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The Anishinaabe Worldview and the Child Reader in Louise Erdrich's the Birchbark House Series

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The Anishinaabe Worldview and the Child Reader in Louise Erdrich's the Birchbark House Series The Anishinaabe Worldview and the Child Reader in Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House Series Angela Joy Sparks Submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of PhD (Literature) May 2018 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the generous funding of the University of Hertfordshire Literature Bursary, for which I am grateful. I would like to thank my supervisory team, in particular Dr Rowland Hughes, for his patience, advice and support. I would also like to thank my husband Peter, who has encouraged me and supported me throughout this process. I am grateful to friends and colleagues from the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Northampton for their advice, support and friendship, and to the library services of those same institutions. Finally, I am forever grateful to my parents, without whose support and generosity I would not have had the opportunity to pursue this project. Abstract Louise Erdrich is an award-winning Anishinaabe-American author, whose works of fiction have attracted a significant body of scholarly interest. To date, her output of children's fiction has received comparatively less critical attention. This thesis is the first study to consider The Birchbark House series (published between 1999 and 2016) as a whole unit, in order to demonstrate its importance as a contributor to the perpetuation of Anishinaabe values amongst both Indigenous and settler children, and as a counter-hegemonic narrative. This thesis takes as its starting point the development of children's literature as a field of scholarly enquiry, using eXisting theoretical frameworks to situate The Birchbark House series within the discourse surrounding children's and young adult literature. The thesis then traces the Anishinaabe worldview through the novels by considering key themes that emerge from Anishinaabe and Native studies as markers of Indigenous culture. The contribution to knowledge of this thesis lies in drawing together the critical fields of Native Studies and Children's Literature. By eXamining The Birchbark House series through the themes of land/environment, home, family, and storytelling, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which Erdrich privileges an Anishinaabe worldview, and in doing so shows how Erdrich's children's fiction interacts with and belongs to her wider body of work. The key findings of this thesis relate to the child reader and the development of indigenous methodologies. Erdrich's novels are central to the rapid growth of Anishinaabe-authored children's and young adult literature, and embedded within a wider cultural renaissance which is contributing to growing activism and widespread awareness of Indigenous cultural and political issues. This in turn warrants a reassessment of the methodologies underpinning the critical study of emerging Indigenous children's literature, building on the eXisting development of decolonising and indigenous methodologies within Anishinaabe studies. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Children’s Literature 41 Chapter Two: Land and Environment 78 Chapter Three: The Home 116 Chapter Four: Family and Kinship 148 Chapter Five: Storytelling 187 Conclusion 220 Bibliography 234 AppendiX 268 Introduction Louise Erdrich’s books for children, The Birchbark House (1999) and its sequels, trace the life of an Ojibwe1 family from their ancestral home on Madeline Island in Lake Superior, to the Plains, and eventually, the Turtle Mountain reservation. Over the course of the series, the protagonists undergo a series of migrations that echo those made by the Ojibwe in the nineteenth century, from the perspective of eight-year-old Omakayas, and in the later novels, her young sons. This thesis eXplores the novels’ foregrounding of the Anishinaabe worldview as an act of presencing against contemporary and historical colonial definitions of Native American identity and culture.2 By addressing the teXts’ engagement with aspects of Anishinaabe life such as land, family, the home, and storytelling, this thesis identifies and traces the development of the Anishinaabe concept of mino-bimaadiziwin3, or ‘the good life’, within the series. This, in turn, enables us to read the novels as a narrative that not only counters Euro-American accounts of white settlement but functions more as an act of cultural presencing than historical revision. This introduction will first situate the series at the interstices of Native Studies and Children’s Literature, then consider the background of the author and the novels’ place within her literary oeuvre. The introduction then eXplores a range 1 This thesis recognises that there are variations in the terminology used to describe the tribe to which the characters of the novels, and Erdrich herself, belongs. Namely, these are Ojibwe, Anishinaabe, and Chippewa, and each term has its own political and cultural meaning and significance. In this study I use the terms Ojibwe and Anishinaabe depending on context, which follows a pattern set by Erdrich in the novels. Ojibwe is the designation used by Erdrich in the preface to her novels. However, she too uses Anishinaabe to describe the wider tribal group and OmaKayas’ cultural heritage. The terms each have variations in spelling, so for clarity I have endeavoured to use ‘Ojibwe’ and ‘Anishinaabe’ consistently. 2 I use the term presencing to refer to the assertion of Indigenous cultural and literary existence, following Daniel Heath Justice’s suggestion that stories are actively part of ‘cultural, political and familial resurgence.’ See Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018) pp. 5-6. 3 Mino-bimaadiziwin is ‘the good life’, or a ‘long and happy life’, which is achieved by upholding Anishinaabe values and relationships. The term is explained more in context in later chapters. 1 Introduction of significant studies in the fields of Anishinaabe Studies and Children’s Literature in order to develop an understanding of the novels as indigenous children’s literature.4 The intersection of Native studies and children’s literature has been a productive site of engagement with the teXts throughout this thesis. Thinking about the role of children’s literature in identity development and cultural awareness facilitates an understanding of Erdrich’s narratives that position the teXts as crucial to the survivance of Anishinaabe culture. The term ‘survivance’ – a portmanteau of survival and resistance – was coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, and is described as “the unique history of survival and resistance that sustained indigenous creativity within their communities.”5 Erdrich’s children’s fiction has been described by Heid E. Erdrich as: “story as persistence and resistance, a postcolonial response as well as a tradition,”6 where the presence of a child reader complicates the idea of a direct postcolonial response in favour of celebrating persistence. For readers that are aware of the history of colonialism and conquest the novels are a form of response to the dominant historical narrative. For other readers, this series may sit alongside other teXts about Native Americans that form a more nuanced understanding of Native history, thus not functioning as a response but rather as evidence of survivance. As a result of the variation in knowledge and eXperience that readers have, the novels speak on multiple levels to a varied audience, written with both Anishinaabe and non-Native readers in mind. By choosing to write these stories as children’s fiction, Erdrich is able to draw on aspects of childhood that are universal, as well as 4 I use the term indigenous/Indigenous to refer to the cultural systems and people groups that existed on Turtle Island/North America prior to European exploration and settlement. I predominantly use the term ‘Native American’ to refer to the indigenous peoples of the United States, unless they have self-identified using a different term. 5 Brenda J Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community, (New YorK: ViKing, 2012), p. xxvii. 6 Heid E. Erdrich, ‘Literary Ancestry as Presence’, in Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories, ed. by Jill Doerfler et al, (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2013), pp. 13-34 (p. 19). 2 The Anishinaabe Worldview and the Child Reader in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House Series those that are culturally specific to an Anishinaabe child. In the interstices between the two, Erdrich negotiates a storytelling position that is faithful to Anishinaabe customs whilst reflecting her own miXed heritage. The historian David Lewis writes: “Indian persistence depends on educating young people in their own language and customs”7 and these novels fit within a broader tradition of resurgence (by which I mean an increase in both quantity and scope of publications) in children’s and young adult literature. As the field of children’s literature has developed, there has been an increase in Native American authors writing for that audience, such as Joseph Bruchac, Sherman AleXie, Cynthia Leitich-Smith, Carter Meland, and of course, Louise Erdrich. Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota to a German-American father, and an Ojibwe mother. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents were teachers at the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School, and she and her siblings were raised in the Catholic church. Her maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau,
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