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496 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2020
Author Biography:
Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of contemporary Native American novelists. Born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, she grew up mostly in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She worked at various jobs, such as hoeing sugar beets, farm work, waitressing, short order cooking, lifeguarding, and construction work, before becoming a writer. She attended the Johns Hopkins creative writing program and received fellowships at the McDowell Colony and the Yaddo Colony. After she was named writer-in-residence at Dartmouth, she married professor Michael Dorris and raised several children, some of them adopted. She and Michael became a picture-book husband-and-wife writing team, though they wrote only one truly collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991).
The Antelope Wife was published in 1998, not long after her separation from Michael and his subsequent suicide. Some reviewers believed they saw in The Antelope Wife the anguish Erdrich must have felt as her marriage crumbled, but she has stated that she is unconscious of having mirrored any real-life events.
She is the author of four previous bestselling andaward-winning novels, including Love Medicine; The Beet Queen; Tracks; and The Bingo Palace. She also has written two collections of poetry, Jacklight, and Baptism of Desire. Her fiction has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle (1984) and The Los Angeles Times (1985), and has been translated into fourteen languages.
Several of her short stories have been selected for O. Henry awards and for inclusion in the annual Best American Short Story anthologies. The Blue Jay's Dance, a memoir of motherhood, was her first nonfiction work, and her children's book, Grandmother's Pigeon, has been published by Hyperion Press. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore called The Birchbark.
On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chipewa.The resolution was one of a series of like measures that sought to deny Native American tribes the benefits treaties with the U.S. government had conferred, things like the government providing medical care, schools, and food. More importantly, it made the tribes vulnerable to loss of their land, which was usually the purpose of such laws. In the case of the Turtle Mountain Band, it would mean, ultimately, forcing reservation residents to relocate to “the cities,” a place where sustaining traditional life would be impossible and living conditions were often appalling. The novel offers a payload of information about this legal abomination while keeping track of the watchman of the title on his nightly rounds at the plant, and in his dealings with his Chippewa community on a diversity of matters, personal and official.
My grandfather Patrick Gourneau fought against termination as tribal chairman while working as a night watchman. He hardly slept. - from the Author’s Note
She had seen how quickly girls who got married and had children were worn down before the age of twenty. Nothing happened to them but toil. Great things happened to other people. The married girls were lost…That wasn’t going to be her life.Speaking of things sexual, the atmosphere at the plant is challenging for some of the women, but defenses are craftily erected, and major misery is mostly avoided. Unrelated to the plant, Patrice faces an attempted assault, barely escaping. Erdrich offers a look at a very dark side of Minneapolis, where exploitation, the worst of which occurs offstage, is extreme, and very disturbing.
Sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields. Some were whorled, others were tiny grooved scallops…Vera and Patrice’s experience with “the cities” would hardly seem an inducement, but another young native woman, a grad student, who was raised in the city, which was not a horrifying experience, has to study, on-site, the rez, a somewhat alien place to her, to get a fuller appreciation of her own roots.
“Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here,” he said to Thomas.
“From the endless way-back times.”
“Think of it. [the] baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here. Who could have known?”
“We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways. Maybe a way-back person touched these shells, Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt. Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now. We can’t know these things.”
…”Sometimes when I‘m out and around,” said Wood Mountain, “I feel like they’re with me, these way-back people. I never talk about it, but they’re all around us. I could never leave this place.”
Her hair, shoulders, and back grew damp. But moving kept her warm. She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.In another,
She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud.We learn what happens with the Resolution, decisions are made about paths forward, characters find themselves, so there is much satisfaction to be had in the wrap up. And along the way we have picked up a payload of learning about native culture, about the relationship of the tribes to the government, a nugget or two about Mormonism, and been led on this journey by warm, relatable characters who are very easy to care about, through a landscape both harsh and ecstatic, to see realities pedestrian, brutal, and magical. What more could any reader want?