Two Old Women

Initially named for the sound a chickadee makes, Ch’idzigyaak is an Alaskan woman who is raised in an environment of cold weather and cold hearts. At a young age, she hears her deaf and blind grandmother crying as her family and tribe abandons her to the elements because of her disabilities. Ch’idzigyaak has always remembered this display of apathy toward human life. She experiences this same indifference when her family refuses to acknowledge her wants and desires and forces her to marry a man many years her senior. In a less extreme way, she is once again part of a sacrifice meant to save society but not her soul.

At the opening of the novella, Ch’idzigyaak is an 80-year-old mother (of Ozhii Nelii) and grandmother (of Shruh Zhuu). She is considered an outcast within her tribe because of her penchant for whining. When both she and a fellow old woman are selected for abandonment, the emotional distance forced on her as a child becomes apparent as she ignores, rather than acknowledges, her departing family. Once Ch’idzigyaak is abandoned by her family and her tribe, she becomes much more self-sufficient and is able to take on the active, independent life she had once coveted as a young woman.