Home Is Where the Heartsong Is: X-Marks and Manifest Domesticity in The Heartsong of Charging Elk

Abstract:This essay encourages critics to take a new look at what “home” is and means in James Welch’s novel The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000). It argues that home should be critiqued less for its geographic place in the historical transatlantic world of the novel, and more for the domestic processes that give it meaning and structure. Indeed, home in Heartsong is more the stuff of “who” and “how” than it is of “where.” The ways in which Charging Elk fails and succeeds in making a home for himself on two continents during the assimilation era depend not so much on where he is, but in large part on the company he keeps and how he keeps it. Scott Richard Lyons’s metaphor of the x-mark and Amy Kaplan’s concept of manifest domesticity inform a reading that explores home in Heartsong as a domestic and domesticated space constructed for and by Charging Elk. Subject and object to domestication, Charging Elk manages the oppressive political realities and social currents over which he has little charge but some command as he attempts to build a life and home for himself in France. Never exclusively one thing or another or easily and neatly bifurcated, home in Heartsong is a primary site in the struggle against US imperialism for control of Indigenous lives in the United States and abroad during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.