General Editors: Helen Jaskoski and Robert M. Nelson
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SAIL - Studies in American Indian Literatures is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. The journal publishes reviews, interviews, bibliographies, creative work including transcriptions of performances, and scholarly and theoretical articles on any aspect of American Indian literature including traditional oral material in dual-language format or translation, written works, and live and media performances of verbal art.

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SAIL

Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2                  Volume 3, Number 4                  Winter 1991

CONTENTS

THE NOVEL AS PERFORMANCE COMMUNICATION IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S TRACKS
        James Flavin         .          .         .         .         .         1

TRANSPERSONAL SELFHOOD: THE BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S LOVE MEDICINE
        Jeanne Smith         .          .         .         .         .          13

SHIFTING IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF LOUISE ERDRICH AND MICHAEL DORRIS
        Ann Rayson         .         .         .         .          .         27

A NOTE ON NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN TRACKS
        Victoria Walker          .         .         .         .          .         37

COMMENTARY
        From the Editors         .          .         .         .         .          41
        More Grizzly Woman           .          .         .          .         42
        Call for Creative Work         .          .         .         .          45
        Call for Papers on Critical Approaches to American
        Indian Literatures        .          .         .         .         .         46

REVIEWS
The Crown of Columbus. Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich
        Two views: Peter G. Beidler, Helen Hoy  .         .         47

Baptism of Desire. Louise Erdrich
        Helen Jaskoski             .         .         .         .         .         55

Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors and Griever: An American Monkey King in China. Gerald Vizenor
        Robley Evans               .         .         .         .         .         57

Native Writers and Canadian Writing. Ed. W. H. New
        Bette S. Weidman         .         .          .         .         .         61

Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Laura Coltelli
        Gretchen Bataille          .         .         .         .         66

Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Ed. Will Roscoe
        Rodney Simard         .         .         .         .          .         67

The Light on the Tent Wall: A Bridging. Mary TallMountain
        Jeane Coburn Breinig          .         .         .         .         70

Fire Water World. Adrian C. Louis
        Roger Weaver         .          .         .         .         .          72

Crazy Horse Never Died; Unfinished Business; Smaller Circles; Breeds. Roxy Gordon
        Charles Ballard         .          .         .         .         .         75

Lakota Woman. Mary Crow Dog with Richard Erdoes
        Elizabeth Cook-Lynn          .         .         .         .         77

Western Apache Language and Culture: Essays in Linguistic Anthropology. Keith H. Basso
        Virginia Hymes         .         .         .         .         .          80

Black Elk's Story: Distinguishing Its Lakota Purpose. Julian Rice
        Daniel A. Brown         .         .         .         .          .         83

CONTRIBUTORS         .          .         .         .         .          85

THE NOVEL AS PERFORMANCE:
COMMUNICATION IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S TRACKS
James Flavin

        Early in Louise's Erdrich's Tracks, Nanapush, one of the novel's two narrators, says, "Nanapush is a name that loses power every time it is written and stored in a government file. That is why I only gave it out once in all those years" (32). The passage reminds us of the customary hesitancy for the Anishinaabeg to utter their own names, believing, in the words of Basil Johnston, that it was "presumptuous and unbecoming, even vain" (Heritage 121) to do so. However, this is an awkward moment in the text, for there, in print on the page, is the written word "Nanapush" uttered by Nanapush himself. While readers know that Nanapush himself has not written the word on the page, that its presence there is the responsibility of Erdrich and the printer, this textual moment must give us some pause, for here, text threatens to subvert character. The name Nanapush, written upon the page, robs the character of power. The character/narrator won't give it out, yet the novelist must use the name again and again throughout her story.
        Erdrich's narrative dilemma, I believe, is another manifestation of a problem Karl Kroeber notes in his discussion of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn: "Momaday is caught up in a hazardous contradiction between his theme and the means available to him for its artistic evocation" ("Technology" 19). In other words, the novel form, as Kroeber notes earlier in the same discussion, is "an Anglo-American literary structure that must prohibit any authentically Indian imaginative form" (18).
        Kroeber identifies a problem all Native American novelists face as they struggle with story and discourse. Is it possible to convey in written discourse a "realistic" sense of a culture whose traditional discourse is oral? The novel, of course, is not indigenous to the Native American. In form the novel differs considerably from those forms which are native, the song and the oral tale. Kroeber notes elsewhere that "All Indian poems. . . are songs, and most are integral to a 'ceremonial situation,' sometimes religious, sometimes secular, sometimes highly formalized, sometimes quite 'open.' But always the Indian poem exists as utterance. It never exists as text, only as act" ("Indian" 106). Kroeber notes that the essential feature of Native American texts is that they are not texts at all but rather performances involving speakers and listeners in specific cultural situations. The distance between these native forms and the novel seems wide indeed, for the experience of the novel is usually private, seldom oral, and rarely brings together artist and audience.
        In the Nanapush sections of Tracks, Louise Erdrich focuses on {2} communication in a variety of forms within the Anishinaabe culture to explore the relationship between communication and whose oral traditions are central to its survival.
        To begin, Erdrich sets up the Nanapush sections of the text in such a way that we have a narrator and a listener or narratee. Nanapush addresses his sections of the novel to his grandaughter, Lulu, thus helping to achieve on the simplest level a sense of the novel as "performance." We learn very early that Lulu's mother is Fleur, that Lulu will not refer to her as "mother." Lulu is angry that her mother has abandoned her, and Nanapush hopes that his narrative will bring mother and daughter together again, or if that is not possible, that his narrative will allow Lulu to understand the importance of the culture which she seems destined to abandon for the white culture, a culture imaged in the patent leather shoes she holds dear as a child, a gift from Eli Kashpaw. Nanapush's purpose of maintaining the family unit reminds us of his legendary counterpart (Nanabozho or Nanabush), a spirit/human who grew into manhood in a fragmented family and sought revenge on his father who he believed had been responsible for his mother's death. Throughout the story, Nanapush addresses Lulu directly, attempting to hold her attention: "Grandaughter, you are the child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared . . ."(1); "My girl, listen well" (32). Direct address reminds us that Nanapush's narrative is oral, that he sits before a specific audience to tell his story. Thus, the relationship here between narrator and naratee in the novel mirrors the performance situation of traditional native-American songs and poems to capture in written form a sense of oral performance.
        Erdrich manages in the dramatic situation of the novel to create two levels of action. On the one hand, we are drawn into the story of Fleur and her attempts to save the land. On the other, at the level of the frame created by the narrator/narratee relationship, we are engaged in Nanapush's narrative, wondering if it will have the desired effect of reuniting mother and daughter and keeping Lulu within her native culture. As a wise elder, Nanapush offers advice to Lulu, hoping he can prevent her from making a mistake and marrying a Morrissey: "Granddaughter, if you join this clan, I predict the union will not last. Listen to experience and marry wisely. I always did" (182). The comic undercurrent here does not mask the seriousness with which Nanapush views the threat to the family unit.
        Discussing the importance of storytelling in Native American cultures, Kenneth Roemer writes, "The stories contain information that the listeners needed or still need to understand themselves, their culture, and their environment" (41-42). Basil Johnston writes that Anishinaabe storytelling attempted to "foster listening and dreaming. Ultimately, the goals were to enhance the capacity to receive and to {3} instil inner peace. It was through the form of story and song that training was conducted and fostered stage by stage" (Heritage 122). He notes also that "to teach the young what was considered meritorious or what reprehensible in human conduct, the grandparents as storytellers would re-create in story form the state of things in the family or community" (Heritage 122).
        In fact, Nanapush is re-creating the history of the family unit, hoping that his story will re-unite the family for the sake of the future. The oral context of the novel heightens the tension within the text for it signals the potential for cultural survival or destruction. The older Nanapush, speaking to the child Lulu, must make her understand truths that might seem on one level too deep for a child to understand, for Lulu must see beyond the fact that her mother has abandoned her and has separated from Eli Kashpaw. Late in the novel, Nanapush is explicit about his motives for having told the story of the loss of the Pillager land:

And so, with the three of you [Lulu, Fleur Pillager, Eli Kashpaw] standing there I told the story. I have seen each one of you since then, in your separate lives, never together, never the way it should be. If you wanted to make an old man's last days happy, Lulu, you would convince your mother and your father to visit me. I'd bring old times back, force them to reckon, make them look into one another's eyes again. I'd work a medicine. But you, heartless one, won't even call Fleur mother or take off your pointy shoes, walk through brush, and visit her. Maybe once I tell you the reason she had to send you away, you will start acting like a daughter should. She saved you from worse, as you'll see. Perhaps when you finally understand, you'll borrow my boots and go out there, forgive her, though it's you that needs forgiveness. . . . (210-11)

In a disintegrating family unit both the present and the future are destroyed. Especially destructive is the loss of a child, for the future of tribal survival depends upon the willingness of the child not only to acknowledge her roots but to embrace the responsibility that those roots bring with them. When a child leaves her culture, when he dies or seeks other cultures within which to live, the entire community feels the loss.
         The drama within the frame is also evident as Nanapush struggles with the process of telling: "And now I ask your indulgence for I can only repeat what I remember, even to a grandaughter . . ." (105); "I don't know how to tell this next thing that happened . . . " (109). At important moments within his narrative, he reminds Lulu to "listen," {4} calling her attention to information he feels is especially important. Narrative self-consciousness is evident also as Nanapush comments upon the structure of his story, a story which deals in large part with how Lulu happened to receive his name when she was not related to him, a detail which Nanapush tries to explain: "There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs clear" (34). Reflected in tranquility, stories come together in the mind of Nanapush, one bound to another in an image of a serpent:

I shouldn't have been caused to live so long, shown so much of death, had to squeeze so many stories in the corners of my brain. They're all attached, and once I start there is no end to telling because they're all hooked from one side to the other, mouth to tail. (46)

In the narrative moment we find story bound to story, life bound to life, past bound to present. The drama of performance exists within the frame as Nanapush tells a story of the past with the hope that it will bring Lulu back to her native culture.
        While the dramatic frame of the Nanapush sections shows Erdrich creating an oral context within the novel form, oral traditions are significant in thematic development as well. Nanapush is keenly aware that he lives in a world that has changed:

    I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot. I trapped the last beaver pelt of more than two years' growth. I spoke aloud the words of the government treaty, and refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and lake. I axed the last birch that was older than I, and I saved the last Pillager. (2)

If experience has made him a wise elder, one characteristic of that wisdom is his understanding that the continued destruction of tribal lands and traditions cannot continue. Thus Nanapush rebels against the government's attempts to buy Indian land and then sell it to logging companies intent on harvesting the trees. Nanapush says:

I've seen too much go by--unturned grass below my feet, and overhead, the great white cranes flung south forever. I know this. Land is the only thing that lasts life to life. Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier. (33)

Here, tradition is equated to preservation. Shared land, the inherited tribal past, is threatened by a system which values land only as a means to immediate riches. As the novel begins, the task of preservation lies {5} in the hands of only a few, for sickness wipes out all of Nanapush's family and many others, leaving the tribe "unraveled like a coarse rope" (2).
        For Nanapush, preserving place is essential, but place is not simply space. Gerald Vizenor says that while the Anishinaabeg did not create written histories "The tribal past lived as an event in visual memories and oratorical gestures" (24). Space, which is a part of that past, exists not merely in a physical sense but in a metaphysical sense as well, an image which links past with present, generation with generation. In Vizenor's history The People Named the Chippewa Pezeekee refers to a map as he points out "tribal communities, memories in space" (52). In addition, Vizenor says, "The words the woodland tribes spoke were connected to the place the words were spoken. The poetic images were held, for some tribal families, in song pictures and in the rhythms of visions and dreams in music: timeless and natural patterns of seeing and knowing the energies of the earth" (24-26). Language is then not simply a means of communication through words and gestures but expression that hints at spiritual links between the earth and the Native American. Vizenor also writes that "Tribal words have power in the oral tradition, the sounds express the spiritual energies of woodland lives" (24). Thematically then, the oral tradition helps to define within the novel the importance of the preservation of space and heritage.
        Nanapush, however, is not simply a spokesman for one side of an argument. He is an intricately developed character, a combination trickster/medicine man who employs language as a tool for survival. "Nanapush. That's what you'll be called," his father said. "Because it's got to do with trickery and living in the bush" (33). "Nanapush" is the name for the Anishinaabe trickster figure, and in many ways Nanapush remains true to the figure. His home overlooks a crossroads, a location common to the trickster figure in many Indian tales (Babcock 162), and his interest in scatology and in his own sexual potency is reminiscent as well of trickster figures. Vizenor writes:

[T]he trickster is related to plants and animals and trees; he is a teacher and healer in various personalities who, as numerous stories reveal, explains the values of healing plants, wild rice, maple sugar, basswood, and birch bark to woodland tribal people. More than a magnanimous teacher and transformer, the trickster is capable of violence, deceptions, and cruelties: the realities of human imperfections. The woodland trickster is an existential shaman in the comic mode, not an isolated and sentimental tragic hero in conflict with nature (3-4).

The trickster is a complex figure of considerable power, and the {6} source/manifestation of that power in Erdrich's trickster Nanapush is found in language.
        Nanapush is first and foremost a "talker." "I know what's fact," he says, "and have never been afraid of talking" (4). He speaks both the language of his tribe and the language of the white people. Though Nanapush knows how to read as well as write, talking is central to his existence, for it ties him to the oral traditions of the past while proving to be a tool for survival. For Nanapush, language is the source of his magic, a weapon against evil, and evidence of his own existence.
        From the very beginning, Nanapush's curative powers are intrinsically rooted in his voice. As he and Edgar Pukwan carry a half-dead Fleur Pillager home, Nanapush "encourage[s] Fleur with songs" (4). Later, as he sits with Fleur, they do not speak "because the names of their dead anchored their tongues" (6). But when Father Damien, the Catholic priest, visits, Nanapush's tongue is loosened:

My voice rasped at first when I tried to speak, but then, oiled by strong tea, lard and bread, I was off and talking. Even a sledge won't stop me once I start. Father Damien looked astonished, and then wary, as I began to creak and roll. I gathered speed. I talked both languages in streams that ran alongside each other, over every rock, around every obstacle. The sound of my own voice convinced me I was alive. (7)

Nanapush's voice is a vehicle through which he asserts selfhood. The stream of sound and rhythm grows stronger as Nanapush speaks until at last he recovers the enthusiasm and strength essential to survival.

        Talk is also the very tool by which Nanapush saves himself during the year of the sickness:

During the year of the sickness, when I was the last one left, I saved myself by starting a story. One night I was ready to bring to the other side the doll I now gave Eli. My wife had sewed it together after our daughter died and I held it in my hands when I fainted, lost breath, so that I could hardly keep moving my lips. But I did continue and recovered. I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on. (46)

Talk is again a means of asserting the physical reality of being, a kind of continued assurance that "I AM" which allows Nanapush to escape the ravages of disease. The point is echoed by Margaret Kashpaw, who when Nanapush worries that he may be past the age of love-making, consoles him by observing, "As long as your voice works, the other will" (129). Nanapush's virility is linked here to the power of his {7} voice, allowing us to see that "communication" is the binding of individual with individual in an exercise of creative exchange.
        Kenneth Lincoln observes that "Native Americans seem to believe that words make things happen" (92), a principle evident in Nanapush's use of language. Nanapush tells us, for example, that when he and Margaret had been taken captive by Boy Lazarre and Clarence Morrissey, "I was a talker and a hunter who used my brains as my weapon" (118). Language, thought, and action are linked in Nanapush's attempts to control his world. We see words cause event in a comic confrontation between Pauline Puyat and Nanapush. Pauline has resolved in her devotion to Christ to relieve her bodily fluids only twice a day. Discovering this, Nanapush tells Pauline a story of a little girl who is rained upon. His sensuous description of the ensuing flood and the effect of water upon the girl finally drives Pauline to an early, unplanned discharge of bodily fluids. While language accomplishes here what Nanapush intends, this is not always the case. Although he talks when he and Margaret are taken prisoner by Lazarre and Morrissey, it is not Nanapush's talk which eventually frees them. As with any other weapon, language can at times prove inadequate, evidence perhaps that Erdrich sees her Nanapush as more flesh than spirit.
        While talk for Nanapush is a means of self-preservation, it is also the source of curative powers he directs toward Lulu. When Lulu is quite young her feet are frostbitten because she insists on wearing the black patent leather shoes Eli Kashpaw buys for her. Nanapush works to save Lulu's feet through his special medicine, and again language is central: "Eventually, my songs overcame the painful burning and you were suspended, eyes open, looking into mine. Once I had you I did not dare break the string between us and kept on moving my lips, holding you motionless with talking . . ." (167). He talks through the night until it seems he can talk no more: "I talked on and on until you lost yourself inside the flow of it, until you entered the swell and ebb and did not sink but were sustained" (167). Like a stream, Nanapush's voice supports Lulu in her struggle, and it is the power of the voice which binds Lulu to him, links his will with hers, and allows him eventually to save her feet. These "cure songs," as Nanapush calls them, "throw the sick one into a dream and cause a low dusk to fall across the mind" (167); they combine the elements of song and rhythm, traditional elements in Anishinaabe ritual. Still later, in a ceremony designed to heal Fleur's spirit, Nanapush concocts a protective paste "with exact words said" (188).
        Nanapush's cure songs reveal the link that exists between the physical and the metaphysical in the Anishinaabe culture, a link established through the medium of language. Basil Johnston notes that traditionally the Ojibway ritual medicine combined song and drum: {8}"While he drummed, man chanted, so that his petitions were borne by the echo of the drum and transformed into the language of the spirits who dwelled above and below and beyond" (Ceremonies 100). A similar link is established in visionary moments which occur within the novel. When threatened with starvation during the winter months, Eli Kashpaw and Nanapush rely on traditional methods of hunting and trapping for their survival. Working independently, they find nothing. But one day, Eli out alone, Nanapush checks his snares and then lies down:

In my fist I had a lump of charcoal, with which I blackened my face. I placed my otter bag upon my chest, my rattle near. I began to sing slowly, calling on my helpers, until the words came from my mouth but were not mine, until the rattle started, the song sang itself, and there, in the deep bright drifts, I saw the tracks of Eli's snowshoes clearly. (101)

While the vision seems to come from a source exterior to Nanapush, it allows him to link his will with that of supernatural forces to direct Eli in the pursuit of the moose. Once the moose is killed, Nanapush watches as Eli butchers the carcass, lashes pieces of meat to his body, and begins the journey home:

Without opening my eyes on the world around me, I took the drum from beneath my bed and beat out footsteps for Eli to hear and follow. Each time he speeded I slowed him. I strengthened the rhythm whenever he faltered beneath the weight he bore. In that way, he returned, and when I could hear the echo of his panting breath, I went outside to help him, still in my song. (104)

The rhythmical cadence of the drum links the will of Nanapush to the spirit world. Here Nanapush becomes a vehicle through which another force functions. This visionary experience links Nanapush with Eli and both of them with the world of the spirit.
        Speaking of the language of ceremony, Paula Gunn Allen writes:

The participants do indeed believe that they can exert control over natural phenomena, but not because they have childishly repeated some syllables. Rather, they assume that all reality is internal in some sense, that the dichotomy of the isolate individual versus the "out there" only appears to exist, and that ceremonial observance can help them transcend this delusion and achieve union with the All Spirit. (68)

Language is a medium which allows Nanapush to bring together the {9} world of the flesh and the world of the spirit, creating in the process a community of forces devoted to survival. Basil Johnston says that "For the Anishinabe the vision became the theme and quest in his life that attained the character of force; as a force, it could alter the course of individuals, bend the nature of living, enhance the tone of life, and change character" (Heritage 119-20).
        The song is the medium through which Nanapush links his will, Eli's action, and the spiritual force: "And then the song picked up and stopped him until he understood . . . "(101). Once Eli's mind clears, he tracks his moose to a stand of young saplings. "Now the song gathered. I exerted myself" (102). Nanapush and Eli work together. As Nanapush watches Eli advance on the feeding moose and take aim, he notes that the bullet can be diverted by scrub brush around, "But my song directed it to fly true" (103). Kenneth Lincoln observes that "Dreams relay visions from the spirit world," that "a thought is a spiritual act; a word has the magical power to actualize spirits" (100). Nanapush's words, chanted alone in bed, summon a supernatural force. The vision quest is an ancient tribal custom devoted to human survival in an often harsh world, and when Eli returns Nanapush finally leaves his bed and goes outside to help him, "still in my song" (104).
        A scene like this reveals Erdrich working in the novel form in ways that recall the verbal world of her subject. Basil Johnston suggests of the Ojibway:

Songs were the utterances of the soul. As such, they evoked every theme that moved men's hearts and souls. Songs were poems chanted; they could be praises sung; they could be prayers uplifted to the spirit. Most were of a personal nature composed by an individual on the occasion of a dream, a moving event, a powerful feeling. (Heritage 148)

Song is a form of utterance that links human to human, human to spirit, human and spirit to nature, thus resulting in an organic world. Nanapush's "magic" is clearly language-centered.
        The source of Nanapush's visionary strength and of his power to cure lies in the fact that he refuses to elevate himself above others, thus remaining true to the communal nature of tribal society. He says:

[P]ower dies, power goes under and gutters out, ungraspable. It is momentary, quick of flight and liable to deceive. As soon as you rely on the possession it is gone. Forget that it ever existed, and it returns. I never made the mistake of thinking that I owned my own strength, that was my secret. (177)

Nanapush sees himself on one level as a medium through which forces {10} stronger than himself act upon the world. In order to affect his world through visionary experience, Nanapush must first recognize that the power lies outside himself, that it resides in sources more timeless than his own will. Giving himself over to their control, he becomes a vehicle through which the spiritual and physical worlds are brought into harmony.
        Conce rned as he is with the survival of tribal traditions, Nanapush distinguishes between oral language and print as modes of communication. Kenneth Lincoln observes that "A common language is essential. Oral traditions unite the tribal people, just as they poeticize the common speech" (92). Lincoln also asserts that "the spoken, sung, and danced language binds the people as the living text of tribal life" (81). This concept is evident in Nanapush, who clearly sees the oral tradition as a bonding force:

Before the boundaries were set, before the sickness scattered the clans like gambling sticks, an old man never had to live alone and cook for himself, never had to braid his own hair, or listen to his silence. An old man had some relatives, got a chance to pass his name on, especially if the name was an important one like Nanapush. (32)

The passage recalls a tribal world that is social, a world in which relative helps relative, in which the sound of the human voice evokes images of love, care, and a sense of community. Spoken communication is the vehicle through which bonding occurs. Nanapush notes that the past lives on in the present through a shared language:

We do not have as much to do with our young as we think. They do not come from us. They just appear, as if they broke through a net of vines. Once they live in our lives and speak our language, they slowly become like us. (169)

Shared traditions of language create bonds between parent and child, link past to present and to future. It is the "shared language" which finally makes our children "become like us."
        For Nanapush, the oral tradition links human to human, past to present, physical to spiritual. Opposed to this tradition is print, the medium of white culture. One of the pivotol meanings of "tracks" as it is used in the novel relates to words printed on a page. At one point in the novel, Margaret Kashpaw, in a moment of frustration and anger, swipes at the page of a newspaper Nanapush is reading:

She swiped at the sheets with her hand, grazed the print, but never quite dared to flip it aside. This was not for any fear of me, however. She didn't want the tracks rubbing off on her skin. She never learned to read, and the mystery {11} troubled her. (60)

Printed words, like tracks in the snow, are evidence of a more fundamental presence. Oral language with Nanapush is vital, fluid, an agent that binds. But letters--words on a page which are sent to readers miles or worlds away--create no bond between speaker and audience. Discussing the system of post, Nanapush says:

[It] was still a new and different thing to Indians, and I was marked out by the Agent to receive words in envelopes. They were addressed to Mr. Nanapush, and I saved every one I got. I had a skin of them tied and stowed beneath my bed. (97)

The letters communicate the government attempts to take the allotment land belonging to Nanapush. Thus, their content represents an attempt to destroy tribal traditions even further. In this instance written communication is clearly threatening to the traditions Nanapush attempts to preserve. Tied in the skin stowed beneath Nanapush's bed, the letters are held in secret storage like the sacred objects in the medicine bag of the Anishinaabe medicine man. While the letters themselves threaten to destroy Nanapush's culture, the words, separated from the white culture's context and form, are sacred agents to the talking Trickster.
        Printed language, Nanapush suggests later, is potentially dangerous to the tribal culture:

. . . once the bureaucrats sink their barbed pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That's when I began to see what we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-spaced documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match. (225)

The paper trail that has replaced the oral tradition of Nanapush threatens the existence of Nanapush's culture, for Indian lore, religion, and custom have been passed on traditionally through talk, talk linking human to human, flesh to spirit. Removed from tribal traditions, his tribe, Nanapush fears, may become as paper to trees, weak, neatly filed, easily burned and destroyed.
        In Tracks Louise Erdrich focuses on language, on oral traditions and their importance to tribal culture. She does this by creating a novel which utilizes a framed tale and takes as part of its subject the nature of language in the Anishinaabe culture. In an important sense, language {12} may be seen as the subject of the Nanapush sections, for his narrative reveals the power of the spoken word in the tribal world. With Nanapush, language re-forms his world in ways that encourage, if not guarantee, survival. The final image of unity within the novel occurs at the end with the return of Lulu from the boarding school. Nanapush and Margaret "gave against your rush like creaking oaks, held on, braced ourselves in the fierce dry wind" (226). While Nanapush's narrative has not brought mother and daughter together as he had hoped, it has brought Lulu back to a world she once seemed intent on abandoning, evidence of the power--and perhaps of the limitations--of oral communication in a world that comes to depend upon a system of post to bring people together.

WORKS CITED

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Babcock, Barbara. "`A Tolerated Margin of Mess': The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered." Critical Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1985. 153-85.

Erdrich, Louise. Tracks. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988.

Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1976; rpt. 1990.

------. Ojibway Ceremonies. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1982; rpt. 1990.

Kroeber, Karl. "The Wolf Comes: Indian Poetry and Linguistic Criticism." Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Ed. Brian Swann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1983. 98-111.

------. "Technology and Tribal Narrative." Narrative Chance. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. 17-37.

Lincoln, Kenneth. "Native American Literatures: "old like hills, like stars." Three American Literatures. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982. 80-167.

Roemer, Kenneth M. "Native American Oral Narratives: Context and Continuity." Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Ed. Brian Swann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1983. 39-54.

Vizenor, Gerald. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

TRANSPERSONAL SELFHOOD: THE BOUNDARIES OF
IDENTITY IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S LOVE MEDICINE
Jeanne Smith

        Louise Erdrich has commented that "one of the characteristics of being a mixed-blood is searching. You look back and say, `Who am I from?'"¹ In Love Medicine Erdrich finds a way of answering that question, and offers a path towards identity for her readers as well. Love Medicine delineates a selfhood both figuratively and literally transpersonal. Characters flow out of their bodies and open themselves up to engulf the world. Even death does not contain them. In a vision of expansive, unboundaried self reminiscent of Whitman, Erdrich suggests a sense of identity that can only be based on a capacity to merge. While Erdrich shares a universalist perspective with writers like Whitman, however, she firmly grounds her characters' identities in their Chippewa heritage.
        In Love Medicine, characters build identity on transpersonal connections to community, to landscape, and to myth. Like many contemporary Native American novelists, Erdrich uses a "homing" plot, which emphasizes family, community and culture, rather than the classic American "leaving" plot, which emphasizes individual freedom (Bevis 618). This homing structure supports a transpersonal view of identity, which "includes a society, a past, and a place. To be separated from transpersonal time and space is to lose identity" (Bevis 585). Erdrich suggests that contemporary Native American writers emphasize this recovery of home and culture because "in the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors, while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe" ("Where I Ought to Be" 23).
        While the reservation landscape, its community, and Chippewa myth all inform Erdrich's transpersonal vision in Love Medicine, the idea of a transpersonal selfhood transcends cultural boundaries; the human need for reference and connection is also expressed by American Romantic writers. Whitman, seeking in "Song of Myself" to create a distinctly American identity, also bases this identity on transpersonal connections: "Absorbing all to myself" (Leaves of Grass line 234), incarnating "a kosmos" (497), and flying "those flights of a fluid and swallowing soul" (800). In "Democratic Vistas" Whitman recognizes the importance of culturally grounded myths to an American identity, declaring that genuine American literature must be "vitalized by national, original archetypes" (Works 242) and "fresh local courage" (245).
        As a celebration of cultural survival and self-definition, Love Medicine answers Whitman's call for "fresh local courage." The novel also fulfills James Ruppert's demand that the best contemporary Native {14} American literature bring "spirit into modern identity, community into society, and myth into modern imagination" (210). Through their transpersonal connections to each other, to the landscape, and to myth, Erdrich's characters offer a compelling contemporary vision of the sources of identity.
        In Love Medicine, Erdrich, like Whitman, translates the concept of a fluid, transpersonal identity in concretely physical terms: bodies become boundaries, outer layers which limit and define individuals. Erdrich suggests that from the moment of conception, our "personal geography" defines us:

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world. Once we emerge we have no natural limit, no assurance . . . for technology allows us to reach even beyond the layers of air that blanket earth. We can escape gravity itself, and every semblance of geography, by moving into sheer space, and yet we cannot abandon our need for reference, identity, or our pull to landscapes that mirror our most intense feelings. ("Where I Ought to Be" 24)

Erdrich's language suggests the real danger that a lack of reference presents in our modern world: individuals cut off from transpersonal connections lose control over their own boundaries, jeopardizing even physical existence.
        Love Medicine opens with just such a case. As June Kashpaw waits for a bus that will take her home, she flirts with a stranger in an oil boomtown bar and decides to put off her trip: "The bus ticket would stay good, maybe forever. They weren't expecting her up home on the reservation" (3). June's ties to home are tenuous at best; the only personal connection she mentions is Gordie, her divorced husband. June's alienation from her home parallels a striking disjunction from her own body. Late in the evening, after she has missed her bus, June begins to feel fragile: "Walking toward the ladies room she was afraid to bump against anything because her skin felt hard and brittle, and she knew it was possible, in this condition, to fall apart at the slightest touch" (4). She thinks of Andy at the bar peeling back the shell of a hard-boiled egg, and her skin itches under her own pink knit "shell" (4). When Andy finally passes out on top of her in the truck, she again "felt herself getting frail. . . . She knew that if she lay there any longer she would crack wide open" (5).
        June's sense of alienation and isolation transates into physical fragility; severed from her home, she can no longer hold her body {15} together. Attempting finally to regain physical control, June extricates herself from the truck and, pulling "her shell down" (5), begins to walk home. She does not make it home alive. "June grew up on the plains. . . . She'd have known a storm was coming," her niece Albertine muses later; "she'd have known by the heaviness in the air, the smell in the clouds. She'd have gotten that animal sinking in her bones" (9). But June misreads the coming snowstorm for a mild wind; her estrangement from her culture finally kills her.²
        In the chapter titled "A Bridge," fifteen-year-old Albertine also feels physically distorted at a crucial moment of self-imposed separation from the community, when she runs away from home. Truly alone in a strange place for the first time, Albertine loses touch with her physical and psychological relation to the world:

She let her eyes close. Behind her eyelids dim shapes billowed outward. Her body seemed to shrink and contract as in childish fever dreams when she lost all sense of the actual proportion of things and knew herself as bitterly small. She had come here for some reason, but couldn't remember what that was. (132)

Surrounded by strangers and cut off from any transpersonal identity, Albertine loses a sense of herself and feels utterly directionless. Her impulse on the bus to Fargo is to connect with the strangers by a physical exchange of breath with them: "Albertine gulped the rank, enclosed, passenger breath as though she could encompass the strangeness of so many other people by exchanging air with them, by replacing her own scent with theirs" (130). Albertine's impulse to exchange breath with a crowd of strangers suggests an implicit need to establish a physical connection in this alien environment.
        On the cold street in Fargo she follows a man partly because he looks Indian, even Chippewa, and indeed "he turned out to be from a family she knew. A crazy Lamartine boy. Henry" (135). The sexual encounter between these two desperate, solitary Chippewas in a cheap hotel room forms a momentary connection. Yet their encounter, like Henry's bar trick of balancing steak knives across water glasses, is one of "precarious, linked edges . . . a bridge of knives suspended in air" (135). Henry Lamartine Junior has just returned from the Vietnam War and carries "enough shrapnel deep inside of him, still working its way out, to set off the metal detector in the airport" (134). The war has altered Henry's physical as well as psychological make-up.
        At this point in their lives, transpersonal connection is impossible for Henry and Albertine; neither has the strength to merge with the other, or exchange air, as each tries to preserve the frail outline of the self. After their lovemaking "she got as far away from him as possible. {16} It was, to Henry, as if she had crossed a deep river and disappeared. He lay next to her, divided from her, just outside and with no way to follow" (141). While their "precarious, linked edges" connect them. the preservation of those edges also prevents the merging necessary to real strengthening of self.
        Lipsha Morrissey also experiences a distortion of his physical boundaries when threatened with the loss of his adopted grandmother, Marie Kashpaw. When Marie collapses Lipsha suddenly loses his own bearings: "She had been over me, like a sheer overhang of rock dividing Lipsha Morrissey from outer space. And now she went underneath, . . . sending half the lake splashing up to the clouds. Where there was nothing" (209). Lipsha defines his relation to Marie in terms of physical space. She forms a shelter for him, and when she fails, his own boundaries disappear. Lipsha's terrifying loss of reference recalls Erdrich's description of the personal geography of birth, suggesting both the nature of his dependence on Marie and his own need to establish identity.
        However, if alienation from oneself and others causes loss of control over one's physical boundaries, the very possibility of dissolving those boundaries can also be an extremely powerful positive force. Just as isolation induces physical distortion and collapse, connection and reunion allow a healing physical merging with others and with the external world. Identity, Erdrich suggests, depends not on one's ability to isolate the self, but rather on a capacity to surpass physical boundaries and join in communion with others. June's ability to "drift out of her clothes and skin with no help from anyone" enables her to survive her encounter with Andy (4). And when she finally heads home, this "pure and naked part of her" (6) can do what she had never been capable of alive: "The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. . . . June walked over [the snow] like water and came home" (6).
        Although June's fluid inner body is a strength of sorts, its disjunction from her outer shell ultimately prevents her from creating a unified self and returning home in one piece. Albertine more successfully integrates an ability to merge with a strong physical awareness, and in so doing she reestablishes her connections to home, place and myth. On the night of her homecoming after June's death, Albertine achieves a mystical physical communion with the landscape:

Northern lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha's arm. We floated into the field and sank down. . . . Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky . . . At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points . . . pulsing, fading, rythmical as breathing . . . as if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought {17} and memories traveled across it . . . one gigantic memory for us all. (34)

Albertine's vision of a vast, universal brain of which her own face forms a part, expresses what Bevis calls "transpersonal time and space" (585). Everything connects and interrelates in living, breathing patterns and rhythms which Albertine inhabits both physically and mentally.
        Albertine's description echoes Whitman's "Song of Myself": "This the far-off depth and height reflecting my own face, / This the thoughtful merge of myself, and the outlet again" (Leaves of Grass, lines 380-81); and recollects Emerson's transcendentalist vision in "Nature":

Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball: I am nothing: I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God. (10)³

        While echoes of Whitman and Emerson suggest Erdrich's affinity to American Romantic writers, an even more striking parallel to Albertine's vision is Chippewa writer Edward Benton-Banai's description of a visionary experience:

As he rested in camp that night, Waynaboozhoo⁴ looked up into the sky and was overwhelmed at the beauty of the ah-nung-ug (stars). They seemed to stretch away forever into the Ish-pi-ming (Universe). He became lost in the vast expanse of the stars. . . . Waynaboozhoo sensed a pulse, a rhythm in the Universe of stars. He felt his own o-day (heart) beating within himself. The beat of his heart and the beat of the Universe were the same. Waynaboozhoo gazed into the stars with joy. He drifted off to sleep listening to his heart and comforted by the feeling of oneness with the rhythm of the Universe. (56-57)

The parallel imagery in Albertine's and Waynaboozhoo's visions suggests their distinctively Chippewa outlook. While Emerson's vision emphasizes his personal participation in the Universal Being, Benton-Banai's description, like Erdrich's, stresses the tremendous comfort the sense of a universally shared pulse can bring.
        Albertine's merging experience works directly to counteract the sense of alienation and disconnectedness with which the chapter (and the novel) begins. She hears of June's funeral after the fact because, as her mother writes, "we knew you probably couldn't get away from your studies . . . so we never bothered to call and disturb You." Albertine feels "buried, too" at this news, as if, "far from home, living in a white woman's basement," she too is dead to her family (7). She {18} drives home two months later to witness violent fighting between her cousin, King, and his wife and father. With the links holding her family together apparently disintegrating, Albertine's vision of the sky as "one gigantic memory for us al" and everything "all of a piece" is powerfully healing (34).
        Albertine's vision is so powerful because it reestablishes her sense of connection to her home landscape, to her family (she holds Lipsha's arm and they float together), and importantly, to Chippewa myth. Albertine sees the northern lights and imagines the sky as "a dance hall. And all the world's wandering souls were dancing there. I though of June. She would be dancing if there was a dance hall in space" (34-35). In Chippewa myth the joyful dancing of the dead in the afterworld creates the northern lights (Vecsey 64).⁵ As Paula Gunn Allen explains, myth is crucial in reestablishing one's sense of connection after a disjunction from one's culture and community. Myth, she says, universally expresses "the human's need for coherence and unity" (4), and is therefore vital to identity: "The mythic heals, it makes us whole. For in relating our separate experiences to one another, in weaving them into coherence and therefore significance, a sense of wholeness arises . . . which . . . constitutes direct and immediate comprehension of ourselves and the universe of which we are integral parts" (11).⁶ Albertine's vision places June within a community, in a "dance hall in space," and reestablishes her own links to her culture. By reinforcing her transpersonal and mythic connections to her family, her community, and the natural universe, Albertine's physical merging into the cool, dark night intensifies her own sense of identity.⁷
        If Albertine confirms the positive force of a single merging experience, Lulu Lamartine is Erdrich's vision of a wholly transpersonal state of being. The vibrant, strongly self-aware Lulu is the best illustration that dissolving physical boundaries can strengthen identity. Lulu possesses an exceptional ability to merge with and absorb her environment. "I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms," she says (216). Totally receptive to the natural world, Lulu physically and spiritually opens herself to it all: "I'd open my mouth wide, my ears wide, my heart, and I'd let everything inside" (216). Even the men she is famous for chasing are largely just a part of her ability to absorb beauty: "There were times I let them in just for being part of the world" (217).
        Lulu's loving, all-inclusive attitude towards life questions even the possibility of imposing boundaries. "All through my life I never did believe in human measurement," she explains, "Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in" (221). Lulu's outlook fuses geography and psycholo-{19}gy, land politics and identity, an important connection for Erdrich. By linking the boundaries of identity with shrinking reservation borders, Erdrich affirms the inseparability of identity from land, and equates western encroachment on Native American lands with an equally devastating threat to self-concept.⁸ "The Chippewas had started off way on the other side of the five great lakes. . . . We were shoved out on this lonesome knob of prairie," Lulu says (222). Lulu's refusal "to move one foot farther west" (222), her resolve "to stay where I was" (222) confirms the strength of firmly grounded, unbounded identity.
        When Lulu's house burns down after she refuses to move off her own land to make room for a factory, she expresses her grief through an intense desire to get past the physical, sensual constraints of her body. She asks,

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud . . . I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood. (226)

Lulu's projection of herself as a piece of an endless body arises, like Albertine's vision, from an extremely painful moment born of discord within the community. She reads the tribe's complicity in the house fire. "My people," she bitterly calls them, "the tribal fire trucks were all broken down at the time. That was their plan" (226). Like Albertine's, Lulu's private anguish eases as she envisions herself in the context of the much larger harmony in the universe.
        It is not surprising that human relationships, which Erdrich describes as necessarily involving "an exchange, a transformation, a power shared" (George 243), are among the most powerful sources of identity in the novel. Individuals are strongest when they are together. Erdrich's description of "Lulu's boys" gives one of her most fully realized models of communion:

Their gangling legs, encased alike in faded denim, shifted as if a ripple went through them collectively. . . . Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism. (85)

Moving in synchronized harmony, they are one being, yet they still preserve their wildly various individualities. The boys present an ideal, yet somehow believable, picture of a potentially competitive and {20} explosive system of interrelationships unified and strengthened by a sense of "unquestioning belongingness."
        For Erdrich sexual exchange, a temporary suspension of physical boundaries, can have a powerful effect on identity. June's sense that she will "crack wide open" under Andy (6), and Henry and Albertine's feelings of "harsh fear" and "numbing terror" (142) during their encounter underscore the danger sex poses to an already frail identity. In contrast, Beverly Lamartine's first encounter with Lulu after her husband's death illustrates the potentially positive power of sex. For their healing union to take place, the boundaries between bodies become indistinguishable: "The grief of loss for the beloved made their tiny flames of life so sad and precious it hardly mattered who was what" (87). Their encounter years later similarly involves surpassing the body, as they fall through time and space together: "His mouth fell on hers and kept traveling, through the walls and ceilings, down the levels, through the broad, warm reaches of the years" (86). Revealing her merging ability, Lulu explains that "I'd slip my body to earth, like a heavy sack, and for a few moments I would blend in with all that forced my heart" (217). The blending signals an irrevocable transformation and, as Erdrich says, "a power shared" (George 243): once two people merge they are never entirely separate, and each is stronger for their union.
        Nector's metamorphosis after his buttery afternoon with Lulu shows how thoroughly sexual exchange can transform a person. "I felt loose limbed and strong in the dark breeze, roaring home . . . my veins full of warm, sweet water." In fact, every time he visits Lulu

it was as though I left my body at the still wheel of the pickup and inhabited another more youthful one. . . . I was full of sinkholes, shot with rapids. . . . I was a flood that strained bridges. . . . She could run with me, unfolding in sheets and in snaky waves. I could twist like a rope. I could disappear beneath the surface. (100)

Transformation, a primary characteristic of the mythical Nanabush, Chippewa trickster figure, empowers because it signifies ultimate control of one's own physical boundaries.⁹ For Nector, however, the power of sexual communion is ultimately destructive: his involvement in two opposed relationships actually destroys his identity altogether. Because Nector's unions with Lulu and Marie both demand his complete physical and spiritual involvement, his identity finally collapses. He fell "right through the hole in his life," as Lipsha says (190).
        Love Medicine ends with a culmination of Erdrich's concern with identity. In "Crossing the Water" Lipsha Morrissey finally finds his {21} identity through transpersonal connections, by reconnecting with both his father and mother and with Chippewa myth. Lulu decides to reveal Lipsha's parentage to him because, as she tells him, "You never knew who you were" (245). At the news that June Kashpaw and Gerry Nanapush are his parents, Lipsha feels "confusion. It was a bleak sadness sweeping through my brain. . . . More than anything I resented how they all had known" (246). Feeling betrayed not only by his parents but by the community, Lipsha leaves the reservation on a mock-American hero journey to find his identity. By now we know that any attempt at forging an identity cut off from the community is doomed. From the beginning Lipsha seems to sense that leaving home is a mistake. As he later tells Gerry, "I believe that my home is the only place I belong and was never interested to leave it, but circumstances forced my hand" (270). Lipsha explains that he sneaks into Marie's room to steal bus fare, which he feels she has subtly offered him as "a chance to get away from here in my confusion. . . . More than any thing I wanted to say I'd get back as soon as I could, reassure her somehow" (245). Lipsha clearly regards leaving home as temporary and even criminal. Wallowing in a border town, Lipsha loses his bearings: "There was no clear direction to follow, nothing to send me anywhere" (247). Suddenly he understands that to find himself he must find, as Erdrich would say, "who he is from": "I want to meet my dad," he says aloud (247).
        At King's apartment in Minneapolis Lipsha finally meets Gerry Nanapush, who draws his son into him with his gaze: "The slow method his eyes took me in by notches gave me reason to believe that he knew whose son he looked at" (260). Lipsha's reunion with Gerry involves June as well.

I could see how his mind leapt back, making connections, jumping at the intersection points of our lives: his romance with June. . . . Me growing up. And then at last June walking toward home in the Easter snow that, I saw now, had resumed falling softly in this room. (262)

Past and present become one, as the snow which separated both of them from June now links all three. Lipsha describes the encounter as "the father meeting up with the son and the ghost of a woman caught in the dark space between them" (265).
        June's sons and her lover play poker for the Firebird bought with her life insurance money. They all have equal claim to it, as they have equal claim to June. "Everyone treated the car with special care . . . as if [it] was wired up to something," Albertine observes earlier (22). The car becomes a symbolic reincarnation of the rather battered but still racy June. "Hell on wheels!" Gerry calls June (268). As he drives {22} off in her car, Lipsha comments, "I had seen there was nicks and dents in the beautiful finished skin" (266). June is again encased in a shell; the car's nicked, dented, but still "beautiful finished skin" encloses both her son, Lipsha, and Gerry, who is wedged in the trunk. The scene culminates in a rebirth: Lipsha discovers Gerry by his intermittent pounding, and releases him from near suffocation. "He was curled up tight as a baby in its mother's stomach, wedged so thoroughly inside it took a struggle to get him loose" (267). Through the birthing scene this forgotten and unrecognized family momentarily reunites, as June's spirit, embodied in the car, becomes both the vehicle for Gerry's escaoe and the site of Lipsha's communion with his father.
        As they drive on together, June remains a palpable presence in the silent night. When Lipsha asks Gerry if he knew June, the "ghost of a woman caught in the dark space between them" (265) surges up all around: "We were driving the small roads, the less traveled and less well kept. The dark was vast and thick" (268). Amid this darkness, Gerry acknowledges Lipsha as his son, focussing significantly on a physical trait: "You're a Nanapush man. We all have this odd thing with our hearts" (271).¹⁰
        Their reunion is brief, as Lipsha leaves Gerry over the border in Canada, which, like the border into the Chippewa afterworld, Gerry cannot recross without great danger.¹¹ But that one mystical night in the car, next to his father and encircled by his mother, has been enough to give Lipsha an awareness of his own importance and place in the universe:

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt the smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. We held each other's arms, tight and manly, when we got to the border. (271)

Lipsha's sense that this has "happened before" helps connect him to all others who have felt a similar reunion, enriching his own very personal experience. His simultaneous awareness of the "expansion . . . branching out in shoots" and "the smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing," places him as an individual point within a vast web of connection. He feels the stars on his shoulders with his father's hands, and the moon comes up as if signalled by their union.

        When Lipsha leaves his father at the border, he is not alone. He {23} rides in June's shell as in a womb, enclosed by her dark spaces: "I cruised for miles and miles in the clear moonlight, slow, feeling the comfortable dark behind me and before" (271). June fills Lipsha's thoughts, and his connection to her also links him with Chippewa culture. In Chippewa myth, souls journeying to the afterworld must cross over

a rapidly flowing river, spanned by a log-like snake. The person needed to cross over the river on the back of the snake, while the wind blew and the slippery bridge shook. Those who fell into the raging water became toads or fishes, or died forever. (Vecsey 64)

When Lipsha comes to "the bridge over the boundary river" (271), he stops the car as if hovering himself between life and death. Looking down into the "dark, thick, twisting river," Lipsha comes to terms with June's deserting him. "I tell you, there was good in what she did for me. . . . The son that she acknowedged suffered more than Lipsha Morrissey did" (271-2). He considers the old Chippewa legends of "an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems" (272), as if wishing to blot out land boundaries as well as his own personal memories. But Lipsha resists this temptation to obliteration, and accepts the realities of the present: "The truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do bur cross the water, and bring her home" (272). By crossing the water in June's car, Lipsha brings her back to life, and also enacts his own rebirth, finally in control of his "personal geography" and coming to life as June's son.
        Erdrich closes Love Medicine with the paradoxical idea that identity depends on blurring the boundaries between self and other. Isolated and self-contained, the individual has no meaning. Her characters gain power and force only in surpassing personal boundaries, allowing themselves to blend with what is outside. Erdrich suggests that when they transform, and thus define themselves through their relationships to others and to the world, they begin to understand the individual's place in, as Lipsha puts it, the "expansion . . . [and] the smallness" (271) of the world.

NOTES

¹In an interview with Joseph Bruchac, Erdrich described her background as "very mixed . . . one that includes German and French and Chippewa" (83).

²Albertine's description of the smashed pies later in the chapter reminds us of June: "All the pies . . . smashed. Torn open. Black juice bleeding {24} through the crusts. Bits of jagged shells . . . stuck to the wall" (38, emphasis added). Coming at the end of a description of the family reunion, this symbolic reference to June suggests the reverberating effect one member's alienation and death has on the community.
        For analysis that attributes June's frailty to a fragmented gender identity, see Barry and Prescott, 130. I agree with Barry and Prescott, but I think that Erdrich's continued emphasis on home and June's inability to get there suggest that gender fragmentation contributes to a larger sense of June's alienation from all of the rituals and traditions of her home and culture.

³While Emerson shares Whitman's enthusiasm for communion with nature and recognizes a "universal soul" at the depth of each individual's experience (27), his transcendentalist perspective does not extend to the interpersonal aspect of transpersonal connection. Rather, his doctrine of self-reliance and non-conformity emphasizes the strength of the individual apart from society.

⁴Waynaboozhoo, whose name is more commonly spelled "Nanabozho" or "Nanabush," is the Chippewa Trickster figure. I will turn to Erdrich's use of the trickster in Love Medicine later.

⁵Unlike the heaven of western thought, this afterlife is not exclusionary. Christopher Vecsey explains that "part of the happiness of the afterlife sprang from the fact that practically everyone went there" (64).

⁶Allen observes that Native American views about myth coincide, "in some significant ways, with contemporary psychoanalytical observation" (6). Much of Allen's discussion of myth expresses Jungian ideas; however, she notes the tendency of Jungian theory to see "what Indians say [as] . . . a factor of their overactive subconscious bubbling to the surface in natureloving, imaginative form," citing in particular Frank Waters' Pumpkin Seed Point (Chicago: Sage Books, 1969). Jung's essays consistently refer to "primitive man," suggesting an earlier stage of psychic development and therefore closer ties to the unconscious (see, for example, Jung's discussion "On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure" in Paul Radin's The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology).

⁷For a different reading of Erdrich's use of the homing pattern that Bevis delineates, see Flavin, who suggests that Erdrich is skeptical about the possibility of renewal. Flavin cites Albertine as a character for whom "leaving home is the road to fulfillment" (56). My view is that although Albertine does live away from home, her continuing ties to the reservation are essential to her sense of self. The "self-defined individual" (56) Flavin sees in Albertine grounds her identity in transpersonal connections.

{25}
⁸While Lulu is the character most reminiscent of Whitman, the connections she perceives between land and identity ironically emphasize an important opposition between Erdrich's and Whitman's perspectives. Native American lands were constantly shrinking in the nineteenth century, as the United States continued to appropriate territory. In the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman says the American bard "incarnates . . . geography" and expands with his country: "When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer and the Pacific coast stretches longer he easily stretches with them north or south" (Leaves of Grass 490, 491)

⁹Nanabush, who appears in Love Medicine in the magically flexible form of Gerry Nanapush, uses his transformational powers to escape from difficult situations and disguise himself to attack his enemies. Johnston explains that "of all the powers Nanabush possessed, none was more singular than his power of transformation." He could "assume at willl, and in an instant, a new form, shape, and existence. Nanabush could be a man, and change to a pebble in the next instant. He could be a puff of wind, a cloud fragment, a flower, a toad" (19-20). For more information on the Chippewa trickster, see Johnston 159-161 and Vecsey 84-100.

¹⁰Lipsha's other inheritance from his mythical father is, of course, "the touch": "I know the tricks of mind and body inside out without ever having trained for it. because I got the touch. It's a thing you got to be born with. . . . The medicine flows out of me. . . . I run my fingers up the maps of those rivers of veins or I knock very gentle above their hearts or I make a circling motion on their stomachs, and it helps them" (190).

¹¹For discussion of the travel between the two worlds, see Vecsey 64-65 and Johnston 103-108. Vecsey notes that though travel was difficult, "living and dead Ojibwa persons did not lose touch with one another" (65). I am greatly indebted to Elizabeth Ammons for her valuable insight and assistance throughout the editing and revision process of this paper.

WORKS CITED

Allen, Paula Gunn. "The Mythopoeic Vision in Native American Literature: The Problem of Myth." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 (1974): 1-13.

Barry, Nora and Mary Prescott. "The Triumph of the Brave: Love Medicine's Holistic Vision." Critique 31 (1989): 121-138.

Benton-Banai, Edward. The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway. St. Paul MN: Indiana Country Press, 1979.

{26}
Bevis, William. "Native American Novels: Homing In." Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987, 580-620.

Bonetti, Kay. "Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris." Missouri Review 11.2 (1988): 79-99.

Bruchac, Joseph. "Whatever Is Really Yours: An Interview with Louise Erdrich." Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1987, 73-86.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." Nature, Addresses and Lectures. Ed. Edward Emerson. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903. Rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1968.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam, 1985.

------. "Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place." New York Times 28 July 1985, sec. 7: 1+.

Flavin, Louise. "Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: Loving Over Time and Distance." Critique 31 (1989): 55-64.

George, Jan. "Interview With Louise Erdrich." North Dakota Quarterly 53.2 (1985): 240-246.

Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. New York: Columbia U P, 1976.

Landes, Ruth. Ojibwa Religion and the Midewiwin. London: U of Wisconsin P, 1968.

Jung, Carl J. "On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure." In The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology by Paul Radin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

Ruppert, James. "Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Contemporary Native American Fiction." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 28.2 (1986): 209-225.

Vecsey, Christopher. Traditional Ojibwa Religion and Its Historical Changes. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983.

Waters, Frank. Pumpkin Seed Point. Chicago: Sage Press, 1969.

Whitman, Walt. "Democratic Vistas." The Works of Walt Whitman, The Death Bed Edition. Vol 2. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968.

------. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Emory Holloway. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1926.

SHIFTING IDENTITY IN THE WORK OF LOUISE ERDRICH
AND MICHAEL DORRIS
Ann Rayson

        In the first formal joint-by-line novel by Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, The Crown of Columbus (1991), mixed-blood Navaho protagonist Vivian Twostar defines her marginal status to imply that beneath the surface levity of this novel Erdrich and Dorris celebrate a new cohesion, the confluence of Indian-white heritages and male-female voices. Such authorship presents readers with a unique challenge and a new look at the old and perhaps useless label of "marginality." The significant questions are: What is the meaning of a mixed racial heritage for these authors? How do they deal with shifting racial identities in their various novels? Are they offering us a number of possible resolutions, moving to a new resolution in The Crown of Columbus of what it means to be bicultural?
        Vivian's speech comes at the beginning of chapter 8:

     I belong to the lost tribe of mixed bloods, that hodgepodge amalgam of hue and cry that defies easy placement. When the DNA of my various ancestors--Irish and Coeur d'Alene and French and Navajo and God knows what else--combined to form me, the result was not some genteel, undecipherable puree that comes from a Cuisinart. You know what they say on the side of the Bisquick box, under instruction for pancakes? Mix with fork. Leave lumps. That was me.
     There are advantages to not being this or that. You have a million stories, one for every occasion, and in a way they're all lies and in another way they're all true.When Indians say to me, "What are you?" I know exactly what they mean, and answer Coeur d'Alene. I don't add "Between a quarter and a half" because that's information they don't ask for, first off (though it may come later if I screw up and they're looking for reasons why). If one of my Dartmouth colleagues asks me, "Where did you study," I pick the best place, the hardest one to get into, in order to establish that I belong. If a stranger on the street asks me where Violet gets her light brown hair and dark skin, I say the Olde Sodde and let them figure it out.
     There are times when I control who I'll be, and times when other people decide. I'm not all anything, but I'm a little bit of a lot. My roots spread in every direction and if I water one set of them more often than others, it's because they need it more. To the College I am a painless affirmative {28} action, to Roger I'm presentably exotic, to Nash I'm too white, to Grandma I'm too Anglo, to Hilda and Racine I'm the romantic American friend. To Violet, at least for now, I'm perfect. No wonder I enjoy her company.
     I've read learned anthropological papers written about people like me. We're called marginal, as if we exist anywhere but on the center of the page. Our territory is the place for asides, for explanatory notes, for editorial notation. We're parked on the bleachers looking into the arena, never the main players, but there are advantages to peripheral vision. Out beyond the normal bounds you at least know where you're not. You escape the claustrophobia of belonging, and what you lack in security you gain by realizing--as those insiders never do--that security is an illusion. We're jealous of innocence, I'll admit that, but as the hooks and eyes that connect one smug core to the other we have our roles to play. "Caught between two worlds," is the way it's often put in cliched prose, but I'd phrase if differently. We are the catch." (123-124)

        The multiple meanings of "catch" suggest what Vivian determines her identity to consist of: the "catch" is something that checks or holds two things in place; a prize, something worth catching, especially a spouse; a concealed difficulty; the germinating of a field crop to such an extent that replanting is unnecessary; and a round for three or more unaccompanied voices written out as one continuous melody with each succeeding singer taking up a part in turn. Thus a mixed-race person, as catch, holds two sides together; is special, the prize, a good catch (to blend the races?); but is a concealed difficulty (the mixed identity?); and is the final germination. The form of The Crown of Columbus consists of monologues by several main characters, which fits the "catch" as a round for several voices, each taking a part in turn. The use of "catch" in Crown can encompass all these definitions. Certainly Vivian means "catch" as prize and "catch" as connection. "Cache," as a play on "catch," is a hidden treasure; the crown of Columbus is a catch in a cache, or a cache itself, but Vivian's child, Violet, turns out to be the true cache. The mulatto or mixed breed used to be considered the detritus of both races, the reminder of unsanctioned miscegenation. But now the mix is to be prized, and the mixed blood brings the two cultures together as the hook and eye, the catch, the connection.
        "We are the catch" is the point of Crown, a seeming lark of a novel with a serious attempt to rationalize, accept, and forgive the European discovery of America by Columbus. Vivian has a child, Violet, with Roger Williams, a caricature of the East Coast academic. Violet becomes the point of everything, "a tan-colored baby, light-haired, {29} mixed by God" (377), Moses in the bulrushes. After the bleak view of fetal alcohol syndrome in Native American life that is revealed so poignantly in The Broken Cord, the later novel may offer an antidote. Violet is the "new" American, out of the melting pot, but with a difference. Vivian and Violet are not "some genteel, undecipherable puree that comes from a Cuisinart," but Bisquick that leaves lumps. Through this novel the authors weave Asian martial art philosophies, Native American chants and rituals, and the Christian story of death and resurrection.
        When a reviewer of this article asked if Vivian's statement was an articulation of the authors' point of view, Dorris replied in a letter to me that Vivian Twostar

is not our "mouth piece," but a fictional creation, and speaks entirely for herself. Vivian's views on the subject of her mixed blood heritage have no bearing on characters in Love Medicine, Yellow Raft, or anything else we've written. Vivian Twostar--and Roger Williams, for that matter--are characters in their own right. We do not endeavor to use fiction as a smoke screen for advancing our philosophy or our politics and it would be a mistake (and a disservice to the books) to suggest otherwise. (16 April 1991)

Understandably, authors do not want to be pigeonholed. On the other hand, in discussing Tracks in a recent interview Erdrich has said,

I think each of the books is political in its own way. I hope so . . . There's no way to speak about Indian history without it being a political statement . . . you really can't write a book about Native Americans without being political. Getting your teeth fixed is political. There's no way around it. I just don't want to become polemical. That's the big difference. (Schumacher 29)

        The issue of mixed blood and shifting identity, of being part of more than one culture or ethnicity but not completely of one clear ethnic background, is of concern to Erdrich and Dorris and something they, in the various voices of their characters, have not resolved.
        In The Broken Cord, Dorris explains how he identifies himself according to the situation he is in. While driving across the country he presents himself as white to get motel rooms and keeps his adopted Indian son, Adam, in the car and out of sight after one bitter experience: standing under a "Vacancy" sign a motel manager had excused himself with "Sorry, Chief. We're full up" (49) when Dorris had asked for lodging. Dorris explains, "Out of context, most strangers didn't place me as Indian, but with Adam, for Adam, it was going to be a {30} different story. We were in a part of the country with many reservations, and that's where unapologetic discrimination was usually the worst" (49). Once he arrives at the reservation, Dorris brings out his Indian side and is careful not to do anything stupid:

A kind of protocol develops when you visit a number of reservations where you don't expect to know anyone. If you appear as unambiguously "Indian," it's easier--depending on how you're dressed: the question then becomes who are you with, why are you here? If you're a "could-be," a mixed blood, more validation is called for: . . . You're the petitioner, you're the one on trial, and there's no rushing the process. (53)

Dorris's flexibility enables him to move in and out of conflicting situations, yet he will never be either a Roger Williams or a Gerry Nanapush, neither a New England blueblood nor a grassroots Native American superhero.
        At other times his outward lack of a clear identity makes him vulnerable. When Adam is hospitalized, he corrects the admitting office nurse, who thinks Adam is Vietnamese, saying "We're Indian.

They surveyed my appearance with curiosity. It was an expression I recognized, a reaction, familiar to most people of mixed-blood ancestry, that said, "You don't look like an Indian." No matter how often it happened, no matter how frequently I was blamed by strangers for not resembling their image of some Hollywood Sitting Bull, I was still defensive and vulnerable.
     "I'm part Indian," I explained. From experience I knew they would not leave this topic until they were satisfied. "He's a full-blood. Adopted."
     Now they got it, and exchanged a knowing glance. (22)

Marginality is unnerving; rigid categories are difficult to overcome. Translation is required.
        In discussing issues of translation and authenticity in American Indian literature, Susan Hegeman defines the "business of translation" as "mediating between two languages and two cultural contexts, to find a way to make one work comprehensible in an entirely different setting. If one did not acknowledge Anglo-American textual conventions to some extent, then there would be no translation--just as there would be no translation if what was produced did not claim to bear some similarity to the translated work" (280). Bearing one culture to another is what Erdrich and Dorris are doing as they "translate" the reservation experience to the canon, what Frederick Douglass, himself half white, {31} was doing in his slave narrative, translating the experience of slavery for white readers, a political act meant to garner support for abolitionism. It is through his process of translating his experience that he begins to understand it. Only with an outsider's perspective can Douglass understand the meaning of the "sorrow songs": "I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension" (57).
        Catherine Rainwater, in a reversed view of marginality, insists that "encoded `undecidability' leads to the marginalization of the reader by the text" (407). For example, in Love Medicine Erdrich parallels the Easter passion story with the American Indian Shamanic tradition. The Western reader will decode the resurrection, but not the shamanic code. Because there is no synthesis in these "conflicting religious paradigms" (409), the reader is led "away from synthesis and into a permanent state of irresolution" (409). Many symbols in Love Medicine, for example June's beads, "invite the reader to bridge codes which do not interface" (413), forcing the reader, "temporarily disempowered," to "pause `between worlds' to discover the arbitrary structural principles of both" (422). White readers come to understand Native American life a little bit. Erdrich has translated this culture for them/us while making them/us struggle with cherished versions of reality. For communication to occur, representatives who can articulate both cultures must provide the translation.
        Erdrich and Dorris achieve in their work a mingling of the male-female voice and a confluence of white-Indian culture. That their writing has entered the canon and not remained on its margin is a tribute to their ability to translate the Indian side of their experience for the dominant culture. In doing so they celebrate Violet and what she represents, a resolution of the colonial suppression of the native. At the same time, baby Violet represents what is essential in life (just as baby Dot gives meaning to the marginal lives of Celestine, Mary, Karl, and Wallace in The Beet Queen). Says Roger of Vivian: "She hungers and thirsts for future justice, and I strive to bring forth from the past what is good. We meet in the present, in this house that holds the treasure. Violet glows at the center" (376). The Crown of Columbus espouses an extremely positive view of the confluence of two cultures, the ideal achievement, the new American.
        Does this ebullience depend on fashion? Gerald Vizenor has said that "Indian . . . has become a good thing to be this decade" [1980s] (111). White acquaintances of mine now mention or stress their Indian blood, whereas fifty years ago they would not know of it or might repress the knowledge. Dorris and Erdrich now are heralded by the {32} establishment, which is ill-equipped to accept Native American ritual performances as American literature, but can grapple with a novel. Will "Indian" continue to be "a good thing to be"? And in what social circles?
        One theme in Love Medicine is the Chippewa view of white culture. In Love Medicine the white is the "other." Chippewa culture is seen from the inside, and forays outside the reservation involve destructive experiences--June's suicide after she is picked up by one too many mud engineers in the boom town of Williston, North Dakota; Henry Lamartine, Jr.'s, character fragmentation and suicide after serving in Vietnam; and Gerry's brushes with law enforcement. In the classic American novel Indian territory is off the map, treacherous wilderness, hostile unmapped terrain; in Love Medicine Indian territory, now the reservation, is the place of safety and nurturance.
        Lulu's is the voice of protest in the novel, angry at the long history of white interference. "Indian against Indian, that's how the government's money offer made us act" (223). Lulu holds on to cultural values, yet despite her anger about the history of white colonization, she does not discriminate in her choice of men. That her many sons have different fathers does not affect their ethnicity or "Indianness." At the end of the novel, Lipsha explains the basis of identity. While playing poker with King, Lipsha realizes he is a part of this family, "that both of our backgrounds were sprung from the same source," namely June. "Belonging was a matter of deciding to" (255).
        Vizenor maintains that you are what you say you are:

The application of mixedblood geometric scores was not a form of tribal cultural validation. Skin color and blood quantums were not the means the tribe used to determine identities. The Anishinaabeg classified a person Indian if he lived with them and adopted their habits and mode of life, according to David Beaulieu, former chairman of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. (107)

Belonging was not racial, but experiential. The percentage of Indian and white blood was not the determining factor; the distinction was cultural.
        Dual authorship also complicates questions about sexual voice and identity. How is male-female voice related to ethnic identity? In A Yellow Raft in Blue Water the important voices are female. In Erdrich's novels both male and female Native American voices have strength, but female characters are dominant. Since Erdrich's writing is textured by Dorris's contributions we cannot make statements about "fiction by ethnic women" as Mary Dearborn does in Pocahontas's Daughters, or {33} classify Erdrich's works in a gender category. Erdrich and Dorris are adamant about their process. In a recent letter to me Dorris says that "we work on most everything together" (15 June 1990), and in an interview they explain their writing method:

We'll be talking about a character or a scenario and one of us will write a draft: a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a chapter, . . . Then the other person takes it and goes over it with a red pencil. The person who wrote the draft takes it back, tries again, sometimes four or five drafts' worth, until we sit down and read them aloud over a period of a week or so, and do the final paring and achieve consensus, on, literally, every word.
        In the course of it, we'll continuously plot and continuously talk about who the characters are, what they eat, what clothes they wear, what their favorite colors are and what's going to happen to them. In that way, I think it's a true kind of collaboration: we both really influence the course of the book. You can't look back and say which one made it go this way or that way, because you can't remember. You just remember that you had that exciting conversation.
     "Nothing goes out of the house," says Dorris, "without the other person concurring that this is the best way to say it and the best way of presenting it. One of the beauties of the collaboration is that you bring two sets of experience to an issue or an idea, and it results in something that is entirely new."
     Erdrich adds, "Some people don't believe it's possible to collaborate that closely, although we both have solitude and private anguish as well. You develop this very personal relationship with your work, and it seems fragile; you're afraid to destroy it. But I trust Michael enough so that we can talk about it. And every time I've been afraid to open it up, it has always been better for the work." (Berkeley 59)

        Characters in The Beet Queen, Erdrich's second novel, are often of mixed or indeterminate racial heritage or sexual orientation, which supports the idea that Erdrich and Dorris are working toward synthesis through characters who are fluid. Karl, who is bisexual; Wallace Pfef, a repressed homosexual; Celestine, a six-foot tall, masculine-looking "breed"; and Mary, the square-built "cement root cellar" (333) all have indeterminate or "marginal" identities. The Beet Queen is a novel of the interior life of "the other"--the orphan, the homosexual, the bisexual, the Indian, the mixed-blood, the disfigured, the crippled, the mentally ill, the unattractive. The title character, Dot is described in Love {34} Medicine as "of the has-been, of the never was, of the what's-in-front-of-me people" (155). The central core of the novel concerns the psychological and sociological consequences of having a mixed or indeterminate identity.
        In A Yellow Raft in Blue Water Rayona is named in a parody of Indian ritual Rayon is the label on her mother's nightgown and the first thing the mother sees at Rayona's birth. Rayona's Indian mother, Christine, is the issue of a scandalous, therefore suppressed relationship, and her father is Black. Christine's orientation moves from the reservation to the outside, Minot and Seattle, and back to the reservation; although Rayona is Indian and Black, she has no experience of Black Culture, no relatives that we see, no Black influence. Her father, Elgin, is more absent than present. Rayona is a product of both the reservation and a larger culture that includes Blacks. Rayona's blackness never seems to be an issue except when people try to puzzle out her racial mix. Occasionally she is referred to as "nigger," but the epithet does not unduly disturb Rayona. She may look black, but since her ties are Indian, and the reservation accepts her on the basis of choice, Lipsha's "belonging was a matter of deciding to" explains her identity--culture over blood. On a fictional reservation this can work. The positive view of Rayona's mix is present, too. Christine tells Elgin, "We're the wrong color for each other. . . . That's what your friends think." He responds that "we may be different shades but look at the blend." Rayona likes to think this refers to her, "since my skin is a combination of theirs" (9).
        The idea of racial mix moving toward synthesis in Rayona is repeated by Nash, Vivian's son in The Crown of Columbus, when he says, toward the end of the novel, "Memory fades, identity gets blurred, as fast as blood gets mixed." Yet he realizes he is "an improbable exception, a survivor of survivors of survivors" (364). Identity is not fixed: "Mostly it's ['feeling Indian'] just confusing or irrelevant, one disguise among many I put on. Except it's not a disguise, it's skin" (363). Creating yet a deeper layer of ambiguity to Native American identity, Dorris and Erdrich give the final vignette in Crown to the Bahamians. Now Vivian Twostar is "a tourist woman" (380), the outsider on Eleuthera rather than the native. Just as Mary Therese, a Caribbean native in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby represents everything "authentic" that Jadine, the black American model who has become the darling of Paris, is not, so Valerie, who has rescued baby Violet from the sea, is opposed to educated, assimilated Vivian. Yet Vivian is the one who can, through heritage and perspective, translate the diary of Columbus, bringing both cultures together in understanding and trying to right the injustices of colonialism.
        Erdrich and Dorris create confusion and uncertainty in the reader's {35} mind over what it means to be Vivian, to have a mixed identity. The New York Times reviewer of The Crown of Columbus says the novel is a "very mixed bag" that "tries on too many costumes--domestic comedy, paperback thriller, novel of character, love story--and finally decides that, unable to make up its mind, it will simply wear them all at once" (Houston 10). Another way to see this play with form is as a parallel to the identities characters assume and the ways they are seen in different contexts by others. This seeming indecision about intent and direction mirrored in the conglomeration of genres and allusions to other fiction comments on the theme of shifting identity. The characters are not always sure who they are; the novel does not know what form it should take. Dorris and Erdrich are playing on and working through the difficulty of determining a clear identity when multiple cultures and literary forms are available.
        For Vivian Twostar, being of mixed blood, "marginal," is an advantage. She knows intuitively that "security is an illusion," what Ellison's Invisible Man has to wander through African-American history to learn: "there are bonuses to peripheral vision" (Crown 124)). The Vivians are the "hooks and eyes that connect one smug core to another"--they hold two cultures together. Erdrich and Dorris, in the same way as the hook and eye, connect the male to the female narrative voice, the Native American to the EuroAmerican perspective. Because of their working methods and mixed heritage, it is not possible to separate one voice from another in their works. In this artistic synthesis lies the power of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris and the challenge to critics who would seek a clear female or ethnic voice to legitimize theories of feminist and Native American literature. The consequence of this artistic synthesis is articulation of multiple forms of expression of mixed Native American and EuroAmerican identity.

SOURCES

Berkeley, Miriam. "Louise Erdrich." Publishers' Weekly 15 August 1986. 58-59.

Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Dorris, Michael. The Broken Cord. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990.

------. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. New York: Warner Books, 1987.

Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich. The Crown of Columbus. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, {36} An American Slave. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York: Penguin, 1982.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1953.

Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1986.

------. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam, 1984.

------. Tracks. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988.

Hegeman, Susan. "Native American `Texts' and the Problem of Authenticity." American Quarterly 41.2 (June 1989): 265-283.

Houston, Robert. "Take It Back for the Indians." The New York Times Book Review 28 March 1991:

Morrison, Toni. Tar Baby. New York: New American Library, 1983.

Rainwater, Catherine. "Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich." American Literature 62 (September 1990): 405-422.

Schumacher, Michael. "A Marriage of Minds." Writer's Digest June 1991: 28-59.

Vizenor, Gerald. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

A NOTE ON NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE IN TRACKS

Victoria Walker

*                  *                  *                 *

COMMENTARY

From the Editors
        This issue of SAIL has been in progress for some ten months, ever since James Flavin's paper on Tracks and the MLA special session on Louise Erdrich indicated the possibility of a special issue devoted to criticism of her work. As work progressed on the issue and papers underwent revision, more submissions were received, including a batch of interesting undergraduate studies produced by Pete Beidler's students at Lehigh University. The happy result was more very fine papers than a single issue could hold. Budget and time constraints precluded a double issue; consequently, both this last number of volume 3 and the first issue of volume 4 (spring 1992) will comprise an extended discussion of the works of Louise Erdrich.
        The papers collected here represent a range from intense close reading to a broad perspective on collaborative and individual works. In "The Novel as Performance Communication in Louise Erdrich's Tracks" James Flavin offers a reading of Tracks centering on its celebration of and reverence for the power of language, while Jeanne Smith explores Love Medicine in the context of American Romantic literature in "Transpersonal Selfhood: The Boundaries of Identity in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine." Ann Rayson's study moves over a number of prose works, fiction and non-fiction, by both Erdrich and Michael Dorris to take up the vexed question of "Shifting Identity in the Work of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris." Finally, Victoria Walker's note on "Narrative Perspective in Tracks" opens up an issue relevant to all of Erdrich's (and Dorris's) work: the relationship of narrative strategy and reader manipulation.
        Four long papers are planned for the following issue. Joni Adamson Clark examines Erdrich's transformation of oral stories in "Why Bears Are Good To Think and Theory Doesn't Have To Be Murder: Transformation and Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich's Fiction," while Annette Van Dyke takes up the theme of motherdaughter relationships in "Questions of the Spirit: Bloodlines in Louise Erdrich's Landscape." Lissa Schneider focuses on healing processes in "Love Medicine: A Metaphor for Forgiveness," and Daniel Cornell extends the disussion of narrative perspective in "Woman Looking: Revis(ion)ing Pauline's Subject Position in Tracks."
        Looking forward to 1992, we envision several important developments. High on the list, of course, is the actual incorporation and organization of ASAIL as an independent scholarly organization. The moment is right, now when interest in this field is mushrooming as evidenced by the attendance and spirited discussion at American Indian Literature sessions in conferences like MELUS, ALA and MLA. {42} Everyone who has worked on this project merits gratitude, especially from younger scholars who hope to specialize in or who want to know more about American Indian literatures.
        Some submissions for the special issue on creative work have already come in; we welcome more, and hope that our call will be passed on to young Native American writers who may not have seen the published notices. Our new size can accommodate longer pieces, and we especially encourage submissions of prose. More information about the issue is in the Call for Creative Work below.
        "Returning the Gift," a major project for American Indian writers which we have reported on before, has received two substantial grants, and plans are going forward for the conference in Oklahoma in summer 1992. SAIL has applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a special issue in connection with the conference; if the grant is funded we shall be able to offer modest honoraria to contributors.
        Greg Sarris has also agreed to edit a special issue on critical approaches to American Indian literatures. Greg's call for papers is printed below; we urge interested scholars to get in touch with him.

Helen Jaskoski             
Robert M. Nelson         

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More Grizzly Woman
        It is good to see attention to Victoria Howard's Clackamas Chinook narratives. May I mention that some of them at least have now the chance of reaching a wider audience, through inclusion in a recent anthology. It is edited by Marian Arkin and Barbara Schollar, Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women, 1875-1975 (Longman, 1989). Three short texts (in ethnopoetic form) by Victoria Howard follow two poems by Charlotte Perkins Gilman! They are "Laughing at missionaries," "Maybe it's Milt," and "Seal and her younger brother lived there" (pp. 106-9).
        May I comment also on two points with regard to the interpretation of the stories in the Spring issue. As to authenticity, it counts for something that the texts show consistent use of Chinookan poetic, or rhetorical, patterns and that if one returns to them, they commonly yield more, not less, in the way of insight, insight interdependent often with details of form. I first wrote about "Seal and her younger brother lived there" twenty years ago. Writing an essay soon to appear, I discovered that a conjecture about narrative by the French linguist A. {43} J. Greimas added to understanding of the working of the short text. And when Gary Morson lectured at Virginia this spring on the Russian critic M. Bakhtin, a point he made added yet another perspective on its concluding scene.
        Obviously dictated texts are not the same thing as a performance in a traditional setting. But we do not know that Victoria Howard ever told the stories she knew in a traditional setting. What we know is that she remembered stories told her by her mother-in-law and mother's mother, and had them in mind until the end of her life. Surely, then, they were not merely something remembered, but something enjoyed and something with meaning. Very likely she reflected on them, and the form in which she told them to Melville Jacobs embodies some of her reflection on their meaning. The variation and change to be observed among versions of related stories, among Native Americans of Oregon, and elsewhere, is not to be explained by variation in performance alone. It presupposes reflection and interpretation between performances.
        In this regard it seems not accidental that Mrs. Howard remembered and told just the scene she did in "Seal and her younger brother lived there." A scene of suspense from a story of revenge by men has been transformed into a story of the consequences of revenge on two generations of women.
        Further, in this regard, "Grizzly Woman began to kill them" (in my article on the second text addressed by Thompson I translate the inceptive aspect of the verb in Mrs. Howard's title) is one of a series of narratives involving the figure of Grizzly Woman. The series as a whole indicates that Grizzly Woman was a figure through whom Mrs. Howard, and perhaps those from whom she heard the stories, interpreted what we now call "aggressiveness" and "assertion" in women. That the figure was probably close to Mrs. Howard's own sense of identity is revealed in an unpublished passage in Jacobs' notebooks to text 114 (vol. II, p. 523). As a young woman, Mrs. Howard was ill from a power. The shaman who finally could remove it asked if he should kill it, or wash it and give it back. Her mother said to kill it. The power is not named, but the shaman who had finally the power to remove it himself had the very strong power of Grizzly Woman also.
        I am sorry not to have made available in published form a book I drafted a decade ago on these stories. It was accepted by the American Folklore Society, with the title Bears that save and destroy. Faces of feminine power. But then I realized that there was more to say, that four of the stories involving Grizzly Woman in effect constituted a cycle. I worked on that one summer in Oregon, but back in Philadelphia was caught up in administrative responsibilities, and never finished the revision. For the record, there are two stories in which Grizzly Woman is finally destroyed. "Grizzly Woman began to kill them" is one. {44} The other is "Gitskux and his younger brother." The first has a younger sister (Waterbug) as decisive agent. The second has a younger brother (Gitskux, probably Fisher) as crucial agent. Two other stories end with a Grizzly Woman figure set loose upon the world. One with a young woman who becomes a dangerous being as decisive agent is "Grizzly and Black Bear ran away with the two girls" (CCT I, #14). One with a young man as decisive agent is "Black Bear and Grizzly Woman and their sons" (CCT I, #16).
        The two stories with a young woman, and the two stories with a young man, appear to align. Parallels of detail between the two with a young woman are especially striking. These two center on relations between women, a mother and daughter in the first, a mother and a new father's wife in the second. In each of the two stories with young men as crucial agents, a woman has a crucial prophetic role. There is nothing known to me more moving and powerful as to the dignity and strength of a woman than certain scenes in "Gitskux and his younger brother," in which the woman the wandering, isolated older brother (Panther) finds, having brought him by her power to her bed, of her own free will confers on him the right to be the hunter of the household, and then, when his younger brother has been rescued by following her instructions, restores and indeed enhances his beauty, his long hair.
        These stories are separate in the telling. The more one becomes acquainted with the complexity of the figure of Grizzly Woman in them, the more it seems likely that they belong together, two pairs, each ending with a final overcoming of what Grizzly Woman represents, one pair with young men as active agents, one pair with young women. Whatever one finds in one of the stories ought to be considered in the light of the others.
        Whatever, then, the limitations of the original circumstances in which the stories were preserved, they were limitations which in the nature of the case could not be overcome. The consistency of form of the stories indicates that the tradition retained integrity in Mrs. Howard. Indeed, if one arranges the stories in the order in which they were told, one discovers that it was only about half-way through the seventeen notebooks that Mrs. Howard began to conclude them with the formal ending, k'ani k'ani. The appearance of the formal ending appears to be a sign of confidence on her part in her role, possibly in the completeness of what she had told. Apart from as yet unpublished narratives in Sahaptin, these narratives from Victoria Howard probably are the finest and fullest that can be known of what was once an ever-renewing abundance of oral narrative in Oregon. As an Oregonian, I am grateful for them.
        With best wishes, and appreciation for SAIL.

Dell Hymes         

{45}
Response
        I am grateful to Dell Hymes for supplying the details on the parallels between the Grizzly Woman tales, and also for the information on Victoria Howard's personal relationship with Grizzly Woman; I hope he finds the opportunity to return to his manuscript and finish the revisions he feels are necessary for publication.
        Professor Hymes raises two points concerning my essay on Mrs. Howard's tales. The first regards the "authenticity" of the myths. Because I am not sure what constitutes "authenticity" for him, it is difficult for me to respond. If he is arguing that they were sophisticated, rhetorically consistent texts, I agree with him completely. For my part, I used the term only because it was necessary, for the purposes of my essay, that the tales closely resemble something that was told in a traditional setting. Generally, the "rhetoric of authenticity" is something which I avoid at all costs--primarily because I know of no tales which I would refer to as "inauthentic."
        Professor Hymes also writes that the Grizzly Woman stories shou