50 pages • 1 hour read
Oscar HokeahCalling for a Blanket Dance
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Leander Chasenuh (2008)”
Leander meets Ever at Southern Plains Youth Development for Reoffenders, a program for at-risk youth where Ever works. Leander is a teenager when he meets Ever, and he recalls his difficult childhood. His mother, whose pores smelled like alcohol even when she wasn’t drinking, went to prison for running a man over in her car when Leander was five. Sent to live with his father, he was forced to roam the streets and eat trash with stray dogs because his father was unwilling to allow his son inside of his home. On this day, Leander is running from the police. Although Ever claims that they just want to talk to him, he’s scared that he will be taken to juvie for his violent behavior. He runs but ends up on a cement awning and is cornered. Ever offers Leander his hand. He takes it and is taken to a mental health facility rather than juvenile detention.
After he is released, he moves in with Ever. The Southern Plains Youth Development for Reoffenders has closed, and its residents have all been transferred to other places. Leander remembers Ever telling him to manage his anger by drawing whenever he feels rage creeping in, and Leander complies. He recalls the assault and battery charges that landed him in Ever’s program in the first place. As angry as he still is, he is happy to live with Ever and his family. He tells Ever that he would like to go to high school, but Ever is dubious that any school would accept someone with his violent record. None the less, Ever makes some calls and Leander is granted an interview with a nearby high school. The principal quizzes him about his past and his future plans, and Leander tells them that he is working hard, that he wants to change, and that now when he gets angry he channels his energy into drawing.
At first things go well at school, but when Leander is allowed to attend a football game he smokes some marijuana, punches a fellow student who makes fun of him, is caught, and is expelled. After that, he spends time at the teen center, and Ever finds him a volunteer position at the Boys and Girls Club. Leander finds that he enjoys working with kids, especially the young, aggressive boys in whom he sees bits and pieces of himself. He begins to take more care with his speech and behavior. He enrolls in a GED program. Still, Leander struggles with an anger that he does not understand the source of. One day, he even visualizes himself stabbing Ever with a pencil, but he realizes that Ever is showing up for him day after day in a way that his father never had.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Opbee Geimausaddle (2010)”
Ever is now about 34. The company he works for lost its funding, his car was repossessed, and he is struggling to get his children to school. At the Gourd Dance, his father calls a blanket dance for Ever and his family, and everyone in the community donates what they can, piling dollars onto an outspread Pendleton blanket as they dance. Opbee, Vincent’s niece, observes the dance and is moved by it. She wants to get a chance to talk to Ever, but he leaves before she finds him.
Ever had sold several quilts, made by his grandmother, and Opbee knows that each quilt has the name of one of Ever’s children sewn into it. For healing, Opbee thinks that those children need their quilts, and she sets off tracking them down so that she can return them to Ever and his family. One by one, she locates the quilts and offers $1,000 to the people who have purchased them. Each person refuses money, telling her that she can have the quilt for free.
Ever and Jimena are now divorced, Jimena had wanted children of her own after they lost their daughter, but Ever has Leander and his three children from Lonnie and thought that they had enough. The two were unable to reconcile their differences, and Ever moved with his children and Leander into a trailer in a run-down part of Lawton. Shawn, Ever’s eldest, had inherited his father’s and grandfather’s rage. Shiloh, too, had inherited Ever’s rage, and Leander changed his work schedule in order to spend more time with his adopted brother, to help him heal in the way that Ever had once helped Leander. Ever tries to balance multiple jobs with spending as much time as possible with his children, and Leander is also a loving presence in the lives of his young siblings.
Shandi, Ever’s daughter, is also angry, and she breaks her toys apart into pieces, just as her father had once broken apart his action figures while playing with them. When she starts biting herself, the family begins to worry. Shandi has one fit of rage so great that Ever has to forcibly stop her from harming herself and hold her down until she stops screaming. Although he is trying his best, he is tired.
By the time of the next Gourd Dance, things have improved. Ever’s children are dressed in their regalia, and Opbee gives each child their quilt back. She tells them that their grandma Lena sewed them “magic quilts” that have the power to heal, and that they are all going to be okay.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Ever Geimausaddle (2013)”
Ever has moved from Lawton to Tahlequah in order to find a better job. His children are now 11,12, and 13. He is hoping to get a house from the Cherokee housing authority so that he can move his family out of his sister’s overcrowded home. Lonnie finds him on Facebook, and he agrees to let her see the children for the first time in a decade. Although she claims to be clean and does not have sores or track marks, Ever thinks that she seems high, and both she and the children are nervous. Shandi asks to call her stepmother Jimena when she gets home, and Ever is happy that the two still have a relationship.
Ever has a good, full-time job as a youth worker with Cherokee kids that comes with health care and benefits. He wants to keep his family together, but Leander misses his old job and wants more space. There are many family members in Lawton who could take him in, and once he leaves Ever knows that his boys would want to follow and that Shandi would ask to live with Jimena. It is important for him to get one of the available houses, but demand far exceeds supply. He waits in line all night outside of the housing office, and although there is a massive throng of people waiting to fill out paperwork, Ever is able to get one of the homes. He and his family move in, and life seems to finally be getting better.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
This set of chapters sees Ever further into adulthood. Identity Development remains thematically important, and Ever grows into his professional role as a mentor for at-risk Indigenous youth and continues to dedicate himself to parenting. He adopts the teenager Leander, a boy whose troubled past and propensity for violence mirror Ever’s own difficult childhood and adolescence. The role that culture plays in Resilience and Family Bonds and in healing from Generational Trauma deepens in this last portion of the narrative, and the story ends up on a hopeful note: Ever is able to secure a well-paying job and move into his own home, at last.
Leander’s character embodies each of the novel’s three key themes. Raised in a home not unlike Ever’s, Leander initially displays the same anger issues and the same tendency to solve problems with violence that readers observed in both Everardo and the young Ever. Ever encounters Leander at work, and the two develop a close bond based on their similar histories. Because Ever understands the importance of having an outlet for anger, and because he himself did not grow up with access to the kinds of emotional tools that healthy families use to solve disputes and process difficult situations, he understands how important it is to help Leander find healthy coping mechanisms. Leander is a gifted artist, and Ever encourages him to draw when he feels anger rising to the surface. This method proves effective for Leander, and in these chapters Leander employs these same strategies with Ever’s children, who largely because of their mother are not without anger and abandonment issues. There is a strong sense, especially in this section of the narrative, that healing is an ongoing process, and that when an individual begins to find a sense of inner strength and resilience, their job becomes to help the next generation to heal. The passage of coping skills, support, and the means to let go of anger on from one generation to the next becomes a powerful counterweight to the passage of generational trauma, and that process can be observed first in the relationship between Vincent and Ever, but then even more so in the relationship between Ever, Leander, and Ever’s children. “Healer” thus becomes an important part of both Ever’s and Leander’s identities.
The role that Indigenous culture plays in the development of Resilience and Family Bonds and in the healing process is particularly evident in the final chapters of the novel. Ever begins to teach his children the Gourd Dance, he works towards getting them their own ceremonial regalia, and he shows them that their Indigenous identity should be a source of pride. He is also the beneficiary of a blanket dance, and through this act of community-based mutual aid, the tightly knit nature of Ever’s Indigenous community becomes especially evident: Although no family can afford to donate a large sum to Ever and his children, the sheer number of small donations adds up, and Ever is able to get the help that he needs. Ever is also, through the help of Vincent’s niece Opbee, able to get back a set of quilts made for his family by his grandmother Lena, which he had been forced to sell. Again, the communal spirit and solidarity of Ever’s extended family is on display, because Opbee offers in each case to purchase the quilt from the individual who ended up with it, but each time they refuse payment, and she is told to take the quilt back and return it to its rightful owner. The blankets, like Ever’s ceremonial regalia and the mask that he is so enthralled by as a boy, are healing objects. They connect the bearer to their familial and cultural history and become a source of comfort.
Family, community, and culture come together even further at the novel’s conclusion. Ever is able to obtain a Cherokee house for his family, and he finds a job working with youth that provides a good salary and benefits. Much like his mother, Ever benefits from his Cherokee community, and the Cherokee houses symbolize the strength that exists in both family and community bonds. Although Calling for a Blanket Dance deals with multiple, difficult themes and is harsh at times in its depiction of addiction, violence, abuse, and trauma, it ends on a hopeful note. Ever, his sister Sissy, and his adopted son Leander all find ways to process and move past their trauma. In addition to their own positive growth and identity development, they are shown to be dedicated to fostering that same positivity in the next generation. Although previous generations of their family passed on (albeit unwittingly) trauma to their children, this generation will pass on resilience, strength, and devotion to both family and to Indigenous communities.
