterlily’s social mother, which is similar to the relationship Waterlily has with her blood relatives.
Good Hunter, Sacred Horse’s father, creates a “cache” (168)underground in which to store food. All the families hunt, prepare, and dry meat to add to it.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
These chapters again delve into kinship practices with continued emphasis on gender roles and misogynistic tendencies. For example, a girl in White Ghost runs away with a man, but he leaves her: “That was a tragedy for her, for her reputation would always suffer because of it” (135). The man’s reputation suffers no damage. Blue Bird uses this girl as an example to teach Waterlily about this value system:“If she is too easy, they do not want her for life, knowing they cannot trust her” (135). Here, a woman displaying sexual desire and/or acting upon it tarnishes her character and makes her untrustworthy. This lesson makes Waterlily feel heavy guilt for her pursuit of Lowanla, and she decides to be a “perpetual virgin” (137)to completely avoid the issue of sex. In this way, girls are taught that displays of sexuality bring shame and dishonor, while this is not true for men, who are the pursuers.
These chapters also enforce the extreme closeness among members of the camp circle and the prescribed rules they must follow when relating to each other. When Waterlily is deciding whether to accept Sacred Horse’s marriage proposal, she is “carried away with the nobility of kinship loyalty, until nothing else seemed important” (153). She agrees in order to keep the marriage gift, and she gives the horses to her uncle. Here, care for her family overrides her personal hesitations. When Waterlily enters a new camp circle, she must learn the individual relationship rules inherent to the unfamiliar environment: “Her first step was to learn by subtle observation who was what to her, and then she must proceed to conduct herself properly in each case, as prescribed by kinship law” (162).Every relationship is very clearly prescribed, and members of the community must treat them accordingly.
Ritual also plays a significant role in these chapters, and its performance reinforces the underlying beliefs of the community. There is a Virgin’s Fire to “protect the reputation of the unmarried girl from unfounded rumors” (139). In order to uphold the Dakotas’ belief that women must not have sex outside of marriage, they can use this ritual to prove they are adhering to this social more. There is also the ghost keeping ritual, which allows the family to mourn a lost loved one. It underscores the deep closeness among members of a family and camp circle, allowing individuals to grieve and pay their respects to the one who has died. In this way, ritual reinforces core values of the Dakota way of life.
