Antelope Woman

“The herd flows in steps and spurting gallops deeper into the west. When they walk she walks, following, dried berries in a sack made of her dress. When they run, she runs with them. Naked, graceful, the blue beads around her neck.”

This passage, which describes the herd of antelope that come for Blue Prairie Woman in her final hours, grounds the novel within a tradition of Indigenous folklore. The antelope woman is a figure who appears in multiple different oral histories, and in engaging with her, the author places her work in dialogue with this traditional story.

“Augustus had grown up in the shadow of his father’s ever more complex grief, and although he had few adults to compare him with, he did think his father was lost.”

There are many examples in this novel of enduring grief, and Scranton Roy’s grief is important because, although white, he deeply regrets the role that he played in the death of an Indigenous woman. His grief consumes him, and he is not able to die in peace until he has righted his wrong.

“The family spoke English with him, wrote in a finer script than he did, and used better grammar. They had been whipped into shape by the government. They had been to boarding school.”

This passage grounds the novel in the real-life history of the Ojibwe and other Indigenous peoples. Many Indigenous boys and girls were forced into brutal and dehumanizing boarding schools during a time when governmental policy toward Indigenous nations was assimilationist in nature and sought to remove young people from their families, teaching them English and white culture.

“Because of the Dawes Act, land was parceled out to individuals instead of remaining in tribal trust possession.”

This novel speaks to many key events in Ojibwe history from both the 19th and the 20th centuries, and its discussion of the Dawes Act is just one example of the way that Erdrich grounds her story within the lived experience of Indigenous peoples in the United States. In this text, she is particularly interested in depicting The Impact of Relocation Policy on Ojibwe People and Their Communities.

“In the evenings by kerosene lantern light, the children worked regularly at their lessons. During the days, their mothers educated them in all that was Ojibwe, all they needed to survive.”

This passage depicts the way that Ojibwe children were educated at home in an effort to avoid the harsh conditions at government-run Indigenous boarding schools. While the boarding schools were spaces that sought to strip Indigenous children of their cultural values and family ties, the education provided at home in this novel does the opposite: It provides children with knowledge of their families and cultures while also teaching them the basic skills and topics that they would learn in a formal setting.

“More and more often as the years went on, Ogichidaa saw his pain vanish at the golden bottom of a whiskey bottle. He would find his way down to the Cities and there, late in age, still gripped by shellshock before there was PTSD, he would father a son.”

Ogichidaa is the only of his brothers to see battle during World War I, and he is scarred by the experience. At that time, there was limited understanding of the way that war damages the psyche, and Ogichidaa has few tools at his disposal to cope with his difficulties. He turns to alcohol in an effort to self-medicate, and the author uses his story as a way to engage with the way that complex trauma often results in substance abuse, self-harm, and other destructive behaviors.

“There was a wave of giving up, and then there was a new government policy designed in the kindest way to make things worse. It was called relocation and helped Indians move to cities all over the country. Helped them to move away from family. Helped them to move away from their land.”

This novel engages with much of the history of the Ojibwe and other Indigenous nations during the 19th and 20th centuries. Here, it describes a 20th-century policy meant to encourage further assimilation: Ojibwe men and women were given financial incentives to move off of their homes on reservation land and relocate to cities, where they would be surrounded by (and, presumably, absorbed into) white culture.

“They antelope are a curious kind of people. They come to check anything they don’t understand.”

All of the descriptions of antelope and antelope women in this novel are in some way symbolic. The figure of the antelope woman represents the perils of urbanization and the difficulty that many Indigenous men and women had once they were removed from their ancestral homelands and relocated into cities. They, like Sweetheart Calico, found that the promise of relocation was false, and in spite of their interest in making a life for themselves off of the reservation, the urban experience was markedly fraught.

“I adore her. I’ll do anything for her. Anything except let her go. Once I get to my city, things are better anyway.”

These lines, spoken by Klaus about Sweetheart Calico, speak to the novel’s interest in the gendered experiences of Indigenous women. Although strong, resilient, and caring, the women in this novel are nonetheless subject to discrimination. Klaus embodies the way that Ojibwe women experience disempowerment even within their own communities: Although it is obvious to everyone that Sweetheart Calico is miserable with him, he initially refuses to let her go.

“But no matter how fast or how far she walks, she can’t get out of the city. The lights and the cars tangle her. Streets open onto streets and the highways roar hungry as swollen rivers, bearing in their rush dangerous bright junk.”

The character of Sweetheart Calico is meant to speak to the novel’s interest in displacement and relocation. The Relocation Act was responsible for mass migration of the Ojibwe from their reservations in outstate Minnesota into the metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and through the difficulties that Sweetheart Calico experiences in the city, cut off from her family and her culture, Louise Erdrich makes a broader argument about the disutility of such policies.

“I find her broken tooth something to adore, although I admit it is not to every man’s taste.”

This description of Sweetheart Calico, given by Klaus, speaks to the novel’s interest in Gender and Indigeneity. Klaus drugs Sweetheart Calico, takes her to the city, and then holds her captive in spite of her obvious unhappiness. He creates living conditions that are deeply damaging to her, and then claims to be the only one who can truly appreciate her “broken” beauty.

“If I had been educated on my home reservation and lived with my family and received instructions in our traditional ways, I probably would have been a medicine man.”

This passage speaks to the novel’s interest in traditional Ojibwe culture as well as the impact of the Relocation policies on Ojibwe individuals, families, and communities. The thematic project of this novel is, in large part, an exploration of relocation and an interrogation of the assimilationist notion that Indigenous people are better off in cities, removed from their cultural and support networks.

“As for Richard, all he’s got left of AIM is the ponytail.”

This novel engages with many of the socio-cultural shifts that shaped Indigenous life in the United States during the 20th century. Rozin and Richard meet while both were involved in the American Indian Movement, an Indigenous Rights movement that was the most active during the 1960s and 1970s. AIM sought to increase Indigenous knowledge of traditional culture as well as to advance Indigenous civil rights in the United States.

“Past a certain age, the Roy women believe they have earned the right to talk about sex, birth, blood, the size and shape of a man’s equipment, and the state of their own, even at a holiday dinner table.”

Women take center stage in this novel, and the author notes at several points that although Ojibwe women are subject to discrimination both in society as a whole and by the men in their communities, they remain strong, resolute, and willing to speak their minds. Cecile in particular does not shy away from the discussion of difficult or unpleasant topics, but all of the female characters are in some way shown to be agentic and empowered, even in the face of external attempts to disempower them.

“They shouldn’t be around here. This isn’t a good neighborhood for children as they could get picked up and drugged and either sold to a Wayzata businessman or trafficked up to Duluth to service the freighters.”

Louise Erdrich is particularly attuned to the experiences of Indigenous women, and in this passage, she creates a connection between her novel and the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women. In Minnesota where this story is primarily set, Indigenous women who go missing are frequently the victims of trafficking rings that operate out of Duluth, a major shipping port on Lake Superior.

“As you know, I started my life in the vicinity of the Roys and the Shawanos. There I lived among my relatives, who all descended in some manner from the dog named Sorrow, who was nursed by Blue Prairie Woman.”

Sweetheart Calico’s dog Almost Soup narrates several portions of the novel. In this passage, he explains his own family history. Through both her depiction of canine and human families, Erdrich shows the importance of family histories and family bonds: Each individual is rooted into the past generations of their families, and from the strength of these connections they derive both a sense of their own identity and a deep inner resilience.

“We dogs know what the women are really doing when they are beading. They are sewing us all into a pattern, into life beneath their hands. We are the beads on their waxed string, picked up by their sharp needles. We are the tiny pieces of the huge design that they are making, the soul of the world.”

This passage speaks to the idea, present in much of Erdrich’s work, that the world is one interconnected web in which each piece is tied to every other and plays an equally important role in the health of the whole. Here, individuals and their points of connection are represented by beads woven together into complex patterns.

“Haven’t you ever wondered how history is working on us?”

Here, Cecile asks Rozin if Rozin has ever thought about the way that life for contemporary Ojibwe people has been shaped by their history, particularly by the history of US governmental policy as it pertains to Indigenous nations, addressing the role of Traditional Ojibwe Culture in Modernity. She interrogates assimilation, asking Rozin to consider the damaging impact of assimilation on their families and communities.

“This is how he must work through the grief that Cecille says sociologists have begun to suspect every Indian is born with.”

Generational trauma is addressed throughout Erdrich’s story. Cecile is beginning to think deeply about the experiences of Indigenous people in the 19th and 20th centuries, and there is a way in which her burgeoning ideas about issues such as missing and murdered Indigenous women and generational trauma mirror the way that these issues have risen to prominence in public discourse during the last decade. Erdrich thus shows the way that our understanding of history and its impact on the individual shifts over time, and in so doing, depicts real-life shifts in meta-discourse on Indigenous life in the United States.

“Sweetheart Calico is throwing the world out of whack. She belongs where she was.”

Sweetheart Calico is an embodied representation of the damaging impact of the 1954 Relocation Act on Indigenous individuals, families, and communities. Her character suggests that Indigenous families and communities should have been allowed to remain together and that the assimilationist policies of the US government not only did not result in the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into mainstream culture, but actively damaged them.

“I am survivor. This life is heavy, but also, it is nothing.”

Richard Whiteheart Beads speaks this line. This highlights the novel’s interest in the difficulties experienced by Indigenous people as the result of not only inequality but also the assimilationist polices of the US government. Richard, despite the damage that has been done to him and that he himself has caused, has nonetheless retained a meta-awareness of the complexities of human existence. There is a sense in which he has not been broken beyond repair by tragedy and inequality, and he becomes another of the novel’s nods to resilience and resistance.

“Rozin is at her desk studying, organizing, taking notes, all with the relieved intensity of a born-again student. She has decided to finish her undergraduate degree and go to law school.”

Rozin’s character speaks to the possibility that Indigenous men and women can both retain connections to traditional culture and thrive in the modern world. She makes sure that her daughters are given Ojibwe names and that they have a strong relationship with their grandmothers, but she also returns to school in order to pursue a law degree. She becomes, like her sister Cecile, a “success.”

“The beads. “Noodin’s whole face wrinkles, her thin lips slowly spread in an innocent smile. Already you want them, I know. But you will have to trade for them with their owner, Sweetheart Calico.”

Beads are an important aspect of this novel’s engagement with traditional Ojibwe culture. They symbolize cultural transmission and the way that various aspects of Ojibwe culture are passed down through each successive generation of the family.