Louise Erdrich’s published works are both popular and critically acclaimed—popular in that her books are often on the New York Times Best Seller list, an indicatin that the general public buys large numbers of her books, and critically acclaimed in that her books earn excellent reviews and are often required reading in college literature classes. The combined honor is rare. Popular fiction is often disdained by university literature professors as being writing that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Stephen King’s works, for instance, have only recently become acceptable as a topic for literature classes—something that was probably helped when many of his novels, such as The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, were made into movies that won prestigious awards. Erdrich’s works have not been made into movies—not yet—but her work is recognized within popular culture, which makes it all the more remarkable that her books are considered worthy of literature status because of the mistaken assumption by many critics and academic scholars that what is popular cannot also be good. Popular fiction is assumed to be fleeting in value, the whim of a finite moment in time, while literature is defined as those works that have something of value to impart that will stand the test of time.
That Erdrich’s work is also considered Native American literature, rather than popular fiction with Indian characters and themes, is partly because there are very few Native Americans who are writing fiction, or for that matter have ever published anything at all, which means that there is a limited choice for any college literature course that concentrates on Native American literature. However, that fact in no way diminishes the quality of Erdrich’s work.
Native American literature is one category in the ethnic literatures genre introduced into college curriculums since the tumultuous 1960s era of the civil rights movements and the concomitant recognition that the United States is made up of many ethnic minorities that include people of African American, American Indian, Asian, Latino/a, and Middle Eastern origin, and many other people of color. These groups have stories to tell that are different from those of mainstream White America, but are just as interesting, just as well-written, and worthy of notice as literature that has roots in Europe. The best way to learn about another culture is to learn their language, but if that is not possible or practical, then learn their stories.
Prior to the 1960s, much had been written about American Indians, but very little had been written by them, and those few works were almost always written in collaboration with a White author or mediated by a White editor. Further, much of this published work was cultural or historical—anthropological content from an insider’s perspective.
In the early 20th century, anthropologists such as Franz Boas, and later Claude Levi-Strauss, rushed to remote Indian communities to chronicle their culture and language in the mistaken belief that Indians were vanishing, dying off, and that a body of interesting information would die with them. Of course, that did not happen. The American Indian population in this country has grown, and while there are major challenges for many American Indian communities, they—and their cultures and stories—are nowhere near extinction.
Much of what was written about Indians by non-native authors was distinctly patronizing, at best, or demeaning and dehumanizing, at worst. Frequently, such literature dismissed Native American cultural perspectives that were different from those of mainstream Euro-American positions and beliefs, as Louis Owens wrote, “like James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumpo dismissing a Pawnee description of heaven with his own privileged European version.”1 Early authors writing about Indians failed to recognize or willfully ignored the fact that White colonists had invaded and taken possession of American Indian land and natural resources, brought European diseases that killed upward of 90 percent of the native population, and did not seem to understand why Indians would take offense at those actions. These Euro-American-authored books set up binaries of good Indians and bad Indians, noble Red Men and savage Red Men. Often, plots involved White settlers who had moved onto native land and were about to be attacked by the Indians they were displacing. The attacking Indians were portrayed as the savages, but often, one Indian, usually a child, warned the settlers and saved them, thus becoming the noble Red Man. Further, Indians who foreswore their own traditional spiritual practices to become Christians were noble; those who rejected Christianity were savages.
Euro-American citizens in the early United States were fond of stories that detailed the Christian conversion of American Indians, and for some, it may have been because religion, bringing the “truth” to the unenlightened savages, was a justification for what amounted to a massive land grab and genocide. Other citizens of the United States, if not most, probably never thought much about the early history of the country, other than that it was founded on the principles of religious freedom and “all men are created equal,” which were true only if the person speaking of such freedoms was male, heterosexual, and White. Films perpetrated the image of American Indians as savages, sometimes noble, but usually not, particularly in the westerns directed and produced by John Ford and starring John Wayne, where the White settlers or soldiers were the good guys and the Indians were screaming savages bent on destroying all that was Christian and fine. Perhaps the most egregious of these films is The Searchers, wherein a White settler community is attacked by Indians and all the White members are killed except for two little girls, who are taken captive. The uncle of the girls, played by John Wayne, spends years searching the west for his nieces, not to rescue them, but to kill them because they have been contaminated by living with savages.
Later fiction about American Indians romanticized their culture and the Indian people. Indians were not savage but noble, possessing a spiritual connection, especially to land and to animals, that was not available to non-Native Americans. While the decades of the 1960s and the 1970s called attention to racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities, in the case of American Indians, people and movements of the era also brought nostalgia for something exotic and different that never existed. Young people and some not-so-young wore beads and fringe, turquoise and silver, and discovered that at least one of their ancestors was an Indian, usually Cherokee, the one tribe that most non-Native Americans had heard of. To be fair, some people really did have a native person or two in their family tree, but while they may have been genuinely proud of that, few knew what being a Cherokee, or any other tribe of Indians really meant, historically or culturally.
Owens wrote, “The fact that, as D. H. Lawrence clearly recognized, at the heart of America’s history of Indian hating is an unmistakable yearning to be Indian—romantically and from a distance made hazy through fear and guilt—compounds the complexity.”2 At the beginning of the 21st century, the pendulum swings of interest from Indian hating to Indian desire seem to have reached a point of near equilibrium. The accepting, even embracing of ethnic cultures that prevailed in the 1960s and 1970s has subsided as conservative politics have gained momentum and ethnocentrisms in the form of anti-immigration movements come to the fore. American Indians, who make up less than 1 percent of the population in the United States, have become invisible for much of the mainstream Euro-American population for many reasons.
Physically, American Indians differ widely in appearance. There is no typical physiognomy, even though many uninformed people think of Indians as being medium to tall in height with dark skin, dark brown or black eyes and hair, a prominent nose and high cheekbones. Some Indians do look like that, but Indians come in all shapes and sizes, with variations in hair and eye color. All of this means that Indians blend in with other populations, which contributes to their invisibility. Indians who do have dark skin, hair, and eyes may be mistaken for Middle Eastern, South Asian or Latino, while fair-skinned Indians with light eyes may be assumed to be of European origin. Further, Indians do not necessarily have exotic-sounding names such as Big Eagle or Black Horse, but often have names that were assigned to them in the historical past by White missionaries in boarding schools or by soldiers at forts, or that were acquired when a distant ancestor married a French explorer or fur trapper, as is common with many characters in Erdrich’s works. Further, as the population in the United States has shifted, becoming less White and more brown, there has been a reaction by some conservative citizens who are afraid that “White” culture is being subsumed beneath a rising tide of “Other.”
Writers of color provide a counterweight to that fear by demonstrating through characters in their stories that brown “Others” are human beings with the same hopes, fears, and dreams as mainstream people of European descent. Poverty, sickness, divorce, and all the other ills that beset mankind are colorblind, as are the desires to love and be loved, a stable income, a healthy body, and a satisfying career. Of all the ethnic literatures, however, American Indian literature may be the hardest to understand, and the easiest to overlook or ignore.
The economic situations of universities and colleges means, among other woes, that administrators choose course topics that will enroll the most students, and for Ethnic Studies departments or English departments, that often means the demand is for African American literature or, increasingly, Latino/a literature because those populations are higher than that of American Indians. A few intrepid souls want to explore beyond the literatures of the most numerous minorities, so there are American Indian literature (or, as more commonly labeled, Native American literature) classes, but often, American Indian literature is included as an “also ran” in an umbrella class that offers literature from many ethnic groups. When the money is divided up for special events in an Ethnic Studies department at a university or college, it usually goes to pay fees for African American or Latino/a speakers and projects rather than American Indians. Without the demand from students, as happened in the early 1970s at San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and other institutions of higher education, American Indian literature is easily overlooked.
Of all the ethnic literatures, that of American Indians is the most exotic, and the most difficult to understand in any depth. Any American student or citizen can read standard, mainstream American writing by an American author without any great difficulty because there is a shared culture in which everyone participates. At the base of this culture is the meta-narrative of Christian-Judeo religious practice and of capitalism as a political and social system. When an author writes that a character goes to church, the reader immediately understands the physical act of attending a church service, but also assumes that the church is Christian (or secondarily, Jewish), and the author assumes that the reader has at least a rudimentary knowledge of Christian belief and practice. When an author creates a character who works and earns a salary from which taxes are withheld, then spends that paycheck for living expenses or to buy other things—needful or not—the reader understands, without even thinking about it, that the character is participating in a capitalist economy.
African American literature includes universal themes of love, hate, poverty, loss, and desire, among a myriad of other themes, but in African American literature, these themes are influenced by the history of slavery and its aftermath—racism and oppression. Of course, that makes it very different from mainstream American literature, but Africans brought to the Americas were brutally stripped of most culture and religious practice, indoctrinated and Christianized to such a depth that, generally speaking, only remnants of their original culture and spiritual practice remain intact. Mainstream television programs such as the mini-series Roots, based on the books by Alex Haley, encouraged many African Americans to search for their own ancestral origins in Africa and to recover their traditional cultural and spiritual practices.
African American English may differ, in some cases markedly, from standard American English, but it is understandable to any English speaker, with little need for explanation and translation. In the main, Christianity and capitalism are still bound into the stories and plots of African American literature, making it accessible for other reading audiences.
The same is true, and perhaps more so, of Latino/a American literature. People of Latino heritage have a history of interaction with Christianity and capitalism going back to their roots in Spain, introduced by Spanish colonizers and forced, often upon pain of death, upon their American Indian subjects, and carried on to the mixed blood descendants. Cultural differences in Latino/a literature involve both cultural practice and linguistic expression, but when a book is written in English with a few Spanish words here and there, most of those words are discernible from the context, making that work still accessible to mainstream readers.
Asian American literature, whether the characters and plots are of Japanese, Chinese, South Asian (India or Pakistan) or some other Asian origin, is less comprehensible because that meta-narrative of Christianity and capitalism is not always present. The spiritual practice invoked in those stories may be Buddhist or Hindu, Taoist, Islamic, or partake of any of dozens, possibly hundreds, of cultural practices and belief systems. Social organizational systems are not necessarily capitalism, but may be some form of socialism, communalism, or feudalism. But Asian American literature, particularly contemporary, still partakes of western capitalism culture. Indeed, the Japanese have become so good at capitalism/business practices that some Americans, up until the recent natural and economic disasters, were afraid that Japan would surpass the United States economically. The decade of the 1980s was rife with rumors, innuendo, and fearmongering conspiracy stories of everyone in the United States being required to learn Japanese within 10 years because the Japanese were coming to take over the United States. Asian people have also become Christian converts in large numbers, and some, particularly under British colonization in India and China, have been Christian for generations.
American Indian literature is the most difficult of all to understand, particularly if a story is set in the historical past, pre-colonial contact. There are over 500 different federally recognized tribes or nations of American Indians within the United States and more than 100 tribes that have been recognized by individual states, and each of those tribes has a different language, culture, spiritual practice, and geographical location, which are factors in works published by their respective tribal members. Some mainstream readers assume that all American Indians speak the same language and partake of the same culture. Certainly, some tribes who live in proximity to each other do share cultural and spiritual practices and a few words and verbal expressions, but in general, each tribe is a distinct entity, and their cultural and spiritual practices make their stories very different. In addition, traditional Indian society was not organized under the capitalist system, but rather, through a kinship system. Each person belonged to an extended family, with obligations to each other and expectations of reciprocity that worked very well to ensure no person starved while others were wealthy; that system provided for children, the sick, and the elderly and meted out punishments to wrongdoers. While contemporary American Indians live in and partake of the mainstream capitalist society, there are also remnants of the kinship system that still exist and function in American Indian daily lives for most tribes. In spite of the best efforts of Christians to eradicate all traces of native spiritual practice, most tribes still maintain aspects of their own specific notions of what is god, if there is more than one, what role those gods might play in the lives of people and so on, and maintain specific ceremonies that honor their gods or ask for assistance or advice in solving problems. These tribally specific epistemologies are a part of Native American storytelling.
All of these differences are woven into the fabric of American Indian literature, and what differences are depicted depend upon the tribal identity not only of the author, but of the characters portrayed in the stories. A Lakota writer may tell a story of lost love that is completely different from that of a story of lost love written by an Ojibwe writer, and both will be very much different from a story on the same theme written by a mainstream American author. A mainstream reader who is uninformed of the culture, language, and spiritual practice described in an American Indian novel is likely to completely misunderstand the context or to simply give up and put the book aside. As Karl Kroeber has written, Native American novels are “not so accessible; and most create doubts, difficulties, and frustrations for a serious reader trying to understand in depth, wishing to gain something more than a superficial, and therefore patronizing, ‘appreciation’ of Native American literary art.”3
Storytelling is a central part of traditional American Indian culture, in part because in nonliterate societies, all information must be remembered. Words become sacred because to forget important facts, about weather, for example, might have meant the death of an entire group of people, and putting important survival information into story form makes that information easier to remember. Putting that story into a song with rhythm makes the story even more memorable, which is true of all human beings, not just American Indians.
To demonstrate that, think of how many children in kindergarten are taught the alphabet. They learn the ABC song, and even adults 60 years of age or more still remember that song. Children are also taught stories such as Little Red Riding Hood, which are not just for entertainment; they are also didactic. Little Red Riding Hood can have several important lessons, such as “beware of strangers,” or more specifically, “don’t open the door to strangers.” While modern mainstream stories—even movies and stage plays and songs—may be considered as only entertainment, there are messages in almost everything, even if it is one of the oldest ones—beware of strangers. While storytelling as a survival mechanism was important in the past, it is still considered valuable in contemporary times, as Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko wrote:
I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off
illness and death.4
The literature of every culture in the world has its roots in stories of oral tradition that were also told for purposes that were not “just entertainment.” Print culture, and consequently, widespread literacy, has only been around since the invention of the printing press around 1440, and even so, it has taken many years, centuries even, for literacy to become common. However, in countries where literacy is commonplace and books are ubiquitous, readers have come to have certain expectations from written stories, such as a chronological ordering of the story that makes the plot easily understood. Any flashbacks are clearly signaled by the author so the reader knows when a section is something that took place in the past. Generally speaking, plots of mainstream novels progress in a linear fashion from A to B to C to D, and so on. Except in rare cases where time travel is a feature of the plot, time in Euro-western stories is unidirectional from the past to the present to the future. However, time in American Indian traditional thought is neither linear nor unidirectional, but cyclical. The seasons follow in order, but are repeated every year with all the natural events that take place in each season, which coincide with ceremonial practice. Likewise, American Indian literature honors that sense of time as a circle with the potential for movement backward as well as forward. The plots of mainstream novels move like a train down a track toward a destination, with other sub-plots or tracks that branch off from each side, but eventually loop back into the main track until, at the end, the story/train arrives at the final destination. The story is contained within this neatly complete structure. However, American Indian stories, and Erdrich’s, follow this pattern more often than not, resemble trees that have a central plot or branch, but other branches or twigs that burst off from that main trunk and do not loop back, but grow out in all directions, not merely forward or up. Below ground, roots move downward and outward in a mirror image of what is seen above ground, so a story may move upward and outward in any direction, but also downward and outward in multiple directions. The point is not to arrive at a destination or end with a set understanding, but to create the possibility for multiple readings or multiple interpretations of meaning.
Consistency in verb tenses in mainstream literature is important to anchor a story in time, whether that is past, present, or rarely, future, even though the average reader is unlikely to notice this aspect. However, as E. Shelley Reid points out, the verb tenses in Erdrich’s writing slip backward and forward. Reid writes that “the narrative whips through time as though chronological distinctions never existed.”5 A quote from a chapter in Love Medicine illustrates this technique:
“Some men react in that situation [the strip poker game Lulu played with Beverly and his brother Henry twenty years earlier] and some don’t,” she told him. “It was reaction I looked for, if you know what I mean.” [past events] Beverley was silent.
Lulu winked at him . . . At the time [present] she would burn it off when her house caught fire, and it would never [far future] grow back. Because her face was soft and yet alert [present], . . . Beverly had always [past] felt exposed, preyed on, undressed around her, even before the game in which she’d stripped him naked [past] and now [present], as he found, appraised him in his shame.6
The linear nature of time in mainstream written work is the norm, but stories told orally, no matter the culture of origination, do not necessarily follow that pattern. Human beings are still oral; we tell stories to each other. We do not write notes and pass them. When we are telling friends about a trip to the store, it is likely to be out of sequence because humans forget things and have to go back and insert more information to make meaning clear, or add information at the end to explain why the trip to the store ended the way it did, or why it was important. Societies that have more recently become literate often still use oral storytelling techniques within their written literature, while societies with a longer history of literacy have gotten out of the habit of understanding written stories that are not told in a linear fashion.
The closer in time that a society is to exclusive orality rather than literacy, the more those elements of oral tradition appear in texts written by members of that society. Besides a nonlinear plot, other elements might include repetition, flash-forwards as well as flashbacks, rhyming words, and the use of the second person narrative.
Repetition is an important element in societies that are nonliterate because it is an aid to memory, and if there are no written records of useful or necessary information, then everything must be archived within human memory. In stories, the important information may be only one line. It may also be that the entire story contains multiple bits of information, and in some cases, the story may be told by more than one person, with each person repeating the same information in different ways. Erdrich utilizes this technique in many of her novels and notably so in Tracks, where the characters of Pauline and Nanapush alternately tell the story. Each of these storytellers has a different version of how they perceive other characters and events within the story, even though each has a bit more information than the other about a particular character or event. This technique allows Erdrich to give a more complete picture of any particular event or character than if only one person was narrating; however, the dual (or perhaps “duel” because Pauline and Nanapush comment upon each other) narration presents another dilemma for the reader—when the information given by each of the narrators conflicts, who should the reader believe? Which one is telling the truth, which is lying, or is there no truth but only individual perception? Erdrich casts both Pauline and Nanapush as sympathetic characters when they are first introduced, but as the story progresses, Pauline’s words begin to contradict her earlier statements like a criminal tripped up on the witness stand by their own lies, and further, she seems oblivious to her own deceptions. Or possibly, she is aware and is manipulating the reader, or rather, Erdrich is manipulating the reader through her characters. It is easy to forget that Pauline and Nanapush are not real living humans, but creations from Erdrich’s imagination. The ability to make characters come alive and walk off the page is the sign of a master storyteller. Nanapush is just as much of a manipulator as is Pauline, but the difference is that Nanapush never lies to himself, never pretends that he is not a trickster. In the end, most readers decide that Nanapush is the reliable narrator, but there is always room for doubt. This dual/duel narration undermines the Euro-western expectation that at the heart of every story, there is a single truth, while following the repetition element so common in oral tradition.
While Nanapush and Pauline tell conflicting truths about the same stories, nevertheless, they are both members of the same community, and as such, each of them possesses the right to tell stories as they perceive them or as they wish others to perceive them. They are illustrating the collective identity of their community, as Pauline Reid pointed out in her article when she argued that the technique of utilizing multiple narrators indicates a collectiveness of identity. She insists, too, that the repetition of the same story told from multiple viewpoints indicates an overall identity that goes beyond the individual characters. People who recognize and iterate a shared history through stories are more likely to work together as a group to survive, and even overcome, adversity. In Tracks, Pauline desperately wants to deny her heritage and trade her Indian community for a White one, but the stories she tells about herself and her community deny that possibility. Nanapush chooses to embrace his Indian heritage and community, and his storytelling anchors him within both, and even, against her own wishes, ties Pauline to Nanapush and the community.
Not always these days, but still enough to be notable, American Indian literature utilizes elements of orality that make it more difficult to understand for the reader used to the Euro-American narrative structure of writing. All of the above—stories drawing from cultures that are not rooted in Judeo-Christian spiritual practice or capitalist society, a multiplicity of languages and cultures, and closer historical ties to orality rather than literacy—make American Indian literature uniquely different and difficult to understand for the Euro-American reader. Yet, remarkably, Louise Erdrich’s work is more widely read and appreciated than that of many mainstream American writers. Why?
Erdrich’s themes and plots are universal—love, illness, poverty, and death—and resonate with readers of any culture, which is a reason they have appeal for the mass-market audience. The details with which she surrounds these stories, the characters and their unique positioning as American Indian citizens of particular native nations in general, and Ojibwe in specific, are not only part of who Erdrich is as a human being and a writer, but offer enough of the exotic and different to fascinate mainstream readers looking for something outside the usual. Her work can be read without any knowledge of American Indian literature in general or of Ojibwe stories and culture in specific. However, for an American Indian reader, her stories take on a depth that harks to their own experience, or perhaps, the experience of an Indian relative or friend, and the result is an echoing of verisimilitude not found in most published works that are simply about Indians rather than by Indians.
The first paragraph of her novel, Tracks, is a masterpiece of writing, both in craft that anyone, Indian or not, can understand, but is also a manifesto that proclaims this writer is an American Indian, and specifically, a Chippewa person who understands the history and culture of Indian people within the colonial and postcolonial context of the United States. It is useful to include that entire section here:
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die. For those who survived the spotted sickness from the south, our long fight west to Nadouissioux land where we signed the treaty, and then a wind from the east, bringing exile in a storm of government papers, what descended from the north in 1912 seemed impossible.7
From a craft standpoint, the beginning sentence is masterful. It contains a hook that pulls the reader into the story. This opening simile that compares dying people to falling snow is unique, creating a picture in the readers’ minds. The rest of the paragraph continues to pique a reader’s curiosity with the implication that this “we” has overcome other disasters, and the information is given in a flowing sentence that leads the reader on in a most Faulkner-like style. But, for an American Indian and especially for an Indian of the Chippewa tribe, this paragraph is packed full of information that they know, either from personal experience or family or tribal history.
Some non-Indian readers may not know from the scanty information contained in K-12 history books or from personal reading that European diseases to which Indigenous Americans had no natural immunity killed more Indians than did the guns of White settlers and inter-tribal warfare, but Indians are well aware of this fact. As European White settlers arrived in the Americas, they brought with them infectious diseases that were not necessarily fatal to the Europeans, but were deadly to the Indians. One contact between one European who might not even have felt sick and one Indigenous person could easily have spread that deadly illness throughout entire families, tribes, and eventually regions, and in actuality, there many such contacts. Disease raced ahead of the settlers, killing Indians as it went. Some of the diseases that may have been agents of death include small pox, cholera, bubonic plague, and even ordinary childhood diseases such as chicken pox and mumps. Erdrich refers to the “spotted sickness,” but this was a catchall term used by many Indians and could have referred to any disease that produced a rash or pustules.
An uninformed reader might notice that Erdrich writes of difficulties coming from south, west, east, and north, and see those words as simply a poetic convention, but Indians know that Erdrich is referencing the four sacred directions, which are inevitably called upon when engaging in spiritual performance and ceremonies. The difficulties coming from each of these directions also refer to incidents in Indian history, such as the already mentioned spotted sickness coming from the south.
The next part of the sentence, “the long fight west to Nadouissioux land,” is a specific reference to Chippewa people, whose original homeland was much farther to the east, but who were pushed farther and farther west by White colonization until they ended up in what was the territory of the Sioux tribe. The word Nadouissioux comes from the Anishinabe word Nadowe-is-iw,8 which translates to lesser adder (snake), another term for enemy. French fur trappers in the region changed the word to Nadouissioux, but eventually the word was shortened to simply, Sioux, which is the term for a group of Northern Plains tribes, who often refer to themselves now as Lakota, Dakota, or Nakota.
The next section, “bringing exile in a storm of government papers,” is more nebulous, but Erdrich is probably referring to Federal Indian Law and Policy, which includes court cases and federal legislation that effectively treated Indians as children, wards of the government, with little agency. The last part of the sentence, “what descended from the north in 1912 seemed impossible,” is about yet another wave of infectious disease, as Erdrich describes in the following chapter and at other places in the book. This disease is not defined, and the symptoms could be any of many that afflicted native people, but it may have been the forerunner of the influenza pandemic that would kill thousands of people around the world during World War I.
Any reader, mainstream Euro-American or American Indian, can appreciate this section, but obviously, the more informed the reader, the more that reader will understand and appreciate American Indian literature, and especially the works of Louise Erdrich. Every author brings personal experience and culture to their work, even if it is only in the patterns of language they use. Erdrich’s personal experience and cultural heritage is German American on her father’s side and Turtle Mountain Chippewa on her mother’s side of the family. Her writing draws upon both.
Her German American grandparents owned and ran a butcher shop, and Erdrich’s knowledge of that business is a part of several of her novels, including Tracks and The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. In Tracks, much of the information included is historical, such as the details about how meat was preserved in times before refrigeration became common—in a cave lined with blocks of ice cut from the river in winter. These details may not be common knowledge for every reader, but Erdrich makes them understandable for any reader, even modern ones who are so accustomed to refrigerators that any prior idea about food preservation is noticeable by its absence.
What is less understandable for uninformed readers are the Chippewa history, culture, and spiritual belief and practice that are everywhere included in Erdrich’s work. An encyclopedic knowledge of the Ojibwe people is not necessary to understand the roots of Erdich’s life and works, but some basic information is helpful to understanding nuances within the stories.
The Chippewa people are also known as the Ojibwa, Ojibwe, or Ojibway, and they are part of the larger group known as the Anishinaabe or Anishinabe, which includes Algonquin, Nipissing, Oji-Cree, Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Originally, their home territory surrounded the Great Lakes on both sides of what is now the Canadian and U.S. borders from as far east as New York and as far west as northeastern North Dakota and all of southern Canada between these two points. The encroachment of White settlers on their territory pushed them farther west and their homelands now stretch from Michigan to Montana, and the corresponding Canadian lands north of those U.S. states.
There are more than 50 branches of the Ojibwe people, called First Nations or Bands in Canada, and sometimes called Bands in the United States. Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and most of her works reference that particular band.9 Their reservation is located in north central North Dakota, very close to the Canadian border, while Wahpeton, where Erdrich grew up, is located in the southeastern corner of the state on the North Dakota and Minnesota state line. When the Ojibwe people were forced to migrate from the Eastern Great Lakes area to their present location, they moved into territory already occupied by branches of the Sioux Nation. Conflicts took place between these different groups, but at the present time, both tribal nations have reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota and many members of both groups live off reservation in rural areas and small towns. As is always true when cultures live in proximity to one another, a pattern usually develops. First, there is conflict, then an uneasy truce, then acceptance, and eventually, inter-marriages until each culture adopts some aspects of the other in language, culture, and spiritual practice, while retaining their own essential unique aspects.
One such spiritual performance that Erdrich details in many of her works is the sweat lodge ceremony, which is practiced by Ojibwe, Dakota (Sioux), and other Native American groups, not only in the upper Midwest, but increasingly across the United States and Canada. This ceremony may be performed for many different reasons—as an offering of thanks to spirits for a favor or boon granted, to seek guidance for a current difficulty, or any of many other purposes. Generally, hot rocks are heated and placed inside a windowless covered structure. Participants gather inside, sitting in a circle while water is periodically poured on the rocks creating steam. Prayers or pleas or thanks are offered by individual participants in a set formula, usually proceeding around the circle in a counter clockwise direction. At the conclusion of the ceremony, participants usually bathe in cold water and eat a meal together. However, one uniquely Ojibwe belief involves the windigo spirit.
The windigo, sometimes spelled wendigo, is a common figure in Ojibwe stories and in Erdrich’s work. The windigo is a monstrous cannibal that appears as a result of human greed, envy, and jealousy, usually in winter when the Ojibwe people are often suffering from starvation and cold. Julie Tharp writes about Erdrich’s use of the windigo as a character in her novel, The Antelope Wife.10 According to Tharp:
Erdrich presents a strong case for the relevance of Ojibwe philosophy to present-day mainstream U.S. culture. The central theme of eating and food, the setting of Gakahbekong or modern-day Minneapolis, and the presence of windigo characters, all contribute to a meditation on the social ills of overconsumption.11
Using her own personal cultural background in Ojibwe history and culture, Erdrich breaks down the binaries of noble versus savage, good versus evil, us versus them, to show the readers a glimpse of native people who live within the double cultural setting that is both American Indian/Ojibwe and Euro-western. The Ojibwe people and the non-native characters within her stories all share a basic humanity. A Neil Diamond song from 1970 illustrates this point quite clearly. In the song, Diamond sings what seems like a simple list of people’s names, famous and infamous, but the last stanza makes the meaning clear when Diamond sings that all the people he has just named have one thing in common—they were all human beings who lived and worked and wondered, and wept when their lives were over “For being done too soon.”12
1. Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 8.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. Karl Kroeber, ed., Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). Qtd. in Louise Owens, Other Destinies, 15.
4. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 2.
5. E. Shelley Reid, “The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives,” MELUS 25:3/4, Traditions Double Issue (Autumn–Winter 2000): 74.
6. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 116.
7. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: HarperCollins First Perennial Library Edition, 1989), 1.
8. Free Resources: Fall 2008 “History and the Headlines,” Collections from ABC-CLIO, www.historyandtheheadlines.abcclio.com.
9. For more information on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, see their website at http:/tmbci.net/wordpress.
10. Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009).
11. Julie Tharp, “Windigo Ways: Eating and Excess in Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 27:4 (2003): 117–131.
12. Neil Diamond, “Done Too Soon,” Prophet Music, Inc., 1970.