Antelope Woman

Content Warning: This guide contains discussions of the source text’s depictions of sexual assault, domestic violence, suicide, and substance abuse disorders.

Blue Prairie Woman is mother to both the girl whom Scranton Roy calls Matilda and twins Mary and Josephette. Although she appears in only the beginning of the novel, she is an important character in that she is one of the two families’ ancestral figures. She represents intergenerational connection and the persistence of tradition, even as the Roys and the Shawanos live in an increasingly modern (and assimilated) world. Blue Prairie Woman’s deep and abiding love for her daughters, as well as her relationship with a canine figure, will be echoed in successive generations and form another way in which the women in the Roy and Shawano families remain connected to the history of their families. Her name will ultimately be bestowed on one of their granddaughters by Giizis and Noodin, and she thus remains closely connected to the last generation of Roys and Shawanos depicted in Antelope Woman.

Scranton Roy is a white soldier in the United States Army. The son of a Quaker father and a poet mother, he grew up on the East Coast before heading west with the military.