Changing woman: postcolonal reflections on acts 16.6-40

Jeffrey L. Staley

Reading Acts 16 in a Postcolonial World

There is little disagreement among Lukan scholars over the general plot divisions of the book of Acts. It is a story that charts the geographic and cultural movement of early Christianity (Acts 1.8), and it can be plotted along these lines: Activity in Jerusalem (Acts 1-7); Judea and Samaria (Acts 8-12); and areas northwest of Judea (Acts 13-28). Furthermore, it is obvious even to an uncritical reader that Paul's proclamation to Gentiles in Acts 13-14 is a new development in the plot. Except for the apostles' debate in Acts 15, Paul is clearly the central character for the rest of the book. Thus, the major plot question scholars must decide is whether Paul's 'first missionary journey' in Acts 13-14 is a challenge to and an aberration from the apostle's central mission--a mission that began in Acts 1 and leads to the authoritative pronouncements of the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. If Paul's 'first missionary journey' is an aberration, then Acts 15 is the major turning point of the plot. On the other hand, if the Jerusalem Council is an aberration and a challenge to Paul's missionary activity, then Acts 13 must be the turning point of the plot ¹.

Over the years, scholars have put forward a variety of arguments for these two possible turning points of the book. But it is not my purpose to settle for one of these options over the other. Rather, I am interested in the fact that scholars can develop lengthy arguments for preferring one central turning point over the other, and then turn around and write in such a way that Paul's 'second missionary journey' (Acts 16.6ff) seems somehow to chart a dramatic new course for the spread of Christianity in ways that his 'first missionary journey' did not.

Many scholars have made this latter point by describing Paul's 'second missionary journey' as 'Christianity entering Europe' ². But while it is well known that the ancient Greeks divided the world into three parts (Libya, Asia, and Europe³), Acts offers no explicit evidence to suggest that the author had these geographic divisions in mind when writing his narrative. Recently, however, James Scott has taken a different tack and argued that, similarly to the three-fold Greek division of the world, the author of Acts could have been structuring his narrative around the geographical areas assigned to the three sons of Noah as found in ancient Judaism's 'Table of Nations' (Genesis 10⁴). Thus, for Scott, Acts 2.1-8.25 represents the mission to Shem (Asia); Acts 8.26-40 represents the mission to Ham (Libya); and Acts 9.1-28.31 represents the mission to Japheth (Europe⁵). Although I remain unconvinced by Scott's argument regarding the overall structure of the book of Acts, his collection of data does suggest that first-century readers of the book could have understood Paul's journey to Macedonia as part of an important new territorial expansion of the apostolic witness.

But irrespective of Scott's proposal or any hypothetical reconstruction of how first readers may have understood Paul's Macedonian mission, Acts 16.9 has in fact played an important role in the colonizing rhetoric of European empires from the sixteenth century to the present day. By describing Paul's entrance into Macedonia as 'Christianity entering Europe', empire building nations have had an apostolic, divinely ordained model ready at hand to justify colonizing and 'winning for the Saviour' hitherto 'unknown' and 'unexplored' continents⁶. Thus, explicitly designating Macedonia as 'Europe' functions as much to legitimize the missionizing agendas of modern colonial empires as it does to clarify any particular geographic notion, plot structure, or hypothetical reader in the mind of Luke-Acts' author. However, I do not want to ignore the plot structure of Acts in order to talk about the ideological foundations of modern Christian missions. I do believe that designating Acts 16.6 as 'Christianity's entrance into Europe' is based upon certain narrative elements that mark out the second journey by Paul as, indeed, functionally different from his earlier journey in Acts 13. I want to explore briefly these elements. A postcolonial critique⁷, on the other hand, would begin by questioning whether any interpreter could possibly isolate those 'narrative elements' from the missionizing agendas of the colonial empires that first made such elements appear so obvious.

So I vacillate and procrastinate. Should I begin with the Acts 'text' or with the colonialist ideology that motivates that text's 'interpretation'? If I were to start with 'the text', I would talk about how Paul's vision of the Macedonian man, Paul's encounter with two women when first arriving in Macedonia, and the vocabulary of Roman hegemony all mark this journey as a new turn in the expansion of the gospel and mark Macedonia as 'foreign territory' in ways that Paul's first journey was not.

On the other hand, if I were to begin with the colonialist ideology that motivates much of the Acts text's interpretation, I might use the female Native American character in Oliver La Farge's Pulitzer prize winning novel Laughing Boy⁸ and the female Native American characters in Leslie Marmon Silko's critically acclaimed novel Ceremony⁹ as intertextual reading grids to present a postcolonial critique of the symbolization of the border women in Acts 16.6-40. Following the lead of Musa Dube Shomanah in her 1997 Vanderbilt dissertation entitled 'Toward a Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible¹⁰, I would then show how 'good' and 'bad' women appear in Acts 16 primarily to justify and mystify an act of ideological colonialization.

But neither beginning seems especially appropriate to my present intellectual quandary. No matter how hard I try, I can't bring myself to isolate the text from the interpretive ideology that surrounds it. Any attempt to separate this 'text' from the ideological world of the interpreter seems arbitrary to me. What I really yearn for is a multidimensional opening; a postmodern hypertext that would encourage the reader to explore a variety of possible entry points, endings, and interconnections between the two poles. But I doubt whether a format like that would be acceptable in an article for JSNT. And so I'm forced to make a choice that I don't really want to make. As I continue to procrastinate, the journal editors for whom I promised this essay send me more and more urgent email messages 'encouraging' me to finish.

Well, the editors will be happy to know that I've finally made a decision and set a deadline for myself which I aim to keep. I shall flit about like the hero of Acts himself, alighting on this island of thought and then that; never staying anywhere very long, always ready to cross over into new territory. I began this essay by briefly introducing an interpretive issue in Acts 16. I will move on now to an ideological, or meta-autobiographical context¹¹, an ideography, if you will, before returning to the book of Acts and offering a postcolonial critique of Paul's 'second missionary journey'. And I promise to finish all this by the end of the week.

A Colonialist Ideography¹²

It is a hot July afternoon on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, the kind of day that flakes off your skin like a fine alkaline dust. My three brothers and two sisters along with our father and his wife, have met at Immanuel Mission for a family reunion. It is the first time all of us have been together since our mother's death in 1984. Now it is eleven years later. I have not been to this growing-up place of mine since my son was two years old. And now he is ten and asking questions about everything. 'Is this the house where you lived? Did you ever climb that mesa? Do you know that Indian woman?' My son is finally old enough to store this red sandstone valley in his own memory, apart from any stories I might tell of my childhood spent here. So I am careful about what I show him and where I go.

But at this precise moment my son is not with me. I have sent him off to explore the mission compound with his cousins. At this moment I am standing beside my oldest brother, Rob, at the grave of Sarah Tsosie, a Navajo girl with whom we grew up. Thirty years ago we were both in love with Sarah. At the age of fourteen, Rob's had been an open, reciprocated affection. I ought to know. I used to follow Rob and Sarah around after dark to watch them kiss behind the dormitory. On the other hand, mine was the sweet, secret, unrequited love of a jealous, pesky little twelve-year-old brother.

The intervening thirty years have taken us both far away from Sarah and the reservation where we spent our childhood. We have been away longer and driven farther to get here than anyone else in our family--Rob from Alberta; I, from Oregon. But now we are side by side at Sarah's hard-packed adobe grave, trying to say goodbye to someone--something--that was once simple, passionate, and young; full of grace and beauty.

Rob and I are here, in the mission cemetery, just a stone's throw from the three-room mission school where our father taught for thirty years. We are standing here without speaking. We are standing here because of one of those generic conversations you start with siblings whom you haven't seen in eight years. It was a conversation I initiated a few hours ago.

I had just sat down at the lunch table next to Greg, my other older brother. 'So,' I began, 'do you ever see any of the Navajo kids we used to go to school with'? I try to make conversation with the most laconic of my brothers, who, after thirty years on the Navajo Reservation, acts more Navajo than half of the Indians in the area.

'Do you ever see William Scott? Or Sam Benally? What about Anna Horse or Bessie Begay? Then there was Sarah Tsosie. No other girl came close to her. I haven't seen her since college when I would occasionally come home from Wheaton. Remember how Mother used say that Sarah had a "cute figure"? It took me twenty years to figure out that was her Christian way of saying "Sarah is really sexy"'.

Greg pauses in the midst of eating a tuna sandwich and smoothes his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. 'Yeah, we were probably all in love with Sarah at one time or another. I used to see her quite a bit. You know, her kids were in school here for a while. She was living over near Red Mesa Trading Post when we got word that she had died. She had had a drinking problem for a number of years. No one knows whether she drank herself to death or committed suicide. Maybe there isn't a lot of difference between the two. I know she died alone. Her body wasn't found for a few days. We buried her up there at the mission cemetery, just east of Mother's grave.'

Towering white cumulus clouds rise over the purple Lukachukai Mountains to the south, shrouding Sheepskin Mesa in greys and blues. A breeze suddenly stirs the afternoon air, raising northern Arizona's version of Middle Eastern swirling dervishes. The dust-coloured pythonic spirits gather up the remnants of faded flowers and spin them across the cluttered mounds in the mission cemetery. Rob and I stand, silent, both caught up in the twists of our own private memories.

I never kissed her. I never held her close and smelled the scent of mountain cedar in her jet black hair. I never felt her blue jeans pressed hard against my body. To her I was just a pal; a silly, laughing boy who kept her mind off of Rob while he was far away at high school in New York. After all, I was just twelve, and Sarah was nearly fourteen. So I spent afternoons playing Ping-Pong and badminton with her, teasing her incessantly. Then at night I would dream about her. I would sing every song on the radio for her, and drift off to sleep by counting how many times that day her laughing eyes had fixed on mine. I would hold on to that delicious yearning with a tortured, pubescent heart, and wake in the morning with my pillow stained from anguished tears.

Sarah was baptized at our mission when she was thirteen. Then she beat out my brother Greg by a tenth of a point for the highest honors in her eighth grade class at the little mission school. But we all lost track of Sarah after graduation. We found out later that she stayed on the reservation, living at home near Mexican Water and taking the bus forty miles to high school in Kayenta. By that time my two brothers and I were attending high school in California, boarding with an uncle and his family. But in the fall of 1966 Sarah Tsosie showed up as a junior at Shiprock High School, where my brothers and I had just transferred. Rob confided in me a few weeks later that he was beginning to get interested in her again. And I felt a strange stirring in my chest, a twinge of jealousy that I thought had died long before. But then we began to hear rumors. Sarah was 'easy'. 'Better drunk than sober'. Crude etchings on bathroom walls outlined her physical attributes and advertised her phone number. We began to watch her guardedly, from a distance. She was different; not the same Sarah we had known in grade school. She didn't study anymore. She skipped classes. She had a look about her that said 'I know things that you haven't even dreamed of yet'. And it was not a happy look.

Rob never did date Sarah. He said he couldn't stomach the kind of girl she had become. And I barely spoke to her those last two years of high school. She was a senior, and I was a junior. She was Navajo. I was white. Things were different in Shiprock, a reservation border town of 1,500 people. Sarah was pregnant before she finished school and married a few months later. It was the first of four or five marriages, some more cruel than others.

Recently I have begun to think of Sarah Tsosie as Slim Girl, a central character in Oliver La Farge's classic novel about Navajo Indians. My brother Rob had a copy of La Farge's book, Laughing Boy, in his bedroom when he was in high school, and I know he had read it, because he told me that he liked it a lot. I suspect that Slim Girl reminded him of Sarah Tsosie, too. I wish I had read the book back then, but I didn't. I didn't know then that Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge became a well-respected anthropologist and spokesperson for Native Americans¹³, or that he had won the 1930 Pulitzer Prize in literature for Laughing Boy (Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was a distant runner-up that year¹⁴).

For years after Rob left home the book collected powdery red dust on a shelf in his old bedroom in our home on the Navajo Reservation. I shook the dust off it a few times over the years and thought about reading it. But I never did. Then when I married, I came into possession of a copy, a required text for course in Native American Studies that my wife had taken at the University of California at Berkeley. Eventually, without her knowledge, I traded it, along with a number of other books I had never read, for a stack of books on literary theory at Powell's Bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

Not long ago, on a rainy Thanksgiving weekend in Washington's San Juan Islands, I found myself in a used bookstore, having forgotten to bring along something to read during the long Northwest evenings. I saw a copy of Laughing Boy. I checked the inside cover, half expecting to find my wife's name. Instead I found the word 'Erbstoeszer' scrawled across the yellowed page, below a penciled $1.50. I bought it, despite my wife's insisting that she had a copy around the house somewhere, and read it over the weekend.

If La Farge has shown me that Sarah is a contemporary version of Slim Girl, my reading in postcolonial criticism has convinced me that Sarah is also much more than that. She is also a variation of Native American border women like Pocahontas and Doña Marina (Malinche¹⁵). And she shares an identity with Lydia and the pythonic slave girl of Acts 16. Sarah is all these women spun into one.

If the Sarah Tsosie of my past is indeed related to the borderland characters of Lydia and the pythonic slave girl of Acts 16, then a postcolonial reevaluation of these two biblical women may help Christians like me critique the colonialist ideology that created both them and Sarah¹⁶. But to do this we will have to go back and take a closer look at the way in which the author of Luke-Acts constructs Macedonian otherness and territory. Only then can we begin to move on to a creative, self-critical reappropriation of the biblical text and our own colonialist past.

Evidence of Colonialist Borders in Macedonia

For well over a hundred years now, biblical scholars have been content to call Acts 15.36-18.22 Paul's 'second missionary journey'¹⁷. But unlike any of Paul's preceding or subsequent journeys, this one begins with a vision¹⁸. Some scholars have read the vision as a mirror of the book's author--Luke, himself, the Macedonian--calling to Paul for help¹⁹. But few commentators today would be convinced by so naive a view of authorial allusion²⁰. And not just today: Origen argued centuries ago for a much different and more ideologically plausible identification. It is an identification that Walter Wink elaborates in his trilogy of books on the language of power in the New Testament. For Origen, and for Wink following in his interpretive footsteps, the Macedonian man in the vision represents the 'angel' of the region²¹, whose power could be challenged or assuaged by Jesus' ambassadors. For them, this angel of Macedonia is comparable to the 'prince of the kingdom of Persia' with whom an unnamed angel and Michael had fought centuries earlier (Daniel 10.5-6, 10-14, 20-21; cf. Revelation 2.1-3.22).

In his commentary on this section of Acts, Charles Talbert collects a number of historical references to the dreams of Roman conquering heroes which provide an ideological context for Wink's and Origen's thesis. For example, Talbert notes how Suetonius (Julius Caesar 32) had 'a dream before leaving Spain for Rome that he [would] have sovereignty over the whole world' and that 'Drusus, the father of Claudius, [saw] an apparition of a barbarian woman, speaking in Latin, forbidding him to pursue the defeated Germanic tribes further' (Suetonius, Claudius 1).²² Although Paul is no military leader, his vision in Acts appears to be programmatic like those quoted above, and is consistent with the imperial ideology that underlies those visions²³. That is to say, the visions provide the divine authorization for a transfer of power. Furthermore, if Origen's and Wink's angelic identification is appropriate, then it makes perfect sense that one of Paul's first acts in the new territory is to perform an exorcism (Acts 16.16-18). As John Dominic Crossan, following the lead of cultural anthropologists, has argued, the physical body is a microcosm of the macrocosmic political system²⁴. In the symbolic universe of the Greco-Roman world, exorcisms in 'foreign' territory become explicit political acts connecting political oppression with demonic possession (cf. Mark 5.1-17; 7:24-31). Surely, then, Luke Johnson has sensed the importance of the Acts scene when he says 'we find . . . [Paul] doing battle with demonic forces and besting them, establishing in still another turf-war a further territorial gain for the "kingdom of God"' (my emphasis).²⁵

Perhaps even the often-discussed 'we sections' which begin in Acts 16.11 could be understood at least in part as a rhetorical evocation of Macedonia as new and foreign territory. While the issue is too complex to do justice to here, from a text pragmatics standpoint one must account for why the 'we sections' begin at this particular point in the narrative. On a pragmatic level, the juxtapositioning of first-person pronouns and verbal forms with third-person pronouns and verbal forms (16.10-17) constructs a grammatical, linguistic distinction between Paul and the Macedonians, a distinction that is paralleled by the ethnic differences and the attending plot developments.

Finally, the designation of the demon possessed girl as 'pythonic' (16.16) evokes the Greek hieropolis of Delphi (still to the west), the omphalos (navel) of the ancient Greek world²⁶. This pythonic spirit of Delphi stands in marked contrast to Jerusalem (to the east), the omphalos of the Jewish and early Christian world²⁷, and the center of the book of Acts up to this point in the narrative: a place where God's holy spirit had earlier filled an entire house with amazing displays of power (Acts 2.1-13).

But not only is Macedonia marked out as foreign territory: it is also the most explicitly Roman territory that Paul has yet entered. The narrator in this section of Acts uses numerous terms for Roman power (k olwnia [16.12], strathgoi [16.20, 22, 35, 36, 38], 'rabdoucoV [Latin, 'lictor'; 16.35, 38], 'RwmaiouV'uparcontaV [16.37, 38)²⁸, along with the less explicit listing of the cities such as Neapolis ('New City') and Philippi ('the leading city of Macedonia'²⁹), which were important Roman setttlements in the area. As Talbert notes, there are also three 'charges leveled against the missionaries', which help to reinforce in political language the foreign character of Paul and his entourage: first, they are called ''Ioudaioi ' (16.20), which evokes their ethnic identity³⁰; second, 'they are charged with disturbing the peace [which] is an appeal to the Roman obsession with public order' (16.20a); and third, they are 'charged with advocating customs that are not lawful for Romans to adopt or practice' (16.20b)³¹. Significantly, this is the first time in Paul's journeys that Gentiles rather than Jews have been the instigators of opposition to his missionary activity³².

These six elements--Paul's vision, the exorcism, the political and legal language of Roman hegemony, the we/them language, the lack of Jewish opposition, and the evocation of the omphalic Delphic oracle--all mark Macedonia as important, new, and foreign territory for Paul's missionary activity. But it is primarily Paul's encounter with the two women that marks the territory as a major bordercrossing in the book of Acts. And it is the author's juxtapositioning of Lydia the 'good' woman with the pythonic 'bad' girl that offers the contemporary reader the most fruitful grounds for a postcolonial critique of that particular border.

In her Vanderbilt University dissertation entitled 'Toward a Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible', Musa Dube Shomanah focuses her attention on those texts in the biblical tradition where there seems to be a connection between 'bad' women and new (soon to be conquered) territory³³. And although her primary attention centers on the story of Rahab (Joshua 1) as the model for what she calls an ancient Hebrew 'land possession type-scene', she also discusses the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15; par. Mark 7) and the Samaritan woman (John 4) as figures who fit into the same stereotypical pattern³⁴. The elements that Dube Shomanah isolates in the typescene are: 1) a traveling hero journeys to a foreign land, 2) meets a woman, 3) and bonds with her³⁵. Although Dube Shomanah does not mention Lydia and the 'spirit-possessed' girl in Acts 16 in her assemblage of biblical examples, I believe that these two women function in the same way as do the other three women--as a means to legitimize the ideological and territorial conquests of a nascent Christianity. But what is unique about the Acts text is the fact that it is the only biblical account where one finds two women on the border--one who is clearly a more positive character than the other³⁶.

Halvor Moxnes's study of patron-client relations in Luke-Acts quite nicely describes the first woman, Lydia, as a representative of feminine propriety³⁷. She is 'a patron who considers her benefactions as an act of reciprocity for the far greater spiritual benefits that she has received. Moreover, her patronage is offered very humbly; if her gift is accepted, she in fact receives the larger gift of recognition of her faith.³⁸ On the other hand, the second female character, the prophetic 'bad girl', is typically described as one who has 'prostituted her divinatory capacity for the benefit of her owners'³⁹. Yet the 'bad girl's' annoying proclamation, 'These men are slaves of the Most High God' (Acts 16.17; cf. Luke 8.28; Dan. 4.34, 5.18), as much reflects a colonized people's 'manic vehicle of fear' and 'an uncontrolled, yet strategic affect of political revolt', as it reflects⁴⁰ a (misguided) theological revelation.

In his recent study of the widow traditions in Luke-Acts, Robert Price argues on historical-critical grounds that Lydia and the pythonic slave girl were originally one person: Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth, a woman with a significant prophetic gift⁴¹. From Price's perspective, the author has cloned the 'positive' figure Lydia into 'the Pythoness, her own "evil twin"⁴². Although I am not particularly convinced by Price's imaginative historical reconstruction or by his hypothetical redaction history of the Philippian women traditions, I do think that his desire to yoke the two women of Acts 16 reflects a genuine insight into the colonialist underpinnings of the Lukan bordercrossing story. But at this point the perspective of recent postcolonial theory addresses the text's problematics more sharply than any dubious historical or redactional reconstruction could.

Toward a Postcolonial Reappropriation of Acts 16.6-40

Lydia is from Thyatira, a city in the Roman province of Asia long noted for its purple dye industry⁴³. Similarly, the three border women who precede her in the Christian canon are associated with blue-red colours: Rahab places a crimson thread in her window (to spartiontokokkinon , Joshua 2.18, 21); the Syrophoenician woman lives in a land called reddish-purple (the proper noun 'Phoenicia' is derived from foinikeoV , Mark 7.26⁴⁴); and the Samaritan woman, whose witness is associated with a harvest of white-headed grain (leukai , John 4.35-36), prefigures the harvest among non-Jews (John 12.20-23)—a harvest that comes only through the death of the scarlet-hued seed (kokkoV , John 12.24; cf. 19.2, 5).

Spider Woman, a feminine deity in Pueblo mythology, plays a central role in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony. In Navajo mythology she is closely related to Changing Woman, who like Spider Woman, is known by the colours she wears: black, white, red, and blue. These four colours in her rainbow are captured in the mother-earth substances of jet, shell, abalone, and turquoise. Together they blend into a rich, dark purple--Lydia's hue. The same mix of colours Slim Girl wears when Laughing Boy first sees her⁴⁵. The colour purple thus binds together these six border women--the four ancient eastern Mediterranean women, and two western twentieth-century Native-American women--in a postmodern, postcolonial weave of intertextual allusions.

Oliver La Farge's novel, Laughing Boy, takes place on the Navajo Indian Reservation in 1915, seven years prior to the founding of the mission where I spent my childhood. At least once the author mentions Sweetwater, the old trading post four miles northwest of where I grew up⁴⁶. La Farge recalls in the foreword to the 1962 edition that he chose the year 1915 because 'romanticism made him feel that he should cast back in time to a less corrupted, purer era⁴⁷'. 'In the space of thirty years, however, the wholeness has gone. . . .⁴⁸' That loss of wholeness is represented in the book by the character Slim Girl, who marries Laughing Boy, the story's protagonist.

Slim Girl is a border woman who participates in the same colonial ideology that gives life to Lydia and the pythonic slave girl of Acts 16. Like my childhood friend Sarah Tsosie, and like Lydia and the pythonic slave girl, Slim Girl is a person who embodies the ambiguous relationship of the colonized to the colonizer. Like Malinche in the conquistadores' legends and Pocahontas in the story of the founding of the British colonies, Slim Girl is a complex character⁴⁹. But there is a twist in La Farge's appropriation of the ideology of the colonized border woman. For in his novel, told from the perspective of Laughing Boy, a traditional Navajo, the secondary character Slim Girl is the reader's main contact with the white world. As the story develops, the reader learns that Slim Girl has been educated in a boarding school where she was converted to Christianity. After her schooling she lived in a reservation border town where she worked as a prostitute. When she meets Laughing Boy, several years later, she is living on the edge of the border town in a house built by a Mexican man. From there she regularly travels to the town to meet with a white rancher who pays her for her sexual services. When Laughing Boy inquires about her activities in the town and the source of her money, she lies to him and tells him that she does housecleaning for a missionary family. Laughing Boy and Slim Girl soon marry, on the edge of the border town, far away from their own clans. With no family members present, Slim Girl procures a drunken medicine man to perform a traditional Navajo wedding ceremony.

Slim Girl, the border woman, is like the pythonic slave girl of Acts 16. She represents all things new and evil, and although she is not the subject of an exorcism, the tension in the novel revolves around the issue of what holds more power--traditional Navajo ways (embodied by Laughing Boy) or American colonialist ways (embodied by Slim Girl). Slim Girl represents change. The colours of her jewelry and clothing show that she represents the rainbow-hued Changing Woman of Navajo mythology. And if the reader somehow should miss this symbolic connection, La Farge has her say to Laughing Boy as she lies dying, '. . . you have changed because of me; in you I shall live'⁵⁰. But for La Farge, Slim Girl's (or Changing Woman's) adaptation to American culture can only be seen as negative; a part of imperial American colonialism that will ultimately destroy even those who, like her, think they are powerful enough to twist American culture to their own ends.

By way of contrast, the male character Laughing Boy represents what is traditional, good, and pure in Navajo ways. Still, he desires the border woman and marries her against the advice of his relatives. But Slim Girl grows to love Laughing Boy and does not merely use him for her own ends. Like Lydia, she is wealthy, and with her money she procures the necessities with which to begin 'traditional' life as a Navajo. She also willingly learns from her husband about the Navajo ways she had lost when she attended the Christian boarding school⁵¹. But in the end Slim Girl, or Changing Woman, becomes one more victim sacrificed to American colonialism. Ultimately she embodies the colonial ideology that underlies most of the novel. For Oliver La Farge's colonialist ideology effectively disempowers any Native voice that would attempt to deconstruct that colonial power, by having Slim Girl killed at the end of the book. Thus the female, bordercrossing character dies to 'save' Slim Boy from the white man's ways. Fittingly for the era in which the book was written, she is murdered by a traditional Navajo man. Like the Lydia/slave girl double, Slim Girl/Changing Woman is the symbolic sacrificial victim that unwittingly allows American imperial power to continue to exert its control over the colonized Navajo.

For all the good the author of Laughing Boy hoped to accomplish in his novel (or that the author of Luke-Acts hoped to accomplish in narrating Paul's journey into Macedonia), La Farge was unable to break free from the colonialist ideology that created the reservation borders in the first place. That task is left to the blue-bodied characters in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony, who find ways to appropriate their colonial, borderland past and transform it into a viable, postcolonial life-way.

Ceremony reflects an important postcolonial shift in the metaphorical status of the border woman. Like Acts 16 and the novel Laughing Boy, Ceremony is set near a border town: here--Gallup, New Mexico, a few years after the end of World War II. Tayo, the main character, is half-Caucasian, half-Laguna; a veteran who suffers from post-traumatic syndrome and returns to the reservation after he has been supposedly cured by white doctors. However, it is obvious to his family and friends that he is not well, and so his grandmother procures the names of two Native medicine men who may be able to help him. But it is not Ku'oosh, a Laguna medicine man from his own tribe, who cures him⁵². Instead an old Navajo medicine man named Betonie sets Tayo on the path toward healing and wholeness. Because Betonie lives on the outskirts of Gallup, a reservation border town, he is able to find traces of truth in the cultures of both the colonizer and the colonized. So he performs a healing ceremony for Tayo the half-breed; one that incorporates Tayo's two divergent worlds. It is a mixed-up ritual that sets Tayo on the road to wholeness. And throughout Tayo's journey toward wholeness⁵³, the colour blue dominates.

The novel's female characters, although many, are symbolized as one person: the ever-mutating Spider Woman of Laguna mythology (known as Changing Woman in Navajo mythology). Spider Woman, or Changing Woman, is in the turquoise blue of the satin dress of Black Swan, a Mexican prostitute⁵⁴; Spider Woman/Changing Woman is in the blue of Mount Taylor⁵⁵; the blue swimsuit of the model in a Coca Cola calendar⁵⁶; the blue of old Betonie's shirt⁵⁷; and in the blue of the Ute woman's tight western pants⁵⁸. Spider Woman/Changing Woman's colour is found in the most incongruous places. It functions as a kind of cultural hypertext, linking the reader to new postcolonial perspectives and possibilities. In all these contexts the colour blue reflects Silko's critical appropriation of the woman of the 'borderland typescene'⁵⁹, a personage whom we first saw in the biblical tradition. But unlike La Farge or the author of Luke-Acts, Silko seems to be arguing that the colonizer's own stories can be used to benefit and heal the colonized if their power can be critically appropriated into the tradition of the colonized⁶⁰. Thus, in Silko's reading of the border woman, the colonized are empowered--even called

--to engage their wits and creatively reappropriate the new and old in ways that the colonial power cannot imagine. Here, finally, the voice of the colonized is engaged: it talks back, it argues, it challenges. That voice is critically involved in active dialogue with the colonizer's ideology. Ceremony offers a lively, postcolonial, post-canonical voice to colonialist-engendered border women like Sarah Tsosie, Slim Girl, and Lydia and the pythonic slave girl who otherwise remain disempowered or dead.

Conclusion

A postcolonial reading of Acts 16:6-40 allows one to understand Lydia and the pythonic slave girl in a new way. Where other commentators and missionizing folk write about the women separately, with Lydia being the positive role model and the slave girl being the negative role model of Native responses to the gospel, a postcolonial reading resists viewing them independently. Instead, the focus of postcolonialist attention is on their paired geographical status as border women.

At this point, my particular reading of Acts 16, conceived and nurtured in memories of a colonialist childhood on the Navajo Reservation and confirmed by my recent reading of Laughing Boy, gains insight from Dube Shomanah's creative work. For as her analysis makes evident, there are a series of biblical stories where border women embody the doubled identity of helper and betrayer. Since Lydia and the pythonic slave girl are the first people Paul meets in explicitly defined Roman territory, they also reflect the conflicted status of colonized peoples. But the author of Acts carefully disguises the gospel's colonialist effects. For in describing Paul's encounter with two border women, the author effectively deflects the reader's attention away from Paul, and instead tries to force the reader to choose between the two opposing responses to Paul's message. There is, therefore, no middle ground in this text: Lydia, the good woman, welcomes Paul the conqueror, and the evil slave girl who challenges Paul is forever silenced. There is no place in this author's narrative repertoire for more complex border women like Rahab, the Syro-Phoenician woman, or the Samaritan woman. And there is certainly no place in Acts for a borderland character like Silko's half-breed Tayo, who struggles to survive on the edges of two different worlds.

But I am not convinced that I have to force a decolonizing strategy upon Acts in order to save the biblical text from imperialist ideologies. If it is important to pretend that we can read the book of Acts apart from any colonialist framework, then that rhetorical pretence can be constructed easily enough. But if we are honest and straightforward about our ideological and ethical commitments, then perhaps Leslie Marmon Silko's contrapuntal voice in her novel Ceremony will be enough to challenge colonialist readings of Acts 16. Perhaps Spider Woman/Changing Woman can function as an important intertextual supplement to Acts 16, one that creates space for an invigorating, postcolonial conversation with traditional biblical texts. Perhaps other such experiments in postcolonial, post-canonical exegesis will empower colonized minds, hearts, and voices to speak and act in fresh, new ways.

¹ See, for example, H. Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles. Translated by J. Limburg, A.T. Krabel, and D.H. Juel. E.J. Epp with C.R. Matthews (eds.). (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p. xlii; M. Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul: Studies in the Earliest History of Christianity. Translated by J. Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), p. 101; R.I. Pervo, Luke's Story of Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), p. 53
² For instance, James Dunn argues that 'This section is primarily intended to demonstrate how it was that Paul first brought the gospel to Europe, or at least into the Agean Basin' (The Acts of the Apostles [Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1997], p. 215; cf. p. 218; see also L.T. Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992], pp. 281, 290, 297; H.C. Kee, To Every Nation under Heaven: The Acts of the Apostles [Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International , 1997], pp, 188-89, 191; C.H. Talbert, Reading Acts: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles [New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997], p. 147-48); R.I. Pervo, Luke's Story of Paul, p. 55; G. Krodel, Acts: Proclamation Commentaries (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), p. 59. Interestingly, R. B. Rackham is one of the few scholars in this century who has questioned the identification of Macedonia with 'Europe'. Writing in 1906, he states: 'Here we have to be on our guard against the influence of modern ideas of geography. The crisis of the work was not, as is popularly supposed, the crossing over from Asia to Europe. The Macedonian did not say "Come over into Europe", but "into Macedonia"' (The Acts of the Apostles: An Exposition (London: Methuen and Company, 1906), p. 272.
³ Herodotus states: 'I cannot guess for what reason the earth, which is one, has three names, all women's, and why the boundary lines set for it are the Egyptian Nile river and the Colchian Phasis river (though some say that the Maeetian Tanaпs river and the Cimmerian Ferries are boundaries); and I cannot learn the names of those who divided the world, or where they got the names which they used. For Libya is said by most Greeks to be named after a native woman of that name, and Asia after the wife of Prometheus; yet the Lydians claim a share in the latter name, saying that Asia was not named after Prometheus' wife Asia, but after Asies, the son of Cotys, who was the son of Manes, and that from him the Asiad clan at Sardis also takes its name. But as for Europe, no men have any knowledge whether it is bounded by seas or not, or where it got its name, nor is it clear who gave the name, unless we say that the land took its name from the Tyrian Europa, having been (it would seem) before then nameless like the rest. But it is plain that this woman was of Asiatic birth, and never came to this land which the Greeks now call Europe, but only from Phoenicia to Crete and from Crete to Lycia' (Histories 4.45.1-5; cf. 2:33; 3:115.1; cf. P.S. Alexander, 'Notes on the "Imago Mundi" of the Book of Jubilees', JJS 33 (1982), pp. 198-199).
⁴J.M. Scott, Paul and the Nations: The Old Testament and Jewish Background of Paul's Mission to the Nations with Special Reference to the Destination of Galatians (Tьbingen: J.C.B.Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1995), pp. 168-176.
⁵Ibid. pp. 179-180; cf. p. 48-51.
⁶J. Townsend, 'Missionary Journeys in Acts and European Missionary Societies', SBLSP 24 (1985), pp. 433-37. See also R.S. Sugirtharajah, 'A Postcolonial Exploration of Collusion and Construction in Biblical Interpretation', in The Postcolonial Bible, R.S. Sugirtharajah (ed.), (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 100-107.
⁷ For two helpful summaries of postcolonial criticism and its tentative relationship to biblical studies, see L. Donaldson, 'Postcolonialism and Biblical Reading: An Introduction', and S.V. Gallagher, 'Mapping the Hybrid World: Three Postcolonial Motifs', Semeia 75 (1996), pp. 1-14 and 229-240 respectively. My own Reading with a Passion: Rhetoric, Autobiography, and the American West in the Gospel of John ([New York: Continuum, 1995], pp. 18-21, 147-234), was an attempt to position the Fourth Gospel within the context of postcolonial discourses.
⁸New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957.
⁹ New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
¹⁰ Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University).
¹¹ Robert Maldonado recently coined the term 'meta-autobiographical' to describe 'the available and recognizable autobiographical plots [his emphasis] that the culture of the teller determines' ('Reading Malinche Reading Ruth: Toward a Hermeneutics of Betrayal' Semeia 72 [1995], p. 91). The plot of my meta-autobiographical vignette is determined by what Musa Dube Shomanah calls a 'land possession type-scene', an idea she develops from Robert Alter's analysis of betrothal scenes in ancient Hebrew narrative (The Art of Biblical Narrative [New York: Basic Books, 1981], pp. 51-52). Dube Shomanah argues that in order to 'validate and to veil the violence of imperialism, gender representations [become] a method of presenting victims of imperialism as those who love, need, or desire to be possessed by imperialist traveling heroes and their nations. Land, [in this context, becomes] a web of intrinsically weaved [sic] tales of power and disempowerment . . . written on the bodies of people' ('Toward a Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible', pp. 205-206).
¹² I fret about the stories I tell from my past, especially those that deal with my years on the Navajo Reservation. In my writing I try to portray the multi-positionality of my interpretive choices (see, for example, J.C. Anderson and J.L. Staley, 'Taking It Personally: Introduction' Semeia 72 [1995], pp. 11-14; cf. M.A. Tolbert, 'The Politics and Poetics of Location', in F.F. Segovia and M.A.Tolbert (eds.), Reading from this Place: Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States Vol. 1 [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995], pp. 305-317), but sometimes I feel as though I am just another Rahila Khan, that 'feminist from the Indian subcontinent whose work purported to describe the life and experiences of young Asian women in Margaret Thatcher's Britain' who turned out to be a 'male, middle-class, white vicar from Brighton named Toby Forward (D. Callaghan, 'The Vicar and Virago: Feminism and the Problem of Identity', in J. Roof and R. Wiegman (eds.), Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995], pp. 195-196). I know that 'native stuff' is 'in', both in popular culture and in the academic world, and that every white, scholarly kind of guy wishes he could invent a fascinating ethnic heritage for himself. We white guys want to write personally, sympathetically about our radical feminism or about some close friend's ethnicity to show that we are 'au courant' and 'sensitive to issues of gender and race'. And so I worry that my Navajo 'other [may be] adopted merely to provide an opportunity for [me] to masquerade as [a] savior of marginality' (S. Sawhney, 'The Joke and the Hoax: (Not) Speaking as the Other', in J. Roof and R. Wiegman (eds.), Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity, pp. 216; see also Greg Salyer's critical remarks in his 'Review of Reading with a Passion: Rhetoric, Autobiography, and the American West in the Gospel of John. By Jeffrey L. Staley. (New York: Continuum, 1995)' Literature and Theology 11 [1997], pp. 320-323, esp. 322-23). Or perhaps I keep 'telling stories with the hope that ultimately [I'll] be able to live [my] way into them [or out of them]' (B.C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality [New York: Oxford University Press], p. 144
¹³Oliver La Farge became one of the strongest opponents of Dillon S. Myer, the controverisal commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) from 1950-1953. Myer was best known for his role as the director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) which was responsible for incarcerating thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II (R. Drinnon, Keeper of the Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], pp. xxiii-xxciv, 39, 226-227). Dillon Myer saw a natural connection in the U.S. domestic policy of Japanese-American 'relocation' and Native American 'relocations' and hoped to exploit this close association in the postwar years by dissolving all American Indian reservations. Interestingly, Leslie Marmon Silko alludes to the similarity between U.S./Japanese-American policy and U.S./Native American policy in her novel Ceremony (pp. 6, 17-18, 124, 246), but lays it open to a postcolonial critique (cf. J. Brice, 'Earth as Mother, Earth as Other in Novels by Silko and Hogan' Critique 39 (1998), pp. 132-133; and T.E. Benediktsson, 'The Reawakening of the Gods: Realism and the Supernatural in Silko and Hulme' Critique 33 (1992), pp. 121-131).
¹⁴ D'Arcy McNickle, (Indian Man: A Life of Oliver La Farge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 58.
¹⁵ C.S. Kidwell, 'Indian Women as Cultural Mediators', Ethnohistory 39 (1992), 97-107. Wendy Doniger voices my feelings when she writes, 'In pursuing the multivocal, multicultural agenda, we must face the implications of the fact that we use other peoples' stories for our purposes. The political problem inheres in the asymmetry of power between the appropriating culture and the appropriated. Thus, if Europe has dominated India [or Navajo culture], it is deemed wrong for a European to make use of an Indian myth. But it seems to me that there are very different ways of using other peoples' myths, some of them fairly innocuous, and the usual alternative to appropriating a foreign text (however inadequate or exploitative or projective that appropriation may be) can be even worse: ignoring it or scorning it. Moreover, the European appropriation need not supplant the Indian version; the native voice can be heard even above the academic clamor of the foreign voice.
¹⁶ The gift that the postcolonial critique has given us is a heightened awareness of what we are doing, why, and the dangers involved' (The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998]), p. 70.
¹⁷ J. Townsend, 'Missionary Journeys in Acts and European Missionary Societies', pp. 433-37. Cf. R.B. Rackham, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 271; R.S. Sugirtharajah, 'A Postcolonial Exploration of Collusion and Construction in Biblical Interpretation', pp. 100-107.
¹⁸ Other programmatic visionary experiences in Luke-Acts are found in Luke 1.11-22; 24.4-11, 23; and Acts 9.10-16; 10.3-20; 22.17-21; 26.19; 27.23-25.
¹⁹ This is an attempt to connect the subsequent 'we' text (Acts 16.11-13) with Paul's Macedonian mission (E. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary [Philadephia: Westminster Press, 1971], p. 489).
²⁰ See, for example, Susan Praeder's essay, 'Luke-Acts and the Ancient Novel' SBLSP 20 (1981), pp. 269-292.
²¹ Origen, Homily on Luke, 12, quoted approvingly in W. Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 32.
²² Talbert, Reading Acts, p. 149; cf. Pervo, Luke's Story of Paul, p. 55.
²³ Interestingly, R.B. Rackham rejects the word 'journey' when describing Paul's activity in Macedonia, preferring the more militaristic term 'campaign' (The Acts of the Apostles, p. 271, n. 2).
²⁴ J.D. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), pp. 76-77, 88-91; quoting Mary Douglas and other cultural anthropologists. Robert Tannehill notes the literary connections between Acts 16.16-18 and the story of the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8:26-39; cf. Acts 19.12-15), but without mentioning the political implications of the stories (The Narrative Unity of Luke-Acts: A Literary Interpretation Volume 2: The Acts of the Apostles (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), p. 197.
²⁵ L.T. Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 297.
²⁶ Scott, Paul and the Nations, p. 20; cf. P.S. Alexander, 'Notes on the "Imago Mundi"', p. 198.
²⁷P.S. Alexander, 'Notes on the "Imago Mundi"', p. 204.
²⁸H.C. Kee, To Every Nation, pp. 197-200; F.F. Bruce, Commentary on the Book of Acts (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1954), pp. 335-336; J.H. Neyrey, 'Luke's social location of Paul: cultural anthropology and the status of Paul in Acts', in B. Witherington III (ed.), History, Literature, and Society in the Book of Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 263-264.
²⁹ Richard Ascough has recently argued that 'prwthV thV MakedoniaV poliV' should be the preferred reading of the textual variant in Acts 16.12, based upon a cultural assessment of civic pride in ancient Philippi rather than upon the city's actual political significance ('Civic Pride at Philippi: The Text-Critical Problem of Acts 16.12' NTS 44 [1998], pp. 93-103; cf. J.H. Neyrey, 'Luke's social location of Paul', pp. 268-270. ³⁰ Talbert calls this 'an appeal to nationalism and racial prejudice' (ibid. p. 152), but is using the terms 'nationalism' and 'racial prejudice' in anachronistic ways (cf. Neyrey, 'Luke's social location of Paul', pp. 255-260, 276-79). ³¹ Ibid. p. 152. Talbert goes on to argue that on another level 'there are [five] . . . points this section makes regarding the relation of believers to the state. . . . [I]t shows the legitimacy of disciples' appealing to their legal rights as protection against unjust treatment by nonbelievers; . . . it says believers must be prepared to suffer unjustly because Roman officials are sometimes swayed by mob hysteria . . .; it claims that the state is usually reasonable and will correct mistakes when these are made clear . . .; it makes very clear that the disciples are not the troublemakers but are the victims of those with questionable motives . . .; [and] such unjust suffering at the hands of the state lends credence to one's claims' (pp. 153-54; cf. Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles, p. 133; R.J. Cassidy, Society and Politics in the Acts of the Apostles [New York: Orbis, 1987], pp. 87-89, 150-153, 162). ³² Cf. Acts 13.6-8, 48-51; 14.1-7, 19-20. See also Acts 17.4-5, 12-13; 18.12-13. The only other case of Gentile-instigated opposition occurs much later in Ephesus, when Demetrius the silversmith starts a riot (18.23-28).
³³Pp. 128-143.
³⁴ Musa Dube Shomanah borrows the term 'typescene' ('Toward a Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible', pp. 205-209) from Robert Alter's analysis of betrothal scenes in ancient Hebrew narrative (The Art of Biblical Narrative [New York: Basic Books, 1981], pp. 51-52). However, Dube Shomanah's appropriation of the term is somewhat problematical, since in Alter's view biblical typescenes isolate 'a series of recurrent narrative episodes attached to the careers of biblical heroes . . .[which] catch [the] protagonists only at the crucial junctures in [their] lives' (Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 51; my emphasis). Thus, by attending to the author's manipulation of the typescene's motifs the interpreter gains insight into the art of biblical characterization (Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, 52). But Dube Shomanah's analysis does not focus on hero or heroine figures of the stature of Jacob, Moses, or Saul, as much as on the secondary characters in the scenes. Nor does she attempt to show how the manipulation of the motifs subtly affects a particular author's ideological strategy. Nevertheless, I do believe that Dube Shomanah has clearly identified an important colonization motif in biblical narrative, one which she goes on to deconstruct in an important, decolonizing manner ('Toward a Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible', pp. 250-326; 378-414).
³⁵ Dube Shomanah, 'Toward a Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible', p. 209.
³⁶ The exorcism of a demon from the Syrophoenician woman's daughter (Mark 7:24-30) is another 'land possession typescene' which mentions two women, but the daughter in the story does not function as a character.
³⁷ H. Moxnes, 'Patron-Client Relations and the New Community', in J.H. Neyrey (ed.), The Social World of Luke-Acts (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Press, 1991), pp. 262-263; see also J.H. Neyrey, 'Luke's social location of Paul', pp. 264-265, 275. Cf. M.R. D'Angelo, 'Women in Luke-Acts: A Redactional View' JBL 109 (1990), pp. 553, 555, 558-559.
³⁸ H. Moxnes, 'Patron-Client Relations and the New Community', p. 262; cf. F.M. Gillman,'Early Christian Women at Philippi', Journal of Gender in World Religions 1 (1990), pp. 59-79.
³⁹ (H.K. Kee, To Every Nation, p. 197). Cf. J.D.G. Dunn's aside to the effect that 'one can well imagine, for example, a dim-witted slave girl, who had picked up phrases used offhand by missionaries, following them around and calling them out in the way Luke records' ( The Acts of the Apostles, p. 221). L.T. Johnson calls the slave girl and her masters 'the equivalent of an urban dog and pony show' Acts of the Apostles, p. 298). But surely in that patriarchal world it is her masters ('kurioi', Acts 16.16, 19) who are the manipulators of her mantic gift. Nevertheless, the fact that Paul exorcises the spirit from the girl is evidence that the author views it as an oppositional and deceptive power (see, for example, P.R. Trebilco, 'Paul and Silas--"Servants of the Most High God" (Acts 16.16-18)', JSNT 36 [1989], pp. 51-73). For a different point of view, see R.M. Price who argues that the prophetic voice being stifled in Acts 16 is that of the authentic Christian prophetess (The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny SBLDS 155 [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997], pp. 225-34; esp. pp. 228-29).
⁴⁰ H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 199, as quoted in J. Perkinson, 'A Canaanite Word in the Logos of Christ; or The Difference the Syro-Phoenician Woman Makes to Jesus', Semeia 75 (1996), pp. 70; cf. p. 66; see also R. Boer, 'Green Ants and Gibeonites: B. Wongar, Joshua 9, and Some Problems of Postcolonialism', Semeia 75 (1996), p. 144.
⁴¹ R.M. Price, The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts, pp. 225-34; esp. pp. 228-29. Price cites as supporting evidence his interpretation of the Joanna vignette (Luke 8.2-3) pp. 127-51, esp. pp. 129-30, 138-40.
⁴² Ibid. p. 229. Price goes on to argue--following the suggestion of William M. Ramsay--that the epithet 'Jezebel' in Revelation 3.20 might also refer to the demonizing of the prophetess Lydia in much the same manner as the Acts 16 text does (The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts, pp. 233-34).
⁴³ Hans Conzelmann notes that a damaged inscription found at Philippi has the word 'PV]RPVPARI[, "purple" still visible' (Acts of the Apostles, p. 130).
⁴⁴P.G. Allen, Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), p. 2.
⁴⁵ La Farge, Laughing Boy, pp. 15-16; cf. 35, 50, 177.
⁴⁶'T'o Tlikahn' is La Farge's spelling of the Navajo word for 'Sweetwater.' It was the closest trading post to our mission (Laughing Boy, p. 13).
⁴⁷ Ibid. p. 5.
⁴⁸ Ibid. p. 6.
⁴⁹ For an analysis of Native American border women in colonial literature, see V. Stolcke, 'Invaded Women: Gender, Race, and Class, in the Formation of Colonial Society', in M. Hendricks and P. Parker (eds.), Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge Press, 1994), pp. 272-289; and K. Robertson, 'Pocahontas at the Masque' Signs 21 (1996), pp. 551-583. Border women of the Bible are discussed by R. Maldonado, 'Reading Malinche Reading Ruth', pp. 97-100; I.R. Kitzberger, 'Border Crossing and Meeting Jesus at the Well. An Autobiographical Re-reading of the Samaritan Woman's Story in John 4:1-44', in I.R. Kitzberger (ed.), The Personal Voice in Biblical Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1999); and by M. Dube Shomanah in her previously mentioned dissertation, 'Toward a Post-Colonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible'.
⁵⁰La Farge, Laughing Boy, pp. 177.
⁵¹ Ibid. p. 45-47.
⁵² L.M. Silko, Ceremony, pp. 33-39.
⁵³ Ibid. pp. 116-145.
⁵⁴ Ibid. pp. 84, 98.
⁵⁵ Ibid. p. 100
⁵⁶ Ibid. p. 153.
⁵⁷ Ibid. p. 119.
⁵⁸ Ibid. p. 155.
⁵⁹ Significantly, Tayo recalls a previous meeting with a mysterious woman (Spider Woman) precisely at the moment he is cutting through the barbed-wire fence that separates the reservation from a white man's ranch (Ceremony, p. 194; cf. pp. 176-177, 183).
⁶⁰ This perspective is seen most clearly in characters like Tayo's grandmother who is able to mingle 'all of creation [with] two names: an Indian name and a white name' and still see the underlying unity (Ceremony, pp. 68-69; cf. pp. 259-260); and in Betonie, the Navajo medicine man who can say 'You see, in many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing' (ibid. p. 126; cf. pp. 132, 150, 153-154; cf. B.A. St. Andrews 'Healing the Witchery: Medicine in Silko's Ceremony' Arizona Quarterly 14 [1988], pp. 86-94; and N.R. Rand, 'Surviving What Haunts You: The Art of Invisibility in Ceremony, The Ghost Writer, and Beloved' MELUS 20 [1995], pp. 21-32).