SOURCE: "The Conflict in the Man Who Killed the Deer," in The South Dakota Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn, 1977, pp. 51-7.

[In the following essay, Hoy argues that the central conflict in The Man Who Killed the Deer is between the communalism of Pueblo life and the individualism promoted in white society.]

The basic conflict which Martiniano [from The Man Who Killed the Deer] is involved in, and from which all his other difficulties stem, is the clash of his arrogant individuality with the collective will of his people. An Indian is not an individual in the eyes of his brothers but a "piece of the pueblo, the tribe." By definition an Indian must conform to custom, tradition, and pueblo ceremonialism; but Martiniano, infected with an attitude—independence—acquired from the white man, does not respond to the requests of his elders for his time and energy. Instead, he labors under the illusion that he is an individual apart from them, self-reliant and free of social responsibility.

When Martiniano begins to suffer "cruelty" and "injustice" at the hands of his own people—punishment in the form of fines and a public whipping—he turns to his wise friend Palemon for consolation. But Palemon can see through the outward manifestation of the problem to its source, and as he sits and listens to his troubled friend, these thoughts occur to him:

He was not unaware of certain superficial injustices which had caused the younger one's sufferings, but he was amazed at the persistent, stubborn individuality which prevented him from seeing the real trouble. Perhaps it reflected the one's away-time in school, when he had lost the precious instruction at home.

Indeed, Martiniano's "away-time" at the white man's school has set him up for the trouble he faces at home, as Palemon suggests. In Masked Gods, Waters describes the nature of the "education" the Indians receive at these schools and the effect it has on them:

Once captured and sent to "away school," the Pueblo children suffered everything possible that could be done to erase all vestiges of their race and culture. Their hair was cut—and to the Pueblos this was a cultural castration. They were forbidden to speak their own language, to wear their own clothes, to keep their traditional customs, even their own names. Dismissed from school, they were untrained for anything but manual or menial labor. Developing a sense of inferiority under the racial discrimination of white employers, they hung around the edges of town, unkempt, drunk, and unwanted in company with that other racial minority, the mestizo Spanish-Americans. When finally they did straggle back to the pueblos they did not know how to adapt themselves.

Perhaps not all the humiliations Waters describes happened to Martiniano, but surely the end effect of those things that he did experience was to inhibit severely his ability to adapt himself to the tribe. Had Martiniano remained in the pueblo as a child, he would have gone through the kiva initiation ceremonies and there learned all the old ways, the sacred beliefs, which would have insured a harmonious relationship between him and his people.

[Carl] Jung uses the term "individuation" to "denote the process by which a person becomes a psychological 'individual,' that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole'" [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959]. For the male Pueblo Indian, this process is given its direction and meaning in the kiva ceremony. Without the benefit of exposure to the collective teachings, the ancient myths and legends of his race, Martiniano could not hope to understand the essential nature of his own people. Waters makes this observation on the value of rituals such as the kiva ceremony [in Masked Gods]:

Outwardly a crude, difficult life, essentially the same life they live today. What enriched it and gave it its only meaning came from within. The certainty that they were not separate from the forces of the land and sky which bound them all into one living whole, in perfect balance. To preserve this precarious balance—which is the ultimate test of any life, civilized or savage, they clung to their traditions and perpetuated their ritualistic religion.

The nature of the kiva initiation ceremony, while designed to insure the solidarity of the collective, is still very personal since it must deal with and mold an individual ego. (Erich Neumann describes the universal function of initiations perfectly in this statement:)

… the collective world of initiations, secret societies, sects, mysteries, and religions is a spiritual and masculine world, and, despite its communal character, the accent still falls on the individual, in that each man is initiated individually and undergoes an individual experience which stamps his individuality … It is true that the men's society also leads to a community life among the members, but this is braced by its individual character, the masculinity and accentuation of the ego. [The Origins and History of Consciousness, 1954]

The individuation process, then, is a complex mixture of ego-strengthening and adjusting to the community. Martiniano does not find in the away-school an adequate substitute for the guidance he would have received in the kiva, for there is an "absence in our culture of rites and institutions designed, like the rites of puberty, to smooth the adolescent's passage into the world," and this absence is "one reason for the incidence of neuroses in youth, common to all of which is the difficulty of facing up to the demands of life and of adapting to the collective and to one's partner …" [Neumann].

The most obvious result of Martiniano's contact with white values at a critical point in his individuation process is that his ego is overly strengthened, at least as far as the pueblo is concerned. He has not developed an inferiority complex because of racial discrimination but has, instead, acquired a taste for independence and objectivity which is foreign to his race. He is, relative to his matriarchal pueblo culture, a patriarchal, ego-centric alien, and cannot immediately adapt himself to the collective.

Martiniano refuses, time and again, to perform his communal duties. He resolves to live in isolation outside the community and thus preserve his newly-acquired individuality. Neumann makes a statement in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness which is pertinent to the young Indian's attitude.

We described the adolescent's advance towards independence and liberation as "self-division." To become conscious of oneself, to be conscious at all, begins with saying "no" to the uroboros, to the Great Mother, to the unconscious. And when we scrutinize the acts upon which consciousness and the ego are built up, we must admit that to begin with they are all negative acts. To discriminate, to distinguish, to mark off, to isolate oneself from the surrounding context—these are the basic acts of consciousness.

Martiniano's consciousness, or ego-centricity, is a white characteristic, and it is to a white man, Strophy, the District Indian Superintendent, that he is best able to express it:

A long, shrill whistle sounded. The Indian turned, looked out the window. A long, streamlined train, gleaming silver, was slipping swiftly out of town.

Martiniano smiled contemptuously. "'The Chief!'" he said pointing. "The modern, up-to-the-minute, Indian Chief riding by in all his platinum feathers. Listen. If you could ride on a train like that, would you wait and take a slow, dirty, old coal-burner? Would you climb into an old springless wagon to jolt over the ruts?"

Strophy smiled. He brought his hand down with a bang on the table-top. "No, by God, I wouldn't!"

"Well, I won't either!" answered Martiniano stubbornly. "I won't cut off the heels of my shoes. I won't cut the seat out of my pants. I'll use good clean dishes. I'll irrigate my land instead of dancing for rain. And if I don't get any help from you, I'll do it myself."

Martiniano's ego eventually leads him to another stage in the evolution of his consciousness, narcissism. Not far beneath the veneer of humbleness the young Indian affects there lurks the sin of pride waiting for just the right moment to assert itself. The moment is precipitated by an event which plunges the tribe into anguish and resentment—the publishing of a booklet which purports to reveal the sacred names and locations of the kivas. The search for the Indian traitor is intense. Martiniano, realizing one day that of this deed he is not suspected, begins to feel a great sense of personal triumph:

"Now I know what makes me feel so good! 'It would not be too much if a man died for this.' That was what they said, those foolish old men worrying about this book. Did you hear the quaver in Palemon's voice as he told me, see the fright in his eyes? Hah! Why not Martiniano? They have suspicioned me, punished me, fined and whipped me for everything else. But not this! Imagine that! This is the first trouble in the pueblo that has not been laid at my door! They are coming to their senses at last."

Martiniano uses this fallacious reasoning to create an "immense pride," a "monstrous pride" which is no sooner formed than his problems resume. The deer he killed reappears to remind him that he has something left undone which will not go away until he faces it. He feels "a strange foreboding," a nameless fear. But his arrogance and pride are still fresh and active; he challenges once more, on San Geronimo Day, the power of the collective:

The sun was setting behind the mesa. The pine slopes flushed blood red. While he was waiting, Martiniano stared up at the tall pine gleaming yellow. Pride and confidence returned to him. This was his one big chance to show these old men, to vanquish the deer and ascend the pole.

He fails, of course, and instead of a hero's plaudits suffers his own self-chastisement as well as the tribe's derision. He is broken, defeated, humbled; there is not a wall standing of what had been his stubborn, individualistic pride. But he is only progressing through the usual series of events in the evolution of consciousness [as Neumann writes]:

Narcissism is a necessary transitional phase during the consolidation of the ego. The emancipation of ego consciousness from thralldom to the unconscious leads, like all emancipation, to an exaggeration of one's own position and importance. The "puberty of ego consciousness" is accompanied by a depreciation of the place from which one came—the unconscious … The meaning of all these processes lies in strengthening the principle of ego consciousness. But the danger inherent in the line of development is exaggerated self-importance, a megalomaniac ego consciousness which thinks itself independent of everything, and which begins by devaluing and repressing the unconscious and ends by denying it altogether …

Martiniano's individuation reaches a turning point; his independence is, after all, only six years old, and it cannot effectively defend itself against the tremendous power of the collective, of the Great Mother. As Neumann says, "… liberation and free activity only become possible when the ego system has more libido at its disposal than the retentive system, i.e., when the ego's will is strong enough to break away from the corresponding archetype."

By dropping out of his native society, so to speak, in order to experiment with individuality, Martiniano has suffered the loss of the "transpersonal" or collective wisdom of his group. He has rejected the old values but has not replaced them with new ones which are workable. Beginning to sense the uncertainty and meaninglessness in his life, he is ready for a change. Neumann asserts that there are two possibilities for someone who has become alienated from his native value system:

Two general reactions are to be observed in this situation. The first is regression to the Great Mother, into unconsciousness, a readiness to herd together in masses, and so, as a collective atom with new transpersonal experiences, to gain a new certainty and a new point of vantage; the second is flight to the Great Father, into the isolation of individualism.

Martiniano, in search of a faith, has already made a symbolic dash toward the Great Father, and increased isolation from the tribe, when he tries "Our Father Peyote," the drug cult so thoroughly condemned by the tribal council. When this fails and Martiniano continues to feel insecure and unhappy, there remains only the Great Mother, the anonymous collective, and to this source of tranquility he ultimately turns.

Martiniano has plenty of help in his decision to "go back to the blanket." Flowers Playing is the final catalyst, but even before she, as Deer Mother, shows him the way to peace, there is another, recurring clue present to hint at the answer. Erich Neumann says [in his 1955 The Great Mother] that primitive man, with the aid of his intuition, has a fundamental truism about the Great Mother well in mind:

… that in the generating and nourishing, protective and transformative, feminine power of the unconscious, a wisdom is at work that is infinitely superior to the wisdom of man's waking consciousness, and that, as source of vision and symbol, of ritual and law, poetry and vision, intervenes, summoned or unsummoned, to save man and give direction to his life.

In Martiniano's case, the Archetypal Feminine has intervened unsummoned by means of a symbol to give to his life the direction it sorely lacks. That symbol is the deer.