Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures

3. RIDDING THE WORLD OF WASTE

3 RIDDING THE WORLD OF WASTE LOUISE ERDRICH’S THE ANTELOPE WIFE I’m an Indian with a buzz cut now. . . . Plain living. Hard work. The simple life, unadorned, ridding the world of waste. “People You Can Count On.” Our motto in garbage management. My belief. LOUISE ERDRICH, The Antelope Wife Ojibwa sanitation engineer Klaus Shawano, one of the many narrators of Louise Erdrich’s 1998 novel The Antelope Wife, embraces his role in the business that he and his on-again, off-again friend Richard Whiteheart Beads have founded.1 Within this novel, the focus on garbage rests primarily on these two central figures.2 However, Erdrich extends her portrayal of waste, excess, toxicity, and pollution, through her use of these two men as foils for a number of other characters. In so doing, she discusses the changing conditions of American Indian people; their relationships to all people, the nonhuman, and supernatural worlds around them; as well as changing cultural and financial patterns within Indian communities. The Antelope Wife addresses and comments on the most prescient issues in Indian country today, including environmental justice and urban Indian identities. Ultimately, Erdrich offers an adolescent young woman, Cally, as a contrast to Richard and Klaus. Like Mónica Marisela, Ted and Amalia Chen’s child in The Rag Doll Plagues, Cally emblematizes the hope for (in this case, Native) success in the cities and the end of a centuries-old curse on the interrelated Shawano, Roy, and Whiteheart Beads families. Finally, Erdrich’s use of multiple narrators in this novel, as in much of her work, serves to place the reader within a space of liquid and shifting identities and histories and, like Butler’s 92 Ridding the World of Waste multiple narrators in Talents, positively pollutes singular or absolute narrative power. I have divided this chapter into two main sections. The first examines the specific correlations between members of the Roy, Shawano, and Whiteheart Beads families and waste, toxicity, and positive pollution; the second details the hope for the urban community represented in this novel as well as the permeability of identity as presented in its characters. SECTION 1: THE ROY, SHAWANO, AND WHITEHEART BEADS FAMILY The Antelope Wife details the connection between the Roy and Shawano families, which serves as a microcosm of vast matrices of human interminglings that can become impossible to separate from one another. In the case of this novel, these interminglings become obvious a century in the past, when Private Scranton Teodorus Roy of the U.S. Cavalry takes part in “a spectacular cruel raid upon an isolated Ojibwa village mistaken for hostile” (3, emphasis mine). The fact that this raid is a mistake, that the killings that occur are taken out of the realm of warfare and placed within that of murder and cruelty, matters a great deal as the narrative unfolds. Scranton Roy bayonets “an old woman who set upon him with no other weapon but a stone picked from the ground” (4). As he kills the woman (who turns out to be the mother of Midass, the matriarch of what will become the Roy and Shawano families), she says, “Daashkikaa” (4). The reader encounters this word on the third page of text, but it is not defined for another two hundred. The term, it turns out, is an old name that means, “cracked apart” (213). In The Antelope Wife, this name speaks to things being broken or out of balance. When read along with the strains of ecological community within this novel, the theme of being out of balance takes on a deeper meaning than a dying woman finding her mortal wounding to be a mistake (which, of course, it is). The word, the name, speaks to the state of the world, to Ojibwa culture seeming to be cracked apart, the human and other-than-human (including the divine) orders appearing cracked apart, the families and clans being cracked apart, though they are certainly not destroyed. Similarly, these connections and orders have never been static but always in the process Ridding the World of Waste 93 of being re-formed. Instead, we note that these patterns are irrevocably altered; but as we will see as the novel progresses, alteration should not be read as a tragic end. This alteration may seem like destruction, but the characters of this novel constantly take broken pieces, fragments, and ingredients to combine...