SOURCE: Stokes, Karah. “What about the Sweetheart?: The ‘Different Shape’ of Anishinabe Two Sisters Stories in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love.” MELUS 24, no. 2 (summer 1999): 89-105.

[In the following essay, Stokes explores the role of Anishinabe culture, mythology, and storytelling in Love Medicine.]

Even though she grew up off-reservation speaking English, and writes a novel, a European form, Louise Erdrich's work is informed and ordered by elements of Anishinabe as well as of German-American, Catholic, and Midwestern cultures. These elements tantalize non-Anishinabe readers by lending a different shape to her fiction, a shape that they can sense but cannot fully distinguish. In order to discern the different shape of her novels, readers must educate themselves about the Anishinabe background of the works.

The meaning of Anishinabe storytelling relies on cultural knowledge through which the hearer fills in the blanks of the teller's “synechdochic omission[s]” (Kroeber 104-05). This transaction between speaker and listener is illustrated in the story of a white translator, Frederick Burton; his unnamed Anishinabe informant; and an Anishinabe song. Burton had been told by the informant that the song meant “I am out all night on the river seeking for my sweetheart,” and had translated it into a song popular in the early part of this century. Later, however, he was informed of the literal translation, which is this:

Throughout
night
I keep awake
throughout
night
I keep awake
upon a river
I keep awake.

(Kroeber 105)

But what about the sweetheart?, Burton asked. His informant replied that the repetition of awake three times told the Anishinabe hearer all he or she needed to know. “Why does a man keep awake all night when he want to sleep?. … Only one reason. I go to find my sweetheart. The word is not there but we understand it” (Burton qtd. in Kroeber 105).¹ Like the traditional song with its invisible lover, Erdrich's novels contain knowledge, concepts, and characters that become apparent only when readers educate themselves in the Anishinabe culture that informs her works.

Although she attended college and graduate school in writing and literature, Erdrich insists that a more primary influence on her novels is the practice of oral storytelling, because she grew up in a household where both Native and non-Native relatives told and still tell stories with great virtuosity (Wong interview 38-39). This oral influence is demonstrated formally in the episodic form of the novels and the fact that, as in traditional stories of the Anishinabe, the same characters evolve through many works (Schumacher interview 175-76). As in oral storytelling, the events of a story will sometimes be contradicted in its retelling by another narrator: no definitive version exists (Caldwell interview 67; Chavkin interview 224). As in the Nanabozho story cycle, stories continue “nose to tail” (Jones interview 4); sometimes characters dead in one tale live again in another story. For example, June Kashpaw dies in the opening scene of Love Medicine but appears as a ghost in The Bingo Palace; the scene of her death is retold from a different point of view as the opening of Tales of Burning Love. Sister Leopolda apparently dies in Love Medicine but appears as a centenarian in Tales of Burning Love. Formal features of oral narrative in Erdrich's work have been noted by Erdrich herself (Chavkin 4), Pittman, Rainwater, Ruppert, Schultz and others.

In addition to formal features, however, Erdrich's work also draws on characters, plot patterns and relationships from traditional Anishinabe culture and mythology.² Specifically, stories about Oshkikwe and Matchikwewis, a polar pair of sisters in a cycle of stories commonly told by Anishinabe women, gives the reader a new perspective on the relationships between women that are central to Erdrich's novels. The relationship between these sisters has no close analogue in European American folklore and therefore lends a different shape to Erdrich's fiction.

The metaphor of a “different shape” of relationships between women is derived from a key scene in Tales of Burning Love in which Eleanor and Dot, the “two sisters” of this novel, first meet. When they are introduced by Jack Mauser, ex-husband of Eleanor and current husband of Dot, the two women bristle at each other, yet in the space of their car trip to Fargo, they bond together against Jack. As Jack sees it, “By the time they got to Mauser's house, he knew that he was in the car with [not two women who are strangers to each other but] something else, a different shape, alien, brilliant, ultra-female” (78, emphasis added). This powerful relationship between women, having no name in Euro-American culture, patterns Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love, which I will examine here, and can be found in four novels published under Erdrich's name.³

Like the “tricky Nanabozho” (LM [Love Medicine] 236), the trickster and culture hero of the Anishinabe about whom innumerable stories are told, Oshkikwe and Matchikwewis appear and reappear in cycles of stories. Their names are descriptive: Oshkikwe means “young woman” (oshki- means “young,” “new,” or “unmarried” and ikwe means “woman”); as for Matchikwewis, matchi means “bad” (Baraga). Oshkikwe, the younger, more often demonstrates the traditional virtues of politeness, modesty, and common sense. Matchikwewis, the elder, is usually rude, greedy, and impulsive, especially in matters that concern sex; however, both mythical sisters are equally loved. IN some versions they are said to be daughters of Nanabozho (Barnouw 93). I see a close correspondence between the relationship that bonds these sisters and that between Marie Kashpaw and Lulu Lamartine of Love Medicine (1993), and Dot Adare Nanapush Mauser and Eleanor Schlick Mauser in Tales of Burning Love (1996). The dutiful, family-oriented Marie and Dot resemble Oshkikwe; the sexually assertive Lulu and Eleanor correspond to Matchikwewis. Like the mythical sisters, both pairs of women at times are connected romantically with the same man, yet they form with each other a strong bond that benefits them both and at times is more significant than their connection with the male. Reading the novels through these traditional stories illumines the centrality of relationships between women in Love Medicine and Tales of Burning Love.

The closest non-Native American analogue to the relationship between Marie and Lulu or Dot and Eleanor lies in the “good” and “bad” sisters [or stepsisters] in the tale of Cinderella. Yet there is a significant incongruity: in non-Native stories, the “bad” sister[s] is not only punished at the end of the story but also, significant in contrast to the Anishinabe tale, irrevocably separated from the “good” sister. For example, in both the popular German version and its ninth century Chinese ancestor, this separation is figured physically in the bad sister's being maimed, having her eyes pecked out, or being killed by flying stones (Opie 155, 158). Other European versions of the Cinderella story feature a class separation just as irreconcilable: even when the good sister “forgives” her tormentors, she is removed from them by being elevated far above them socially. They are commanded by her new royal husband “to make obeisance to her as their queen” [Italian], or they become her subjects and she marries them off to lords of her court [French] (Opie 157). Oshkikwe and Matchikwewis, and their counterparts in Erdrich's novels, however, remain allies and equals throughout the story cycles, as I will show.

The bond between the women also fails to fit informal twentieth century American assumptions about unfaithful husbands, wronged wives, and “other women” made explicit to me by my students, who are often confused by the characters' relationship. For example, if the women are bound through Nector during his life, why does their bond intensify after his death? If Marie is merely a wronged wife so saintly and forgiving that she assists her ex-rival in recovering from a cataract operation in Love Medicine (“The Good Tears”), why does their relationship continue and strengthen, as it does later in that novel and in The Bingo Palace (1994) when they begin together to run the tribe? How to explain the instant alliance of Dot and Eleanor, ex-wives of the same man, against this man in Tales of Burning Love? Why do both women narrate, at approximately equal length, the greater portion of Tales of Burning Love?

Certainly, excellent fiction transcends cliché; however, understanding these women as bonded like the mythical sisters acknowledges in a satisfying way the centrality of their relationship. More importantly, knowing the Anishinabe stories makes the pattern of relationship between women in all Erdrich's novels emerge from its background. The pattern of the two sisters stories structures Love Medicine according to family relationships: the sister dyad, the co-wives with their husband,⁴ the bond with child of the mother and the parallel aunt, which among the Anishinabe would be similar to that with the mother. Erdrich turns this pattern in a different direction in Tales of Burning Love, focusing in her more recent novel further both inward and outward, on the internal development of each woman and the connection of both to the earth, the seasons, and specifically to the landscape of Anishinabe country.

Lulu Lamartine and Marie Kashpaw are the women whose relationship gives a different shape to Love Medicine. Just as Matchikwewis and Oshkikwe appear in Anishinabe mythology more frequently than anyone except Nanabozho, the voices and presences of Lulu and Marie appear more often than anyone else's in the novel, and both are equally central to the work. The women narrate more sections of the book than any other characters: “Saint Marie” (Marie); “The Island” (Lulu); “The Beads” (Marie); “Flesh and Blood” (Marie); and “The Good Tears” (Lulu). They also figure prominently in sections they do not narrate: “The World's Greatest Fishermen” (Marie); “Wild Geese” (Marie); “Lulu's Boys” (Lulu); “The Plunge of the Brave” (both); “Love Medicine” (both); “Resurrection” (Marie); “The Tomahawk Factory” (both); and “Crossing the Water” (both).

The women in Love Medicine correspond to the mythical sisters in age, Lulu being older than Marie, and their personalities share identifying traits. Like the elder sister Matchikwewis, Lulu is sexually assertive and adventurous, initiating liaisons with men who are taboo by blood relationship (LM 74-75) or marriage to other women (LM 283-85). At seven years old she examines the sexual parts of a male corpse (LM 279-80). On the other hand, Marie, like the younger Oshkikwe, is sexually modest. At fourteen, she is not completely certain what physically happens during sex (LM 65). As an adult, when her husband Nector has apparently left her for Lulu, Marie does not even return the gaze of his brother Eli, who has begun to spend time at her house in Nector's absence and whispers her name late one evening (94). While Lulu presents herself as a sexual creature even in the retirement home, wearing low-cut dresses, spike heels, lipstick, and “passion-pink fingernails” (LM 305), Marie lets her hair grow gray and favors, as she always has, baggy traditional clothing (LM 303).

Elements in Marie and Lulu's relationships with Nector also reflect Matchikwewis and Oshkikwe's relationships with men in the traditional tales of “Bebukowe the Hunchback” and “The Star Husband” (Barnouw 93-106).⁵ In the traditional tale of “Bebukowe,” Oshkikwe (Marie) and Matchikwewis (Lulu) discover the corpse of a hunchback. Oshkikwe has “a certain power” and thereby knows that the corpse is not really a hunchback, but a young man who has been transformed into one by a hunchbacked sorcerer (Barnouw 95). Oshkikwe builds a sweat lodge, drags the body inside, and brings it to life by dropping her hair oil on the stones while Matchikwewis stands outside. The corpse comes to life and regains his original form, “handsome and straight” (Barnouw 95).

The young man's reversible deformity mirrors Nector's early phase of excessive drinking, which stops when Marie dries him out. Marie claims, and there is no evidence in the novel to disprove her assertion, “[Nector] is what he is [tribal chairman] because I made him” (LM 154). In the sexual arena, even Lulu admits that “it took Marie to grow him up” (LM 73). Nector begins his life handsome enough to be in the movies (LM 122-23), and to be paid for work as an artist's model (123-24). However, he becomes affected by serious drinking—he refers to this phase later when thinking about Lulu causes “the kind of low ache that used to signal a lengthy drunk” (128)—until Marie, in her words, “drag[s] him back from the bootlegger's house” and “ration[s] him down, mixing his brandy with water, until he came clean” (LM 154). She transforms him from a drunk to tribal chairman, “that handsome, distinguished man” whom Lulu loves (LM 277) and whom others admire for his looks (LM 73).

The girls' intentions for the young man mirror Lulu's and Marie's intentions for Nector. When the young man is revealed to be handsome, Matchikwewis says immediately (referring to the custom of polygamy): “‘He will be our husband.’ But Oshkikwe [says modestly], ‘No, he will be our brother.’” The young man sees a lot of turkeys, kills them, and presents them to Oshkikwe. She is the one he wants to marry (Barnouw 95). Like Matchikwewis, Lulu has designs on Nector from the beginning. She declares “I could have had him if I'd jumped. I don't jump for men, but I was thinking of maybe stepping high” for Nector (LM 71). Like Oshkikwe, Marie, on the other hand, does not pursue Nector. When they meet in “Wild Geese,” he accosts her on her way down from the convent, hoping to recover property he assumes she has stolen from the nuns, and she matches him insult for insult, kneeing him in the stomach when he twists her arm behind her (63). In a few moments, however, this adversarial relationship becomes a bond that lasts throughout Nector's life. What first appears to Nector as his prevention of a theft by a “little girl” metamorphoses in an instant into a sexual encounter with “a full-grown woman” (65).⁶ Echoing Oshkikwe's mythical turkeys, Nector presents Marie with the pair of wild geese he carries (66). He takes her hand and does not let her go, an ending as magically arbitrary as that in the traditional tale.

“Star Husband,” another story of Oshkikwe and Matchikwewis, is also reflected in the stories of Lulu and Marie. Although this tale is told by indigenous people over North America, the Anishinabe version stresses the differences between the sisters and their personalities (Barnouw 104).⁷ Sleeping under the stars one night, the older, sexually forward sister says that a certain bright star resembles a young man, while a dimmer star represents an old man. She would like to sleep with the young one. The younger, demure, sister says she has no preference; yet the young handsome man comes and sleeps with the modest sister, while the old man sleeps with the forward one. The star husbands then take the two sisters to their lodge in the sky (Barnouw 102). In this story Matchikwewis again resembles Lulu because of her sexually adventurous nature: Lulu seduces Nector, a married man, with government butter in her car (132-33), “winks” at Bev Lamartine “with her bold gleaming blackberry eyes” (116). The young sister resembles Marie: her back is “hard, like a plank,” yet it still warms Nector's (140). Like Oshkikwe, Marie is modest and does not demand the man she wants—Nector—yet still she gets him.

Even though this insistence on modesty and selflessness in traditional Anishinabe tales may seem to counter ideals of female autonomy and assertiveness, the balance between the two sisters actually works to legitimize female strength. This legitimation is suggested by two features of the story cycle. First, like the ambiguous trickster Nanabozho, and unlike the pairs of sisters in non-Native tales, each sister exhibits both desirable and undesirable qualities and actions. Second, in these tales the sisters are never separated like the sisters in non-Native folktales by physical mutilation or an extreme change in social status. Like the trickster, who commits taboo acts such as marrying his daughters, the “bad” sister is never rejected, and her presence is necessary to the story.

Like their father Nanabozho, Matchikwewis and Oshkikwe share positive and negative characteristics that differentiate them from the impossibly good Cinderella and her completely wicked stepsisters in the European tale. Bettelheim theorizes that the sisters' contrasting roles allow children who hear this story to work out their feelings of sibling rivalry. The child-listener feels his/her parents favor his siblings over him/her; s/he believes s/he deserves to be punished for wishing revenge on them and at the same time can justify his/her revenge fantasies because of the odiousness of the stepsisters and stepmother (238-43). The Anishinabe tales of two sisters function quite differently. In “Star Husband” and “Bebukowe the Hunchback,” Oshkikwe exhibits the traditional virtues of modesty and selflessness and Matchikwewis does not. In “Oshkikwe's Baby,” however, Matchikwewis dreams a prophetic dream, while Oshkikwe violates the warning of her sister's dream, which results in her child's being kidnapped. Oshkikwe journeys to recover the child; Matchikwewis waits at their home and is just starting out to rescue them both when they return (Barnouw 115). This mixture of desirable and undesirable behaviors in both characters may work in a very different way on the audience. The listener need not fear that just because she is not perfectly good, that she must therefore be completely wicked. The child-listener is reassured that ambivalent feelings are not fatal and therefore is able to “regard both the self and the object as ‘both good and bad,’ and [does] not need to split off the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ object” (Miller 34). On the simplest level, the fact that both sisters set off to rescue the child in “Oshkikwe's Baby,” and that they accomplish this rescue, acknowledges and affirms women as active, capable beings.

In the one tale in which Matchikwewis is punished for violating a taboo, she is not separated from her sister; in fact, the fates of both sisters are similar, linked together by association with the landscape. At the end of the “Star Husband” variant collected by Barnouw, Oshkikwe is told by a mouse that her sister wants to marry her. She runs away across a frozen lake and tells “a man chopping a hole in the ice” that “somebody was bothering her and chasing her” (103). The man instructs her to go between his legs, which she does, and runs on. When Matchikwewis tries to follow her sister between the man's legs, he pushes her through the ice hole, saying “That's where you belong. What sort of world would it be if people did what you wanted to do—marry your sister?” (103-04). The most salient feature of this tale is the parallelism of the sisters' fates. As the man berates her, the ice hole closes and Matchikwewis is caught under the ice, where she is assumed to remain. The tale ends thus: “Now on cold winter days, when you hear ice cracking and making noises, that's Matchikwewis. But when you see a beautiful sunset on a winter evening, that's Oshkikwe” (104). Certainly, the overt meaning of the tale is a warning against incest (105);⁸ however, both sisters are united in an eternal symmetry of lake and sky.

Like the mythical sisters, Lulu and Marie are are never separated and in fact their bond outlasts Nector, strengthening after his death. First, in “The Good Tears,” the women's indirect relationship, linking through Nector while he is living, becomes a face-to-face connection. While Nector is alive, Lulu concedes that “It took Marie to grow him up,” and remarks that his wife must wonder what he does on the nights he spends with her; Marie refers to Lulu only as Nector's “last fling.” Immediately after his death, however, their relationship changes. Marie volunteers to put eyedrops into Lulu's eyes after cataract surgery. When Marie visits her, Lulu reports: “We mourned [Nector] the same way together. … It gave me the knowledge that whatever had happened … in the past, would finally be over once the bandages came off” (LM 297).

Their alliance is based on their shared knowledge of the personal stories of the tribe. Lipsha notes “[Marie] and Lulu was thick as thieves now … knowing everybody's life” (LM 334). In the past, both women have maintained their power in this way: Marie wards off the women who snoop around her house in search of gossip while Nector is “having a last fling” by dishing out the “goods” she has collected in town about their own straying husbands and illegitimate grandchildren (LM 93). Lulu defends her land rights against a hostile tribal gathering that heckles “She's had the floor and half the council on it” by replying, “I'll name all of them. … The fathers [of her eight children] … I'll point them out for you right here” (LM 283-84). Stories, under the modern guise of paternity suits, are her defense. Lulu and Marie unofficially manage the delicate balance of clans that keeps the tomahawk factory running as long as it does (LM 308-09), and also orchestrate the epic clan battle that brings it down (LM 315-19).

A major link between Lulu and Marie is their relationship with Lipsha Morrissey, which reflects and refracts the traditional two sisters story “Oshkikwe's Baby” (Barnouw 112-15).⁹ In this tale, the two women live together, apart from all other persons, and Matchikwewis “takes good care of” her younger sister. Oshkikwe finds a magic pipe and “because of the pipe” gives birth to both a miraculous boy and a puppy, whom she nurses together with the baby. Matchikwewis has a dream that warns Oshkikwe not to let the child out of her sight for ten days; when the younger sister briefly disobeys this warning, baby and pup are stolen by a witch who tells the baby, supernaturally already grown to be a young man, that she is his real mother. The witch uses the baby's miraculous hunting powers for her own benefit only, in the words of storyteller Delia Oshogay, “so she got all the profit out of it” (113). Oshkikwe convinces the young man of the truth, which he corroborates with material evidence, a piece of his old cradleboard and a scrap of flesh from the witch bitten by the puppy in the kidnap struggle. She returns with her son just as Matchikwewis is about to go in search of her.

The relationship between Lulu and Marie, whom Lipsha calls his “two grandmothers,” echoes this tale. With his healing “touch,” his insight, and his “personality [that] seems to transform personal pain into wonder” (Chavkin interview 223), he functions as the miraculous child of both Lulu and Marie. Although Marie brings up Lipsha, both women contribute to his spiritual nurture. Although at first he is unaware of his biological connection to her (great-aunt), Lipsha calls Marie “Grandma” and considers her to be his mother because she took him in and raised him from an infant (LM 39). As for Lulu, when Lipsha reaches adulthood, Lulu reveals that she also is his grandmother and provides him with the crucial information about his parentage that shapes his identity; his subsequent investigation of his origins drives both Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace. In Love Medicine, Marie provides the cash that enables Lipsha to escape the reservation and mull over his new knowledge of his origins in a kind of vision quest. In The Bingo Palace, Lulu summons Lipsha back to the reservation and sets in motion the events of that novel.

In these novels, in which relationship is based on behavior rather than biology, June, Lipsha's biological mother, plays a double role, both as the witch who steals the miraculous child and as a very distant mother-figure who orients Lipsha's blood relationships with other members of the tribe. June's behavior most clearly mirrors that of the witch in “Oshkikwe's Baby.” When Lipsha is an infant, she throws him in a slough in a gunnysack weighted with rocks (BP [The Bingo Palace] 50-51), from which he is miraculously saved by Marie's daughter Zelda. This refusal to allow him to be informally adopted by her relatives, which Erdrich notes is quite common on the reservation (Chavkin 73), is a theft from relations who would bring up this child and later do benefit from his miraculous powers. Growing up in the Kashpaw household, Lipsha would not have had an old-fashioned cradle-board, but would probably have seen the dresser drawer he slept in later holding the family's clothing (126), witness to his part in the family history.

Another of the novel's parallels with the Anishinabe tale involves evidence of scars, physical and psychic. In the traditional story, Oshkikwe proves her maternity to the young baby-man by producing a piece of flesh bitten by the pup off the witch's buttocks (Barnouw 114). He then makes up an excuse to check his witch-“mother” for scars. In a thematic parallel with the tale, Lipsha spends much time in Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace pondering the pain and sorrow of June's life, contemplating her emotional scars (LM 363-64; BP 52-55, 257-58) and the reader is provided with a view of these scars that Lipsha will never have, the formative scene of her childhood rape (BP 57-60). Seeing these psychic scars demonstrates to Lipsha and the reader that June is not his true mother because she is unable to act as one. Lipsha himself testifies to this fact: when told the slough story by Zelda, who pulled him out of the water, Lipsha insists “No mother …” but cannot finish his statement (BP 50). Evidence of her own mother's complicity in her rape demonstrates that June has no model to guide her in motherly behavior. By the time she is brought to Marie she cannot trust a mother figure at all, Marie observes, manifested by the fact that she leaves Marie's house to live in the woods with her uncle Eli (LM 92).

Erdrich's novel, Tales of Burning Love, uses the two sisters stories to further explore relationships between women. The novel is narrated from many points of view, yet two principal female characters, Eleanor Schlick Mauser and Dot Adare Nanapush Mauser, narrate most of the novel. The second and fifth wives of Jack Mauser, they are linked through their relationship with him, as in “Bebukowe.” However, although they meet through Jack, immediately they bond independently of him. At their first meeting, Eleanor inadvertently reveals to Dot that Jack has had more former wives than he had previously mentioned to her. In the ensuing three-way argument, Mauser unintentionally discloses to Eleanor that he has had a baby by wife number four. Like the “He will be our husband/brother” responses of Matchikwewis and Oshkikwe, both women reply in a parallel fashion when Jack tries to placate Dot. When Jack claims, “I'm still the same guy you married,” Dot retorts, “No you're not. … I don't know you from shit,” while Eleanor responds, “He's still the same man I married, though. … No difference whatsoever” (77). Like their traditional counterparts, each defines her relationship to Jack in a divergent way.

This parallel connection takes on more resonance when both women link nonverbally through weeping and then laughing at Jack together. This section's omniscient narrator reports that their weeping takes them backward into the past to recognize their common history of parallel stories: the tears “fused unseen connections, circuits clicked into place, their stories matched cadence by cadence (78, emphasis added). The “stories matching” suggests that the women realize that they, like Matchikwewis and Oshkikwe, are part of the same story, and further, that this story focuses on their relationship to each other as strongly as their connection with Jack. In a significant bit of body language, Dot holds out both hands to help Eleanor out of the car, Eleanor looks into her face, and they both, as befits daughters of the trickster Nanabozho, burst out laughing “hard, still holding hands.” Jack recognizes that their alliance now precludes his bond with either woman: he “knew he was lost” (79). With one wife long divorced from him, the other contemplating separation, and both deeply disillusioned with him, the relationship of the two women becomes for a time more central than his own with either. In episodes that reflect the cohabitation and journey of the two sisters, Eleanor stays for a while at Dot's house; journeying together in a snowstorm, they tell the stories that are the tales of the title.

The women's personalities reflect those of the two sisters. Eleanor, like Matchikwewis, is older, more self-centered, and more sexually aggressive, having had forty or fifty lovers by the time she is in her early thirties. When she first appears, she is seducing one of her students and the third-person narration reports that “[H]er self-destructive [sexual] greed both bored and excited her” (34). Like certain transgressions of Nanabozho the trickster, her violation of this taboo has both negative and positive consequences: she loses her job as a college professor, which harms her financially, but also “set[s] her free,” in her words, to research a book on Sister Leopolda and ultimately to reconnect with Jack. Dot, on the other hand, shares Oshkikwe's characteristics of modesty, selflessness, a more restrained sexuality, and devotion to family. Although her husband, Gerry Nanapush, has been in prison for over a decade, she has not until the present time remarried, and mentions having had only one lover during that time. In fact, she remains legally married to Gerry.

Dot's child, Shawn, conceived almost miraculously with her husband in a corner of the prison visiting area (LM 196), resembles the child of the myths conceived through contact with a supernatural pipe (Barnouw 112-13). Like the pipe, Gerry is a locus of supernatural power that belongs to the tribe, a “politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert, escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement” (LM 341). The son of shaman Moses Pillager, Gerry shares a version of the healing “touch” that Lipsha possesses (LM 354) and an ability to magically change shape and escape from the prisons in which he is confined (LM 352, BP 227). Indeed, like Oshkikwe's baby, Shawn does seem supernaturally precocious, with powers identifiably inherited from her father. Federal agents, tracking her father after his prison escape, attempt to “steal” her by tricking her into revealing his whereabouts, only to fall for her masquerade as a child terrified of her criminal father: “I'm scared to death of him and so's my mom. If he ever came around I'd call 911” (BL [Tales of Burning Love] 399). As he leaves, one of the agents, feeling he has been mysteriously eluded, absently notes that she resembles a wolf, which is the family's supernatural signature, seen in Gerry, his grandmother Fleur Pillager, and son Lipsha Morrissey, throughout Love Medicine, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace as well as this novel (BL 400).

In contrast with the good and evil sisters of European folklore, Dot and Eleanor are united in fates at the novel's end that resemble Matchikwewis's under the ice and Oshkikwe's in the winter sunset (Barnouw 104), images similarly connected with the landscape of the Anishinabe tribal land. After Dot breaks off her relationship with Jack, she walks in the winter sun and has a vision of connection with Gerry in images of the winter landscape. She imagines him “in the north woods of Minnesota, leaving no tracks, building no fires. Farther north than that, maybe. … In the lakes, on the pure islands, there is no telling. … There is more lonely space out there than people could imagine or see, for it opens in the human heart, I think, horrified at how it yawns, in my human heart. … I breathe the comfort of the ground because I can't breathe otherwise for all the sorrow. … It goes through like a storm of weather” (BL 418). In the extended meditation from which I have quoted, Dot moves from perceiving Gerry as part of the larger landscape, to seeing the vast loneliness of the northern landscape as part of herself, to realizing that the vast loneliness, like weather, is inside her and will return periodically. It connects her with the landscape and weather, similar to the way Oshkikwe can be seen in every beautiful winter sunset.

Like the fates of Matchikwewis and Oshkikwe, Eleanor's vision of her future is symmetrical to Dot's. Rather than a symmetry of lake and sky, however, the two women's fates are associated with the winter and summer seasons. While Dot connects to the winter landscape of icicles, snow and ice (418), Eleanor's vision links her to the summer landscape of Anishinabe country. The voice that narrates from her point of view muses much on the natural world surrounding her, a new development for her character. The book's last chapter begins with a description of the unusually benevolent weather that ensured that that year's “harvest would be record breaking” (444). Eleanor rents an old farmhouse at the edge of the reservation in which to write her book, works in the yard, jogs through the farm fields, and watches “a weathered apple tree, thick and patient … [drop] petals of swimming fragrance and [grow] tiny hard green knobs” (447). She sees herself in a landscape of ripening apples, summer thunderstorms, and stray cats, and the narrator notes that she cannot separate herself from her surroundings because the old house's windows do not shut completely (447). The section, “A Last Chapter,” is filled with images of merging and communicating with other living beings. She writes in her journal, “‘It's time to sit still and listen to the sensible grass.’ Outside her window the yard merged into a small field of hay that leaned and rippled in hypnotic visual speech” (448). Like Matchikwewis, she is now a timeless process within the landscape.

Jack's presence is included in her future as they reunite in the novel's final pages; like the sounding lake ice that becomes Matchikwewis, the past and present voices of their conflict and concert echo in this passage. “Jack made love more the way he built bookshelves and toys than the way he built his subdivision houses, thank god. Eleanor had said that once. He didn't think it was funny” (451). Jack's experience of their reunion also evokes landscape imagery specifically associated with ice melt. He “melted right through … it was also hard to bear the pain of coming back to life” (452). The lovers connect sexually with each other and also with past and future generations who have left their traces on the old house. Further, the house metamorphoses into landscape as its ceiling is transformed into the sky through lunar, generational time: “Looking up at a cracked and intimate low ceiling where some child had bounced a ball and left rounded dirt marks … eight new moon smudges, maybe ten in a random arc” (452). This novel's end links Jack and Eleanor with June's death by ice at the beginning of Love Medicine, and it also extends outward to connect with the larger matrix of Anishinabe myths beyond the stories of the two sisters.¹⁰

Erdrich's novels take as their larger subject the act of storytelling itself. The title of this novel reminds us that we are listening to different voices, similar to the Heptameron or The Canterbury Tales, juxtaposing love and conflagration in virtuoso extemporizations on a theme. Jack contemplates his history of marriage on a drunken New Year's as he allows his house to burn. Anna Kuklenski, trapeze artist, saves herself from a circus fire and lives to bear Eleanor. She later uses her circus skills to save Eleanor from a house fire. After Sister Leopolda tells Eleanor the tale of her burning love for God, she drops dead of heart failure, and her body is struck by lightning. When Eleanor's mother dies, her bereaved husband, a funeral director, embraces her body in the crematorium, immolating himself along with her.

The stories within all of Erdrich's novels are important for the transaction that takes place between teller and listener, which is often described in terms of the sacrament of confession. Jack surreptitiously visits Eleanor in the convent at the beginning of Tales of Burning Love because “the old need for confession plagued him” (40). Ancient Sister Leopolda, “perhaps genuinely curious” about the prospect of confessing to Eleanor, reveals her experience of God—that He is like an unfaithful husband—and immediately dies, perhaps from relief (52). In Love Medicine, narrators also confess to the reader: [Lulu Lamartine] “Nobody knows this” (279). [Lipsha Morrissey] “Maybe I can't admit what I did” (250). Both Anishinabe and Catholic storytelling depend on the listener: the Anishinabe to bring specific knowledge to the tale, the Catholic to act as instrument of grace and forgiveness. Both traditions intersect throughout Erdrich's fiction and poetry.¹¹

In Erdrich's fiction, relationships are shaped by the storytelling process. As Jack puts it as he approaches Eleanor's convent room to tell her about his latest marriage early in Tales of Burning Love, “He needed a blessing, perhaps an assurance, an okay. Maybe a little common sense, that was all he craved. The grounded feeling of a connection” (55). These relationships include the novelist's relationship with the reader, linking past and present generations of Anishinabe storytellers, Erdrich among them, with novel readers of the present and the future.

Notes

1. For a book-length study on the way this supply of information by the audience works in a Native American culture, in this case Western Apache, see Basso.

2. Jaskowski ably illumines the play of European, Anishinabe, and Christian mythological elements in Love Medicine, but does not touch on the mythical sisters I discuss here.

3. Sarve-Gorham discusses the mythical sisters in relation to Fleur Pillager and Pauline Puyat in Tracks; Mary Adare and Celestine James co-parent Dot Adare while narrating The Beet Queen. The Bingo Palace, narrated principally by Lipsha Morrissey, follows a different pattern.

4. Vizenor relates a description of polygamous marriage customs first printed in the Anishinabe newspaper The Progress 1877-1888: “Very often our men would take two or three wives and mostly of the same family, that is sisters, as there were fewer quarrels that way” (Summer 78). The Anishinabe tradition of multiple wives is mentioned by John Tanner and Frances Densmore and discussed in Landes (68-71). Landes relates examples of co-wives getting along harmoniously, while other observers mention jealousy between co-wives.

5. “Bebukowe” is told by Delia Oshogay and “Star Husband” is narrated by Julia Badger (Barnouw).

6. Their encounter is sexual but not sex: When Marie scoffs “I've had better,” Nector understands “we haven't done anything yet. She just doesn't know what happens next” (LM 65). Erdrich remarks on this, one of the few passages she altered in her revision of LM, the revision of which consists mostly of added material: “I wanted to clarify [Nector's] act: wrong, but not technically a rape” (Chavkin 234).

7. Another version of this tale was told by David Red Bird in 1974 and appears as “The Foolish Girls” in Ortiz and Erdoes (158-60). Although Red Bird is identified as Ojibway, the story differs significantly from the version collected by Barnouw.

8. Barnouw notes that Nanabozho also is pushed through the ice in a similar way as punishment for attempting to marry his own sister (105).

9. Paula Gunn Allen sees links between this tale and “American Horse,” which is published in Spider Woman's Granddaughters, and which Erdrich revises as “Redford's Luck” and “Shawnee Dancing” in The Bingo Palace.

10. Specifically those of the windigog, cannibal spirits with hearts of ice.

11. For a definitive treatment of Anishinabe-Catholic religious syncretism in Love Medicine, see Jaskowski.

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