Hale’s somewhat autobiographical novel ostensibly concerns the memories of an American Indian woman who is incarcerated for drunken driving and for an old welfare fraud charge. Her jailing, however, is metaphorical as well as literal. As a child, Cecelia conforms to her father’s expectations for a boy, and her chosen sport appropriately is running. Her childhood dreams of flying and of angels with wings reflect her desire to escape: “She thought that her favorite song [‘Oh, if I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly’] must have been made up by a little girl like herself, another secret angel, who had been imprisoned.” Cecelia’s story is, in fact, a series of flights, of attempted escapes, that ironically result in her “capture” before she finally escapes over the walls of exploitation and oppression. Late in the novel, she recognizes that she feels much as her mother had, the prisoner of “circumstances and an inability to imagine anything beyond the prison,” both in loveless marriages, traps of their own making.

Circumstances such as racism have led not only to her exploitation and oppression but also to that of all American Indians unable to see beyond the walls. Using Cecelia as a spokesperson, Hale points out that American Indians did not receive citizenship until 1924, that separate-but-equal schools are not equal, and that whites introduced disease through blankets given as “gifts” to American Indians. It is, however, the insidious, less obvious racism that produces the “sidewalk Indians,” those marginalized individuals without futures. The lack of self-confidence that cost Cecelia her race is fostered by bureaucrats such as Miss Wade, who suggests vocational courses for Cecelia, and by whites such as Nathan, who advocates a “more realistic career goal” such as “social worker or a teacher of young children”—both choices, unlike law, have less status than college professor. Even her mother, Mary Theresa, attacks Cecelia’s (and her own) American Indian heritage and asserts the superiority of their Irish American ancestors, the Harrigans, whose white skin Mary Theresa has inherited. Since both American Indians and Irish Americans endured abuse and became “displaced persons,” Mary Theresa’s racial prejudice seems ironic and tragic.

Like her parents, Cecelia has contradictory feelings about her identity. Will attempted to lead a “white” life and failed, but he seems determined that Cecelia achieve his goals, which include becoming a lawyer. While she speaks English, attends white schools, and adopts stereotypical white academic behavior, Cecelia believes that she belongs on the reservation, where she gives up academic pursuits. While she identifies with the “sidewalk Indians,” she also has little in common with them. As Thomas Running Horse points out, she is an “educated squaw.” Both fathers of her children are white, and she takes Nathan Welles’s name. Hale depicts Nathan as the quintessential white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the son of a concert pianist and the descendant of a Mayflower family. When she marries him, she moves into a white world where she cannot survive. She is, in Nathan’s eyes, another Lupe, a Mexican prostitute to whom he once proposed marriage. Both women appeal to him because they represent the “other” and because his supposed love for them reinforces his self-image as a liberal. When Cecelia sees herself as Nathan sees her, the member of an inferior race with lowered expectations, she leaves him to return to law school, but she is not free until she sees herself as Cecelia Capture, not Mrs. Welles.

Cecelia’s ambivalence about her identity leads her to adopt another persona, Carmen, which becomes her “drinking name” because she says it derives from Carmen...