I distinctly remember the conversation. I was a college freshman, talking to an older student about our respective faith heritages. This school, I should explain, was rigidly conservative, often to the point of paranoia, and students talked about their faith all the time. It was what might today be called virtue signaling and could even function as a coded flirtation. I was flirting, I suppose, trying to show off how exotic and different I was, when I told him that I wasn’t just Catholic (everyone there was Catholic); I was Jewish as well.
He looked at me in pity, incredulity. “You can’t be both,” he said.
We argued for about half an hour, and I grew increasingly irate at this man for daring to define me, to tell me what I was and what I was not. I am Jewish on my mother’s side and that’s the side that counts, for the Jewish tradition. And while my family had grazed about on various religious pastures, from white Anglicanism to Black Pentecostalism, the constant all along had been the Jewish rituals we kept. I would never forget, either, the first time I found out about Hitler and the Nazis. It was me they wanted to kill. That wasn’t something I could just carve out of my identity.
But I was talking to a Catholic male, and it never occurred to him that he didn’t have the right to define me, even against my own experience.
I suppose it’s a power thing, this desire to draw stark lines between one religion and the next, but even if creeds can be easily defined, people can’t. The authorities can tell us “you must believe X” or “you can’t be both A and B”—but we defy them, simply by being human.
So I was fascinated to discover the novels of Louise Erdrich, who writes from one of those liminal places the authorities tell us aren’t supposed to exist. Her mother was Chippewa, her father a Catholic of German descent, and the sense of magic and myth in her work draws on both parts of this dual inheritance.
I don’t want to give the impression that this is an easy alliance. If Erdrich succeeds in blending and overlapping these influences, it’s not because they go nicely together—after all, Catholic proselytizing was often a form of cultural obliteration—but because she’s being truthful about the unique position in which her characters are located, poised between these two experiences. To those who would say you can’t be both, her answer is: But there they are, being both.
While Erdrich is widely regarded for her intricate portrayal of Native American characters and culture, she is rarely recognized, at least by Catholics, as a Catholic writer. I don’t think this is a bad thing. There’s something limiting in the idea of being a “Catholic writer,” anyway, and Erdrich is anything but limited. And we’ve had plenty of Catholic writers already. Plenty of overtly Catholic stories, overtly Catholic characters.
Native American characters, by contrast, end up relegated to story sidelines or reduced to stereotype—even by white writers who mean well. This is not surprising. In contrast to Roman Catholicism, which is visible and powerful in American society and unfortunately often complicit in imperialist violence, Native cultures are overwritten, pushed aside, or at best lumped together into one amorphous mass. So white Americans easily ignore the diversity of these cultures, unaware of how variegated they are. Give them a flat stereotype of a Native character, viewed through a colonizer’s eye, and they’ll accept it as real.
The rage with which white Americans respond to the truth about the legacy of “heroes” such as Christopher Columbus is proof of this. They have their own preferred story already, the story told by the conquerors. So simply portraying Native characters as complex and internally conflicted ends up looking like an act of subversion.
Erdrich reminds us that even in labeling a culture as “Native,” as I am doing here, we force it into an artificial homogeneity. In an interview with Amy Bacon in Modern American Poetry, Erdrich states that what she writes is not Native literature but tribal literature: “Ojibwe literature is very different from Lakota, or Zuni, or Santa Clara Pueblo, or Ho-Chunk, or Mesquakie literature. Each is based in an extremely specific tradition, history, religion, worldview,” she says.
It’s likely that the average white Catholic reader has heard of maybe two of these tribes, at most. But these are the names of the people who were here first, long before the European interlopers arrived to claim and rename their places.
The history of this continent is the history of appropriated territories, boundaries redrawn. There’s a kind of territory that can’t so easily be raided, though, and that’s the terrain of myth, which Erdrich has marked out for her magic—the magic that succeeds in creating epic out of the shattered pieces of a culture fighting to survive. Though complete in themselves, her novels are also puzzle pieces which together form the epic story of a people. The same characters flicker on the edges or stride across the center of many novels, sometimes over generations, interwoven stories, stories going back through time and tradition.
If there is a central character in the epic it is not a man, as in the European epics, but a woman, the enigmatic Fleur Pillager, twice drowned but more alive than anyone around her. Fleur is rumored to have dark powers: “She can think about you hard enough to stop your heart,” Erdrich writes.
In the novel Tracks, Fleur is in her youth and in the throes of giving birth is nearly mauled by a bear that bursts into her cabin. Echoes of the woman of Revelation, crying out in labor, assailed by a beast? The lines are blurred. But it would be a mistake to call Fleur an avatar of Mary, because Fleur is Fleur and Mary is Mary. And the Virgin is also powerful. A miraculous statue weeps tears that freeze into chunks of eyes, in sympathy for a young girl abused by an older man, sympathy because she too had “experienced a loss more ruthless than we can imagine . . . known in the brain and known in the flesh and planted like dirt.” Women are hammered by men, used by men, used even by gods, but are not emptied of their power, especially this power of sympathy for one another.
Fleur’s long thread of story, though, is not about sex or men. It’s about her struggle to hold onto her land. And in a way, this is the overarching theme of this ongoing epic.
Because the tribes are losing their land—in the novels as in real life, today. Sometimes it’s a pipeline; other times it’s a bingo palace. And with the loss of this land, the identity of an entire people is at stake. What does it mean, after all, to own a thing? In The Bingo Palace, the rich have the legal right to seize the land for their own gain, but there is a deeper kind of possession, an inheritance inscribed in the flesh: “The blood draws us back, as if it runs through a vein of earth.”
When we understand this, we understand just how fictive our western imperialist concepts are. But even as we enthuse about this more vital, this “tribal” understanding of ownership, we run up against the danger of a kind of cultural tourism. As though the point of the story were our own voyeuristic enjoyment of dreamcatchers and magic powders.
Erdrich is aware of this, I think. At any rate, her work defies this imperialist impulse to get off on the “native” or “exotic.” Her characters won’t let you. Try to decenter them, and the story remains closed to you. Fleur Pillager is not there for our own enjoyment of a spectacle. There’s magical realism, but not because Erdrich is raiding her own maternal traditions for the weird and the strange, to parade before the viewer. It’s more a case of sometimes needing to break a few rules, for the truth to be told.
One rule that is broken is the rule about those stark dividing lines between one religion and the next. So maybe you can’t be both Catholic and Native, that you always need to renounce one thing to be another. So, in A Plague of Doves, when the wild white birds descend, everywhere, spoiling the crops, the priest leads all his people, both Indians and white residents, across the fields, chanting Hail Marys to scare the doves away. A young man is attacked by the doves, which peck and pierce his forehead and nearly tear his ear off. When he opens his eyes a young woman in white stands over him, washing the blood away with her white sash:
…the boy shaken, frowning; the girl in white kneeling over him with the sash of her dress gracefully clutched in her hand; then pressing the cloth to the wound on his head, stanching the flow of blood. More important, I imagined their dark, mutual gaze. The Holy Spirit hovered between them. Her sash reddened. His blood defied gravity and flowed up her arm.
As a Catholic reading this passage, I suddenly find myself a voyeur not of another culture, but of my own. Who knew that being Catholic could be so strange? That the Holy Spirit might peck you in the face and tear your ear off, that a miracle might set blood flowing upwards?
Maybe in learning to honor the beliefs of the other, we are led back to the point of being able to honoring our own. Perhaps we have to step away from our traditions and let them become strange again, relinquish them, cease to hold them with such insistent control.
So maybe, paradoxically, the only reason I have been able to remain Catholic—in spite of our problematic history, our patriarchal violations, our homophobia; in spite of how boring and awful so many Catholics are—is that I’ve been allowed to remain in such a liminal realm myself, balanced between two religious traditions. Both of which, honestly, are problematic. Judaism has its own legacy of infamy and so do the tribal cultures Erdrich depicts. She doesn’t romanticize her characters for the voyeuristic tourist seeking to use the Other only as a way out of his tired, dull self.
Critics tend to focus on the “conflict” between the two different religions Erdrich portrays, but I find that conflict isn’t quite the right word. The interaction is more complex than this.
Erdrich’s account of this resonates with me:
There is an immense and contradictory sorrow and love at the heart of this entire subject. Missionary work is essentially tragic. Those who enter the field from the religious side often do so out of love, and out of love they destroy the essence of the people they love. Of course, there are many sorts of priests and nuns—those who despise their converts included. My grandfather believed in the power of the traditional Ojibwe religion, and he also attended Catholic Mass. The priests where he lived (Turtle Mountain) were at the time amenable to a syncretic belief system. There is no tension in my own life regarding the two—I accept the Catholicism of many in my family. Ojibwe traditional practices are more meaningful to me, but I am not deeply religious anyway. That is to say, I do not have an assured faith. I am full of doubt. But even those who doubt can practice a faith, and can pray, and can try to act out of a tradition of kindness and love. My own emphasis is on how religion helps in this world and not how it might improve our standing in the next. (Interview in Modern American Poetry)
However, I want to resist making too much of the idea that Erdrich is important as a Catholic writer because she helps us find Catholicism more interesting. Yes, she does—at least in my case. I am more willing to say a Hail Mary in a field if I think it might have magical powers to drive away plagues. But this could easily be end up as just another imperialist raid on tribal peoples. The point is not “read these novels, and they’ll help your faith.” It never is.
All the same, if we fail to own her, we’re in serious trouble. And not because we’ve denied her some needed apotheosis in the curricula of the moribund Catholic liberal arts world. We’re in trouble because we’ve lost the ability to open ourselves to the stranger even safely within the pages of a book. Because we’re still just colonizers. Still slapping on labels. Still drawing those stark black lines.
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