Diaz & Russell
When Natalie Diaz concludes her short story The Last Mojave Indian Barbie with ‘Mojave Barbie was probably waving goodbye - with hands like that, you can never be sure’, she frames her protagonist driving away from a Dream House which has become more cultural nightmare than aspirational home. Throughout the piece, Diaz braids together aspirational aspects of a plastic indigenous Native American Barbie doll with real-world elements of the lived experience of a young Native American woman.
Swiftly moving between accessories of dream catchers and turquoise earrings into forehead tattoos and six packs of beer, Diaz never dwells in one place for long. Her Mojave Barbie co-exists in a place which is outside of the plastic Barbie’s fantasy and adjacent to a real-world experience of sex, disease, origin and the contentious history of the American west between the country’s indigenous populations and those seeking manifest destiny. She blends the two together, often in violent terms. Mojave Barbie is a diabetic but has to resort to the black market to find the hypodermic needle accessory kit in order to take her insulin. Skipper reminds this Barbie that she’s not even from the mountains in the desert, she’s made in Asia. And her true love Ken only serves to satisfy both of their sexual appetites. By giving the neutered and sexless dolls the ability to yenni (have sex) all night, Diaz reshapes the plastic of their lives and resolves their flattened out cast plastic gender. In their liberating realization, they are still just plastic sex toys.
Inside their sexual role-play, Diaz has Ken and Barbie play Cowboy and Indian. Barbie’s feathered hair tickles Ken’s fancy and finds her adorned in the turquoise and white beads of the American Southwest, where Ken straps on his wooden six shooters, a plastic Stetson, and chases her around the Dream House. Their discovery leads to punishment from the all-powerful Mattel, who strip Ken of his luxuries but banish Mojave Barbie from the house to a job as a casino dealer in California. Her destiny is to be sent as far west as possible. Here Diaz is leaning on the historic violence between not just male and female culture, but the destructive relocation of indigenous peoples by the cowboy culture brought forward in the 1800s as immigrants in the east sought better lives in the west. Mojave Barbie and Ken may have made good bedfellows once, but this is a relationship which ends in terrible darkness with Mojave Barbie, as with many Native American cultures, consigned to reservation casinos which still entertain those of privilege. Diaz’s Barbie is one of unmedicated and unresolved historical pain. Subject to the violence of those around her, but also taught things about herself which aren’t true. Mattel, serving in the authoritative role of government within the piece, move communities around like chess pieces in order to accommodate westward expansion, where Mojave Barbie is rendered as voiceless as her plastic counterpart. No wonder Diaz’s Mojave Barbie drinks.
But it’s more than just a plastic parable about the ills of the old west. It’s an indictment of the fabricated, polished veneer we place upon our past. Diaz breaks the wall between past and present through the relationship between plastic and flesh. Mojave Barbie’s flesh is the past catching up to the present and breaking the sheen of the modern day plastic. This Barbie drinks, has sex, flips others the bird, has tattoos and works in a casino. She breaks the glass of history’s Dream House and subjects it to harsh reality of a modern indigenous life. These may begin as dolls but, just as those who play with them often do, they mature and find out that the promise of the world espoused by Barbie is very different from the real world Barbie’s owners exist within. It’s a place which weaponizes the plastic aspiration of the past to remind us of truth in the present. A displaced, disorienting place which falls between the promise of Barbie and Ken’s neutered existence as dolls and young indigenous females’ actual experience. It leans on both but ends up existing as neither dream house nor trailer park. A third place where plastic and flesh are braided together.
All of these meta-textual references of old and young, then and now, manifest destiny and the violence of indigenous relocation produce their own hallucination venue, where toys and bodies entwine, and we as readers are never truly certain of what’s real or imagined. Ultimately it’s an experience and site of great sadness, however victorious Mojave Barbie might be as she drives away from the Dream House. So few of the things which happen to her are of her own choice, rendered without agency as both plastic toy and native community. This is Diaz drawing comparisons with not just the political expansionist thinking of the 1800s, but how the practical echoes of such marginalizing policy still exist today. Mojave Barbie isn’t given the agency for us to know if she’s waving or swearing, and while Ken reassures Skipper that one can never be sure, we as readers know the answer. It’s both.
