Certainly Anglos should be active in attempts to eliminate prac tices and ideas oppressive to American Indians. However, despite her politicized sensibility, Kingsolver’s depiction is undercut by authorial and rhetorical practices which commodify, ritu alize, and idealize the Cherokee.2 In spite of her argument that Americans should consider themselves one nation regardless of ethnic differences, her novel unintentionally demonstrates how entrenched oppressive practices are in the U.S. In this novel, Kingsolver, whose politicized consciousness is evident in much ofher work, explores an issue that only a few Anglo women writers have attempted to address in fiction: the condition of Native peoples in the contemporary United States.1Like Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Helen Hunt Jackson in their respective time periods, Kingsolver displays sympathy for American Indians and even outrage at the continuing difficulties they face, pointing out dis criminatory practices that have caused pain and disruption in tribal lives. Annawake Fourkiller’s statement in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven (1993) suggests both the significance the United States places on skin color and the discrimination that many people of color have difficulties evading. I only had to look at her for about ten seconds on TV to know she was Cherokee’” (Kingsolver, Pigs 279). In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ī a r b a r a K i n g s o l v e r ’s C h e r o k e e N a tio n : P r o b l e m s o f R e p r e s e n t a t i o n in P ig s in H e a v e n K a t h l e e n G o d f r e y ‘“ You have the option of whiteness, but Turtle doesn’t.

Pigs in heaven kingsolver