Exploring identity, assimilation, and the effect of a
dominant white society on present day Native
Americans
Chris Eyre
Joanne Shenandoah
Filmmaker
Musician
Louise Erdrich
Author
Louise Erdrich
Born July 6, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota
She and her family moved to North Dakota and lived nearby the Turtle Mountain
Chippewa Reservation where her mother grew up. Most of her novels take place on
the reservation. Her parents were teachers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding
school.
Her heritage is a mixture of Ojibwe (Chippewa), French, and German. Erdrich’s
greatest role model was her grandfather who served as a tribal chairman on the
reservation.
She attended Dartmouth College where she pursued studies in Native American
culture and writing. She got her masters at John Hopkins and then went to work at
Dartmouth as a writer in residence.
Erdrich married her professor Michael Dorris, the chair of the Native American
Studies Department at Dartmouth. He was well known as a writer and as an advocate
for understanding fetal alcohol syndrome.
They had a great literary relationship until their estrangement and Michael's death.
She now lives in Minnesota with her daughters where she owns a small bookstore.
Works by Louise Erdrich
Novels
Poetry
Love Medicine
Jacklight
The Beet Queen
Baptism of Desire
Tracks
Original Fire
The Bingo Palace
Tales of Burning Love
The Antelope Wife
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
The Master Butcher’s Singing Club
Four Souls
The Painted Drum
The Crown of Columbus (co written with Michael Dorris)
She has also written
numerous children books
and a memoir on
childbirth
“There were lots of people with mixed blood, lots
of people with their own confusions. I realized
that this was part of my life- it wasn’t something
that I was making up- and that it was something
that I wanted to write about.”
Louise Erdrich
Chris Eyre
 Born in 1968 and grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon
 Member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe of Oklahoma
 Received his Associate’s Degree in Television Production from Mt. Hood
Community College
 He then attended the University of Arizona and graduated with a Bachelor’s
Degree in Media Arts.
 He was accepted to attend the Graduate Film Program at New York University.
His short film Tenacity won first place in the Graduate Film Department and was
invited to screen at the 1995 Sundance Festival.
 He was invited to attend the Sundance Institute’s Directing Workshop and was
mentored by Robert Redford and other Hollywood greats.
 His first feature film, Smoke Signals, won the Audience Award and Filmmaker's
Trophy at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and was bought by Miramax Films.
 He is known as the first Native American to direct a feature film that received a
national theatrical release.
“I love making movies and telling people's stories. So
far, the ones that have interested me the most are the
ones I'm making. The cultural aspects of the film mean
nothing if you're not personally and emotionally
engaged in the characters you are watching. I am
interested in the people I'm portraying."
Chris Eyre
Joanne Shenandoah
Joanne Shenandoah is a Wolf Clan member of the Oneida
Nation (Iroquois)
Her father was the an Onondaga Tribal Chief and both of her
parents encouraged her musically from a young age.
She spent 14 years as a computer programmer until her “reawakening.” She has
been recording since the 1980’s.
She has been nominated for a Grammy twice and she has won the Native
American Music Award numerous times. She has also been recognized as “A
Native American Woman of Hope”
She was presented with an Honorary Doctorate of Music at Syracuse University
in 2002.
Her music blends traditional music with contemporary instruments.
"As musicians we represent not just ourselves, but
our families and community. When I stand on the
stage I am with those Oneidas who struggled, past
and present, to protect our identity, culture and
spiritual beliefs."
Joanne Shenandoah
Common Threads throughout the Arts
Erdrich, Eyre, and Shenandoah are all present day Native
Americans who are proud of their culture. Through their
chosen art forms, they seek to instill pride in their fellow
Native Americans.
Subjects include the negative aspects of modern day
Native American way of life yet have an underlying
hopeful tone.
Show a balance between traditional ways and modern
ways as a alternative to assimilating completely into white
society.
They strive to protect their identity and culture.
Love Medicine
Plot: Love Medicine tells the story of thirteen Native Americans living on the
Turtle Mountain Reservation. The characters, including Marie and Nector
Kashpaw, Lulu Nanapush, Lyman and Henry Lamartine, and Lipsha Morrisey
struggle to affirm their identity and maintain their culture in the face of
alcholism, depression, poverty, self-doubt and their own haunting pasts.
Style: Louise Erdrich utilizes multiperspectivity with chapters shifting from
first person to third person and from past to present throughout the novel and
with each chapter being told from the perspective of a different character.
The novel emulates a traditional Chippewa story cycle, in which Native
Americans tell stories through oral tradition.
Erdirch also has a uniquely poetic writing style. The shifting voices and fluid
writing style reinforces the water imagery in the novel.
Tone: depressing and dark yet hopeful, humorous, and benevolent
“Even while the characters suffer, the joy and beauty they experience emerges
with a poetic sense.” Donna Woodford
Love Medicine
Themes: Through love, understanding, and forgiveness Native Americans can
discover and come to terms with their identities and assert themselves proudly
in a contemporary society.
“Forgiving somebody else made the whole thing easier to bear” Love
Medicine, 254
Voicing the pain within can absolve the wounds of the past and become an act
of healing.
“Throughout the many stories that make up the novel, characters search for a
‘love medicine,’ a trick or potion that will bring them the love they so
desperately need. In the end however it is the stories themselves that prove to
be the love medicine.” Woodford
Erdrich also emphasizes throughout the novel the importance of family bonds
which is an integral part of Native American culture.
Imagery: water, cars, rocks, nature, animals, love medicine, fire, space, apples
Water Imagery
Water imagery highlights the character’s overall insecurity with their identity
as Native Americans. Also, water separates the characters from one another,
loosening their strength as a family unit.
“I’d hold my breath when I hit and let the current pull me toward the surface,
around jagged rocks. I wouldn’t fight it, and in that way I’d get to shore,”
Love Medicine 124
“Time was rushing around me like water around at big wet rock. The only
difference is, I was not so durable as stones.” LM 127
“I think of small stones… I see no kindness in how the waves are grinding
them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear.” LM 96
“I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that
had once covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was still easy to
imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on
dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there
was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home.” LM 366
To Those Who Dream
For so long I dreamed a dream
the sweet grass still grows
where the wise ones still know
dream
where
and
how to
For so long I dreamed a dream
the people spoke their tongue
the elders still teach the young
a dream
where
and where
I dreamed
To those that dream
I sing this song,
above and beyond,
beyond the sky,
beyond the sky they dream
To those that dream
above the stars,
wherever they are,
beyond the sky,
beyond the sky they dream
The Bingo Palace
Plot: The main character Lipsha Morrisey returns to the reservation after trying
to find a place where he belongs in white America. Still lacking a sense of
belonging when he returns, he falls in love with Shawnee Ray, who is also
considering a marriage proposal from his uncle Lyman Lamartine. At the same
time, a “Bingo Palace” is slated to be built on sacred ground.
Style: Erdrich utilizes multiperspectivity and switches from first person to third
person throughout the novel. The writing style is poetic and interwoven with
extensive imagery.
Tone: Naïve and insecure (Lipsha) passionate, tender, and hopeful (Shawnee
Ray) despondent, proud, and insecure (Lyman) - serene at the end
Imagery: chance, luck, bingo, nature, space, stars, dancing
Themes: Although life is often misdirected by forces beyond one’s control, an
understanding of the meaning of love, the power of selflessness, and the needs of
others will mend the holes in a broken spirit.
You cannot love someone if you do not fully appreciate who they are as a
person.
The Bingo Palace
“I have reconsidered. If my love is worth anything, it will be larger than
myself.” BP 229
“He knew from sitting in the still eye of chance that fate was not random.
Chance was full of runs and soft noise, pardons and betrayals and doublebacks. Chance was patterns of a stranger complexity than we could name, but
predictable.” The Bingo Palace 226
“…love is the essential medicine, the power that binds humanity
together…[Lipsha] realizes fully that that the human response is to hold onto
others, to comfort and protect and receive comfort and protection.” Terry
Heller
“luck don’t stick when you sell it,” BP 220
“It seemed, on thinking back, that there, in the little border station, in the
hands of the first non-Indian who ever attached that pipe together, sky would
crash to earth.” BP 35
Her Dance
Shawnee Ray does Traditional Jingle Dress
Dancing in The Bingo Palace as a means of
earning money to pay for a better future.
The tone of Joanne Shenandoah’s piece is
hopeful and almost calming.
Tracks
Plot: The novel begins in the wake of two epidemics that have devastated the
Chippewa tribe. Tracks is a saddening look at the Turtle Mt. Reservation’s
battle with starvation, disease, infidelity, betrayal, assimilation, and death.
The main characters, Pauline Puyat, Fleur Pillager, and Nanapush, represent
the successful and unsuccessful “tracks” that Native Americans might follow
to avert disaster, while attempting to retain humor and personal dignity.
Style: Narrative first person from perspective of Nanapush and Pauline. Same
fluid and poetic writing style as Erdrich’s other books.
Tone: Dark, somber, morose, self-loathing, reverent, mythic, proud, bleak at
times, at other times hopeful
Imagery: traditional Tribal customs, nature, Christ, cards, gambling, hunting,
death, life
Theme: With a balance of acceptance for the new ways and respect and
appreciation for the old, Native Americans will survive the dangers of a
pervading white society.
Tracks
“Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and
new among us were taken…In the years I’d passed, I saw more change than
in a hundred upon hundred before.” Tracks 2
“I was an orphan and my parents had died in grace, and also, despite my
deceptive features, I was not one speck of Indian but wholly white.” T 137
“Although Fleur is finally beaten down, she becomes so only after having a
powerful influence on all those around her. She demonstrates that there are
different ways to live than liquor and the dollar bill and that there is dignity
and even power in the way she has chosen.” Sidner Larson
“To become a bureaucrat myself was the only was that I could wade through
the letters, the reports, the only place I could find a ledge to kneel on, to
reach through the loophole and draw you home.” T 225
“Nanapush represents a positive kind of an ability to live between cultural
extremes without being torn apart by contradiction” David Carlson
The Peacemaker is Born
This song tells the story of the Iroquois legend of the Peacemaker. The
song is traditional, and yet Shenandoah mixes in contemporary
instruments as well
The tone is reverential and peaceful.
Common Threads: Identity
Throughout all three of Erdrich’s novels, the characters question their identities and
their places in society as present day Native Americans.
“I felt I had no inside voice…no Marie.” Love Medicine 54
“Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well from my
dealing with whites I would add to that quote: ‘The only interesting Indian is dead, or
dying by falling backwards off a horse.’” LM 124
“Belonging was a matter of deciding to. Through many trials I had seen this to be true. I
decided I belonged.” LM 348
“I have this sudden knowledge that no matter what I do with my life, no matter how far
away I go, or change, or grow and gain, I will never get away from here.” The Bingo
Palace 21
“Pauline represents all the pain, rage, and frustration of a person forced to live in two
different cultures while being rejected to a large degree by both.” Sidner Larson
Common Threads: Healing
As the characters in Love Medicine narrate their stories, the stories themselves become an
act of healing“Lispha’s voice was a steady bridge over a deep space of sickness I was crossing. If I just
kept listening I knew I’d get past it all right.” Love Medicine 38
In The Bingo Palace, Lyman and Shawnee Ray dance as a way to mend their spirits“… when Lyman danced in those clothes, it was to keep Henry alive, to give him heart, for
his drowned ghost was restless and low in spirit…Then Lyman danced his own rough
struggle from the freezing muscle of water where he had jumped in to grab Henry back, and
failed…carefully, gracefully, with completeness, hour after hour, until finally, from the drum
and with the singers just past the clearing, he heard Henry’s voice ride the sky.
It is so calm, so calm
In that place where I am
My little brother” BP 205
In Tracks Nanapush uses the power of words to heal“I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and
traveled on.” Tracks 46
First movie to be co-directed,
written, and produced by a
Native American.
Plot: Victor embarks on a
journey to Phoenix with a nerd
named Thomas to retrieve his
abusive father’s ashes. Along
the way he comes to terms with
his father’s abandonment and
his identity.
Subjects: alcoholism, abuse,
Reservation life, white society’s
view towards Native
Americans, identity searching,
the value of friendship and
family
Works Cited
http://www.amazon.com/Peacemakers-Journey-Joanne-Shenandoah/dp/B00004R8PY
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http://www.bobbilane.com/photos/director04.jpg
http://www.nativepeoples.com/site/np_may_jun04/mj04-shenandoah/image6.jpg
www.dirtylinen.com/98/shenandoah.jpg
http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/erdrich.html
www.shellandstoneturquoise.com
http://www.nativevillage.org/Quotes/Native%20American%20Quotes%205%20.htm
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ndance2.jpg
http://www.chriseyre.org/bio.html
http://worldmusiccentral.org/artists/artist_page.php?id=928
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