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  • Oral Narrative and Ojibwa Story Cycles in Louise Erdrich’s The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence
  • Elizabeth Gargano (bio)

In a 1985 interview Louise Erdrich describes her fascination with the sacred stories of traditional Ojibwa culture, separate tales that nevertheless form an interrelated whole. These stories, she acknowledges, have served as an aesthetic model for her fiction. Such interrelated oral stories generally revolve around a central and unifying figure, often a powerful manito from the spirit world or a human being with magical powers. In Erdrich's words,

One tells a story about an incident that leads to another incident in the life of this particular figure. Night after night, or day after day, it's a story telling cycle. It's the sort of thing where people know what they're going to say. They're old stories, but the stories have incorporated different elements of non-Chippewa [non-Ojibwa] or European culture as they've gone on, so that sometimes you see a great traditional story with some sort of fairytale added to it.

(Chavkin and Chavkin 4)

Erdrich describes a rich and enduring tradition that achieves a dynamic balance between continuity and innovation. The storytelling tradition can open at any point to include new elements. Hospitable to contemporary experiences, it maintains a profound cultural relevance and significance; it continues to serve its Ojibwa audience by reflecting their experience back to them and imbuing such experience with sacred meanings, while also situating it within familiar cultural patterns.

In her two novels for children, The Birchbark House (1999) and its recently published sequel, The Game of Silence (2005), Erdrich creates histories that are also cultural texts in this specific revitalizing sense. In both novels she employs a cyclical narrative structure and interweaves the daily experiences of her human protagonists with traditional stories of such powerful spirit-mentors as [End Page 27] Nanabozho, the great trickster-creator. Erdrich's creative juxtapositions shed new light on the lives of the human characters, while also illuminating the regenerative powers of traditional Ojibwa storytelling.

In recent years such critics as Hertha Wong, James Ruppert, and Catherine Rainwater have explored the Ojibwa roots of Erdrich's use of the story cycle form in her rich body of fiction for adults. Hertha Wong, for example, emphasizes the "polyvocality" of "Native American oral traditions" as a source for Erdrich's use of interwoven but separate narratives in her first novel, Love Medicine (Wong 173). James Ruppert's "Mediation and Multiple Narrative in Love Medicine" argues that the novel "celebrate[s] [Native American] culture by [means of] a continuing recreation of the multiple facets of identity through multiple narrative" (230). Catherine Rainwater reminds us that Erdrich's novel Tracks "draws on a variety of oral storytelling strategies" (145), while The Bingo Palace embodies a "collective narrative voice" that combines the "authority and humility" of the "traditional oral storyteller" (152). In contrast, the story cycle aspects of Erdrich's children's fiction have received relatively little attention. In her illuminating essay "Sea of Good Intentions: Native American Books for Children," Melissa Kay Thompson emphasizes the historically and psychologically accurate content of Erdrich's children's novel, as opposed to the Native American stereotypes in so much children's fiction. Understandably, other critics have also focused on the content of Erdrich's novel rather than its form. Lisa Hermien Makman, for instance, contends that Erdrich's depiction of an actively-working child protagonist typifies multiculturalism's emphasis on child labor as integrated into the fabric of culture.1

As I argue in this article, however, an appreciation of Erdrich's skillful incorporation of Ojibwa story cycle elements is crucial to understanding both The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence. Drawing on the conventions of oral storytelling, Erdrich repeatedly interrupts both novels' forward momentum with self-contained traditional tales that emphasize cultural continuity while also serving to explain and contextualize present action. Rather than foregrounding a linear, plot-driven narrative, Erdrich subtly interweaves events into a natural and spiritual landscape where change is cyclical and at times illusory. Even the most dramatic actions are woven like bright threads into nature's dense and variegated tapestry. Further, Erdrich...

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