97 pages • 3 hours read
Louise ErdrichA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.”
Nanapush, talking to his granddaughter, Lulu Pillager, explains the history of her people—the Anishinabe—of which their tribe, called either the Ojibwe or the Chippewa, are members. In 1912, consumption ravaged the population, reducing the tribe to a skeleton of its former size and strength. Lulu is Nanapush’s adopted granddaughter. This quotation also demonstrates a significant theme of the novel: the Native people and the weather are symbolically entwined with one another, and some—such as Fleur Pillager—are thought to have control over the weather.
“Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken. My own family was wiped out one by one, leaving only Nanapush. And after, although I had lived no more than fifty winters, I was considered an old man. I’d seen enough to be one.”
Nanapush describes the decimation of his tribe and the loss of his wife and two children to the consumption epidemic. So many old people are lost that Nanapush is the oldest man left alive among his people.
“I had no wind left over to curse Pukwan, who watched but refused to touch her, turned away, and vanished with the whole sled of supplies. It did not surprise or cause me enduring sorrow, later, when Pukwan’s son, also named Edgar and also of the tribal police, told me that his father came home, crawled into bed, and took no food from that moment until his last breath passed.”
In the Chippewa moral code, a man who does not do right by the living or the dead is doomed. Here, Edgar Pukwan, who fears and loathes the Pillagers, even a helpless and sick girl, suffers death because he does not fulfill his duties properly.
“Starvation makes fools of anyone. In the past, some had sold their allotment land for one hundred poundweight of flour. Others, who were desperate to hold on, now urged that we get together and buy back our land, or at least pay a tax and refuse the lumbering money that would sweep the marks of our boundaries off the map like a pattern of straws …
But that spring outsiders went in as before, and some of us too. The purpose was to measure the lake. Only now they walked upon the fresh graves of Pillagers, crossed death roads to plot out the deepest water where the lake monster, Misshepeshu, hid himself and waited.”
In Nanapush’s thinking, spirits of the dead regard the living as fools, and therefore living people’s actions are doomed to failure. Nanapush sees that the white men and the government, which are the same thing to him, will overcome the weakened and starving Chippewa, taking all their land in the end. This passage foreshadows the power of the dead to thwart the plans of the living, whether Chippewa or white, because many white surveyors never return from the woods.
“The Agent went out there, then got lost, spent a while night following the moving lights and lamps of people who would not answer him, but talked and laughed among themselves. They only let him go at dawn because he was so stupid. Yet he asked Fleur again for money, and the next thing we heard he was living in the woods and eating roots, gambling with ghosts.”
The Pillager woods contain the spirits of the dead, who act upon people who wish to harm Fleur Pillager. In this case, the government land Agent cannot collect allotment money from Fleur Pillager because he goes mad. As a result, rumors spread throughout the community concerning her powers to move spirits and take advantage of their protection, while most Chippewa remain wary of spirits, including Nanapush, who also understands their power to influence the living. The power of the spirit world comprises a significant theme in the novel.
“I was never one to take notice of the talk of those who fattened in the shade of the new Agent’s storehouse. But I watched the wagons take the rutted turnoff to Matchimanito. Few of them returned, it is true, but those that did were enough, loaded high with hard green wood. From where we now sit, granddaughter, I heard the groan and crack, felt the ground tremble as each tree slammed earth. I weakened into an old man as one oak went down, another and another was lost, as a gap formed here, a clearing there, and plain daylight entered.”
Nanapush demonstrates the unity of the Chippewa people with nature, specifically with the oak trees in the forest, as he describes how the loss of the forest turned him into an old man without power. He also reveals that he does not believe the gossip in town about Fleur, or about any event, including the actions of the government. He does not trust people, even his own people, since the disruption of the white government’s money hit the town of Argus.
“Men stayed clear of Fleur Pillager after the second drowning. Even though she was good-looking, nobody dared to court her because it was clear that Misshepeshu, the water man, the monster, wanted her for himself. He’s a devil, that one, love hungry with desire and maddened for the touch of young girls, the strong and daring especially, the ones like Fleur.”
Pauline speaks of the gossip surrounding Fleur Pillager even when she is only 17 years old. The Pillager clan is always associated with power, but a dark power, drawn from supernatural sources. Fleur is considered no different. This passage demonstrates the strong relationship between the spirit world, or the supernatural, and the real world. Frequently, they become blurred together in this novel.
“She knew the effect she had on men, even the very youngest of them. She swayed them, sotted them, made them curious about her habits, drew them close with careless ease and cast them off with the same indifference.”
Pauline reports the attraction that men had to Fleur Pillager, though Fleur did nothing to attempt to attract anyone’s notice. She worked hard at the butcher shop, lifting heavy carcasses and learning how to cut and trim meat. At no time does Fleur indicate any interest in the men who stare at or follow her around. Notably, Pauline is nearly sick with envy: she is completely “invisible” to the same men (15). This jealousy colors Pauline’s statements about Fleur. Can she possibly be a reliable narrator?
“Land is the only thing that lasts life to life.”
Nanapush explains the foundation of the Chippewa tribe’s way of life—their land. Without that, they have nothing. The clans who are manipulated, tricked, or starved off their land on the reservation turn to drink and to white religion. Their dignity is lost along with their futures.
“The name had a bearing on what happened later, as well, for it was through Fleur Pillager that the name Nanapush was carried on and won’t die with me, won’t rot in a case of bones with leather. There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs clear.”
Nanapush here describes the entwining of his life with Fleur Pillager’s from the moment that he saved her life. Nanapush’s greatest desire, for his clan name to go on living after his death, is fulfilled through Fleur’s daughter, Lulu, whom Nanapush addresses in his narrative as his granddaughter. Throughout his narrative directed to Lulu, Nanapush attempts to persuade her to accept her mother, Fleur, and to understand the terrible trials that Fleur endured. Lulu is an angry teenager who is about to marry poorly into the Lazarre/Morrissey clan. Nanapush wants to prevent this.
“He was determined. Maybe his new, steady coolness was the thing that turned my mind, the quiet of him. He was different, sitting there so still. It struck me that he had come into his growth, and who was I to hold him back from going to a Pillager, since someone had to, since the whole tribe had got to thinking that she couldn’t be left alone out there, a woman gone wild, striking down whatever got into her path. People said that she had to be harnessed. Maybe, I thought, Eli was the young man to do it, even though he couldn’t rub two words together and get a spark.”
Nanapush describes how Eli Kashpaw comes to be the husband to Fleur Pillager, when she is pregnant with Lulu. He claims to be the baby’s father, saving Fleur from shame within the tribe.
“After that, although I kept the knowledge close, I knew I was different. I had the merciful scavenger’s heart. I became devious and holy, dangerously meek and mild. I wore nuns’ castoffs, followed in Bernadette’s tracks, entered each house where death was about to come, and then made death welcome.”
In a macabre twist, Pauline finds the escape she seeks in easing the deaths of others and in supporting their loved ones by cooking, baking, and cleaning.
“But I was so disgusted at his foolish reasoning that I’d begun to wonder whether I would even help him. So many other things were on my mind. I had already given Father Damien testimony on this Anishinabe land, which was nibbled at the edges and surrounded by famers waiting for it to go underneath the gavel of the auctioneer. There were so few of us who even understood the writing on the papers. Some signed their land away with thumbs and crosses.”
In this passage, Nanapush explains the overwhelming forces arrayed against the Anishinabe peoples: the white government, the white loggers, and the greed and ignorance of the Anishinabe peoples themselves. Nanapush has little patience with Eli and his lovelorn desire to be reunited with Fleur after his affair with Sophie Morrissey. Eli pays so little attention to anything in the world beyond his own needs that he cannot understand Nanapush’s role as an elder and his deep need to keep the people together and to save their land from the encroachment of the whites. Nanapush understands that once the people lose their land that they will have nothing.
“In my fist I had a lump of charcoal, with which I blackened my face. I placed my otter bag upon my chest, my rattle near. I began to sing slowly, calling on my helpers, until the words came from my mouth but were not mine, until the rattle started, and the song sang itself, and there, in the deep bright drifts, I saw the tracks of Eli’s snowshoes clearly.”
“We were tense in silence. Then I couldn’t contain my words. ‘I helped you with this woman you couldn’t handle, who scares off sensible men. I taught you how to get her on your own without medicine. I gave you certain items by which I remembered my last wife. I took you in. And before long, you’re so bored you cannot resist a Morrissey, and so stupid you imagine your wife is pregnant when she’s not.’ ”
In his role as father figure to Eli Kashpaw, Nanapush attempts to set Eli straight and prevent him from making more mistakes, especially by thinking that his wife, Fleur, is pregnant by the lake monster. Eli attempts to rationalize his own infidelity by imagining that Fleur too has strayed. Nonetheless, Nanapush continues to help Eli, who listens to and implements Nanapush’s advice, and they work together to save their families and their land.
“I don’t know how to tell this next thing that happened, an event that started baldness in the Pillager women, and added new weight on each side of the feud that would divide our people down the middle, through time. It started with Eli and Sophie. But it spread from the slough to our politics, just like that. The two families ranged on either side of the question of money settlement. I could do nothing, It is embarrassing for a man to admit his arms have thinned, his capacities diminished, and maybe worse than that, his influence over the young of the tribe is gone for good.”
Nanapush dreads the loss of land in settlements with the whites. He understands that once the land is gone, it is gone for good, and the people selling it do not understand that they will no longer be able to live on, or even cross, the land that they have sold. Many do not read or do not understand the situation fully enough to be able to make sound decisions. Here, Nanapush laments his inability to stop many of the clans from selling their land. Land equals a chance for survival. Selling the land equals destruction of the clan, as the money payment is in no way adequate compensation.
“I stared at my fists. I did not dare move and now knew the tea, the story, were his plan. He was informed by Satan, sent to me on purpose to test my resolve. He meant to bar me from gaining joy in the presence of my Savior, in heaven where I would be finished with such earthly humiliations as I suffered now with each corner of my mind, each muscle.”
Pauline suffers the humiliation brought on by her overly full bladder. Nanapush has discerned her self-imposed penance of relieving herself only twice a day, and he resolves to show her how foolish it is by making her fail in its execution. Nanapush is well accustomed to human failings. He dislikes Pauline’s superior attitude and her overtly zealous suffering for God, so he believes he can dissuade her by showing her how silly and unnecessary her penance is in the face of real suffering. He is only successful in making Pauline despise him more.
“I had been everywhere on the reservation, but never before on this road, which was strange because it was so wide and so furiously trodden that the snow was beaten to a rigid ice … We skated on our bark shoes, floated the iced pathway only with other Indians. How odd that there were so many, and still hungry, too. The twigs were snapped along the way for something to chew, and all the moving water sipped from the streams.
We glided west, following the fall of night in a constant dusk. We passed dark and vast seas of moving buffalo and not one torn field, but only earth, as it was before …There were no fences no poles, no lines, no tracks. The road we walked was the only sign of humans, and also where it led, which I knew only when it appeared.
Those who starved, drank, and froze, those who died of the cough, all of the people I’d blessed, washed, and wrapped, all were here. The road ended in a long plain of shallow snow. Across the waste, I saw the cold green fires of their town. We passed my mother and father walking. I hid my face. I wanted to pull on Fleur’s shoulder, ask her to turn back now, but she crept toward the closest blaze and stood outside a circle of people. They were huddled, watching a game. Three men played it.
I knew them all.”
Pauline follows Fleur Pillager’s wandering spirit as it accompanies her baby to the other side. It is unclear whether Fleur is aware of Pauline’s presence, or if this is simply Pauline’s delusional vision. However, the vision is real to Pauline, and she accompanies Fleur into the Chippewa heaven where the baby is left with a mother who resembles Pauline’s. When she returns to the cabin, the baby is indeed dead, and Fleur nearly so.
“I was like a woman in my suffering, but my children were all delivered into death. It was contrary, backward, but now I had a chance to put things into a proper order.
Eventually, my songs overcame the painful burning and you were suspended, eyes open, looking into mine. Once I had you I did not dare break the string between us and kept on moving my lips, holding you motionless with talking, just as at this moment. For the first time in my life, it was my duty as well as pleasure to hold forth all night and long into the next morning.”
Nanapush describes how he saves Lulu’s feet from being amputated after she has run to get Margaret to help her mother in childbirth. In her childish vanity, she wears the thin, patent leather shoes that Eli bought her to run through the frozen world from Matchimanito to Nanapush’s cabin. Nanapush happily sacrifices his sleep to save Lulu because he relishes a fight for a child’s life against death.
“Power dies, power goes under and gutters out, ungraspable. It is momentary quick of flight and liable to deceive. As soon as you rely on the possession it is gone. Forget that it ever existed, and it returns. I never made the mistake of thinking that I owned my own strength, that was my secret.”
Nanapush attempts to help Fleur regain her power after the death of her son and her false vision of where Eli might find a deer during the starving time in winter. She has lost hope and with it the power that once made her so formidable and vibrantly alive.
“ ‘We Indians are like a forest,’ I had said once to Damien. ‘The trees left standing get more sun, grow thick.’
But now I spoke differently. A crippling poison had followed on the tail end of disease …
Just that spring, coming home from a sickhouse early one morning, the priest had stumbled across a child dressed in nothing but snow, bedded in the frozen leaves, skin black as charred wood. The house who this tiny girl belonged was sleeping with the windows open and the doors locked. Everyone inside was blind drunk and raved, when they awakened, with pity for themselves, their loss, one less.
This was the poison, the affliction.”
Father Damien tells Nanapush this story to encourage him to become more involved in the politics and leadership of the tribe. Nanapush is too consumed with the problems of his own family to be able to assume power. Still, he recounts this story to Lulu so that she can understand the many evils stalking the clans during this tumultuous time. Additionally, this passage is significant because Nanapush uses the metaphor of the tribe representing a forest—just like the oak forest the logging company levels to the ground. This passage foreshadows the destruction of the clans.
“Don’t stop your ears! Lulu, it is time, now, before you marry your no-good Morrissey and toss your life away, for you to listen to the reason Fleur put you on the wagon with Nector, whom Margaret had hidden from your mother’s wrath. She sent you to the government school, it is true, but you must understand there were reasons: there would be no place for you, no safety on this reservation, no hiding from government papers, or from Morrisseys who shaved heads or the Turcot Company, leveler of a whole forest. There was also no predicting what would happen to Fleur herself.”
Nanapush narrates an important insight to enlighten Lulu. He clearly states why Lulu was not safe on the reservation: Fleur could not risk Lulu’s life. Fleur’s enemies, either through people’s fear of her supposed supernatural powers to drown men or through their jealousy of her strength and beauty, would have taken out their aggression on Lulu, who was only about 5 years old.
“It was then I felt the wind building on the earth. I heard the waves begin to slap with light insistence against the shore. I knew the shifting breeze, the turn of weather, was at hand. I heard the low murmur of the voices of the gamblers in the woods.”
Nanapush is aware of Fleur’s power and her connection to the weather as well as the lake. Just as a tornado ravaged the butcher shop and smokehouse where Fleur was raped, the wind and waves gain force as the loggers attempt to displace Fleur from her home. Even her own husband tries to convince her to get in the wagon, but the spirits of the dead murmur from the remaining trees, crowding together. Nanapush hears and knows these things, and senses the coming danger, but the loggers notice nothing and are simply impatient to get an obstructing woman out of their way.
“One man laughed and leaned against a box elder. Down it fell, crushed a wagon. The wind shrieked and broke, tore into the brush, swept full force upon us. Fleur held to me and gripped my shirt. With one thunderstroke the trees surrounding Fleur’s cabin cracked off and fell away from us in a circle, pinning beneath their branches the roaring men, the horses. The limbs snapped steel saws, and rammed through wagon boxes. Twigs formed webs of wood, canopies laced over groans and struggles. Then the wind settled, curled back into the clouds, moved on, and we were left standing together in a landscape level to the lake and to the road.”
Fleur saws through the bases of all of the trees on her property. She, not the loggers, determines the fate of the trees. Operating in the narrative as both a human woman and a being in touch with supernatural forces, Fleur will not be moved without her consent. She brings the forest down on the loggers rather than let them bring “her” forest down one oak at a time. Fleur determines her own destiny within the parameters she can control. Though Nanapush narrates Fleur’s life as if she is merely a woman, and does not give credence to Eli’s belief that she consorts with the lake monster, or to the town’s gossip and lies about her, the reader knows that she functions as a supernatural being. Therefore, his observations that simply recount events offer even stronger proof of Fleur’s power.
“Your knees were scabbed from the punishment of scrubbing long sidewalks, and knobbed from kneeling hours on broomsticks. But your grin was bold as your mother’s, white with anger that vanished when you saw us waiting. You went up on your toes, and tried to walk, prim as you’d been taught. Halfway across, you could not contain yourself and sprang forward. Lulu. We gave against your rush like creaking oaks, held on, braced ourselves together in the fierce dry wind.”
After five years, Nanapush and Margaret get Lulu back home, out of the boarding school where she, and all of the children, were treated harshly. Lulu’s character, according to Nanapush’s description, is very like her mother’s. In addition, the same kind of nature metaphor is used for the family once Lulu returns: they are a family of tall oaks left after the ravages of the white government and the loggers have ended. They are the survivors because they hold on together.
By Louise Erdrich