Antelope Woman

Antelope Woman is a novel that is invested both in the micro-world of the Roy and Shawano families and in the macro-world that is Ojibwe history in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the history of the way that Ojibwe individuals, families, and communities were impacted by governmental policy. Through Erdrich’s depiction of the Roys and the Shawanos, she ultimately tells a much larger story, that of the various shifts and changes that Ojibwe people have undergone since their territory was invaded by white settlers and their government. Much of the history depicted by Erdrich focuses on space, land, and movement, but she also engages with Indigenous rights movements such as AIM (the American Indian Movement) that were active particularly during the mid-20th century. The first major piece of history described by Erdrich is the Dawes Act, an 1887 piece of legislation that sought to break up reservations by allotting parcels of tribal lands to individuals rather than the tribes as a whole. (Prior to the Dawes Act, Indigenous lands were owned collectively by various nations, then called tribes.) Indigenous individuals, including the Ojibwe in parts of North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, were given small pieces of land and encouraged to shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture. The government sought to assimilate Indigenous men and women into American society by incentivizing the adoption of white cultural practices such as farming.

Another key piece of legislation that sought to assimilate Indigenous Americans through policy related to place was the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. This piece of legislation incentivized movement from reservations to cities by providing vocational training to Indigenous men and women who agreed to leave their ancestral homes and relocate to various urban centers. Like much of the United States’s policy related to its Indigenous populations, it was assimilationist in nature and sought to further separate Indigenous individuals from their families, traditional lands, and cultures.

Much of the thematic project of Antelope Woman centers around the disastrous impact of this policy, and through her depiction of Sweetheart Calico in particular, Erdrich demonstrates the damage done to both individuals and traditional culture through relocation and engages with the theme of The Impact of Relocation Policy on Ojibwe People and Their Communities. Although AIM is not a key focal point of the novel, Erdrich does use Rozin’s recollections of the movement to engage not only with its history, but with its problematics: AIM did much to advance the cause of Indigenous civil rights, but it has been criticized, especially by its female members, for a culture of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Rozin’s experiences as an activist echo these criticisms and help Erdrich to paint a complex and accurate portrait of AIM.