The “Second Creation” of Captive Children

The “Second Creation” of Captive Children is Doris Dillon’s account of what happens when a child is taken from one community and later returned to another: the experience can undo the first formation of the self instead of restoring it. The idea gives a name to the distance between physical return and belonging. Johanna Leonberger’s captivity and the remembered story of Kiowa Dutch make that distance concrete, while Jefferson Kyle Kidd’s duty to deliver Johanna to her blood relatives brings its human cost into the present.

Doris Dillon’s account

Doris introduces the idea while Johanna eats pieces of bacon with her hands and the adults discuss what she is. To Doris, Johanna has been twice captured and carried away by forces larger than herself. Doris compares her to the china-headed doll: neither simply real nor unreal, and still strange regardless of what clothing is put on it. The comparison does not make Johanna into an object; it conveys how little a change in outward appearance can settle the question of who she is after what she has endured.

Doris describes a first creation as a turning of the soul toward the light, away from the animal world. A second creation, by contrast, tears apart the making of the first. Its damage may leave a person falling into pieces, searching for the ground or foundation from which the self was formed. Doris’s image of a lost rock of creation makes the problem more than a choice between two homes: the child may no longer feel securely anchored in either account of who she is.

When Jefferson Kyle Kidd asks how Doris knows this, she points to An Gorta Mór. She recalls children who saw their parents die, then went to live with people on the other side; in their minds, she says, they went with them. When they returned, they were unfinished and forever falling. Her comparison presents the wound as a consequence of bereavement and displacement, not as a simple failure to adapt. Johanna’s quiet, careful eating remains before the adults as Doris speaks: the theory takes shape around a child who cannot make her experience legible to them in ordinary terms.

A life beyond the return journey

Simon supplies another example in the story of Kiowa Dutch, a completely blond-haired man whose place and time of capture were unknown to everyone, including the man himself. Simon had played for a dance at Belknap when Kiowa Dutch was brought in. During the Army’s attempt to return him, he escaped from the men escorting him and remained in the country he had been taken to. The account does not explain his later life or claim that every returned captive responds in the same way. Its force lies in the unresolved details: neither the man’s origins nor the circumstances of his capture could give the authorities a reliable path back for him.

Jefferson Kyle Kidd says he has heard of the case and reflects on how completely minds can change. He has nevertheless taken on the task of returning Johanna and must try. Simon agrees to go and get Doris, but not before recognizing the burden of Kidd’s undertaking. Kiowa Dutch’s escape stands as a stark alternative to the return Kidd is attempting: an Army escort can carry a person toward relatives, but it cannot by itself restore an earlier identity or make the destination feel like home.

Return and the fear of confinement

Later, while traveling with Johanna, Jefferson Kyle Kidd sees that she is content as long as they are on the move, absorbed by the world around her. He fears what will happen when she understands that travel will end and she is expected to live with her Leonberger relatives in a square house, a place that cannot be broken down and carried on a travois. His anxiety is not proof that he knows what Johanna wants for the rest of her life; it is the recognition that the return he is responsible for may feel like confinement to a child accustomed to another way of moving through the world.

He remembers accounts of other returned captives: Cynthia Parker and Temple Friend starved themselves after being returned to white relatives, while others became alcoholics, solitaries, or people regarded as strange. He thinks of returned children as restless and hungry for spiritual solace, abandoned by two cultures. These examples widen Doris’s idea beyond Johanna without reducing all such lives to one outcome. The repeated emphasis is on the failure of a neat resolution: being returned does not necessarily restore a person to the identity or security others expect.

Kidd’s obligation remains painful precisely because affection and duty pull in different directions. Johanna and Kidd have saved each other’s lives and fought together, yet he believes her blood relatives are the people to whom she must be returned. He considers the possibility that delivering her there may mean surrendering the freedom and movement she presently enjoys. The novel leaves that conflict intact: care for a child can require action that does not guarantee comfort, reconciliation, or a completed sense of home.

Narrative significance

The concept links an intimate image—the child searching for the rock of her creation—to a larger failure of return. Doris’s account, Simon’s recollection, and Kidd’s fear do not offer a treatment or a reliable prediction for Johanna. Instead, they challenge the assumption that a child can be made whole simply by being brought back to relatives. The doll’s unchanging strangeness, Kiowa Dutch’s escape, and Johanna’s contentment on the road each resist a clean boundary between an original self and a restored one.

The novel also places these reflections beside the practical demands of survival. When Doris speaks about the unfinished child, Kidd is shaving, then returns to his newspapers and the need to earn a living; he has to hear the coins fall before he can attend to mysteries about children’s grief. Doris answers that the newspapers leave great holes, including the lives of the poor. That contrast gives the idea a social dimension: an experience can be central to a person’s life and still be almost absent from the public account of events. The “Second Creation” therefore names both the child’s dislocation and the difficulty of making that dislocation visible to those who are arranging her return.