SOURCE: Little, Jonathan. “Beading the Multicultural World: Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife and the Sacred Metaphysic.” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (fall 2000): 495-524.

[In the following essay, Little focuses on Louise Erdrich's treatment of culture and personal identity in The Antelope Wife, characterizing Erdrich's depiction of both as fluid and continually evolving.]

In his recent study of multiculturalism, philosophy, and identity, Satya P. Mohanty criticizes the debilitating insularity of identity politics on the one hand and liberalism's universals on the other. Mohanty charts a postpositivist space between these two positions that combines relativism's antifoundational insights about the historical entanglements of knowledge with liberalism's social hope. Attacking traditional empiricism by stressing subjective knowledge, Mohanty claims that objective knowledge “is based on a conception of human inquiry as profoundly historical and socially mediated; no a priori incorrigible epistemological principles are possible. … we do not only ‘discover’ reality; we ‘make’ it as well” (193). Therefore, “cultural diversity [should be] based on the claim that ‘cultures’ are fields of moral inquiry, with room for objective knowledge as well as for error or mystification. Multiculturalism … should be defined as a form of epistemic cooperation across cultures” (xiii). Without this redefinition, “we cannot conceive of what genuine tolerance might mean and what a genuinely multicultural society would look like” (21). Such a position, argues Mohanty, serves as a powerful foundation for the social-justice agenda and the “ongoing struggles against racism, sexism, and social inequalities of all kinds” (xiii).

Mohanty's perspective is designed to forge a more politicized postmodernism, capable of combating social injustices of all kinds with appeals to moral universals and to objective or cross-cultural knowledge. Mohanty argues that the pervasive epistemological skepticism of the postmodernist position seriously underreads “the real epistemic and political complexities of our social and cultural identities” (216). But would this epistemic cooperation work between secular and nonsecular cultures? Mohanty's antimetaphysical bias and his reliance on confirmation and evidence to evaluate cultural perspectives would seem to make it difficult. Although he does not address religion directly, Mohanty leaves room for accepting alternate world-views as part of his synthetic philosophical multiculturalism. He calls for an approach that takes into consideration “theoretical positions from fields other than literary and cultural studies, bringing to center stage such methodological issues as ‘explanation’ and ‘confirmation’ and examining alternative definitions of theory and knowledge” (252). Indeed, there may very well be “a nonhuman universe about which we might find out more and more things … which then change the way we think of our own human world” (158). In considering alternative epistemologies, however, we must not accept “that the nonhuman world out there can be completely described once and for all.” Instead of a totalizing “god's-eye view,” more emphasis should be put on the “partiality of our knowledge and our (human) situation in the world.” There must always be a sense for “what there is and our relation to ‘it’” rather than a claim of metaphysical comprehensiveness.

Compelling parallels can be drawn between Mohanty's position and Native American theology, which already contains some of these post-structuralist features.¹ For example, Steven Leuthold argues that unlike analytic Western thought, “native thought is primarily synthetic, involving a search for and appreciation of the connections between categories of experience” (190).² Dennis McPherson and J. Douglass Rabb phrase it a little differently, arguing that Native American theology is polycentric:

This perspective, this polycentrism, recognizes that we finite human beings can never obtain a God's eye view, a non-perspectival view, of reality, of philosophical truth. Every view is a view from somewhere. Hence it follows that no one philosophical perspective can ever provide an entirely adequate metaphysical system. But this does not mean, as [Richard] Rorty thinks it does, that philosophical systems do not point toward the truth, that they have nothing to say about truth. It merely follows that no one perspective can contain the whole truth. … The fact that different cultures can have radically different world views reveals something very interesting not just about culture, not just about language, but about reality itself and the way in which we come to know it. Though none is privileged yet each culture's world view, each different metaphysical system, contributes something to the total picture, a picture which is not yet and may never be wholly complete.

(10)

Like Mohanty, McPherson and Rabb argue that “[o]nly by attempting to accommodate and reconcile as many different world views as possible can we hope to build up an accurate picture of reality”; indeed, this is a requirement of the “polycentric perspective” (11). As part of their ethno-metaphysical study of Canadian Native American philosophy, McPherson and Rabb assert a perspective that joins metaphysics with perspectivism. Echoing some of these ideas while discussing Native American views of the sacred, Vine Deloria writes:

Each holy site contains its own revelation. This knowledge is not the ultimate in the sense that Near Eastern religions like to claim the universality of their ideas. Traditional religious leaders tell us that in many of the ceremonies new messages are communicated to them … each bit of information is specific to the time, place, and circumstances of the people. No revelation can be regarded as universal because times and conditions change.

(God 277)

With emphases on process, incompletion, interdependence, synthesis, and context-specific objective truth, Native American theologies and metaphysics to some extent mirror Mohanty's desired epistemological methodology, albeit with much more reliance on belief in a nonhuman spiritual realm than Mohanty exhibits.³ And while Mohanty positions himself within the framework of the dominant culture eager to learn and benefit from minority cultures (and to evaluate them), Native American artists are often more interested in immediate survival and empowering identity creation.⁴ As Jace Weaver writes, Native writing “prepares the ground for recovery, even re-creation, of Indian identity and culture. Native writers speak to that part of us the colonial power and the dominant culture cannot reach, cannot touch. They help Indians imagine themselves as Indians” (44-45). Despite differences in perspectives, Mohanty and Weaver share a commitment to battling ethnic injustice beginning with epistemological and aesthetic influence.

Certainly the flourishing of Native American writing (along with other ethnic literary production) since the 1970s has aided in the progressive philosophical and political projects Mohanty and Weaver outline. Novels such as N. Scott Momaday's groundbreaking House Made of Dawn (1969) and Leslie Marmon Silko's canonized Ceremony (1977) have done much to bring the injustices of the past and present to light and to advance important literary representations of Native American identity and culture. In The Antelope Wife (1998), Louise Erdrich makes an equally important contribution to this project by demonstrating how her Ojibwa culture survives amid the chaos of intersecting bloodlines, cultures, and belief systems.⁵ Through the traditional Native American metaphor of beading, Erdrich creates a narrative of overlapping spaces between cultures while also depicting the enduring strength and resiliency of the Ojibwa heritage. In the context of Mohanty's thinking, Erdrich avoids the debilitating insular spaces of essentialism and identity politics and the potential invisibility of assimilation while still crafting a narrative of resistance, counterepistemology, and cultural maintenance. As she states in “A Writer's Sense of Place,” “Contemporary Native American writers have before them a task quite different from that of non-Indian writers. In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the untold stories of contemporary survivors, while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the European invasion” (41). Perhaps the key factor in maintaining the core culture for Erdrich is her exploration and perpetuation of a specifically Ojibwa sacred metaphysic. Her novels, especially The Antelope Wife, demonstrate the ways in which unseen spiritual forces imbue everyday reality with life-affirming meaning.⁶ Instead of protecting and perpetuating culture through static principles, however, Erdrich demonstrates how conceptions of culture, identity, meaning, and the sacred are forever evolving, perspectival, and interdependent.⁷ Despite their relative metaphysical open-endedness, her spiritual beliefs serve as a powerful source for individual and cultural transformation, comfort, and survival.⁸

There are parallels between my position on Erdrich's work and Catherine Rainwater's in Dreams of Fiery Stars, a semiotic analysis of a broad selection of contemporary Native American writers. Rainwater argues that Erdrich is part of a group of Native American writers who “dream of nothing less than revision of contemporary reality, beginning with its representation in art” (ix). Through their semiotic recreation of the world, Native American writers are engaged in a project to subvert the dominant discourse and expose “the ways in which both Native and non-Native frames of reference constantly undergo revision” (xiv). Native American writers use written narrative to increase “solidarity bonds with an audience consisting primarily of sympathetic, non-Indian outsiders” (9). Such “counter-colonizing texts expand the Euro-American epistemological frame and facilitate the entry of other such texts—and their concomitant worldviews and ‘realities’—into the dominant domain” (34). While I am in full agreement with Rainwater's points about Native American writing and Erdrich's participation in this movement, Rainwater's discussion of Erdrich's work tends to highlight Erdrich's self-conscious juxtaposition of competing social codes and symbols to emphasize cultural and epistemological incompatibility: “[She] emphasizes irreducible otherness yet suggests that all views are part of a larger, mysterious picture” (64). More so in The Antelope Wife than in the earlier novels that Rainwater examines (especially Love Medicine and The Best Queen), Erdrich dramatizes a vast web of interdependence brought about by the intersection of many cultures, pasts, and heritages.⁹ Instead of showing the irreducible incompatibility of different cultures, the bead imagery in the novel demonstrates the “remarkable interpenetration of colors” (Antelope Wife 209) as cultures, individuals, epistemologies, and myths interact, overlap, and become part of a vast kaleidoscopic synthesis. This synthesis does not erase cultural difference or the injustices of the past; instead, it includes them in a portrait of complex cultural interrelationships to show the tensions and conflicts inherent in a multicultural society.¹⁰

The Antelope Wife should therefore go far in answering Louis Owens's critiques of Erdrich's writing. Owens argues that Erdrich overemphasizes negative portraits of Native Americans in contrast to the more desirable community-affirming messages and unified characters presented in Silko's Ceremony, Thomas King's Medicine River, and James Welch's Winter in the Blood (Mixedblood Messages 73-82). Owens complains that in Erdrich's “very popular novels, the reservation seems to be little more than a place where people live in cheap federal housing while drinking, making complicated love, feuding with one another, building casinos, and dying self-destructive and often violent deaths” (71). While The Antelope Wife certainly contains examples of self-destructive and violent deaths, the emphasis of the novel is less on fragmentation and victimization than on individual growth and weaving new patterns for individual and communal cohabitation and survival out of the chaos and pain of the past.¹¹

The important bead metaphor is introduced before the narrative of the antelope wife starts. Each of the novel's four parts begins with a short introduction numbered 1 through 4 in Ojibwa: “Bayzhig,” “Neej,” “Niswey,” “Neewin.” In the first of these, “Bayzhig,” Erdrich sets in motion a beading competition: “Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing.” One twin sews with light beads, the other with dark, “glittering deep red and blue-black indigo,” in contrast to “cut-glass whites and pales” (1). Each tries to “set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world” (1). The opposition between light and dark contains many levels of symbolic significance. On one level, the battle between the twins can be read metaphorically as different fates (fortune and misfortune) warring against each other, both being equally present in the rich tapestry of life. The mythic twins who try to outdo each other at the beginning of The Antelope Wife represent the dual forces in nature and experience that are dramatized in the accompanying narrative, as I will discuss. The neat oppositions that are set up in “Bayzhig” are, however, quickly deconstructed as the beaded pattern of the narrative moves forward.

Another possible reading of the “Bayzhig” preface is related to race or ethnicity. The different colored beads, including the contrast between the pale whites and the darker beads, signify the opposition between the different races. Such a racial contest for dominance has ominous overtones, as each twin tries to upset the balance of the world through this coded racial warfare. The bead pattern is immediately filled with the blood red of Anglo-colonialist oppression and violence. Already blending myth and historical realism, the narrative begins “[d]eep in the past” (3) with the entrance of cavalry soldier Scranton Roy, who is an embittered man after a “pale and paler haired” (4) woman breaks his heart. He participates in a massacre on a small, isolated Ojibwa village near the Minnesota-North Dakota border “mistaken for hostile during the scare over the starving Sioux” (3). Sioux-federal government conflict has a long history, escalating with the Sioux War of 1865-67 and continuing to the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 during which two hundred Dakota men, women, and children were slaughtered. Although it is not clear in what year the cavalry raid in the novel takes place, Erdrich's reference to the starving Sioux places the novel in a particular historical time frame. This attack on the Ojibwa village probably occurs near the end of the Sioux-federal government conflicts when, particularly in 1889, starvation and disease were widespread among the Sioux reservations in South Dakota. The novel's Ojibwa massacre bears a striking resemblance to the Wounded Knee massacre. Erdrich's rendition of this violence is an act of historical reclamation; it is recounted “in order that it not be lost,” since “What happened to him [Scranton Roy] lives on” (3).

Scranton Roy's destiny is changed when Roy bayonets an elderly woman who sacrifices herself so that he will not kill any more Ojibwa children. As she dies on the end of his sword, she curses him with the word “Daashkikaa,” meaning “cracked apart,” then uses her shamanistic powers to alter his behavior.¹² Drawing his gaze into hers, she grants him a vision of his own prebirth, birth, and mother, which is “A groan of heat and blood” (4). Roy runs away, horrified, and sees a baby-bearing dog, a sight that stirs in him a “human response,” which motivates him to leave the massacre and follow the baby (3). In a way perhaps ordered by the elderly woman, Roy becomes the surrogate mother of Blue Prairie Woman's baby. The baby educates Roy “past civilized judgment” into love. Miraculously, he is able to breast-feed the baby (whom he renames Matilda Roy). Brought up in the Quaker tradition, Roy reads this miracle strictly in biblical terms instead of from within the controlling frame of Ojibwa mythic narrative.

The line between myth and reality is blurred both by the curse of the powerful elderly woman and by what happens to Blue Prairie Woman after her baby is carried away by the dog. Members of Blue Prairie Woman's Ojibwa tribe must call upon the power of the spiritual realm, or the “in-between,” in order to save Blue Prairie Woman from going insane with grief. After her still nameless baby is gone, Blue Prairie Woman splits into two selves; she has been cracked apart into Ozhawashkwamashkodeykway (Ojibwa for “Blue Prairie Woman”) and Blue Prairie Woman. As she sends her shadow-soul forth, she worries that she will come across her daughter's bones and eats clay, dirt, and leaves in her fear and worry. The careful tripartite balance between her souls and her body valued by the Ojibwa has been upset.¹³ She “at last so viciously took leave of her mind that the old ones got together and decided to change her name” (13). The elders of her Ojibwa tribe cover her name in blood and burn it, since “the woman who had fit inside of it had walked off” (13). She has crossed into the spirit realm to find her “half-spirit” unnamed baby, and the elders want her “to return to the living” (13). Her new name Other Side of the Earth, grants her the power to be in “both places at once” (14), searching for her daughter and at home with her husband and community.

Other Side of the Earth is now able to perform routine domestic duties while simultaneously tracking “the faint marks the dog left as he passed into the blue distance” (14). Within her grow the twins Mary and Josephette (Zosie), who are creating themselves “just as the first twin gods did at the beginning,” further solidifying the connections between “Bayzhig” and the Roy-Ojibwa narrative. The disembodied journey she takes, which is made possible by the power of her name, prepares her finally to take the embodied journey west to follow “the endless invisible trail of her daughter's flight” (15). In other words, her journey will yield objective knowledge not at all akin to mere dreaming or fantasy. The ability to read both the real and visionary realms at once allows her to locate her lost baby.¹⁴

Soon after she finds her daughter, Other Side of the Earth dies of a virus. Before dying, she leaves her daughter her name and sings a song “to the blue distance” (19). Her song attracts “pale reddish curious creatures, slashed with white on the chest.” These multicolored antelope “emerge from the band of the light at the world's edge,” where the sky and heaven meet. The seven-year-old child joins these dreamlike creatures and becomes part of their liminal existence, still wearing the blue beads given to her by her mother to protect her. As an antelope person, Other Side of the Earth crosses the line between human and nonhuman. In his study of Ojibwa ontology, Thomas Overholt states that other-than-humans consist not only of gods but also of “dream visitors and guardian spirits; the sun, moon, and winds; Thunder-birds; the ‘bosses’ of animal species; and certain stones, animals, and trees” (160).

Both the blue beads and the antelope people are representative of the fluidity of forms and interpenetration between the human and other-than-human realms. As Zosie tells Cally Roy (Zosie's granddaughter), the beads represent “the mystery where sky meets earth” (21) and the “depth of the spirit life” (214).¹⁵ In emphasizing this point of dialectical intersection, Erdrich again draws from Ojibwa belief. The source of spiritual and life power comes from the manitous, or the spirits. In a compensatory gift to the Ojibwa after the Great Deluge (when the heroic Nanabush re-created the earth), the manitous gave the Ojibwa the midewiwin (literally “mystic doings”) society, allowing its shamans access to the spiritual realm and its gifts of power.¹⁶ The force or power of the midewiwin society comes from the interaction between the sky and water spirits. As Smith argues, spiritual power in the midewiwin society is “an immeasurable gift for it holds within it a mysterious and tremendous fulfillment” (187). The place where the midewiwin seminal gift is made to humans is at the midpoint between opposing mythic sky and water spirits: “We see that the meeting [between Nanabush and the manitous] takes place just above the earth, perhaps at the level of the clouds” (187). In the layered Ojibwa cosmos, the gift is made possible only through cooperation by the manitous that exist in the upper and lower realms between which the earth floats. While Erdrich does not explicitly invoke the complete mythic story, this creation myth informs the novel's deepest level of poetic symbolism.

When the narrative skips ahead to the present, Blue Prairie Woman's descendant carries on her mythic legacy. In the second chapter, “The Antelope Wife,” Klaus Shawano, who is a direct descendant of Blue Prairie Woman's husbands and brothers, focuses on her in-between or mythic status. After letting his brain “wander across the mystery of where sky meets earth” (21), Klaus sees her and immediately plans her capture. For Klaus this as yet unnamed woman represents the sacred unity of the human and natural realms; her hair is “Dark as heaven, with roan highlights and arroyos of brown, waves deep as currents, a river of scented nightfall” (24). As an antirealist character, Sweetheart Calico exists on the borderline between the human and the spirit beings. Her character emerges most clearly from Ojibwa mythic heritage. As Hallowell asserts, “Whether human or animal in form or name, the major characters in the myths behave like people, though many of their activities are depicted in a spatiotemporal framework of cosmic, rather than mundane, dimensions” (“Ojibwa” 27). Hallowell and others argue that although the Ojibwas make distinctions between different kinds of beings in the historical reality of mythic characters, myth “is accepted by them as a true account of events in the past lives of living ‘persons’” (27). Sweetheart Calico, or the antelope wife, is such a “person” who is not only a person. Klaus Shawano is deeply attracted to this core embodiment of his collective past and the spiritual magic she represents. The antelope are the only “creatures swift enough to catch the distance” (32). Through her looks, Klaus is able to envision traditional stories of her people and to hear the voices of the antelopes: “We live there. We live there in the place where sky meets earth.”

In taking Sweetheart Calico away from her natural environment and her family, however, Klaus commits a crime that nearly destroys him and the object of his obsession. Named after the fabric that he uses to capture her, Sweetheart Calico is miserably trapped within the concrete confines of the city. Even though she often “loped crazily through the park” looking for ways to escape, there seems to be no exit for her. The dream represented by Sweetheart Calico quickly turns into a nightmare for Klaus, as he starts to dream of the antelope people taking their revenge on him. They “sprang into his dreams. Galloped at him. Brandished their hooves like polished nails” (94). As a self-destructive alcoholic unable to live with Sweetheart Calico but also unable to set her free, Klaus is nearly torn apart by conflicting impulses. His story has an allegorical meaning. It is a cautionary tale that enacts the Ojibwa ethical code warning against wanting too much or being too greedy.¹⁷ It is also Erdrich's embedded message about the necessity of keeping Ojibwa mythology alive and free, and closely aligned to its original narrative and physical space.

Layered into the narrative about Sweetheart Calico is Cally Roy's related and updated struggle to understand her identity in a diversified urban multicultural context. At eighteen, Cally Roy wanders in the “bloody heart” of Gakahbekong (Minneapolis) to begin her spiritual quest. As one of the youngest characters in the novel, she is struggling to define what her relationship is to Ojibwa culture and the past. Still aching after the death of her twin sister Deanna, she searches for her grandmothers, Mrs. Zosie Roy and Mary Shawano, the abandoned twin daughters of Blue Prairie Woman. Cally and her sister Deanna are themselves of mixed blood. Their mother Rozin was born to Zosie and Augustus Roy, the grandson of Scranton Roy.

The theme of cultural intermixture goes beyond blood with Cally. After the accidental death of her twin sister, she moves north to the Ojibwa reservation to live in her great-grandmother Midass's house. On the wall of Cally's room is an eclectic mixture of objects reflecting her cultural synthesis: “On the wall of my room up north, there hangs a bundle of sage and Grandma Roy's singing drum. On the opposite wall, I taped up a poster of dogs, photos of Jimi Hendrix and the Indigo Girls, this boyfriend I had once and don't have anymore, bears, and Indigenous, my favorite band, another of a rainbow and buffalo trudging underneath” (103). The sacred objects and the artifacts from dominant culture exist in a random mixture, reflecting her uncertainty about her identity. She comes to Gakahbekong to live in Frank Shawano's bakery and to try to determine what the underlying design of her past is (106). She believes that “[f]amily stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and times” (200). Cally represents the newest voice of tradition in the novel, since she thinks that once the pattern is set “we go on replicating it.” She comes to Minneapolis to try to discern the “old patterns in myself and the people I love.”

As part of this personal quest, Cally wants to interview her grandmothers about getting a new name. She reflects on the diversity of her past: “I am a Roy, a Whiteheart Beads, a Shawano by way of the Roy and Shawano proximity—all in all, we make a huge old family lumped together like a can of those mixed party nuts” (110). Erdrich uses Cally to explore the meaning of blood intermixture. Cally feels that “Some bloods they go together like water,” especially those of the French Ojibwas, which she claims to be. Other mixtures are more problematic. Mixing, for example, a German and a Native American results in “a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself” (110). The most volatile mixture of all is that of her Aunt Cecille, who is Irish and Native American. When Cecille begins teaching the martial arts, Cally sees her as possessing an “Irish-Anishinabe-girl-Wing-Chun-Jackie-Chan-flying-monkey demeanor” (118).

Cally is educated about her past largely through her association with Sweetheart Calico. She calls her Auntie Klaus, since she has been kidnapped by Cally's Uncle Klaus. Although no one communicates this to her directly, Cally recognizes her aunt's mythical status immediately. Her enigmatic and silent aunt “is not just any woman. She is something created out there where the distances turn words to air and thoughts to stone” (218); she “alters the shape of things around her and changes the shape of things to come” (106). Cally's personal identity is thus corrected or transformed through her allegorical and literal interaction with her aunt, a living embodiment of the power of the past and collective Ojibwa myth. Her aunt also represents the interconnectedness of the narrative strands in the novel, since the Roys are descended from Blue Prairie Woman, who was the original “deer woman.” Blue Prairie Woman married a Shawano brother after living on the prairie with a deer person who solved her hunger with his love for her. It is the deer people who warn Blue Prairie Woman of the coming attack and advise her to put her nameless baby on a dog's back so that the baby may escape.

After learning about the significance of her aunt's beads (and their connection to her heritage), Cally aids the antelope wife's liberation by offering to trade her freedom for the beads once owned by her great-grandmother. Zosie tells her granddaughter in a key passage that the blue beads not only represent the intersection of worlds but offer access to another state of being. Through them you can “[s]ee into the skin of the coming world” (214). To survive and complete her search for contentment and identity, Cally must internalize this cultural legacy and realign herself with her cultural heritage and its source of power in her urban displacement. Her aunt holds these powerful blue beads under her tongue, symbolic of her alienation and silence in such a foreign and inhospitable environment. After the bargain with Cally is made, she speaks a “blue sentence” as the beads emerge: “Let me go” (218). A flood of words ensues. “I'm drowning in stuff here in Gakahbekong,” says her aunt. “In so many acres of fruit. In warehouse upon warehouse of tools, Sheetrock nails, air conditioners, and implements of every type and domestic and imported fabrics, and in the supermarkets and fish from the seven seas and slabs of fat-marbled flesh of warm-eyed cows who love and nuzzle their young” (219). As the most complete representative or repository of the Ojibwa sacred metaphysic, the antelope wife is endangered by her imprisonment in materialist white culture. Despite her mythic stature, she is dependent on human agents for her ultimate liberation, again reflecting the reciprocal and interdependent web of relations in the Ojibwa cosmos.

As Cally and her aunt walk north together away from the center of Minneapolis, they are both transformed by their interaction with various forces. When they wake up together outside of town, Cally realizes the exact nature of her longing. In listening to some Hmong grandmothers talking and digging in their gardens, Cally realizes that what she misses is her “birth holder,” or the turtle connecting her back to her mother and her mother's mother. The turtle is a significant figure in Ojibwa mythology. As Basil Johnston notes, the turtle was granted special powers, “enabling him to transgress time periods from present to future or to the past and back again; and to transform his being from its physical to an incorporeal nature” (171). The turtle represents the power of liminality, the ability to transcend the limitations of time and physical being. In her subsequent continuation of her mother's adolescent dream-fast vision, Cally is similarly able to see into both the past and the future. Her mother, after spending six days alone in the woods, sees “a huge thing, strange, inconceivable” (220), which comes out of the sky.¹⁸ This huge shape “pierced far into the ground, seethed and trembled.” All her life her mother wondered what this vision meant. Perhaps inspired by the liminal power of the turtle, Cally's secondary vision identifies the object as “the shape of the world itself. Rising in a trance and eroding downward and destroying what is. Moment by moment until the end of time if ever there is an end to this. Gakahbekong. That's what she saw. Gakahbekong. The city” (220).

Cally's conclusion and continuation of her mother's dream-vision reconciles her understanding of cultural intermixture and cultural displacement with her longing for pattern and family order. Instead of believing now in a strict, predetermined order based on old family stories and blood designs, Cally now believes in a more chance-influenced version of her family's history and her own identity. This realization is foreshadowed by “Niswey” (“Three”). In this mythic prelude, the great-grandmother of the first Shawano is surprised by the unpredictability of the color of her quill dyes. Similarly, Cally learns to appreciate the role of accidents and the unexpected in the beaded patterns of ongoing cultural narratives. It is in the city “[w]here we are scattered like beads off a necklace and put back together in new patterns, new strings” (220). In other words, Cally accepts the fragmentations and randomness of the new multicultural design and its inherent overlapping spaces and intermingling colors. The new patterns and new strings that shape the beaded multicultural fabric of present and future identity do not, finally, displace Ojibwa heritage and the past. The new patterns instead show the resilience and creativity of myth and the sacred metaphysic as it shapes new narratives, new strings (such as The Antelope Wife itself) out of the scattered and mixed beads which it has been given. After this vision, aided in large part by her interaction with embodied Native American myth (her aunt), Cally realizes that the “part of my life where I have to wander and pray is done” (220); her quest for identity is completed.

The antelope wife's related quest for freedom is achieved only after the mediation of her human counterparts. First Cally and then her captor, Klaus Shawano, have to intercede in her imprisonment and disempowerment. Apparently, after Cally had led her north, her aunt returns to the city to wait for Klaus to liberate her. Although she feels the intimations of freedom, she is still bound to Klaus Shawano. The psychological band that connects them “slowly winds tighter. It clenches at the base of her stomach” (221). Once asleep, however, she feels a “swarm of ecstasy” that “pulls her deeper, gently and in waves, into the softness, until she is curved against a great fur belly of mothering sunlight.” Her experience with Cally reminds her of her previous, empowered existence when she was unified with nature and its nurturing forces. In this state she can feel the “world breathing, the air, the turning order,” as opposed to the deadness of materialistic Minneapolis, which can only appropriate and commodify nature. The antelope wife's re-immersion in the nurturing spirit of the land and nature reinforces Erdrich's belief in the central role that place plays in constructing a coherent and lasting cultural identity:

And although fiction alone may lack the power to head our government leaders off the course of destruction, it affects us as individuals and can spur us to treat the earth, in which we abide and which harbors us, as we would treat our own mothers and fathers. For once we no longer live in the land of our mother's body, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying completely on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

(“Writer's Sense” 44)

Sweetheart Calico, or the antelope wife, recovers that sense of place and is empowered by her re-immersion in the land of her mother's body, from which she has been so cruelly separated.¹⁹ As a liminal, other-than-human figure from Ojibwa historical mythology, she wonders how Klaus was able to take away her freedom when her “traverse of boundless space” was so powerful. How was a human able to capture her, when her ability to travel in the realm between the material and sacred worlds was so strong? Such an entrapment is consistent, however, with the reciprocal and interdependent Ojibwa world-view as identified by Hallowell, Smith, Johnston, and others.

The antelope wife's release therefore occurs only after Klaus wills it. He does not arrive at this decision alone. His change of heart is influenced by animal spirits. He is visited by a joke-telling, white windigo dog, whose “confiding dog grin … started Klaus drinking” (126). Ruth Landes helps to define the windigo: “Ice and snow could be friendly, as when crippling the tender-footed deer; but often they shaped up into cannibalistic skeletons, each called windigo” (7). Additionally, “All insanities were termed windigo. … Psychically, the windigo disorder involved projection of the sufferer's fears and vindictiveness, besides the experiences or anxious anticipations of starvation” (12-13). Similarly, Erdrich connects the windigo disorder with a comic dog and with Klaus's own guilty conscience.

Despite the windigo dog's sarcastic irreverence, he and the other dogs in the novel play an important role in the bead pattern. Almost Soup, the other windigo dog, had saved Cally by keeping her soul while her body suffered a life-threatening fever, thereby returning her life-saving favor when she kept him from being cooked in a pot. This interdependence and chain of favors goes further back, since it was Almost Soup's ancestors who saved Blue Prairie Woman's daughter. Further, Blue Prairie Woman suckled Almost Soup's relative Sorrow to alleviate her suffering. As Almost Soup relates:

We dogs know what the women are really doing when they are beading. They are sewing us all into a pattern, into life beneath their hands. We are the beads on the waxed string, pricked up by their sharp needles. We are the tiny pieces of the huge design that they are making—the soul of the world.

(83)

Almost Soup admits that although he is not a “full-blooded Ojibwa reservation dog” and is part Dakota, he still remembers his origins in the “pure space” (76) of the reservation. He is the result of a “blend of dogs stretching back to the beginning of time on this continent” (76). Despite the fact that he considers himself “breedless,” he is proud of his origins: “We know who we are. Us, we are descended of Original Dog,” who walked beside Wenabojo, the Ojibwa's creator. Almost Soup and his ancestors are confident in their role in maintaining an Ojibwa world-view, since “As an old race, we know our purpose” (81).

This same spirit of service, protection, and devotion between the animal world and the human world continues into Klaus's narrative. Klaus's life is saved when a mysterious dog sacrifices his life for him as he sleeps in the park and a lawn mower runs over his head. Klaus would have been killed except that “a powerful stray dog bolted toward the machine and got hit, slammed into the air. Bounced off a tree and vanished” (225). The lawn mower skips and puts only a single stripe down the middle of Klaus's face, which he sees in his dream as a “sacred center stripe.” This conflation of the sacred and the comic is reminiscent of many moments in Erdrich's fiction, especially of when Lipsha Morrisey in The Bingo Palace is sprayed by a skunk during a vision quest. After Klaus awakens, the windigo dog no longer torments him. With the assistance of both dogs that are beaded into his life's pattern, Klaus decides to stop drinking and to liberate his antelope wife.

When Klaus and Sweetheart Calico meet again in a park, her hair, which was earlier so spectacular, now “hung tatty and lifeless” (228). Yet for Klaus she is still associated with antelopes. She breathes in clear air and breathes out smoke, starts but does not run away. He binds her with the calico fabric he used to capture her, and they continue the journey north and west that she and Cally had started. Similar to Cally's accompaniment of her aunt, Klaus and the antelope wife's walk is a walk back in time. It is a walk of Native American recovery and cultural maintenance. Their path turns from sidewalk to tar, “and then lighter, lighter, showing stones in the aggregate and thinning, rubbing out, erasing, absorbed back slowly into the earth and then the earth itself under their feet” (228). In other words, they leave the multicultural, collective city, to return to a more eternal sense of time. This journey reflects one of Cally's central insights, that beneath the concrete of Gakahbekong lies a more enduring presence. Part of her revelation is that “I get this sense of the temporary. It could all blow off. And yet the sheer land would be left underneath. Sand, rock, the Indian black seashell-bearing earth” (124). Even beneath the “aggregate” Minneapolis population resides the underlying Native American earth and its foundational cosmology. Thus the multiculturalism that Erdrich envisions is made possible by the eternal presence of Native American heritage, which is carried forth into the present and the future by the living and unconquerable earth and its attendant sacred metaphysic. This sentiment is a clear demonstration of Erdrich's deeply held belief in the significance of the land. “In a tribal view of the world,” Erdrich writes, “where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history. … People and place are inseparable” (“Writer's Sense” 34).

On their restorative journey, Klaus and Sweetheart Calico pass by the ruins of white culture. They walk past rusting cars and abandoned farms and come upon dog vertebrae “scattered beside more bones” (229). They move into a sense of the eternal, toward the spiritually charged open space from which Sweetheart Calico or the antelope wife originated. They walk until they reach a “slight rise” that lifts them into the sky (or horizon), which “suddenly and immensely opened up before them in a blast of space.” Having entered into this empowered liminal space between sky and earth and the material and sacred, Sweetheart Calico's grace or magic returns to her, and Klaus undoes the fabric that binds them together. She continues walking west, which for the Ojibwas is the traditional direction of death, until she is a “white needle, quivering, then a dark fleck on the western band” (230). She becomes again part of the inarticulate or ineffable in-between spiritual space that provides Ojibwa myth and culture with its energy and sense of renewal. One gets the impression that the energy arising out of the interaction between the two layers of existence (sacred and human) interacts with the individual beads (characters that are human, animal, and other-than-human) to form ever-shifting cyclical narrative patterns.

Rozin's spiritual quest is, like her daughter Cally's and to some extent the antelope wife's, part of an effort to deal with the loss of loved ones and her feelings of displacement and alienation. In the mythic prelude to the second part of the novel, “Neej,” which immediately follows the tragic death of her daughter Deanna, the beaded pattern suddenly “glitters with cruelty” (73). The blue beads are colored with blood and the reds “with powdered heart.” At the same time, “[t]he beads collect in borders of mercy” (74). The deepening pattern unifies opposites and is also unpredictable, since “[t]here is no telling which twin will fall asleep first” (73). In other words, there is no way of telling which colors will dominate, because there is no predetermined pattern to follow. Further adding to its complexity and unpredictability, the beading is dependent on human beings: the beaders use “endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair” to sew the beads into the “fabric of the earth.” Humans, like animals, are “crucial to this making.”

Like Cally, Rozin must work her way back to a clear sense of unity with herself and her family before she can see herself in the pattern of her culture and find a measure of contentment and peace. As she reflects on the tragic pattern of her life while living in Minneapolis, Rozin identifies herself as one of “the daughters of the granddaughters of Blue Prairie Woman” who are “lightened by Roy blood” (34). She elaborates on Cally's contemporary narrative of urban racial and cultural intermixture by going farther back through the generations to identify her lineage. She is “descended of the three-fires people and of an Ivory Coast slave, who crawled under the bark of an Ojibwa house and struck a match and looked into the eyes of the daughter of Everlasting, Magid” (34-35). In the next generation there is an admixture of French through the “bastard son of a bastard daughter of a French marquis” who adventured into “the raw territory of the wolf, and married six Ojibwa women” (35). This complex fabric of a multicultural heritage and memory is a powerful legacy. When Rozin reflects back on her family history, she regrets breaking the pattern of naming as a means of cultural maintenance. In naming her daughters Cally and Deanna, she “broke continuity, and they suffered for it” (35). She wishes she had kept to the old ways and helped protect Deanna from tragedy. Rozin wishes she could reweave the past, pulling out the “pattern of destruction” that was caused by the love triangle with her husband Richard Whiteheart Beads and Frank Shawano. But she wonders, given the complexity of reliving the past, “how can you pick out the strands of all you might have changed and all you couldn't” (36).

After the accidental death of her daughter, Rozin begins to plot how to get away from her husband, who inadvertently caused their daughter's death. Despite her longing to be free, she is inextricably linked to her husband by “[o]ne thick black seam stitched of unforgiveness” (181). After Richard commits suicide in front of Rozin and Frank, she understands how fragile the beaded pattern of her life is. In a dream she watches the beaded watchband she made fro Frank symbolically unravel as it “loosens and falls apart in his hands” (188). She realizes that she is twisted in a tangle of feelings for Richard, including hatred and longing. She can see the pattern of her life only after embarking on a contemporary version of the dream-fast, in which she isolates herself from everyone and seeks union with spirit beings through her dreams. The centrality of dreams as a way of maintaining psychic health is, according to Hallowell, an integral part of Ojibwa beliefs:

Whereas social relations with human beings belong to the sphere of waking life, the most intimate social interaction with other-than-human persons is experienced chiefly, but not exclusively, by the self in dream. Social interaction in terms of the Ojibwa outlook involves no vital distinction between self-related experience when awake and experiences during sleep which are recalled and self-related.

(“Role” 274)

In the first of her dream experiences, Rozin sees her daughter Deanna, who asks “Mama, Are you coming too?” after she sees her father enter the spirit realm (186). During the second night, Rozin is visited by a windigo, who opens up his body to her, “like a fearful suit,” and who represents death (189). Although afraid of him and of death, Rozin hopes that the windigo will return so that she may see her daughter again. She uses her dreams to try to find the windigo man and “[p]ull his cold sky-colored skin around her like a grave” (190). Instead of this personification of death, Frank Shawano visits her. She straps on Frank's skin “like body armor” (191). This protection, however, is not entirely sufficient, since she also realizes in her dreams that Richard's body and “suit of anguish has become her own skin” (192). She worries that even death will not allow her to escape her tangled love for Richard. But as she is drifting off to sleep, she experiences an ecstatic moment of spiritual empowerment. “[U]nexpectedly, a radiance of goodness, a strange pleasurable intensity sifts into her body and floats her just an inch above herself” (192). In this odd state akin to astral projection, Rozin realizes the closeness of life and death, “two countries that don't know each other” (192). Staring into her own face, she realizes that it is only through living that she will be able to keep Richard safe. She is closely beaded to Richard, and both are “woven together into Cally and Deanna” (193). After this dream realization and interaction with an other-than-human being, she is able to live out life fairly contently with Frank Shawano, while still paying respects and making offerings to her dead daughter and her dead husband.

Rozin's spiritual quest, and her desire to find the pattern of her scattered beads, resembles both Cally's search and the final mythic introduction to part 4, “Neewin.” In “Neewin,” the second twin gambles everything to acquire the ruby red beads for the center of her design. When her children eat the beads as candy, she grabs her knife in anger: “She had to follow them, searching out their panicked trail, calling for them in the dark places and the bright places, the indigo, the white, the unfinished details and larger meaning of her design” (184). Similarly, Rozin has to follow her dead daughter through the dark and light places of her dream vision in order to see the “larger meaning of her design,” and her relationship to the living and the dead. Unlike her mythic counterpart, Rozin experiences some measure of reconciliation and contentment. While the “pattern of destruction” reflects the tragic nature of the mythic prelude, the destructive pattern turns into a life-affirming one in Rozin's case. She is able to negotiate her relationship with the living and the dead and to create a balance for herself at the end of her narrative. She has embraced the complexity of her life design and rejected the easy and perhaps unsatisfactory answer of death or suicide. She realizes the value of her life and the closeness with which it is related to the world of the dead. In her own way she reinterprets her mother Zosie's cryptic statement that the blue beads represent the unity of life and death. This understanding offers her the “radiance of goodness” that parallels Sweetheart Calico's final unified and empowered state, in which she feels the “world breathing” with its “turning order.”

Another version of this spiritual peace occurs at Rozin's wedding, after it is disrupted by Richard Whiteheart Beads. After Richard has been taken away in an ambulance, the wedding guests eat Klaus Shawano's famous blitzkuchen. The guests, although they are culturally and racially mixed, experience a moment of profound spiritual unity, which parallels the first tasting of the blitzkuchen after World War II. The blitzkuchen represents another message about cultural intermixture and Anglo-Native American relations and generational change. Klaus's father returned from serving in World War II ready to take revenge on whites for the death of his cousin in the war. One of the tribal elders tells him to make the Germans slaves: “That's how they would have done it in the old days” (130). Planning to kill one of the Minnesota German workers to avenge his cousin's death, Klaus's father allows him the chance of making a cake as a way of saving his own life. Klaus's namesake is saved by the miraculous cake, since it leads to a collective vision: “They breathed together. They thought like one person” (139). Such collectivity and unity prevent the Ojibwa from killing the German: “How, when they were all one being, kill the German?” (139). This moment leads Klaus to reflect that when he dies he will “taste the true and the same taste, mercy on the tongue” (139). Thus the cooperative multicultural unity that Erdrich depicts leads, in Ojibwa terms, to an enactment of respectful interdependence across cultural boundaries. In Christian terms this reciprocity or interdependence can be defined as mercy and forgiveness. The cake, whose exotic flavors and spices are unnamed in their language, nonetheless stimulate a profound, culturally specific spiritual experience. In departing from the old ways of blood revenge, Klaus's father creates something new that, somewhat paradoxically, returns his family and community to their heritage and to their beloved ancestors.

Erdrich extends and deepens this paradox in the contemporary wedding-cake scene in which Klaus Shawano serves his guests his blitzkuchen. The wedding guests are clearly multicultural. They are “[a]n eclectic bunch of people … the mixed-blood families had intermarried not only with neighboring tribes of Winnebago and Lakota origin, but with at least one sub-Saharan African and an exchange student from Brazil” (167). This intermixture, however, does not prevent them from experiencing a spiritually charged moment that blurs the line between the living and the dead:

[T]hey all ate together, and they all saw their loved ones moving in the present, around them, children running in the grass. The old people sacrificed a corner of the cake, with tobacco, for the spirits. The ones who had gone on before, the dead, even they came back for a little taste.

(179)

The original cultural mandate of avenging the death of the cousin, and the earlier cultural genocide at the hands of the European invaders (including the Germans), has evolved first into an act of mercy and secondly into a scene of inclusivity that perpetuates a very culturally specific Native American spiritual experience. Through these repetitions and alterations, Erdrich demonstrates the ongoing and unpredictable nature of the larger beaded narrative pattern of Native American culture. Drawing from the Ojibwa's sacred metaphysic, Erdrich illustrates how traditional visionary power enables cultural survival and continuity in the face of cultural encroachments and dispersals. It is a legacy that is shown to be robust in its ability to adapt as it comes in contact with different cultural forces.

The final chapter of The Antelope Wife, “Scranton Roy,” returns to the beginning of the narrative. It elaborates on the beginnings of the beaded pattern and makes the final connections between the characters in the contemporary narrative and the ever-intruding past. In his old age, Scranton Roy was visited by the spirit of the old woman whom he killed (who was related to Midass, or Ten Stripe Woman). She punishes him for his evil actions, making him violently ill, and communicates the following message to him, although he cannot understand her words:

Who knows whose blood sins we are paying for? What murder committed in another country, another time? The black-robe priests believe that Christ allowed himself to be nailed high on the cross in order to pay. Shawanos think different. Why should an innocent god, a manitou spirit, have to settle for our drunks, our rage, our heart-sown angers and mistakes?

Those things should come down on us.

(238)

Instead of the Christian absolution of sin, in Ojibwa spiritual ontology blood sins must be paid for by the sinner or the sinner's ancestors, as befits the Ojibwa's reciprocal and interdependent world-view. Scranton Roy feels as if he is being eviscerated until he bargains with the old woman to find her people, taking with him his grandson Augustus. This offer apparently satisfies the old woman, for Roy is immediately healthy again. After seeking town to town and reservation to reservation, “Scranton and his grandson came to the remnants of the village and the unmended families, the sick, the bitter, the restored” (239). Although some have healed, the Native American families are still largely Daashkikaa, or “cracked apart.”

The grandson Augustus trades his grandfather's beads for one of the tribe's young women, who is Ten Stripe Woman's granddaughter. The beads he carries are multicolored; “the old ones of highbush red, white centers, glowing glass. The ruby red whiteheart beads all the women loved” (239). The “whiteheart” beads he carries contain, in other words, the paradoxes or the dualities of existence and hark back to the imagery at the beginning of the novel, when an icicle is said to pierce Scranton Roy's heart: “it drove into his heart and melted there, leaving a trail of ice and blood” (4) when the “pale” woman he is attracted to breaks her promise to meet him. The white absence at his heart drives him to massacre the Ojibwa Indian village. Zosie and Mary, who have every reason to hate Augustus given his connection to Scranton Roy, make Augustus disappear from his grandfather's cabin years later. Through their revenge they mend or at least counter the Daashkikaa of his grandfather's blood sins in the glitteringly cruel pattern of what has gone before.

Erdrich complicates the meaning of the beading metaphor while, at the same time, providing links that the earlier narrative had skipped. The unnamed or anonymous narrator explains that the beads that Augustus Roy traded were sewn into a blanket made by Ten Stripe Woman and given to a pregnant woman, who later names her baby after the famous Whiteheart Beads. The name of Whiteheart Beads continues until Richard “ended up with it” (240). Richard marries Rozin, the descendant of Augustus Roy and Zosie Roy, who are related to Blue Prairie Woman (Other Side of the Earth) and the original Shawano brother. Further back still, relatives include the intercultural mixtures of Ojibwa and African, Ojibwa and French. Rozin Roy and Richard Whiteheart Beads's union seems ill-fated from the start since it replicates the old tragic patterns that Cally uncovers in her families' histories. The violence done to the Shawanos and the other Ojibwas by the Roys, the representative whites, seems to carry down through the generations to produce irrevocably tragic results, with the accidental death of Deanna and the suicide of Richard Whiteheart Beads. In the words of the old ghost woman, “Those things should come down on us” (238). As the anonymous narrator of the final chapter writes: “Everything is knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble” (239). The Roy-Whiteheart Beads union is fatal for Whiteheart Beads, who “would have died in his sleep on his eighty-fifth birthday, sober, of a massive stroke, had his self-directed pistol shot glanced a centimeter higher” (240), or if the bloody Roy-Ojibwa relationship had not started a hundred years earlier.

Erdrich's final narrator complicates the notion of simple causality or predestination, however, asking:

Did these occurrences have a paradigm in the settlement of the old scores and pains and betrayals that went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern? Who is beading us? … Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of this earth?

(240)

In Mohanty's words, these questions emphasize “what there is and our relation to ‘it’” (158), rather than a claim of metaphysical comprehensiveness or confident foundationalism. These questions are foreshadowed by the appearances of indeterminacy stressed earlier in the narratives, especially in “Niswey,” concerning the unpredictability of the quill dyes, and also in “Neewin,” which reveals the difficulties of seeing in the unfinished pattern the “larger meaning of her design” (184). These examples problematize an easy one-to-one causal correlation between life and myth, between individual lives and historical determinacy. The fluidity and ongoing nature of mythological construction and its cyclical repetition, which is stressed throughout all the separate narratives in the novel, thwart any essentialist paradigm of Native American or Ojibwa identity. The confusion between the beaders and the beads reinforces the unpredictability of identity, chance, and fate. As the quotation above indicates, the beads (individual characters) are not merely passive objects. Indeed, they influence and may determine the shape of the design into which they are being beaded. Stressing the reciprocal nature of the pattern, however, is not the same as arguing for a “strictly random pattern.” Given the connections that are available to the reader and the ones that lie still hidden, the sentiment at the end of The Antelope Wife seems to echo the conclusions about order at the end of The Bingo Palace. In that novel the heroic trickster figure, Gerry Nanapush, reflects on his life in this way: “There was no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it seemed unrepetitive up close, that is, until you sat doing nothing for so long that your brain ached and, one day, just maybe, you caught a wider glimpse” (226).

In the closing sentences of The Antelope Wife, Erdrich repeats some of this imagery. She writes, “We stand on tiptoe, trying to see over the edge, and only catch a glimpse of the next bead on the string, and the woman's hand moving, one day, the next, and the needle flashing over the horizon” (240). Through this final image of beading, Erdrich suggests that the pattern is there, but seeing it in its entirety is impossible, except for brief “glimpses.” This uncertainty is multiculturally inclusive: the narrator now refers to “we” and “us,” seeming to extend the collective audience of non-Native American readers into the beaded patterns she has been developing. She implies that our status as human beings prevents us from seeing fully the larger patterns of design, myth, and fate that affect all our lives. Erdrich provides us, like the mythic twins who begin the novel, only tantalizing glimpses or partial explanations about why something might have happened. She represents the connections between the material and spiritual realms as multilayered and at times inexplicable. Instead of leading to deconstructive postmodern despair or a sense of entropic futility, however, Erdrich's spiritually informed uncertainties lead her and her readers into a state of expectation. We are all (including the writer) standing on tiptoe “trying to see over the edge” into the future as a life force, driving us to keep moving “one day [to] the next” to a fuller understanding.

Erdrich's emphases on mystery, indeterminacy, multiple mythic meanings, and multicultural or intercultural patterns are part of a perfect narrative vehicle for articulating exactly how Ojibwa, and, by implication, Native American culture, can and does thrive in an environment of constant cultural endangerment and systematic desecration. Such a well crafted aesthetic vision can only help our larger collective society. As Mohanty argues, “Since cultural identities are not mysterious inner essences of groups of people but are fundamentally about social relations, especially relations among groups, the realist view gives us a way to envision multiculturalism as an inevitable part of a theory of justice in societies defined by deep and pervasive cultural inequalities” (239). What Mohanty and others might hope is that through such a brilliant and ongoing narrative world as Erdrich's, our society can acknowledge the overlap between Native American and European-based cultures while at the same time working to redress the pervasive inequalities and blood sins of the past. Erdrich's novels emphasize the layers of responsibility and interconnections between different ethnicities and cultures while still paying homage to Ojibwa traditions and mythology.

In The Antelope Wife, Erdrich implicitly suggests that Native American survival depends in part on extending traditional epistemologies that stress reciprocity, interdependence, and revision to the idea and practice of multiculturalism. When framed within the context of Ojibwa mythology, this intermixture can serve, paradoxically, as a means back into the empowering past. At the same time, Erdrich's insights into culture address the widest possible audience. Through the application of the Ojibwa sacred metaphysic to the contemporary multicultural world, Erdrich outlines ways of improving the broader collective society while also providing a sense of an empowered Ojibwa identity. Erdrich argues that literature informed by such a specific world-view as her own plays a key role in these accomplishments for all readers, including non-Native Americans. For example, while technology offers us the possibility of moving into a disembodied “sheer space,” free from “gravity itself, and every semblance of geography” (“Writer's Sense” 44), technological freedom has its limitations. In a statement that Mohanty would surely appreciate on a number of levels, Erdrich argues that we cannot lose our reciprocal relationship with the earth, since “we cannot escape our need for reference, identity, or our pull to landscapes that mirror our most intense feelings.”

Notes

1. Catherine Rainwater writes about the dangers of using “Western” and “Indian” “as though the terms denoted homogeneous sets of people and ideas” (68). However, I agree with Rainwater when she argues that one can use generalizations cautiously but legitimately in order to “add to, qualify, or correct the general body of information” (69), not to claim absolute truth. This process modifies and amends generalizations with specific information. Her Dreams of Fiery Stars includes a valuable list of “pan-Indian” beliefs that underscores differences between Native American world-views and a Judeo-Christian one (158-59).

2. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen makes a similar statement. “It is reasonable,” she argues, “from an Indian point of view, that all literary forms should be interrelated, given the basic idea of the unity and relatedness of all the phenomena of life. Separation of parts into this or that category is not agreeable to American Indians, and the attempt to separate essentially unified phenomena results in distortion” (62). In The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, Vine Deloria calls for an integrative epistemological approach, one that includes combining ancient Native American world-views and mythologies with contemporary science. Deloria argues that modern physics already draws from non-Western cultures and traditions: physics is the first of the sciences to reject “the old divisions of subject-object in favor of the integrated event. The epistemology that emerges from modern physics is extremely compatible with the way in which many traditions think, speak, and derive both cultural values and rules for governing society” (211). For example, “Modern physicists, incapable of expressing space-time perceptions in the English language, now often refer to the Zuni or Hopi conception of space-time as the more accurate rendering of what they are finding at the subatomic level of experiments” (viii).

3. In “The Religious Life of Native North Americans,” Ake Hultkrantz summarizes several key “pan Indian” concepts and addresses the dilemma of a nonhomogeneous cultural group. He writes: “North America is a continent with many diverse cultures, and it is therefore meaningless to speak about North American religion as a unified aggregate of beliefs, myths, and rituals. Still, there are several religious traits that are basically common to all the Indians but variously formalized and interpreted among different peoples. … To these common elements belongs the idea of another dimension of existence that permeates life and yet is different from normal, everyday existence. Concepts such as the Lakota wakan and the Algonquian manitou refer to this consciousness of another world, the world of spirits, gods, and wonders. … In twentieth-century pan-Indian religion the connection between terrestrial phenomena and the other world is extremely important” (3-4).

4. Robert Warrior writes, “Our struggle at the moment is to continue to survive and work toward a time when we can replace the need for being preoccupied with survival with a more responsible and peaceful way of living within communities and with the ever-changing landscape that will ever be our only home” (126).

5. Erdrich is of French Ojibwa and German American descent. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota near an Ojibwa reservation where her mother grew up. Both her parents were teachers in the Bureau of Indian Affairs school in Wahpeton.

6. Leuthold argues that the spiritually transformative power of art “lies at the heart of indigenous art's significance” (191) and plays a major role in establishing historical, cultural, conceptual, generational, and cosmological continuity (190).

7. In her study The Island of the Anishnaabeg, Theresa S. Smith emphasizes the reciprocal and interdependent aspects of the Ojibwa life-world. The balance of the cosmos is determined by a rule of respect which is “born of the recognition that we exist in a web of interdependence” (194). In their study of Ojibwa world-views, Thomas W. Overholt and J. Baird Callicott write that Ojibwa mythology constructs the world “as a kind of drama in which actors of unequal power relate to each other through patterns of blessing and reciprocal obligation” (161). Irving A. Hallowell argues, “The more deeply we penetrate the world view of the Ojibwa the more apparent it is that ‘social relations’ between human beings (änícinábek) and other-than-human ‘persons’ are of cardinal significance” (“Ojibwa” 22-23).

8. Weaver writes: “the single thing that most defines Indian literatures relates to this sense of community and commitment to it. … Literature is communist to the extent that it has a proactive commitment to Native community, including the wider community. In communities that have too often been fractured and rendered dysfunctional by the effects of more than 500 years of colonialism, to promote communitist values means to participate in the healing of grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them” (43).

9. Erdrich seems to cherish both her mixed-race status and her Ojibwa heritage. As she said in a recent interview: “To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life” (Max 116).

10. I am indebted here to David Palumbo-Liu's definition of critical multiculturalism: “A critical multiculturalism explores the fissures, tensions, and sometimes contradictory demands of multiple cultures, rather than (only) celebrating the plurality of cultures by passing through them appreciatively” (5).

11. In his discussion of Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart, Owens argues that Vizenor's work stands in “vivid contrast” to the work of Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Adrian Louis, and others. Using deconstructive and liberating satire, Vizenor counters the victimization pervasive in Erdrich's fiction (Mixedblood Messages 86). Owens also emphasizes the negative aspects of Erdrich's writing in his earlier work, Other Destinies. About Love Medicine he writes, “the novel's fragmented narrative underscores the fragmentation of the Indian community and of the identity which begins with community and place; and the fragmentation of community, the rootlessness that results in an accumulation of often mundane tragedies among the assorted characters, subtly underscores the enormity of what has been lost” (204).

12. According to Smith, traditional Ojibwa shamans possess unusual medicine or spiritual power. They can use this power for conjuring, for metamorphosis into different forms, and for effecting cures of prophecies (55).

13. Smith states that Ojibwas believe the self to be tripartite, made up of “the body, the ego-soul (the part that leaves the body upon death), and the free or shadow-soul (the dream or traveling part)” (63).

14. Such a dualistic visionary state bears a striking resemblance to what Jess Byron Hollenback labels “empowered ex-stasis” or the “transsensory” in his comparative study of mystical experiences: “The mystic and the medium utilize and direct their imaginations in ways that are no longer ‘merely’ imagining or ‘merely’ dreaming. For them the imagination is no longer just synonymous with the domain of subject experience” (200). Exstasis can therefore lead to “clairvoyant, hence objective, modes of knowing.”

15. Like June Morrissey, who arrives on Marie Kashpaw's doorstep in Love Medicine wearing black beads on a silver chain and who is also associated with deer and the “invisible ones who live in the woods” (Love Medicine 65), Other Side of the Earth represents the persistence of the mythical spiritual realm as it is blended into the material realm.

16. As Ruth Landes writes, “The Ojibwa regarded all religion and magic as ‘medicine’ or as ‘power,’ expressed through visions and purchased formulas and exercised responsibly or hostilely toward society” (42). Membership in the midewiwin or medicine society includes the following categories: “(1) patients cured of disease in his life through the Life midéwiwin or treated after death … (2) ritual officers, and (3) curing shamans or midé doctors” (76).

17. Hallowell argues that one of the prime values in Ojibwa culture is sharing with others: “Hoarding, or any manifestation of greed, is discountenanced” (47).

18. Ojibwa women's relationship to the adolescent dream-fast is interesting. Smith observes: “We should note that while women, as well as men, could and did embark on vision quests, it was not required of women and was less frequent among them. The belief was—and is—that women are already ‘complete’ humans because they have the power to give life” (63n5).

19. Allen also emphasizes the sacred dimension of the land: “It is reasonably certain that all Native American peoples view the land as holy—as intelligent, mystically powerful, and infused with supernatural vitality” (Off the Reservation 41).

Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons. Boston: Beacon, 1998.

———. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Deloria, Vine, Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. 2nd ed. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1992.

———. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. San Francisco: Harper, 1979.

Erdrich, Louise. The Antelope Wife. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.

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