Louise Erdrich Research Articles

Disease, Dislocation and Deprivation in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House: Exposing the White lies of the Civilizing Discourse

When the colonizers reached America, they came across people who held a totally different view of the world and their surroundings. In their world they were not the masters of the animate and inanimate world, rather they were a part of it. This world view did not conform with the culture of Europe, so they started denigrating them; but the reasons behind denigration of the Natives were deeper as exposed by the narratives of the Native Americans. The whites were not interested in de-culturing or a-culturing the Natives, they were interested in the land occupied by the natives. For usurping the land; they started denigrating the Natives and referred to them as uncivilized barbarians. Some of the narratives even featured them as cannibals. The natives did not have any idea about what was written about them, but now the tide has turned and the Natives have started writing narratives that project their world view. These narratives written by the Natives not only demolish stereotypes, but also try to revive their culture. The Native writers try to reorient the consciousness of the readers and instigate them to uncover the true history of the oppressed people. These kind of texts have been termed as ‘autoethnographic’ narratives. Louise Erdrich is one of the most prominent Native writers who is trying to construct a new identity of her people by scattering the mist created by the colonial narratives. The current paper is a study of Louise Erdrich’s novel The Birchbark House.When the colonizers reached America, they came across people who held a totally different view of the world and their surroundings. In their world they were not the masters of the animate and inanimate world, rather they were a part of it. This world view did not conform with the culture of Europe, so they started denigrating them; but the reasons behind denigration of the Natives were deeper as exposed by the narratives of the Native Americans. The whites were not interested in de-culturing or a-culturing the Natives, they were interested in the land occupied by the natives. For usurping the land; they started denigrating the Natives and referred to them as uncivilized barbarians. Some of the narratives even featured them as cannibals. The natives did not have any idea about what was written about them, but now the tide has turned and the Natives have started writing narratives that project their world view. These narratives written by the Natives not only demolish stereotypes, but also try to revive their culture. The Native writers try to reorient the consciousness of the readers and instigate them to uncover the true history of the oppressed people. These kind of texts have been termed as ‘autoethnographic’ narratives. Louise Erdrich is one of the most prominent Native writers who is trying to construct a new identity of her people by scattering the mist created by the colonial narratives. The current paper is a study of Louise Erdrich’s novel The Birchbark House.

The Regaining Territory of the Ojibwa Tribe in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House Book Series

Native American people have been experienced in confronting the white people. One of their experiences in confronting the white people is written in the Louise Erdrich’s literary works, an Ojibwa author. Native American authors have different point of view in telling about Native Americans because they and their ancestors have bitter experiences in dealing with the white people, especially the Ojibwa tribe’s experiences living in the America where other Native American tribes cannot survive their tribes. This research focuses on the struggles of the Ojibwa people in getting their territory and the reasons why the Ojibwa people try so hard in keeping their territory. This research uses historical approach in its analysis. The method used is qualitative method related to literature study by using the five books of The Birchbark House book series as the primary data of this research. There are several conclusions based on the analysis of the data. The Ojibwa people are able to maintain their tribal presence in America against the white people. They can defend their tribe by using their intelligence, courage, and self-confidence. As for the reasons they prefer to choose their own way in getting territory because of several factors such as beliefs, relatives, and natural conditions of the land. Keywords: Historical Approach, Indian Territory, Native American, Ojibwa.

“There Are Many Kinds of Justice”: Confessing Growing Up an Indian Legal Subject in Louise Erdrich’s 'The Round House'

This paper looks at Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning The Round House as a novel that mixes and reworks genres from a Native American perspective to narrativize the “(post)colonial” (Cheyfitz) status of contemporary American Indian nations. An autobiographical story that can be read as a “postcolonial Bildungsroman” (Nayar), The Round House uses crime fiction as a pretext for writing Indian sovereignty. The legal is fully involved in the construction of the Indian colonized subject. Erdrich’s novel can be read as a confession to “a wrong thing that serves an ideal justice” (RH 306). The main character’s statement that “[t]he sentence was to endure” (RH 317) can be understood both in terms of his admitted moral guilt, and as a proclamation of “survivance” (G. Vizenor). The paper approaches the novel in light of the inseparability of U.S. federal Indian law and American Indian literature (Cheyfitz). My reading relies on Lyotard’s “différend” and on Agamben’s “state of exception” to discuss the plot and its dénouement as Erdrich’s way to wage a contemporary “Indian war” (E. Cook-Lynn).

Environment and Literary Landscape: An Ecological Criticism of Louise Erdrich’s Novel Tracks

Connecting the environment with societies’ cultures through literature has created a new awareness of environmental issues. The current environmental crisis is a product of modern human culture. The thought of using land as a commodity and disregard for environmental ethics has worsened the ecological crisis. The paper focuses issues of environment highlighted in Native American literature. The anthropocentric behavior of Euro-Americans is contrary to Native American idea of biocentrism. For American Indians, land is considered not merely a stage on which the act is played but also as an active participant in the drama with major role to play in the lives of the characters. This article applies Ecocriticism theory on Louise Erdrich’s fiction Tracks to generate an ecological criticism of the text. This paper highlights new ways of treating the natural world, putting responsibility on humans to see how their cultures are affecting environment.

Environment and Literary Landscape: An Ecological Criticism of Louise Erdrich's Novel Tracks

Environment and Literary Landscape: An Ecological Criticism of Louise Erdrich's Novel Tracks

Pictography, Law, and Earth: Gerald Vizenor, John Borrows, and Louise Erdrich

This essay examines Anishinaabe pictography in contemporary legal contexts, challenging the notion that the law must necessarily inhere in alphabetic isomorphism, let alone in the colonialist inscriptive norms of the nation. Explaining how pictography elicits a loosened relation between sign and signified, this essay develops a semiotic theory of nonisomorphy to analyze uses of pictography in the work of several Anishinaabe scholars and writers: in John Borrows's advocacy of “jurisgenerative multiperspectivalism,” in Gerald Vizenor's conception of social irony and ironic constitutionalism, and in Louise Erdrich's figuration of ecological literacy and reciprocity. Focusing in particular on the trope of metonymy in pictographic writing, this essay elucidates the perspectival shifts and contextual metamorphoses of metonymy in the native poetics of the Americas, forming and transforming historical experience while offering colonial situations ample room to trip themselves up on their own contradictions.

Getting People Wrong: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing

Getting People WrongSome Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing Matthew Shipe (bio) A few weeks after Philip Roth's death this past May at the age of 85, I was invited to participate in a podcast hosted by fellow Roth Society member Danny Anderson. He had invited me on his show, The Sectarian Review, to discuss Roth's long and distinguished career and speculate on his ultimate impact on American literary culture. I had never done a podcast before and have always been apprehensive about the platform—when using it, I always recall that bit in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) when a Skype-like invention creates a sort of national existential crisis as people become painfully self-conscious and purchase attractive mannequins to be their stand-ins for video chats. Nevertheless, I was more than happy to talk about Roth with Danny and his other guest Michial Farmer, a friend I had met through Updike circles.1 For around two hours we bandied about our favorite bits of Roth's work and somehow tried to solidify our thoughts on what his fiction had meant to us. Midway through the podcast, Danny and I recalled the Roth@80 event, laughing at the memory of finding ourselves in a room with Don DeLillo, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, Louise Erdrich, and, of course, Roth himself, without a drink anywhere in sight. The night was somewhat surreal—it felt a little bit like being thrust, sober and slightly underdressed, into a Fellini film.2 I do remember managing to nudge myself in line behind Don DeLillo as he ordered a Sprite.3 I think I ordered one too hoping that I might impress him (shockingly, the gesture wasn't noticed). At the end of that night, I made my way to the front of the room to talk with Roth—again, I'd like to reiterate that this would have been the type of event where a drink (or two) would have been very handy. It was my one time to meet Roth: I can't remember what I had told him—something fairly generic about how much his work had meant to me—but I'm grateful that I was able to tell him this and he was gracious in our brief conversation. As I was finishing up, some family [End Page 130] friends approached and a flurry of pictures were taken. I like to believe that I'm in the back of one of those photos, an unidentified curly-haired mystery man never to be identified in some Roth family photo book. After sharing stories of that night, Danny asked us to read aloud our favorite passage from Roth's fiction as a way to wrap up the conversation. While there are countless passages I could have selected, the choice for me was fairly easy. I turned to my well-worn copy of American Pastoral (1997), the novel that was my first real introduction to Roth when I was an undergraduate back in the late '90s. I qualify it as my "real introduction" because I know I had read a few of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) while in high school—we did "Defender of the Faith" and maybe "Eli the Fanatic" sometime during my senior year—but I had not really experienced Roth until American Pastoral was assigned in Professor Marshall Boswell's junior seminar titled "The Literature of Replenishment."4 That course, more than anything, propelled me down the Roth rabbit hole. After the semester, I snatched up a remaindered copy of Sabbath's Theater (1995), and soon after found myself quickly making my way through much of Roth—zipping through the first Zuckerman trilogy after graduation, reading Letting Go (1962) after my first year in grad school,5 and then tackling The Human Stain (2000) the summer after it had been released as I was recovering from that first year in grad school. I confess I didn't pick up Portnoy's Complaint (1969) until much later in my Roth reading, and I still haven't read When She Was Good (1967), a lapse that I was loudly called out on by students...

Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change by Christian Knoeller

Reviewed by: Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change by Christian Knoeller William Barillas Christian Knoeller, Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2017. 352 pp. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $32.95. The title of Christian Knoeller’s book, Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change, does not inform the potential reader that the volume is a work of literary criticism. Nor does it specify a regional, or even national, focus. This is both fortunate and apt. The title emphasizes instead the author’s central concern: how nature writing informs us about past human disturbances of ecology and how it can inspire and empower individuals and communities to restore as well as appreciate local ecosystems. If the title draws the attention of readers other than literary scholars, so much the better. Historians, ecologists, and general readers will enjoy and learn from the nature writers whose work Knoeller examines, from artists, naturalists, and essayists to poets and novelists. Despite its title, Knoeller’s study does in fact have a regional focus: literature that evokes landscapes of the American Midwest and describes how they have changed over history due to human intervention. Knoeller presents the work of ten writers, grouped in pairs: nineteenth-century artist-naturalists; twentieth-century ecological essayists, poets with environmentalist leanings, Native American novelists, and two more ecological essayists. While acknowledging the wisdom and influence of better-known figures (such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Loren Eiseley, all of whom have Midwestern or Plains connections), Knoeller devotes chapters to writers whose ideas about ecology and the human place in nature deserve wider circulation. In working to save and restore remnants of formerly extensive wetlands in Indiana, for example, Gene Stratton-Porter anticipated the science of ecological restoration and the contemporary notion of rewilding the land. Her novels, essays, and photographs represent and narrate such efforts, preceding Leopold’s by a generation. Although poets like Theodore Roethke and William Stafford and novelists like Louise Erdrich are widely celebrated as literary authors, their participation in conversations about ecological destruction and the need for a new paradigm [End Page 84] of human-nature relations has been underacknowledged. Knoeller provides exegeses of each writer’s work, but also of interest are the continuities he traces among the ten writers: their fascination with local biota and ecological diversity; their reading of earlier naturalists (Scott Russell Sanders’s published appreciation of Stratton-Porter, for example); their interest in Native American history and ideas about nature; and a recurring consideration of landscapes and parallel environmental changes in the American West, including the loss of predators like wolves and the near extinction of the American bison. The term “ecological memory” refers in science to adaptations in a landscape after disturbances both natural and human caused. In this regard, ecologists speak of “disturbance legacies,” which include species migration, extinction, and strategies by which plant and animal species and even entire ecosystems respond to disruption. Seeds, for example, left after the devastation of a forest by a storm—or by clear-cutting—constitute a material legacy, a memory that will in time express itself in nature. Christian Knoeller’s study, like the writing of Stratton-Porter, Sanders, and the other authors he discusses, represents another form of ecological memory: the considered recollection of what we have lost and what we have yet to learn from environmental history and earlier responses to changes on the land. William Barillas University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Copyright © 2019 Western Literature Association

All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States ed. by Jonathan D. Cohen and David G. Schwartz

Reviewed by: All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States ed. by Jonathan D. Cohen and David G. Schwartz Helen Breen All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States. Edited by Jonathan D. Cohen and David G. Schwartz. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. ix + 276 pp. Contributors, about the editors, index. $34.95 cloth. As the title states, this book is a broad multidisciplinary study of gambling during the twentieth century in the US. At the turn of the twentieth century, commercial gambling had been all but outlawed across the nation. In contrast, by the turn of the twenty-first century, many forms of commercial gambling had been legalized and gambling was widely available in most states. The focus here is an examination of major historical, legal, social, religious, ethical, cultural, literary, and sporting influences on the restrictions and growth of US gambling over a century. In ten chapters, well-informed scholars analyze causes and consequences of this gambling evolution and its legitimizing processes. As background to these evolutionary processes, three factors were from time to time very important: Americans liked to gamble regardless of its legality, criminals and corporations became wealthy because the public liked to gamble, and state governments looking to reduce budget deficits were reluctant to raise taxes. In summary, All In: The Spread of Gambling in Twentieth-Century United States is a valuable reference book for its breadth of topics and depth of investigation by the authors. Relevant especially for Great Plains readers is a chapter that explores the impact of gambling commercialization and casino development on the culture and land of the Ojibwe people in North Dakota. The author, Seema Kurup, uses the insightful writings of novelist Louise Erdrich, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, to examine the dynamics of casinos on tribal reservations and to document concerns about the preservation of tribal culture. From the description of vignettes from Erdrich’s books, a paradox emerges. If reservation casinos have brought economic benefits and opportunities to invigorate dying elements of tribal identity (such as protection of languages), then this development appears to have been at the expense of tribal values and sovereignty. Using Erdrich’s stories, Kurup suggests that some disruption to traditional power structures and commodification of tribal traditions, symbols, and artefacts are closely linked to tribal casino development. While there are some successful casinos, many have not produced the benefits anticipated by the tribal group. The methodology used in Kurup’s chapter is somewhat unusual but demonstrates a range of scholarly approaches useful in the study of gambling. It is very informative and well written, with the main points supported by book extracts and quotations. This chapter challenges everyone to respectfully consider the long-term costs of legalized gambling on tribal values, traditions, and identity. Helen Breen School of Business and Tourism Southern Cross University Lismore, Australia Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies

Hybrid Mythologies: Identity and Heritage in the Poetry of Louise Erdrich

Hybrid Mythologies: Identity and Heritage in the Poetry of Louise Erdrich

Hybrid Mythologies: Identity and Heritage in the Poetry of Louise Erdrich

espanolEste articulo analiza la presencia de mitos nativos y clasicos en la poesia de Louise Erdrich, que actuan como testimonios de su doble herencia cultural –nativo-americana y germanoamericana– y ejemplos de su percepcion de la identidad. El articulo ahonda en las connotaciones simbolicas de los mitos occidentales y nativos y la apropiacion que hace Erdrich de los mismos, creando una mitologia hibrida que contrasta con un trasfondo contemporaneo. Asi, su poesia funciona como un ejercicio de auto-etnografia que reivindica su herencia hibrida en lugar de llevar a cabo una reconstruccion artificial de un pasado idealizado o mitologico, a la vez que denuncia las consecuencias ambientales y psicologicas de la colonizacion. EnglishThis article analyzes the presence of aboriginal and classical myths in the poetry of Louise Erdrich, tokens of her double cultural heritage –Native American and German-American– and examples of her perception of identity. The aim of this article is to research the symbolic connotations attached to Western and aboriginal myths, and to study Erdrich’s appropriation of such stories. By doing so, she creates a hybrid mythology that contrasts with a contemporary background. Her poetry is an exercise of self-ethnography that empowers her hybrid heritage instead of relying in an artificial reconstruction of an ideal or mythological past, while denouncing the environmental and psychological consequences of colonization.

A Cloud of Unknowing: Agonistic Anticolonial Ethics in Louise Erdrich’sThe Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

A Cloud of Unknowing: Agonistic Anticolonial Ethics in Louise Erdrich’s<i>The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse</i>

The Significance of Gender Transformation in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is the product of Louise Erdrich’s continuous attention to the concepts of sex and gender in white culture. In the novel, Agnes’s gender transformation into Father Damien has a significant effect on her assimilation into Native American culture. Inevitably, this gender transformation is not an easy process, but Agnes overcomes it by means of her self-confidence and self-assurance. The most important factor in her successful transformation and subsequent assimilation into Native American culture is the generous acceptance of gender flexibility in Native Americans, compared to the rigid dichotomy of the Catholic Church and white culture in general. In order to demonstrate the superiority of the Native American culture in this respect, Erdrich presents the reader with a number of favorable relationships between Agnes and some memorable Native Americans. Among these, the most notable characters influencing Agnes’s transformation and assimilation are Mary Kashpaw, who represents the opposite of white femininity, and Nanapush, who represents the humorous and warm hearted side of Native Americans. Although the ending of the novel is somewhat ambiguous, Erdrich’s wish for mutual understanding and coexistence between the two cultures is strong, expressing her desire for peace and harmony between them.

A Practical Proposal to Use Venuti’s ‘Minoritizing Translation’ for Native American Literature

In a recent article, I argued that Native American literature, as a minor literature according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a great candidate for being translated in a minoritizing way, as proposed by Venuti. Since this literature is very popular in Spain –13 translations published in the 2010s–, I analysed the most recent translations of Sherman Alexie’s, Louise Erdrich’s and N. Scott Momaday’s novels and concluded that they were aimed at entertainment, at linguistic and syntactic fluency, and at over-refined stylistics. This kind of translation means, hence, the erasure of indigenous cultural and literary aspects from the target texts and the hiding of the socio-political implications of the source texts. &#x0D; In the present article, I insist on the idea that Venuti’s ‘minoritizing translation’ can be adapted to attend to the minor literature features of American Indian books and, consequently, to produce culturally and socio-politically engaged translations. After revising Venuti’s proposal and Tymoczko’s criticism on it, I present a brief description of the translations of works by Alexie, Erdrich, Momaday and Zitkala-Ša, all published during the 2010s. Then, I detail the precise strategies that would help to emphasize the specific characteristics of this literature, and I compare passages from the published translations with my alternative minoritizing translations.

Louise Erdrich's The Round House: Restorative Justice in a Coming of Age Thriller

In a novel critics have described as a "thriller-like" coming-of-age story, Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012) integrates two apparently conflicting approaches to Native American law. First, Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law legitimizes the need for working with allies to Indigenous peoples in developing contextual applications of settler state laws. The second draws on the authority of authorless Anishinaabe stories and dreams. While Cohen and his descendants in tribal law practice are allies to the Anishinabeg, dream narrations by the narrator's grandfather affirm the contemporary vitality of Anishinaabe approaches to justice. Finally, Erdrich's narration suggests why restorative justice for women in Indigenous communities in the United States should matter for her international audience.

Dressing the Cuts of the Past, Seaming a Glocal Future in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness

SummaryThis article focuses on two contemporary novels, Louise Erdrich's Tracks and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, which revolve around the ways in which two indigenous communities, the Chippewa of North Dakota, America, and the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape in South Africa, try to cope with the devastating effects of colonial invasion and exploitation of their lands and culture, and to maintain a sense of bioregional history and identity, while anticipating a future of fruitful interaction with global society. Both novels demonstrate the entwinement and interdependence of these native tribes and the specific natural environment they inhabit, both in the economic and spiritual sense, and underscore the importance of a sustainable relationship of communities with their local environment for a healthy and peaceful engagement among themselves and with the rest of the world. Various characters with shamanic features play a significant role in combining tribal lore with the emergent configurations of existence, especially in their capacity to integrate the material and the spiritual, the animate and the inanimate, as well as the past, the present, and the future. While exploring the links between shamanism and environmental consciousness in a global context, as implied by the two novels, this article will avoid homogenising shamanism into a conceptual category or flattening its contextuality.

PREVOĐENJE ELEMENATA INDIJANSKE KULTURE U ROMANU DEVOJČICA SA OSTRVA DUHOVA LUIZ ERDRIČ

Prevođenje književnih dela koja se mogu sama po sebi posmatrati kao prevod predstavlja jedan od velikih izazova sa kojima se prevodioci susreću. Ovde se prvenstveno misli na multikulturalne tekstove, nastale u dve kulture i na dva jezika paralelno. Multikulturalnom književnošću se smatraju ostvarenja pisaca imigranata, ali i kolonizovanih starosedelaca, koji predstavljaju etničke manjine u okviru dominantnog društva. Multikulturalni pisci najčešće pišu na dominantnom jeziku, ali u svoja dela uključuju i reči, fraze, pa i čitave rečenice napisane na maternjem jeziku kako bi iskazali jedinstven kulturni sadržaj. Ovakve enkodirane poruke predstavljaju izazov za čitaoce, ali i prevodioce koji moraju taj sadržaj da prenesu na druge jezike. Problemi ove vrste prisutni su gotovo u svim delima indijanske književnosti. Luiz Erdrič, u romanu Devojčica sa Ostrva duhova koji piše na engleskom, oslikava kulturu, običaje i verovanja svog naroda, koristeći reči i izraze iz jezika Odžibve. Ovaj rad se bavi analizom prevoda ovog romana sa engleskog jezika na srpski Aleksandre Grubor. Posebna pažnja je posvećena strategijama koje prevoditeljka koristi kako bi prevela reči iz jezika plemena Odžibve, kao i reči iz engleskog jezika obojene kulturnim nasleđem plemena Odžibve.

Louise Erdrich’s The Round House , the Wiindigoo, and Star Trek: The Next Generation

Since its publication in 2012, the climax to Louise Erdrich’s novel The Round House has troubled many readers due to its apparent idealization of vigilante violence. Joe Coutts’s execution of Linden Lark, his mother’s rapist, feels too easy, too much of a kind with Linden’s own vengeful killings. However Erdrich’s association of Linden with the Anishinaabe legend of wiindigoo, and Armus—a sadistic creature from Star Trek: The Next Generation—reframes this shooting as a ceremonial sacrifice. We can thereby understand Linden’s shooting as what Girard termed the pharmakos, the scapegoat that absorbs and personifies the violence of the larger community and whose death therefore helps short-circuit the violence that Erdrich’s afterword assures us is still all too frequently perpetrated on our contemporary Native American reservations.

Shawnee’s Redemption in The Bingo Palace

The novels of American Indian writer Louise Erdrich have aroused wide interest among literary critics. However, the majority of scholars working on her novel The Bingo Palace have focused on male c...

Fleur Pillager: Chippewa Woman of Power in Louise Erdrich's Tracks

Karen Louise Erdrich is acclaimed as one of the most significant Native American writers and a most accomplishing and promising novelist. Erdrich's skill in creating and developing fictional characters is a central aspect of her success as a versatile writer. Erdrich confronts the realities of Native American life in the Twentieth Century. Her fiction depicts the Anishinaabe culture in which present occurrences cannot be isolated from the past and her works often deal with the issues concerning Native Americans. Louise Erdrich is renowned for the portrayal of women characters, specifically as mothers and self made personalities. Her women project self confidence and stand in good stead for their community as a whole. Erdrich depicts Fleur Pillager as a self made woman who uses her powers and strengths absolutely to the fullest inorder to stand tall as an individual and for her community at large.