Plant Life in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen

Abstract

Plant Life in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen Jane Im (bio) How firm we stand and plant our feet upon the land determines the strength of our children’s heartbeat." —Louise Erdrich, “Who Owns the Land” Critics of Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen (1986) have debated fervently over the Indianness of the novel, a discussion that reached its peak during the Silko-Erdrich controversy. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy Tale Shelf: Review of The Beet Queen,” Silko accuses Erdrich of “self-referential writing” that glosses over the harsh political realities of Native American life and scathingly remarks that the book has “shimmering beauty because no history or politics intrudes to muddy the well of pure necessity contained within language itself ” (10). The novel, in fact, features mainly white Euro-American characters with very few Native American characters and takes place in a town off of the reservation, and critics have mostly praised it for its lyrical prose style and postmodern aesthetics. Still others, like Ann Braley, Dennis M. Walsh, and David Stirrup, have variously defended what they see as the novel’s nuanced yet strongly present Indian consciousness. I argue that the Indianness of the novel is marked by Erdrich’s use of plant tropes that subtly encapsulate traditional Ojibwe (also known as the Chippewa, Ojibway, or Ojibwa) values—including the Ojibwes’ historical sense of land attachment as well as their values of home and community. Moreover, these plant tropes highlight the spiritual dimension of plants, a strong Ojibwe belief, along with the economic, decorative, and medicinal values of plants. Erdrich’s various uses of plant tropes help to depict [End Page 109] Ojibwe/Native American worldviews as permeating even the predominantly white setting. While plant life has been taken for granted in the past, recently it has begun to attract attention in the humanities. Leading philosopher of plant life Michael Marder argues that vegetal life has been neglected in our environmental thought, which has largely been preoccupied with animals (5). In an interview in Philosopher’s Zone (2014), Marder suggests that artworks offer an entry-point into the lives of plants because “it is through art that we are able to manage to be at peace with plants; where we do not interfere with them; we observe them from a distance or represent them on a canvas. In that way, [we] do not instrumentalise them, [we] do not turn them into means for our own ends” (Marder, “Plant Thinking”). Furthermore, according to Randy Laist, contemporary society suffers from “defoliation of the cultural imagination” (10) where plant life goes largely unnoticed. In Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, he nostalgically looks back to pre-modern times when societies celebrated their relationships with plants with harvest ceremonies. Despite the mental defoliation of contemporary society, the essays Laist compiles recast light on works throughout the post-Enlightenment past to understand plant representations in connection with various issues such as human subjectivity, femininity, and queerness. For Laist, the “representation of plants in popular culture provides a compelling window into the anxieties and possibilities that are associated with plants in the contemporary imagination” (16). In this spirit, I investigate plant life in The Beet Queen not only because the title of the book tellingly suggests the central role of plant life, but also because the novel’s recurrent images of plant life and their relationship to each character need to be examined thoroughly to appreciate how Indian the novel really is. Erdrich’s plant tropes reflect the traumatic historical anxiety of allotment acts that caused the disintegration of Ojibwe communalism. This sense of land attachment is essential when we consider the effect of the Dawes and Burke Acts that caused dispossession of land for the Chippewas during the late nineteenth century. While the Turtle Mountain Tribe of Chippewa Indians had suffered from continued land loss in the past, the historical setting of Erdrich’s tetralogy from the early 1910s to the 1970s was yet another significant period when Chippewa [End Page 110] Ojibwes suffered from the aftermath of federal allotment acts. Although The Beet Queen does not directly comment on historical and...