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LOUISE ERDRICH's CONCEPTS of HOME by JONATHAN MAX WILSON Presented NATIVE SPACES OF CONTINUATION, PRESERVATION, AND BELONGING: LOUISE ERDRICH’S CONCEPTS OF HOME by JONATHAN MAX WILSON Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON MAY 2008 Copyright © by JONATHAN WILSON 2008 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the University of Texas at Arlington, the UTA English Department, and my dissertation committee: Dr. Kenneth Roemer, Dr. Neill Matheson, and Dr. Desiree Henderson. Without my fellowship and assistantship and the above professors’ guidance and dedication to furthering my studies, I would not have been able to complete this dissertation or my degree. iii ABSTRACT NATIVE SPACES OF CONTINUATION, PRESERVATION, AND BELONGING: LOUISE ERDRICH’S CONCEPTS OF HOME Jonathan Wilson, PhD. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2008 Supervising Professor: Kenneth Roemer In light of continual Native migration, relocation, and hybridization, it is my intention to examine the evolution and diversification of home in a spectrum of Louise Erdrich’s writing. My examination of the texts focuses on the notion that “home” for all Native Americans (mixed and full bloods) has and is evolving and that this re-definition has made the location of language, culture, family, and community a “Home” that cannot be defined by traditional Native or Western boundaries or definitions. Instead, home depends on the inter-relation of such attributes, but it is not specific to any inclusion or omission. Home is not anything or everything but a definite correlation of those elements that correspond to belonging to a space or place. My contentions rely on the fact that the traditional sense of space and place is no longer readily available to a majority of full-bloods and mixed bloods. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………. iii ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………. iv Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION: NOTIONS OF HOME………………………………………… 1 2. TRACKS AND FOUR SOULS ……………………………………………………. 20 2.1 Home Sweet Home: Following the Tracks of a Lost People………… 20 2.2 Fear and Loathing in the Search to Reclaim Home in Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls ………………………………………………………… 33 3. THE LAST REPORT ON THE MIRACLES AT LITTLE NO HORSE…………. 43 3.1 Reading ‘Home’ as the Catalytic Converter in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse ……………………………………………… 43 4. BEET QUEEN AND MASTER BUTCHERS SINGING CLUB………………… 63 4.1 ‘Blood Memory’ in Action: Pull Towards ‘Home’ in Louise Erdrich’s Beet Queen …………………………………………………………………… 63 4.2 The Office of Carnage as the Location of ‘Home’ in Louise Erdrich’s Master Butchers Singing Club ……………….………………….. 74 5. TALES OF BURNING LOVE AND BINGO PALACE …………. ………………. 83 5.1 Old Wives, the Same Man, and a Baby: Location and Family as the Foundation of ‘Home’ in Louise Erdrich’s Tales of Burning Love …………………………………………………………………………… 83 5.2 Finding a Winner in Louise Erdrich’s Bingo Palace ...………………. 93 6. BLUE JAY’S DANCE AND PAINTED DRUM...……………………………….. 111 6.1 Home Away From Home: Body and Nature in Louise Erdrich’s Blue Jay’s Dance ……………………………………………………..…….. 111 6.2 Following the Sound of the Painted Drum Home; Or the Power and Sacrifice of Little Girls……………….………………………………… 119 v 7. LOVE MEDICINE………………………………………….............……………. 130 7.1 Notions of Home in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine ………………… 130 8. CONCLUSION: HOME…………………………………………...………………. 153 REFERENCES……………………………………………….…………………………………. 158 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION………………………...…………………………………. 165 vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: NOTIONS OF HOME The land. The people. They are in relation to each other. We are in a family with each other. ---Simon Ortiz, Woven Stone The Oxford English Dictionary defines “home” as a specific, fixed residence or dwelling- place that may or may not include family. Native American notions of home, however, encompass a much more complex conception: Home “is not only a place; it is a past, a set of values and parents, an ‘ancien regime’” (Bevis 581). “Home” is the singular yet webbed intricacies of people, land, memory, identity, space, language, and community. In light of continual Native migration, relocation, and hybridization, it is my intention to examine the evolution and diversification of home in a spectrum of Louise Erdrich’s writing. In “Louise Erdrich’s Storied Universe,” Catherine Rainwater argues, “Erdrich’s recurrent themes concern the ties between people and geographical locations, the importance of community among all living beings, the complexities of individuals and cultural identity, and the exigencies of marginalization, dispossession, and cultural survival” (271). I claim that Erdrich’s writing addresses each of these issues to explore the variety of ways that Natives have and continue to find “reference [and] identity…to landscapes-” in the “absence of all familiar place” (Erdrich “Where” 23). My examination of the texts focuses on the notion that “home” for all Native Americans (mixed and full bloods) has and is evolving and that this re-definition has made the location of language, culture, family, and community a “home” that cannot be defined by traditional Native or Western boundaries or definitions. Instead, home depends on the inter- relation of such attributes, but it is not specific to any inclusion or omission. Home is not 1 anything or everything but a definite correlation of those elements that correspond to belonging to a space or place. My contentions rely on the fact that the traditional sense of space and place is no longer readily available to a majority of full-bloods and mixed bloods. In her New York Times article, “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place,” Erdrich convincingly compares the situation of Native Americans to the survivors of nuclear holocaust, which explains the exigence for the malleable structure home has been forced to take on. However, relocation and/or migration are not necessarily apocalyptic for Natives when couched in the protective halls, walls, and foundations of homes created by community, family, land, and language. The Native American living in a Fargo apartment has little context for the land of his ancestors; the un-informed Native has little knowledge of his past except for his surname or a brief historical account learned in public school textbooks; and Erdrich, herself, while fortunate enough to remain in contact with her Ojibwe relatives, is a mixed-blood, who lived on the edge of the reservation for an extended period of time. Erdrich’s writing reflects these types of contemporary circumstances for Native Americans, but her writing also suggests that neither Native Americans nor Native American identity is extinct or vanishing. Instead, Erdrich asserts that Natives are very much alive, coping with the post-colonial world in various fashions. I hope that this study of “home” will add to the broad spectrum of Native literatures already dedicated to the significance of “home” to indigenous peoples. To do so, I wish to focus on emerging hybrid “homes.” There, I believe, is the opportunity for Natives to view and utilize various non-traditional and traditional spaces and places to sustain their cultures, customs, and identity. Thus, the real significance of this project is that my contentions are not new at all. Whether voluntary or involuntary, for over 500 years, Native Americans have redefined “home” in a world of extermination, relocation, termination, and assimilation. This re-definition began in oral tales, but it has moved to the modern language of the oppressor in fiction, poetry, and non- fiction writing by Native authors. Thus, as a base for my own survey of Erdrich’s treatment of 2 home and to demonstrate the importance of the topic, I offer a brief overview of significant works in Native American literature and criticism that address space or place as essential to Native identity and belonging. Contemporary texts of the last fifty to sixty years address the “homing motif” at length. Pulitzer Prize winning author, intellectual, critic, and tribal spokesman N. Scott Momaday’s (Kiowa) House Made of Dawn , The Names , Way to Rainy Mountain, and especially “Man Made of Words” speak to the formation or recreation of identity and place in relation to stories and language. Leslie Marmon Silko’s critically acclaimed Ceremony recounts the importance of place to affirming Native identity, culture, and life. Gerald Vizenor’s Dead Voices relates the origins of the earth and Native peoples to the spoken word. And most pointedly, Simon Ortiz’s Woven Stone addresses the difficulty of Native preservation and continuation in an ever changing world-that is consumed by Western ideologies. In Way to Rainy Mountain , Momaday states, “In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken” ( WTRM ix). Here the “beginning” and “origin” are tied together with the land (the original “home” of Native peoples). In reference to his own memory of Kiowa stories, Momaday notes, “They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the Earth” ( WTRM ix). While this seems to give rather large leeway to what home is or is not (the entire Earth), Momaday is careful to trace the migratory patterns of the Kiowa people and how and why they formulated and/or adapted new versions of “home,” both in the physical and psychological sense: “They [Kiowa] began a long migration from the headwaters of the Yellowstone River eastward to the Black Hills and south to the Wichita Mountains. Along the way they acquired horses, the religion of the Plains, a love and possession of the open land” ( WTRM 4).This glorified interpretation of migration is, however, fleeting. Being true to historical events, Momaday later relates the catastrophic effect the United States occupation of tribal lands and Natives’ forced relocation had on his people. 3 Yet, Momaday does not leave his tribe or audience with a depressed outlook for the future. He expertly concludes the introduction of Way to Rainy Mountain with a new beginning, instead of an end.
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