The Problem(s) of (Anishinaabe) History in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich: Voices and Contexts

Abstract

The publication ofLove Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and Tracks (1988) by Louise Erdrich are mi terventions in the writing f tribal histories. Disrupting he boundaries between history and fiction, her novels reflect variety of literary c nve tions, i scribing revisionist histories of the ultural borderlands ea the geographical center of North America. Her fictionalized reservation community and town lie athwart the bound ries of the woodlands and the plains. Its pop lation of India s, whites, and mixed-bloods i ermingle in efiance of standard social science cat gories. The s ries, taken as a whole, reflects historic changes th ough most of the twentieth century in su h instituions as tribal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he locally o ned butcher shop, the Catholic Church (and its schools), and the family. These institutional h stories are fr med within the personal narratives of Erd c 's fictio al c aracters. Most reviewers have commented on Erdrich's use of multiple n rrat rs, whose stories overlap, contradict, and comment on one another. For some, her shifting arrative point of view is the major flaw in her writing.' The bulk of her critics, on the other and, p a se Erdrich's narrative form. Russ ll B ks, for example, situates the orchestration of several points of view by Erdrich and others in terms of an effor t rediscover a narr tive form equal to a social and political vision radically di ferent fro the one we inherited from the mo ernists.2 Still others beli ve, as Jack Cady puts it, that [t]oo many demands are m de on the first-person short-story form, although Erdric b ings it mo t of the wa home.3 Both her avant-garde narrative structure and her use of one community over a series of novels raise questions regarding her interventions in history. To what extent does the multiplicity of voices in her novels challenge the conventions of objective history in their montage of partial truths and prejudicial interpretations? Do her works stimulate research on the part of scholars in literature who teach her works into the problems of Indian and tribal histories? How effective in raising pertinent issues is her fictional catastrophe in Tracks, with its resemblance to the historic White Earth timber scandal? What interpretive significance should be accorded novelistic histories when the author (and her husband-collaborater, Michael Dorris) insist that their work is only incidentally political? In the opening chapter of We Talk; You Listen (1970), Vmine Deloria, Jr. develops some questions regarding the content of the form in a society oriented increasingly toward instantaneous communication. Repeatedly asserting that the medium became the message, he observes that the children of the Depression generation learned the media of federal solutions for local problems. Both the demise of Kozka's butcher shop from Tracks through The Beet Queen and the double-edged entanglements of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Tracks and Love Medicine are salient political issues, extending beyond the Depression era in both directions. How do content and form intertwine with local, national, tribal, and universal concerns in Erdrich's historical fictions? Historical dialogues regarding assimilation are refigured in the contrast of the parallel spiritual autobiographies of Pauline, Sister Leopolda and her daughter Marie Lazarre (Kashpaw) and with the stories of cultural survival of Nanapush and Eli. Almost immediately, once she begins to speak about