Janet Campbell Hale - 1946
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Advanced English III
Emmett High School, Emmett, ID.
I. Personal and Professional Biography
Native Americans have always struggled to find a better place in the prejudicial eyes of this society. Janet Campbell Hale, a reservation girl whose fate seemed predetermined by her race, has exposed those eyes to the potential each person has to turn his or her life around. She has shown all that, given the worst conditions, one can succeed as she has, and because of this she has become a well-known Native American author.
Born on January 11, 1946 (Hale 11), in Riverside, California ("Hale" 245), Janet Campbell Hale was the youngest of four daughters (Hale 12). Hale's father, Nicholas Patrick, who was around fifty-two years old when she was born (Hale 11), was a full-blooded Coeur d'Alene Indian (Bataille 111) veteran of WWI (Hale 11) that worked as a carpenter ("Hale" 245). Margaret Sullivan Campbell, Hale's mother, was also a Native American. She was Kootenay, Irish, and Ojibwa (Hale 12).
In her younger years, Hale felt disconnected from her family. She faced rejection from the most important figure a daughter can have, her mother. Hale's mother was not one to pride herself in her heritage. In fact, Margaret denied her native roots and called herself an Irish American. Lacking the recognition of her own roots led Margaret to disrespect the Native American heritage of Hale's father (Hale 12). Besides verbally attacking Nicholas about his ancestry, Margaret also turned on her own daughter. Janet was often subjected to her mother's verbal abuse. Margaret made it clear to Janet that she was Margaret's "worst pregnancy" (Hale 48). According to Hale, her mother was "a master, an absolute master of verbal abuse" (Bataille 111).
Besides being rejected by her mother, Hale faced rejection from other family members, as well. The others happened to be her mother's sisters. Instead of making remarks directly to Hale, her aunts would focus their emphasis on the Indian race as a whole (Hale 49). But, the pain and rejection didn't stop with racist remarks. Hale's grandmother went lower by turning away Hale simply because of her dark skin (Bataille 111).
To make her life worse, the relationship between Hale's mother and father wasn't typically healthy. Their constant disputes filled with drunkenness and verbal beatings resulted in no hopes or dreams for Hale. The only thing she found was plenty of moving around. One of the first places Hale grew up was the Coeur d'Alene reservation located in northern Idaho (Voices). There she had no running water or working electricity (Interview). She also grew up partly on the Yakima reservation in central Washington (Voices). At one point during the 1950s, Hale's mother decided to leave Hale's father because of his drunkenness, and Janet and her mother ended up moving back and forth from the reservation where her father lived to towns found all around the northwest (Hale 12) but her mother and father finally reconciled and the family (reconciled but not unbroken) of three moved together, again, all around the northwest. Uprooted and moving around, Hale found herself in Tacoma, Portland, Yakima, Pocatello, and Wapato, Washington, where she lived the longest (13). After moving around for so long, Hale decided to go off on her own.
While still a teenager, Hale moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico (13). In Santa Fe the sixteen year-old Hale attended the Institute of American Indian Arts and met her first husband Arthur Dudley III whom she married in June 1964 (13). The two had a son, Aaron Nicholas (Bataille 109). However, the marriage was a short and unhappy one, and it ended in 1965 (Hale 13).
After her first marriage, Hale found herself all alone in San Francisco with a child to take care of (Hale13). She needed to pull her life together which was a tough goal to achieve due to the fact that she hadn't completed high school ("Hale" 46). Hale found ways to support herself and her son by welfare and by the few temporary jobs she was able to find (Hale 14). Finally, her life began to turn around for the better when she was able to put her son in a government-funded day care so she could attend the City College of San Francisco, also made possible by government funding (14).
According to Frederick Hale, Janet had a "successful year" at the college (14). However, in her interview with Amazon.com Hale reveals that during her time at CCSF she was given a "D" in one of her writing classes; discouraged, Hale decided to study law instead. She chose to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where she met and married Stephen Dinsmore Hale in 1970, and they had a daughter, Jennifer Elizabeth (Bataille 109). While attending Berkeley, Hale, also, earned her Bachelor's degree in Rhetoric in 1974 (Hale 14). She then became part of the five percent of Coeur d'Alene Indians to have a college degree (14). Hale was able to obtain a degree again, this time at the University of California at Davis in 1984 ("Hale" 245). She received her Masters of Arts in English (Hale 15).
After obtaining an education, Hale sought a career. Hale's career consists of numerous teaching positions around the West, none of which was long-term (15). She was a literature instructor at the University of Oregon, the University of California, Davis, and Lummi College in Bellingham, Washington ("Hale" 245), and according to McFarland she also taught at Western Washington University (25). Hale, also, used her career as a form of interaction with her heritage by teaching at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, the University of California, Berkeley, as a instructor of Native American studies, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, as a visiting professor for Native American literature ("Hale" 245). Other temporary jobs include positions at Iowa State University for the Richard Thompson Lectureship, the Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the University of Idaho (Hanksville ). Hale also had a job as an editor's assistant at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc. at San Francisco in 1970 (Hale 14).
Hale's literary career began long before she ever received a real education. At the age of nine, Hale explains in her interview with Amazon.com, she had already begun writing poetry as a remedy for her mother's verbal abuse as well as a remedy to the isolation she felt from her family. Hale continued to write poetry throughout her years as a teenager even though she had already grown up by then ( Voices). Through poetry and other forms of writing Hale found salvation and comfort in these forms of self-expression. "I wrote poetry, stories, essays because of a deep personal need," says Hale who found that the only way for her to understand her life was to write about it ("Hale" 246).
This "personal need" has turned Hale into a well-known Native American author (246). Her first and most popular book is The Owl's Song (Voices) which Hale wrote while attending a workshop at the University of California (Hale 17). Published in 1974 (Bataille 110), The Owl's Song follows a pattern of events similar to the pattern of Hale's own life ("Hale" 246). In it she reveals the truth about the prejudices found among people of all races (Bataille 110); prejudice was something she had experienced often, even while in college--at the University of California, Davis, the instructor would call Hale "The Indian Princess" and "Pocahantas" (Interview). In the book, Hale also deals with the subject of death among the cultural world, the physical world, and the spiritual world (Bataille 110).
Hale also wrote The Jailing of Cecelia Capture while attending college. It was written as her thesis for her Masters at Davis (Hanksville). The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, a combination of autobiography and fiction (Walsh 25), was published in 1985 (Hale 32). Hale's other published works include The Conners of Conner Prairie which was published in 1982 ("Hale" 245), Custer Lives in Humboldt County and Other Poems which was published in 1978 (Hale 16), Women on the Run which was published in 1999, and her autobiography Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter which was published in 1993 (16).
Hale has also received literary distinction through her awards and honors. In 1963 she received first place in the Vincent Price Poetry Competition, and in 1964 she received the New York Poetry Day Award (Bataille 109). In 1985 Hale earned a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for her work The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (Interview), and in 1994 she received the American Book Award for Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter (Native American) . And, in 1995 Hale received a creative writing grant from the National Endowment of the Arts (Native American).
Hale has also explored other types of art. She painted a mural at the Coeur d'Alene tribal school and the cover of Women on the Run (Hanksville). Currently, Hale is working on her latest novel, Dora Lee in Love , and The Fort Vancouver Trilogy, a novel based on her ancestors (Interview). Hale has, also, been able to come to terms with her past. The death of her mother in 1982 made Hale realize that "in the end there are no resolutions. Only an end." (qtd. in Bataille111). Through the death of her mother, Hale has, also, faced the issue of truth in her own life. The lies she had told her children of her happy childhood have been confronted, and Hale now lives comfortably on the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation in northern Idaho (Bataille 111).
Having been born into a family that expected nothing from her, Janet Campbell Hale has faced challenges from her very beginning. But, all of her trials and hardships have created a wiser and stronger woman, a woman whose eyes now see the true colors of society and the true colors of her own life. Janet Campbell Hale will continue to make an impact in her own life and an impact on this society as one of Idaho's Native American authors.
II. Works Cited
Bataille, Gretchen M. "Janet Campbell Hale." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 175. 1997. 109-111.
"Hale, Janet Campbell." Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Vol. 75. Detroit: Gale, 1999. 245-246.
Hanksville Storytellers. 9 April 2001.
Hale, Frederick. Janet Campbell Hale. Boise State U. Western Writers Ser. 125. Boise, ID: Boise State U, 1996.
Interview with Janet Campbell Hale. Amazon.com Author Interview. 9 April 2001.
McFarland, Ronald E., William Studebaker, and William Stafford. Idaho's Poetry: A Centennial Anthology. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 1988. Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color. 9 April 2001.
Walsh, Dennis. "The Place of Janet Campbell Hale and Sherman Alexie in American Indian
Literature." Tough Paradise: The Literature of Idaho and the Intermountain West. Boise: Idaho Humanities Council, 1995. III. Other Resources
Bataille, Gretchen, and Kathleen M. Sands. "Women's Autobiography." Dictionary of Native American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. New York: Garland, 1994.
Brumble, H. David. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Hale, Janet Campbell. Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter. New York: Random, 1993.
The Conners of Conner Prairie. Indianapolis: Guild P of Indiana, 1989. "The Jailing of Cecelia Capture." Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary
Western Women Writers. Eds. Kim Barnes and Mary Clearman Blew. New York: Penguin, 1994. The Jailing Of Cecelia Capture. New York: Random, 1985.
Women on the Run. Moscow, ID: U of Idaho P, 1999. Jelinek, Estelle C. Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.
Kowrach, Edward U., and Thomas E. Connolly, eds. Saga of the Coeur d'Alene Indians: An Account of Chief Joseph Seltice. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon, 1990.
Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Came After: A Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.
McFarland, Ronald E., William Studebaker, and William Stafford. Idaho's Poetry: A Centennial Anthology. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 1988.
Peltier, Jerome. A Brief History of the Coeur d'Alene Indians, 1896-1909. Fairfield, WA: Ye Galleon, 1982. Ruoff, A. Lavonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction Bibliographic
Essay, and Selected Bibliography. New York: MLA, 1990. Walker, Deward E., Jr. Indians of Idaho. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 1978.
This essay was submitted by a student of Joanne Davis, an English teacher at Emmett High School in Idaho.