Chippewa and Catholic Beliefs in the Work of Louise Erdrich

H. Wendell Howard Chippewa and Catholic Beliefs in the Work of Louise Erdrich In Louise Erdrich's novel 77ie Bingo Palace, the fourth book in the tetralogy whose other books are Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks, Lyman Lamartine, a dark-minded schemer, a bitter yet shaman-pleasant entrepreneur, is described in his duality: "But he was two people then, split . . ."(93).That phrase perhaps fits Louise Erdrich as well as Lyman, for like Christopher Columbus, about whom she and her husband Michael Dorris wrote in The Crown of Columbus, she is an ethnically complex person. Her mother is aTurtle Mountain Chippewa and her father is of German descent, but those simple facts are not enough to explain her mental complexity .The Chippewa connection, she has said, is a connection to a background "before and before, the first settler."That place connection is then complicated by an overwrought German romantic notion of place which is still further confused by the fact that her German ancestors were in all probability converted Jews with their own particular search for place. The result is, in her words, an "awful mix." VivianTwostar, who might well be speaking for Erdrich, says in The Crown ofColumbus: "I'm not all anything, but I'm a little bit of a lot. LOGOS 3:1 WINTER 2000 BELIEFS IN THE WORK OF LOUISE ERDRICH My roots spread in every direction, and if I water one set of them more often than others, it's because they need it more."To keep all this mixture from driving her "totally crazy" while looking for a home— home and homelessness are of enormous consequence to the characters in her novels—Louise Erdrich writes pointedly about it in her fictional quartet, creating a Faulknerian homeland inArgus that "unites the archetypal and the arcane, heartland America and borderline schizophrenia" (Thomas Disch in Passaro, 163). No dimension ofthis struggle among forces is greater than that between Catholicism and NativeAmerican religious belief, for here, perhaps, is the most evident indication of Ms. Erdrich's suspension between two cultures. When growing up in North Dakota, she always felt that she was an outsider.When she was at Dartmouth, she was still an outsider, so the psychological state ofthe outsider unable to find a place in society forces her—if that's not too strong a term—to consider religious beliefs another form of longing for home. The results of that consideration, however, are themselves uncertain. In response to Contemporary Authors' question about her religion, she said that she is antireligious, but in answer to Nancy and Allan Chavkin's query: "Do you regard yourself as a religious writer?" she responded: "It depends upon how that is defined. If I take it to mean a person whose characters ask questions about their origins in space and time, well, yes, and ofcourse someone is often bumping up against crucial church dogma. Life is religious, I think, and that includes writing" (2 28).The church that she mentions is the Catholic church, for as she told Mickey Pearlman in a 1989 interview , she "grew up with all the accepted truths [of Catholicism] but," she went on, "I don't have a central metaphor for my life. I only have chaos" (ice). Perhaps her openness to Chippewa religious beliefs as well as her hesitant acceptance of at least some Catholic dogma is what she means by chaos, just as her inability to exclude one set of beliefs for the sake of another may be what she had in mind when she claimed to be antireligious. For the present we 1 1 1 I¡2LOGOS merely introduce those possible interpretations.We shall return to them later. What the reader of Erdrich's tetralogy bumps up against initially is the proliferation of Catholic characters, images, and references, making us recall Robert Frost's evaluation ofT S. Eliot's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism as a good thing because it provided him with an endless supply ofpoetic imagery. Among Ms. Erdrich's Catholic characters, the most dominant, without doubt, is Sister Leopolda. Before entering the gleaming white Sacred Heart Convent atop the highest hill above the town ofArgus, Sister Leopolda was Pauline, a...