The Historical Consciousness and the Guilty Conscience in Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife

Abstract

In The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich presents us with her notions of historical consciousness ― focused on a certain massacre and some other conflicting factors in connection with Native Americans and whites. The massacre reminds us of the Wounded Knee Massacre, one of the most decisive and fatal incidents in American history. However, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian, like other intellectuals, intentionally ignores the massacre to build American history progress without Native Americans. In The Antelope Wife, Erdrich calls for the recognition of whites’ conscience through the fictional character, Scranton Roy. Even though he commits suicide after his spiritual journey in order to obtain forgiveness and reconciliation, his guilt ridden conscience gets rest at last. And his son, Augustus Roy, as a white man, lives with Native Americans, which enables him to witness the oppressed Native Americans and various, absurd government policies. Augustus’s marriage to a Native American woman, a relative of an old woman who was killed by Scranton Roy, and the relationships with their descendants, including Sweetheart Calico, Klaus’s Antelope Wife, prove the interconnectedness of history. Erdrich asks the reader to gain a new historical consciousness through Rozin’s acknowledgment of Native American tradition and culture.