Adapting the Self: Stockholm, Stockholm! (A Captivity Rant)

Native Americans, first and foremost, were adapters.  They acquainted themselves with Land, with Nature, with their Mother, and over the years, managed not to tame it, but to co-exist within it, blurring the lines constantly between where they ended and the wilderness began. Puritans were never meant to do this, nor would they have ever attempted it, given the chance.  It's a twisted irony that the Puritans, in a very real way, stood for everything the Native Americans did not.  It is for this reason above all that I remain unsurprised their meeting ended in the bloodshed and the heartbreak from which we derive our current understanding of the relations between the New World and the Old.

In Women's Indian Captivity Narratives, Mary Rowlandson is indeed taken by Indians, and throughout what she calls Removes, she accounts the harrowing, at times unbelievably so, tribulations she endured, on her way back to her family.  And yet, I say tribulation, when in reality, something stranger, more intriguing was at work...she learned to adapt, in some bizarre crossroad forming from Indian culture and her steadfast Puritan faith, to the way of life she was stolen into, she was forced to assume.  Now, judgment be not made here...but if one is so easily adaptable, is it not possible, is there no chance, that one can also tolerate another, can let another be and lead his or her own life, without imposing one's own truths and beliefs?

Let me get to the juice here...despite the wrongness of the actions, and the Eye to Eye mentality, which, let's face it, leads nowhere fast...in these captivity narratives (Mary's, anyway), I can see a subtle transformation, a changing of the tides for this Puritan women, as though the Woods have taken hold of her, and though she may fight strongly against its stronghold, there are just too many inconsistencies in her character for me to believe she is the same Mary she began the narrative in, witness to the murder of family, and even the carrier of her Babe's unbearable corpse.  Perhaps the most striking example for me remains the moment in which she snatches a piece of meat from a boy's hand, his teeth still too tender to bite into it.  What a savage act, no, from a woman so delicately cloistered amongst her religion and her home.  This is what captivity does to you...it backs you into a corner, only for you to exit from where your back is facing, a new woman (a new being, really), that looks the same, but is no longer.

To flash forward quite significantly...how many of you are familiar with Patty Hearst?  She the captive of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and later to become the poster child for Stockholm Syndrome.  I'm not saying she's a modern-day Mary Rowlandson (on the contrary, their situations vary too greatly for there to be any real comparison aside from the surface of things), but to believe that a person, either of these women, can turn to their captors and say, Yes, if only for a split second, can mold their existence, if only momentarily, to mirror that of those who have refused her the comforts and knowledge of her old life...this is something extraordinary, and extraordinarily human.  So what if Mary enjoyed smoking from a pipe, so what if she delighted in taking the meat in her hands and letting its juices flow freely, so what if she...you get the idea.  The point is that no matter how furious her religion and her passions, even she could not contain her instincts, her own survival tricks in order to stay alive.  I wouldn't go as far to say came to love her captives (nor did Patty Hearst, in case you're wondering), but it's not a simple/clean metaphor any longer...the victim is, in a way, just as much in power when she/he relinquishes her right to be afraid in public, when she assimilates into the way of life of a prisoner, but REFUSES to be that prisoner she/he is playing the role of now.  Does that make any sense?

Perhaps it's too raw an idea for this blog, even, but all I'm trying to say is that, force or not, these women learned valuable lessons that they would have never even encountered stuck between the halls of their Puritan religion...the freedom and the fright of choice, of simple adaptation.  These women were strong!  Mary did not give in, did not give up, no matter how it may have seemed all throughout that she had...but what if she had never been taken to begin with?  What then, would she have learned of herself, of her mind, of her body, of the resilience of her spirit, of her Faith?  One could call this the slap to the face one needs to really wake up to the world, and I only wish it had happened some other way, one that didn't involve the mass killings of so many innocent lives...for they were all innocent, even the guilty few.

I'm so angry with the Puritans, even now.  Angry that it took captivity for them to see what they were really prisoners of...and yet, who knows.  I could be wrong, and I could have misinterpreted the whole thing.  More room for discussion, then, more room to breathe and talk about this ever-changing landscape on which the Puritans forced their Home.

In all of us exists, I think, the passion, and the will, to be caught, to be taken against our very wills...and then...

set free.

I leave you all with an intriguing little slice of Patty Hearst's endlessly fascinating story (I highly, highly suggest you all read on it, if even on Wikipedia) and some of the quotes I thought stood out for me (and probably some of you, I bet):

The Simple Truth Isn't Ever Simple

Quotes of Note:

"So little do we prize common mercies, when we have them to the full."

"...I cannot but admire to see the wonderful providence of God in preserving the Heathen for farther affliction to our poor Country."

"I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them..."

- Mary Rowlandson.