Introduction

Louise Erdrich's poem "Captivity" was published in 2003 in Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. The poem's title references The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, a 17th-century autobiographical account of a Puritan woman abducted by the Wampanoag tribe after an attack on her village in Massachusetts in 1676. Rowlandson's narrative explores her struggle to maintain her Puritan faith while living among Indigenous people, highlighting her fear of being spiritually and culturally altered by the experience.

Erdrich, a writer of Chippewa descent, often examines the complexities of identity, culture, and survival in her work, as seen in her acclaimed novels Love Medicine and The Round House. Her works stand as a counterpoint and corrective to early Eurocentric works that depict indigenous American peoples as "savage" or "heathen" because they did not believe in or worship the Christian God. 

Poem Summary

"Captivity" opens with an epigraph from Mary Rowlandson's narrative, where her Wampanoag captor offers her a biscuit. Though starving, she hesitates to eat, fearing that consuming the food might "make [her] love him" through some kind of magic. This moment introduces the central tension of the poem: Rowlandson's fear of being changed by her captors and, by extension, of losing her cultural and spiritual identity.

After the epigraph, the speaker, Mary, describes harsh circumstances, highlighting the violence and extreme conditions; for example, she is "dragged … / by the ends of [her] hair" by her captor. From there, Mary notes that she can "distinguish" her captor's face from the other members of the tribe. She sometimes feels afraid when she hears him speak "his language," which she refers to as "not human," mostly because she does not want to grow to understand it, as that would signal a change in her own identity. In these moments of anxiety, she prays to her God.

In the second stanza, Mary reflects on the tribe's flight from pursuers, but she is unsure who the true enemies are, describing the pursuers as "God's agents / or pitch devils." This uncertainty highlights her moral and spiritual confusion as she questions the nature of good and evil. In the present, however, her only concern is survival: "we must march." Despite her hardships, including her inability to feed her infant, the tribe shows her kindness. A native woman gives Mary's child "milk of acorns," helping them to survive.

In the following stanza, Mary resumes her hostility and fear toward the Wampanoag as she vows to "starve" rather than eat food given to her by her captor. Yet when he kills a deer and fawn and offers her the "tender" meat, she cannot resist and enjoys the meal. That night, she follows her captor, and he releases her from her bondage to a tree.

Mary begins to experience a deeper unease. Nature itself seems to turn against her, "mocking" and "roaring" as she sees birds and trees as enemies. Her captor does not pay any mind to what Mary perceives as "God's wrath," though she experiences intense fear while parts of the forest burn around her. Even though she feels terrified, she acknowledges that "this, too, passed." 

In the final two stanzas, Mary has returned to her family after her captivity. However, once she has been "Rescued," she "see[s] no truth in things." Her husband, a Puritan minister, cannot seem to farm their land successfully, which makes Mary question her faith. Even though she is in a relatively comfortable Christian home, she imagines herself with the Wampanoag again, though "outside their circle." She is both with them and apart from them during the time of her captivity and after her rescue.

Mary's most troubling realization is that her time in captivity altered her fundamentally, and her experience with the tribe shifted her identity. In her memory, she hit the ground with a stick, "begging it to open / to admit" her, as she prayed for her own death, thus an end to her existential crisis. She searches for comfort in those moments but does not find it even when she returns to her everyday life with her husband and community.