Stewardship in The Chicken Chronicles

I noticed that along with using the chickens as a vehicle for communicating her life philosophy and working with her memories for personal growth, Walker also uses setting dynamically to not only set a scene but to communicate life lessons learned.  In chapter 24, “A Few Kind Words About Stupidity,” I feel that Walker uses setting to expose human folly in her dealings with the deer. She describes the change that happens on her land over time: long before the chickens, Walker would watch the deer wander across her property; then at some point, Walker fenced off a quarter of her land for the house/garden/orchard/yard; then the coming of vineyards that limited the deer’s access to the land; and finally the decimation of the deer population by hunters and traffic. She sets up this chronology to then make an interesting move: she links the hunting of male deer (bucks) to the hunting of runaway black male slaves and Native American men—both also called bucks. In this way, Walker brings together many of the complexities that have arose and haunt American culture in regard to land, space, ownership and the violence that began during colonial times, continued through manifest destiny, and is still affecting the natural world as more and more habitat space is being erased in the face of human “development” of land. By setting up her prose as if her audience were the chickens, Walker also serves her purpose here. By using simple language and syntax, and breaking down ideas to what she feels a chicken might understand, Walker is able to powerfully expose how ridiculous and (at their base) irrational many human behaviors in are. For example, she says “Discrimination often means having a hard time finding a place to live or feeding yourself and your family. People could starve. Like, for instance, some of you could starve if I gave food only to the Red Gang of Six…and very little or none to Rhode Island Reds, Barred Rocks, or Ameraucanas” (122).  Walker does not attempt to explain why discrimination happens but rather highlights what the dire consequences of it are. In this way, Walker shows how arbitrary discrimination is and the life or death disadvantages it creates; if you are dealt a certain card by fate, you may not have a home or enough food to survive.

 But fate, in this situation (or maybe Nature?), shows Walker the way to become a steward of her land, taking care of both herself and all the creatures on it in happy coexistence when a storm knocks down part of her fence. She says “The solution came to her in a flash of inspiration, which is simultaneously a welcome release from stupidity!...She saw how she and her kind, humans, were really the dangerous ones” (123). By knowing what to do, by coming up with the solution to build smaller fences around her garden and let the deer have more access to the other, safer parts of the yard, Walker becomes an active agent on her land, shaping it to everyone’s advantage. I feel in this chapter Walker is relaying a personal triumph in solving a problem, but I also feel she is calling humanity at large, and especially Americans, to think outside the box for solutions to problems of environmental conservation and discrimination in access to resources.