Power, Discrimination, and Oppression Theme Analysis

In “Lullaby,” Ayah, the Navajo protagonist, faces discrimination and oppression at the hands of white people in power. In flashbacks, she and her husband, Chato, live in a shack “where the rancher let the Indians live,” implying that their presence is tolerated as opposed to welcomed. A white officer delivers the news that Ayah’s son, Jimmie, has died fighting in a war started by other white men, but that they have no body for her to bury—an added indignity that angers her. In addition, white doctors take her two younger children away from her. This event particularly illustrates Ayah’s powerlessness in white society, since her inability to speak English hinders her from understanding that she has signed away her rights to her children until it is too late.

The resentment Ayah feels toward white people is exacerbated by Chato’s attempts to assimilate into their culture by learning English. She hates Chato specifically for teaching her to sign her name, regretting that she didn’t listen to “the old ones” who warned that learning the ways of white colonizers only puts Navajo people in danger. Throughout the years, Ayah takes grim satisfaction when Chato’s loyal work and “fine-sounding English talk” ultimately make no difference in how white people treat him.

Unlike Chato, Ayah does not seek the approval of white people. By freeing herself from the pursuit of this kind of acceptance, she does gain a limited form of power. In the present, she is an old woman who has lost so much that she gains a peculiar kind of invincibility. Confronting a bar full of patrons who look at her with something like fear, she sees what they see: that “there was nothing anyone could do to her now.” With this in mind, the story hints that, though Ayah is forced to live in a racist and intolerant society, she can maintain a certain sense of dignity by refusing to seek approval from her oppressors. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily change her circumstances, but it does afford her a small—but important—kind of personal freedom.