Louise Erdrich Essay - Louise Erdrich Poetry: American Poets Analysis

Louise Erdrichs interest in writing can be traced to her childhood and her heritage. She told Writers Digest
contributor Michael Schumacher, People in [Native American] families make everything into a story. . . . People
just sit and the stories start coming, one after another. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the
stories rise, break, and fall, it gets into you somehow. Her parents encouraged her writing: My father used to give
me a nickel for every story I wrote, and my mother wove strips of construction paper together and stapled them into
book covers. So at an early age I felt myself to be a published author earning substantial royalties.
Although most of her characters and themes grow out of her background as a Native American woman who grew up
off the reservation, Erdrichs writings not only reflect her multilayered, complex backgroundshe is both Turtle
Mountain Chippewa and European Americanbut also confound a variety of literary genre and cultural categories.
In her fiction and poetry, she plainly regards the survival of American Indian cultures as imperative. She prescribes
the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary American Indian writers in her essay Where I Ought to
Be: A Writers Sense of Place, published in a 1985 issue of The New York Times Book Review: In the light of
enormous loss, American Indians must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating
the cores of cultures left in the wake of catastrophe.
Erdrichs themes tend to focus on abandonment and return, pleasure and denial, failure, and absurdity. She raises
virtually all the issues important to an understanding of the human condition: accidents of birth and parentage,
falling in love, generosity, greed, psychological damage, joy, alienation, vulnerability, differentness, parenting,
aging, and dying.
Jacklight
The meanings of Jacklight radiate outward and circle back to the title poem. Instead of being trapped by the hunters
jacklights, the animals in Erdrichs poem lure the hunters into the woods: And now they take the first steps, not
knowing/ how deep the woods are and lightless. This poems themes are typical of Erdrich: her knowledge of the
natural worlds wisdom, an awareness of the contentious interaction between humans and animals, and a prophetic
sense that human beings need the healing power nature offers.
Following the title poem, section 1, Runaways, explores the theme of return, most often to the natural world.
Erdrich details a quest for ones own background in the work. She describes mixed-blood American Indians like
herself searching to discover where we are from. In Indian Boarding School, the children running away from
their off-reservation schools speak collectively that Homes the place we head for in our sleep. In Rugaroo, an
alcoholic mans search is so dogged that He blew up with gas./ And now he is the green light floating over the
slough. As the title poem prophesied, there is a return to the natural world and a haunting transformation.
Section 2, Hunters, pursues the theme of the interaction between the human world and the naturalhuman beings
having forgotten, for the most part, links with the natural world. The Woods presents a first-person speaker who
has made the move back to the woods and who invites her lover to join her: now when I say come,/ and you enter
the woods,/ hunting some creature like the woman I was,/ I surround you. An integration is made, but it is bizarre
and somewhat threatening: When you lie down in the grave of a slashed tree,/ I cover you, as I always did;/ this
time you do not leave. The following poem removes the threat as the speaker directly addresses her husband:
Again I see us walking into the night trees,/ irreversible motion, but the branches are now lit within. There is more
companionship here, less seduction. This poem is clearly a response to the Jacklight poem, taking up its challenge
and discovering new powers: Husband, by the light of our bones we are going.
Captivity uses the narrative of Mary Rowlandson, who was captured by the Wampanoag Indians in 1676. At first
repulsed by her male captor, Rowlandson will not eat the food he offers. Later, she witnesses a tribal ritual: He led
his company in the noise/ until I could no longer bear/ the thought of how I was. The poem concludes with her
entreaty to the earth to admit me/ as he was.
Section 3, The Butchers Wife, is a sequence of poems that share the central character of Mary Kroger, a powerful
woman. These are narrative poems dealing chiefly with non-Native American material, although Kroger is a
midwesterner and aware of what the land was like before white incursions. In Clouds, Kroger says, Let
everything be how it could have been, once:/ a land that was empty and perfect as clouds. When her husband dies,
Kroger goes through a transformation: Widowed by men, I married the dark firs. Kroger has answered the call of
Jacklight. By marrying the woods, she has discovered unexpected powers. At certain times, she says, I speak
in tongues.

Erdrich concludes Jacklight with Indian oral narratives. In The Strange People, for example, she uses a story
about the antelope. As in Jacklight, Erdrich narrates this poem from the point of view of the animal. Initially, the
antelope doe is attracted by the hunter whose jacklight/ fills my eyes with blue fire. Though she is killed by the
hunter, she does not die. A trickster figure, she becomes a lean gray witch/ through the bullets that enter...
Louise Erdrichs poem Dear John Wayne, like much of her work, reflects her Native American heritage and
upbringing in small towns in Minnesota and North Dakota where prejudices regarding Native Americans sometimes
ran deep. While perhaps unfair to the memory of the actor, and for a generation the predominant symbol of male
virility on the Big Screen, John Wayne, whose roles and off-screen views were actually fairly sympathetic to Native
Americans, Erdrichs poem is nevertheless an apt indictment of the racial biases that were prevalent in American
culture for hundreds of years. As Dear John Wayne begins, the narrator and another person a boyfriend, perhaps
are at a drive-in theater viewing a Western, the genre that most prominently featured Wayne, and that too-often
demonized the indigenous populations that settled North America well-ahead of the Europeans. The narrators
description of the action on the large screen leaves little question as to the lens through which Erdrich viewed
society:
The drum breaks. There will be no parlance.
Only the arrows whining, a death-cloud of nerves
swarming down on the settlers
who die beautifully, tumbling like dust weeds
into the history that brought us all here
together: this wide screen beneath the sign of the bear.
And, then, to mass applause from the overwhelmingly Caucasian audience, the larger-than-live visage of John
Wayne fills the screen the moral and physical symbol of white superiority:
His face moves over us,
a thick cloud of vengeance . . .
Each rut,
each scar makes a promise: It is
not over, this fight, not as long as you resist.
The idea of John Wayne serves as a metaphor for the dehumanization of Native Americans and their depiction in
American culture as slovenly, drunken, thieves bent on the rape and pillaging of white people. For Erdrichs
characters, even the ubiquitous and relentless mosquitos represent the devastation of Native culture, as when her
narrator, in the poems opening stanza, references the hordes of mosquitos intent on breaking through the smoke
screen for blood.
Any analysis of Dear John Wayne has to emphasize the authors Native American heritage and condemnation of
the way Native Americans were depicted in American culture, especially in films and on television. The heroic
white cowboy vanquishing the fanatical, primitive natives was a common theme of films and television shows for
many years. Erdrich captures the sorrow prevalent among a population reduced to economic and social destitution
by invading European settlers whose sense of racial superiority resulted in one of historys greatest instances of
genocide.