Discontinuous Narrative, Ojibwe Sovereignty, and the Wiindigoo Logic of Settler Colonialism: Louise Erdrich’s Marn Wolde

When we are young, the words are scattered around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

—Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

The dominant consensus among interpretations of Louise Erdrich’s novel The Plague of Doves (2008) represents Marn Wolde as a victim figure, abused by her husband, Billy Peace (Hudson 47–52; Strehle 119; Valentino 131–32; Roemer 122–23, 129). This characterization of Marn emerges coherently when the novel is read continuously and linearly and especially when Marn’s story is interpreted independently of other narrations within the novel and in isolation from its earlier form as “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet,” first published in the Atlantic (August 1997). A rather different profile of this narrator-character emerges when Marn is read discontinuously, across the narrations offered by five distinct narrators, across Erdrich’s wider oeuvre, and across her extraordinarily wide range of intertextual allusions to Ojibwe stories, the Bible, the midrashim, the Kabbalah, and Paradise Lost.¹ The tension between covert symbolic convergence and overt narrative discontinuity, I argue, is key to the demand that her writing be interpreted in ever-widening contexts in order to reveal the possessive logic of settler sovereignty, on the one hand, and to constitute Ojibwe sovereignty, on the other. It is easy to forget that the narrative Marn tells, a narrative framed by her traumatic story of domestic, sexual, and spiritual abuse at the hands of her husband, is the story of how she came to murder her husband and walk away with sole possession of their money and land.² The fragmented and unreliable nature of her narration reveals the ways in which she rationalizes her entitlement to kill in order to possess, that is, the ways in which her discourse exemplifies the possessive logic of settler sovereignty. At the same time, the very unreliability of her narration opens discursive opportunities that reveal the repressed meaning of her actions as a traumatic repetition of the historic lynching with which the novel begins. Settler land hunger, symbolized here and elsewhere in Erdrich’s writing in Ojibwe terms as a wiindigoo psychosis, emerges in the interstices of Marn’s narration to disrupt the logic of settler entitlement to indigenous land.

The Plague of Doves, like many of the novels that comprise Erdrich’s North Dakota series, originated in a group of nine separately published short stories.³ Reworked into novel form, these stories generate a discontinuous style of narrative: the twenty-two chapters are recounted by five different narrators, starting with the prefatory section entitled “Solo” by an unnamed third-person omniscient narrator, focalized through an anonymous “he”; Evelina narrates the following six chapters; Judge Antone Bazil Coutts is the narrator of the next four chapters; and Marn Wolde’s three chapters interrupt his telling of the story. A single chapter by Evelina follows Marn, providing commentary on Marn Wolde and the aftermath of her murder of Billy; the Judge completes Billy’s story in the following chapter; and Evelina’s narration concludes in the next three chapters. The novel ends with two chapters narrated by the Judge; and the narrator of the final chapter is the town doctor and president of the local history society, Cordelia Lochren. While some chapters are divided into named sections or vignettes, others are unnamed, both emphasizing the discontinuous nature of the novel and underlining the significance of those parts that are titled. What continuity would be created by the alternating narrations of Evelina and the Judge is disrupted by the interventions of Marn and Cordelia, which stand out in contrast to those of the two primary narrators in that Marn and Cordelia share an intimate relation to the primary problematic of the novel: Who murdered the Lochren family? And why? Cordelia is the only survivor of the massacre; Marn is the niece of the real murderer, her Uncle Warren, who sees that Marn has inherited his capacity for murderous violence. The answer to the question, Who did it? is gradually...