| The author of 17 novels,a history of American Indians’ active survival,Louise Erdrich(1954-)is among the most important Native American writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance.In her oeuvre,Native American experience in the realistic realm is intricately interwoven with romantic tales through variable narratives.Among others,The Plague of Doves(2008),as the first entry in her loose trilogy,signals her quest for justice in a literary way.Based on a historical case and drifting through time and space,the novel makes a groundbreaking investigation into racial history and justice,drawing literary criticism from narratology,Native American identity,cultural trauma,and New Historicism.In contrast,justice and legal issues raised by it have yet to be studied systematically.Based upon existing studies,this thesis focuses on Erdrich’s efforts to strike a balance between Native American cultures and the primary philosophy of the criminal justice system in The Plague of Doves.Bringing together concepts from many theoretical positions,including those from Linda Hutcheon’s poetics of postmodernism,New Historicism,and Perpetrator Studies,the novel is interpreted as a response to three questions: How does the novel rewrite the official records of racial cases? How does it break down the dichotomy between Native American victims and Euro-American victimizers? Furthermore,how does it remedy individual and collective traumas left by the impersonal jurisdictional justice?Through elaborative investigations in terms of history,psychology,and culture,this thesis maintains that Louise Erdrich’s postmodern novel rewrites official narratives of a legal dispute between Natives and non-Natives,rejects the applicability of the prevailing justice mechanism to Native American communities,questions the availability of the predominant legal means to impede future relapse,and proposes restorative justice as an alternative approach.Underneath such advocacy are narratives about Native American survivance and universally internal conflicts,which to some extent offers a better understanding on issues of Indigenous cultures,justice,and human nature. |
