Mary Austin: The Land of Little RainThe Basket Maker The Basket Maker by Mary Austin is, like all the other stories in the book, a very detailed description of the Western landscape and the its inhabitants. But this time it focused more on a single inhabitant, an Indian woman named Seyavi. It's quite difficult to really define the plot of the story. While the story seems to focus on Seyavi's life and experiences, she is not the one telling that story. The narrator, who is omniscient, takes on the role of intermediary between her and the reader. The narrator is not determined, the reader does not know who is telling the story, whether it is a woman or a man, although two things speak of a female narrator: the first is very obvious, since the book was written by a woman I suggest simply that here too the narrator is a woman. The second reason also works in favor of a female narrator, because it focuses more on things that I would expect to be of greater female interest and that are more likely to be acknowledged or mentioned by women: I have read many journals written by women on the earthly paths and written about their lives on the frontier (Willa Cather does the same). All of them had a very special way of treating the landscape and the Indians in their writings. Especially with the landscape they were very detailed, sometimes this was the only thing they wrote about for days. It also seemed to me that, compared to the men's diaries, the women had a very special curiosity about the Indians and their behavior. So in my analysis I will refer to the narrator as “she.” The reason I think the narrator is omniscient (meaning he knows more than us about the subject he's talking about) as well as trustworthy, or at least wants us to think he was, is because he simply says it. She feels empowered to tell Seyavi's story because she knows the land, the living conditions and knows how to survive in these lands. This is when he forms a kind of conspiracy with those who also know the land, who have been there. "To understand the style of a life, one must know the land in which one lives and the procession of the year.