Medicine Dresses and (Trans)Vestments: Gender Performance and Spiritual Authority in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Four Souls

Abstract

ABSTRACTLouise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse and Four Souls, two of the later installments in her saga about a fictional North Dakota reservation, explore intersections between gender, ethnicity, and spirituality through cross-gender performances involving the assumption of gendered religious roles. In Last Report, the reservation priest Father Damien is also the former nun Agnes DeWitt, and in Four Souls, Nanapush wears his wife’s medicine dress during a tribal council meeting. These performances present gender identity and spirituality as deeply intertwined, aligning Erdrich’s fiction with beliefs in the sacredness of gender fluidity in many Native North American religions. Drawing from aspects of Ojibwe culture and theories of gender performativity, this article suggests that these characters’ transformations of Ojibwe and Catholic social norms work to create inclusive, flexible ways of accessing the spiritual that resist gendered religious hierarchies and either/or constructions of religious and cultural identity.