Elegies on Lost Daughters – Individual and Cultural Trauma in Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum and David Treuer’s Prudence

Abstract

In my article I compare two contemporary Ojibwe novels about death. Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum and David Treuer’s Prudence are elegiac stories about different ways of experiencing mourning in individual and collective context, filtered through the Western and Indigenous traditions. In both narratives the authors trace historical motives that give the readers access to Indigenous perspectives in the mainstream American history and I would like to argue that the discussed novelists focus on different strategies of including Indigenous history. I would like to argue that despite the contrast in the literary convention, i.e., Erdrich’s use of magical realism and Treuer’s social realism, there are many similarities between the narratives, as they both refer to mourning after the loss of daughters (biological and adopted), and in both cases the process is accompanied by self-destruction, memory and denial. What is more, even though Erdrich showcases feminist perspective and Treuer focuses more on masculine tradition, neither of them promotes a radical gender perspective. Another common denominator is a polyphonic structure, which helps to emphasize the clashes in the characters’ attitudes towards the Indigenous tradition, in the assimilation to the American culture and the deconstruction of pop cultural stereotypes about “stoic Indian men” and “promiscuous Indian women” and, last but not least, the relationship with nature, which is not always considered an animistic living space. My interpretation will extend to the broader context of Ojibwe presence in Minneapolis by a short analysis of museum exhibitions and public places of commemoration and I will try to demonstrate how Erdrich’s and Treuer’s propositions relate to it. In my paper I will use the terms “Ojibwe” when specific references are made by the authors to this particular culture and “Indigenous” when a broader context is indicated, e.g. boarding schools’ history that goes beyond the Ojibwe experience. I will also try to explain why Treuer uses the term “Indian”.