| Louise Erdrich, one of the most significant, prolific and acclaimed American native writers of the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln calls the Native American Renaissance, enjoys a position as established as that of N. Scott Momaday in the first wave. Her literary achievement mainly lies in her stories and novels. Since1984when Love Medicine was published to enthusiastic critical acclaim and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Erdrich has been in the limelight. Erdrich’s works have been canonized and widely anthologized, becoming the subject of discussion in the areas of American Indian literature, women literature, ethnic literature, contemporary American literature, comparative mythology and comparative literature.Erdrich’s Little No Horse Reservation Saga consists of five novels:Love Medicine (1984), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1996), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and Four Souls (2004), all set in the fictional Little No Horse Reservation in North Dakota, relating the stories of four generations of four families, namely, Lazarres, Pillagers, Morrisseys and Kashpaws over about150years. The Saga is comparable to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County Saga in terms of its local color, multiple narratives, time span of several generations and a large cast of characters populating the novels.Erdrich has been the focus of two controversies. The first one is about the genre of her "novel-like" fiction with the advent of Love Medicine. Erdrich’s eleven novels so far published are all composed of short stories, among which about46pieces have been separately published previously. Therefore, each of her novels is told by more than one narrator and the use of multiple narratives is the most salient feature of her novels. With six first person narrators, Love Medicine is the most typical novel and perhaps best illustrates Erdrich’s multiple narratives. Critics are widely divided as to whether her "novel-like" fiction is collections of short stories, short story cycle, or novels. The advent of The Beet Queen in1986aroused another heated controversy. Erdrich was censured in Silko’s acrimonious review of The Beet Queen for her indulgence in language and self-reflectivity, ignoring political issues and the living conditions of oppressed American Indians, and consequently lacking political commitment. Silko insists that postmodern aesthetics cannot truly represent the living condition and historical suffering of the American Indians. Some critics and writers like Louis Owens speak for Erdrich, pointing out that Erdrich has been misread by Silko. Such censure implicitly encompasses all of Erdrich’s works published before The Beet Queen.So far, postmodernity, the image of tricksterish characters, hybridity and magical realism in the Saga have received attention from critics. However, the study on the social criticism and political commitment of Erdrich and her novels is sporadic. This dissertation is a thematic study of Erdrich’s Little No Horse Reservation Saga, holding that the Saga, rather than Silko has criticized, brims with severe social criticism, strong political commitment and the author’s intense concern over American Indians’historical and cultural problems.Some critics contend that Erdrich’s preference for multiple narratives can be attributed to her postmodern epistemology, which holds that reality, history and identity are all fragmentary and discontinuous. Still others believe that her preference results from the Indian oral tradition. And some maintain that such a preference is a creative synthesis of both her postmodern epistemology and Indian oral tradition. So far, neither domestic critics in the United States nor abroad have studied the importance of the fact that almost all the narrators of the Saga stories are mixedblood or fullblood Chippewa. This dissertation contends that the cultural identity of the narrators of the stories of the Saga deserves close attention. In most of writings by the whites, American Indians are objects of whites’gaze. Consequently, they are always silenced and marginalized. By employing Chippewa narrators, Erdrich empowers American Indians to speak. In her novels, American Indians, turned from objects into subjects, are in a position to reverse the gaze, making their voices audible and their images visible through their own stories. Chippewa narrators also present the images of the whites in the eyes of Chippewa:deceitful, greedy, haughty, with "pride and prejudice," never attempting to know the native but just desiring to convert, acculturate and assimilate them.Compared with traditional novels often narrated by omniscient narrators, Erdrich’s novels are loosely and fragmentarily structured, nonlinear, nonchronological, fragmentary, contradictory. Hence her novels are filled with tantalizing and elusive bits and pieces. Gathering and piecing together the scattered bits and pieces of the personal experiences narrated by Chippewa, the four chapters of this dissertation present clear and complete pictures or relate linear/chronological stories to reveal the painful experiences imposed on the American Indians by whites:of being forcibly sent to boarding schools, converted into Catholics, driven into the sterile and barren land in the West to make room for white settlers, and confined to the reservations in the West, transformed into farmers with the tribal community disintegrated. In each chapter, juxtaposed with the stories are the corresponding "well-meaning" Indian policies, high-sounding or discriminatory discourse. Apparent tension exists in each juxtaposition, and it is in this tension that the power of the author’s scathing criticism resides. It is rightful to conclude that in the Little No Horse Reservation Saga, Erdrich invariably targets the whites’acculturation and assimilation policies and discriminatory discourse.Chippewa tales as an alternative narrative overthrow relevant mainstream and official narratives. These tales readdress the land issues and reveal the truth of Chippewa loss of land. American government and the whites professed to educate Indians and bring them into civilization by enforcing the Removal Act and the Dawes Act. Actually, the enforcement of these two acts resulted in the loss of large expanses of land by the American Indians, loss of a sense of history, personal identity and a certain core of spiritual power and magic with their land, disintegration of the community, and a change of mode of life from fishing and hunting to farming.The professed purpose of Indian boarding schools,"to kill the Indian in the child"(qtd. in Miller35), brings to light that this policy brims with supremacy and cultural chauvinism. The enforcement of this policy ended in the wholesale destruction of Indian language, customs, values, religious beliefs. The destructive effect of this policy, for example, goes beyond Lulu’s irreconcilable alienation from her mother. Away in the boarding school and forced to speak English, Lulu quickly becomes estranged from traditional tribal customs. Consequently, she does not acquire the healing powers that should have been passed on to her by her mother. Attending the same boarding school as Lulu, brainwashed by the white culture, Nector ends up repudiating the traditional culture and being assimilated into the white culture and becomes an "apple," voluntarily serving the white government. In the white discourse or the mainstream narrative, however, such devastating destruction of American Indians and the traditional native culture is absent.In the Little No Horse Reservation Saga, Erdrich, through Chippewa tales, reveals the truth of Catholic missionary activities and forcible conversions. Catholic missionaries professed that only they could guide the lost American Indians out of darkness to light. Their missionary work and forced conversion actually brought American Indians diseases, chaos in their religious belief and destruction of their family units. Erdrich’s criticism goes further than just revealing this. The Chippewa narrators relate stories about Pauline/Leopolda--an appalling, sadist, frenzied, abnormally pious zealot. She kills her love and abandons her daughter. Erdrich implies it is the avowed privilege or oppression from the Church that drives Pauline to make an outcast of herself in an effort to achieve acceptability in the white world but unexpectedly brings affliction to her and others. Though Pauline follows rigidly all steps of the conversion process, and there are miracles about her that are required of a saint, she is ironically unqualified for sainthood. Passing as a man, Agnes acts as Father Damien. Not well trained in Christian teachings, she gives up "pride and prejudice" against American Indians and realizes the power of the Chippewa spirituality. Eventually, she abandons her former intention of converting Indians and is eventually converted by the Chippewa. In spite of her many sins, Father Jude, a priest assigned by Rome to investigate the possibility for Pauline’sainthood, feels touched and advises the Church canonize Agnes instead of Pauline. These two stories lay bare the tragic effect that Catholic conversion brings to the native people, satirize the pride and prejudice Catholic missionaries hold against American Indians, and implicitly question the necessity of the forced conversion.Perhaps no other ethnic group has ever been so severely victimized by fabricated unpleasant images as American Indians. These unfavorable images result either from the ideology of white supremacy or the whites’ignorance of their less "civilized" neighbors. Lyman’s image of making the best of the U. S. Indian policies to survive counters the stereotypical image of American Indians as living in the past and refusing to adapt themselves to the changing society. Moreover, the tales by the Chippewa counter the colonial legacy--women are meek, docile, servile and inferior to men--and undermine the imposed ingrained stereotypic image of American Indian women. Their resiliency, resourcefulness and creativity can be found in different social roles they play. Moreover, the tales by the Chippewa characters, modeling Gerry on Leonard Peltier, a former AIM leader and later a convicted criminal, deconstruct Leonard’s image from a criminal in the eyes of whites into a political hero who is innocent and can be confined by nothing from the perspective of American Indians. Tales by the Chippewa also challenge American Indian stereotypes of being humorless. Nanapush and Lipsha flesh out a vivid picture of American Indians; humor plays an important role in their daily lives and serves as a survival strategy. Portraying American Indians from their own perspective, Erdrich reveals the ever present notion of white supremacy, resulting in racial discrimination. Erdrich’s criticism is also echoed in her non-fictional writings--such as poetry, open letters and other political essays.The Little No Horse Reservation Saga reveals both the catastrophic effect of the American government’s main Indian policies on American Indian individuals and communities in the past150years, and the discrimination, ignorance and arrogance behind white discourse. It challenges and interrogates such Indian policies and discourse. Erdrich’s criticism is dispersed among fragmentary narratives and is hidden in significant images. Consequently, it necessitates the reader’s scrutiny to discover her criticism. Her fiction transcends didacticism; the wide swath that the political commitment of the Saga cuts and the depth of her intense concern over the historical issues offer the best response to Silko’s censure. |
PDF Full Text Request