Janet Campbell Hale

The Jailing of Cecelia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale

It took longer than it should have for me to realize that this is really an excellent little book. The style in which it is written is intentionally understated, no sentimentality, no insistent cries for social justice. It is left to the reader to assimilate the message and to infer from the events the condemnation of the economic system that has created the events. It is a book about the difficulty of bridging cultures and about the terrible sense of loneliness one woman feels who can find herself nowhere. Though a successful law school student at Berkeley and apparently living out the dreams of her father, dreams of learning the white man’s law as a way of helping Native Americans against whom that law is used as a weapon, she has had to bear incredible sacrifices in order to get where she is. She has to live without her children and the husband who sees her obsession with getting an education as simply willful abandonment of him and her family. Even as a girl, long before running away from the reservation to the city, where she is forced as a pregnant teenager onto welfare rolls, she senses her alienation from those around her. To many (if not most) of her own people, she is seen as wanting to be white, as being ashamed of who she is and where she is from. Like her father, a chronic reader and dreamer, she is seen as being intentionally lazy, proud and incorrigible. Her own sisters and her mother conspire to have her sent away to a reservation school. Barely escaping from a white lover who condescends to save her via marriage, shocked that his noble proposal is spurned by Cecelia, she finally gets herself enrolled in college in San Francisco. Still, she must accept welfare in order to support her child, and when the welfare people discover that she wants more money to attend college, she finds herself the target of a new indignant wrath. ‘Anthropology,’ Miss Wade read aloud, ‘English composition, Spanish, psychology.