Louise Erdrich's Great Plains

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for Fall 2001 "We Anishinaabeg Are The Keepers Of The Names Of The Earth" Louise Erdrich's Great Plains P. Jane Hafen University of Nevada, Las Vegas, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly Part of the Other International and Area Studies Commons Hafen, P. Jane, ""We Anishinaabeg Are The Keepers Of The Names Of The Earth" Louise Erdrich's Great Plains" (2001). Great Plains Quarterly. 2207. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2207 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. "WE ANISHINAABEG ARE THE KEEPERS OF THE NAMES OF THE EARTH" LOUISE ERDRICH'S GREAT PLAINS P. JANE HAFEN In a tribal view of the world, where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history. Unlike most contem porary writers, a traditional storyteller fixes listeners in an unchanging landscape combined of myth and reality. People and place are inseparable. - Louise Erdrich, "Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place" (1985)1 With these words, Louise Erdrich sets forth two poetry collections, a memoir, and two co her own manifesto for writing about her place. authored books, Erdrich has created a vision A Native of the Northern Plains, Erdrich is a of the Great Plains that spans the horizon of member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa time and space and ontologically defines the nation. In a stunning production of seven nov people of her heritage. els, six with interwoven tales and characters, ERDRICH'S NORTH DAKOTA KEY WORDS: Anishinaabeg, Chippewa, Louise Erdrich, Native American literature, North The literary impact is remarkable. Louise Dakota Erdrich's North Dakota cycle of novels in cludes the award-winning Love Medicine P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) is Associate Professor of (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love publications include articles on Louise Erdrich (Great (1996), and most recently The Last Report on Plains Quarterly, 1996), Native American Writers of the Midwest (Updating the Literary West, Texas the Miracle at Little No Horse (2001).2 In an Christian University Press, 1997), Dreams and audacious move, Erdrich took the acclaimed Thunder: Stories, Poems and The Sun Dance Opera Love Medicine, edited it, added to it, and reis by Zitkala-Sa (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), sued it in 1993, thus demonstrating that the and co-editor of The Great Plains Reader (forthcoming, vital, living nature of indigenous storytelling University of Nebraska Press). exists not only in oral traditions but in fixed print as well. J Additionally, The Antelope Wife [GPQ 21 (Fall 2001): 321-32] (1998) blends Ojibwe traditions with the 321 322 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2001 FIG. 1. Louise Erdrich. Photograph by Lynda Koolish. challenges and humor of urban natives in Min pleted me-the isolation from family, from neapolis, Erdrich's current residence. Earlier, other people of OJ ibwe mixed background, the relocated by career and family obligations, absence of sky and horizon."4 Erdrich describes her memoir of early mother Karen Louise Erdrich was raised in Wah hood, The Blue Jay's Dance (1995), as having peton, North Dakota, "on land that once be "some desperation in the writing ... a long longed to the Wahpeton-Sisseton" Dakota ing for my home ground. New Hampshire de- and was home to a Bureau of Indians Affairs LOUISE ERDRICH'S GREAT PLAINS 323 boarding school, where her parents taught and in reference to locale and legal definition, ac her Ojibwe grandfather attended.s She de cording to the federal processes of validating scribes Wahpeton as "really half a town, the American Indian authenticity. More than the other half being Breckenridge, Minnesota" reductionary blood quantum with attendant and "desperate to be something."6 Although certificates of degree of Indian blood, Erdrich the Red River is a natural geological divider, has a heritage within that community. She is the political boundaries between the states of the granddaughter of former Turtle Mountain North Dakota and Minnesota, of course, tribal chair Patrick Gourneau. The German meant nothing to Erdrich's Ojibwe ancestors. American ancestry of her father, Ralph The Ojibwe people, historically referring to Erdrich, is subsumed by the omnipresence of themselves as Anishinabe, ranged through the race and traditional Ojibwe heritage. Tribal Great Lakes region and the Northern Plains. community is also defined according to its The English speakers of the United States geographic placement. When she and other mangled their name into "Chippewa," and indigenous peoples write about land, they are that is the legal designation of the federal speaking of culture and resources, of course, government. The Ojibwe trace their origin to but also acknowledging ontology, the defin Mantoulin Island, Ontario, "the largest island ing concepts of existence. That reality is anywhere in fresh water, an expanse of roll brought into existence through language. ing hills and deep azure lakes, suffused with highly differentiated vegetation, animal life, PLACE NAMES and geological oddities."7 Here the mystical manitous coordinated the world into exist In an endnote to The Last Report on the ence. Here on the island, Moses Pillager and Miracles at Little No Horse, Erdrich has Lulu Nanapush in Love Medicine, heirs of the Nanapush explain about naming and place in Bear clan and the Nanabozho trickster legacy,S an indigenous cosmos: give life to a new generation of contemporary Ojibwe survivors, starting with their son, Gerry White people usually name places for Nanapush. men-presidents and generals and entre Although the Ojibwe consist of about a preneurs. Ojibwe name places for what hundred bands and reservation communities grows there or what is found. If we in what is now Canada and the United States, call ourselves and all we see around us by there are commonalities among traditions, the original names, will we not continue histories, and, most importantly, geographi to be Anishinaabeg? Instead of reconsti cal place. Imposition of political divisions tuted white men, instead of Indian ghosts? after European contact and conflicts with tra Do the rocks here know us, do the trees, ditional enemies, the Dakotas and the Sac do the waters of the lakes? Not unless and Fox, forced the Ojibwe into discrete com they are addressed by the names they munities and diminished their collective themselves told us to call them in our power but did not reduce a general commu dreams. Every feature of the land around nal sense of identity. Western bands of the us spoke its name to an ancestor. Perhaps, Ojibwe settled in the Pembina area and the in the end, that is all that we are. We "Turtle Mountains of present day North Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names Dakota's border region."9 Consequently, these of the earth. And unless the earth is bands, including Erdrich's home tribe, called by the names it gave us humans, adopted Northern Plains traditions into their won't it cease to love us? And isn't it true Woodland cultural way of life. that [if1 the earth stops loving us, every Erdrich's tribal identity is inextricable with one, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease place. She is Turtle Mountain Chippewa both to exist?lO 324 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, FALL 2001 The imperative is clear. The earth and tribal June's body by her husband, Jack Mauser. The peoples have a symbiotic relationship; they language of each passage is similar but not are mutually self-defining. Forgetting recipro identical: cal dependence leads to destruction. Survival as indigenous peoples is predicated on the land. He turned away, and still the shadows Erdrich is refuting assimilation and the Van rode across the icy crust of open ranch land, ishing American through adherence to the the pastures, pure and roadless, the fields, earth. The consequences affect all human be the open spaces .... The storm had blown ings. over with the speed of all spring lapses .... Just as Erdrich exists in a context of geo [June'dl gotten tired of walking in those graphical locale, many of her characters are thin shoes, and sat down against a fence indelibly connected with portraits of place, post. To wait for the bus, he thought. She most often with Great Plains descriptors. In was looking to the east, her hair loaded Love Medicine, the long-legged Chippewa with melting stars. No one had touched her woman, June Morrissey Kashpaw, walks to yet. Her face was complex in its expecta ward home in an Easter blizzard. The compul tions. A fist of air punched Jack to earth sion to return to homeland, what William and he knelt before her with his hands out Bevis calls "homing in"ll and which we see in stretched. But then the officer reached past other Erdrich works, drives June to risk her him, thumbed her eyelids down, took her life to the natural elements and capricious purse from her lap, knocked off her blanket spring weather of the Plains: of snow.13 The wind was mild and wet. A Chinook More than altering the perspective, Erdrich wind, she told herself. She made a right keeps consistent the images associated with turn off the road, walked up a drift frozen the character, June. The reader never encoun over a snow fence, amI began to pick her ters her without some sort of geographical sig way through the swirls of dead grass and icy nifier.

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