The report is presented by Wendy.
Present Barbara, Beth, Christine, Denise, Grace, Julie, Kathleen, Mariannick, Murielle, Pat, Rosie, Wendy
Louise Erdrich was born in 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her German American father, Ralph Erdrich, and her half-Ojibwe and half-French mother, Rita Gourneau, both taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school there. (In 1993 the school came under tribal control as the Circle of Nations Wahpeton Indian School.) Erdrich grew up surrounded by the rich oral storytelling traditions of her mother's Ojibwe heritage, visiting her grandparents on the Turtle Mountain reservation. Her father also encouraged her early passion for writing by paying her a nickel for every story she produced.
Her spiritual heritage—both Native American and Catholic— is an important influence in her writing.
I kept writing because I grew up as a Catholic. And…the one place you’re allowed to be emotional and to really talk about yourself is in the confessional. And in the darkness of the confessional, where you are safe, the priest is supposed to be a conduit just to God.…You begin to think, “Well, I have a sacred entity that is also able to receive these unknowable emotions.” And it begins to move outward. Eventually, I began to write about what was innermost.
Erdrich writes poetry as well as fiction, and she has published a number of poetry books along with numerous novels. She has won many prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.
Erdrich is also the owner of Birchbark Books, a bookstore in Minneapolis that specializes in selling books, art, and crafts by Native artists. The store is the setting for the haunted bookstore in The Sentence, in which Erdrich herself makes a cameo appearance. Erdrich also briefly worked with prisoners in North Dakota’s state penitentiary, and then with the Women’s Prison Book Project ere in Minnesota. She found that reading was one of the few activities afforded inmates, and sometimes the only way to escape the four walls or to connect with what’s going on outside.
One of the reasons Wendy chose the book was that it talks about a bookstore and books. The characters’ love of books and their vital role in personal development reminded her of another book we read, What You Are Looking For Is In The Library, by Michiko AOYAMA.
Wendy first asked whether people learnt anything about Native American culture from the book. People’s prior knowledge was varied. Denise was interested in the ceremonies mentioned in the book, although she would have liked more specifics. Julie, who has taught Native American literature in the USA, felt that the book could be a primer to Native American culture and history. It mentions many tribes and many historical moments. It evokes the colonial impact up to present day. There is a little on reservation life and the boarding school experience, but not a lot (unlike other books by Erdrich).
Pat was intrigued by the question of how the characters identified as Native American or not. There was the character Penstemon who thought about getting tattooed to show the percentages of tribal and European blood in her genetic makeup. Why does someone like Erdrich, whose heritage is 3/4 European and 1/4 Ojibwe claim Native American identity? The question is complex. For some tribes the percentage of Native American ancestry is 1/16. The obsession with blood quantum is really Euro-American. Julie insisted on the difference between Native American and Eurocentric mindsets. For Native tribes what counts can be being raised in culture or having just one ancestor from the past.
Christine felt that the culture was somewhat superficially mentioned, since there’s so much that the book touches on. Personally, she was fascinated by the body snatching episode that begins the book, and Tookie’s resulting prison experience. She felt that that was dealt with too quickly.
We agreed that the body snatching was a dramatic starting point. Why did Tookie do such a foolish thing? It was one of many stupid things that she did before discovering books. Was she on drugs? She explains that she had a crush on the woman who set her up. Reading between the lines Mariannick felt that Tookie loves her friend because she has no mother. She lacks a family.
Wendy then asked about the novel's attitude toward cultural appropriation. Is it a put-off for non-native readers. Flora was an Indian wannabe or a Pretendian. The bookstore workers are tired of receiving customers like her. As in the novel, Louise Erdrich has had customers looking for an Indian name for a pet, or claiming to have been an Indian in a former life, or boasting that their grandma was an Indian. In the novel there’s woman in blue who wants to share stories of her ancestor who helped the starving Indians (but wasn’t willing to give up the land to them). The same woman later drops off Indian bones collected by her ancestor. The novel shows how insensitive white people can be to Native American culture. We wondered whether the body snatching incident that starts the book isn’t an inversion of the history of grave robbing by American anthropologists. The Smithsonian and other museums collected many bodies, bones and sacred artefacts.
We thought about the title of the book, The Sentence, and how different meanings gather as the book develops. “sentence” is the first word Tookie looks up in the dictionary that is gifted to her when she is in jail. She’s trying to understand the 60 year sentence that the judge gives her. But the first definition of the word deals with its function as a grammatical unit. The dictionary gives her the example: “The door is open. Go! They were the most beautiful sentences ever written” (p. 24). So the book—the dictionary—carries a message of hope, a suggestion of a way to free herself.
Wendy asked what readers make of Tookie’s 60 year sentence? Is there a criticism of the judicial system? Christine confirmed the racial bias behind the sentence. The crime of smuggling crack cocaine would have a heavy mandatory minimum sentence. The law targets minorities—especially blacks—because they were predominantly the ones involved in the crack trade. The trade in regular cocaine is more a white domain, and the sentences tended to be much lighter.
The word “sentence” recurs through the novel. It’s in the title of the book within the book: The Sentence : An Indian Captivity Narrative. One of the bookstore workers, Asema, found the book which turned out to be important for her research; then Flora stole it, and a sentence within it kills her. Flora’s adopted daughter gives Tookie the book and she finds it so disturbing that she buries it. Some words in the book strike Tookie immediately: “A line popped out: Sentenced to be white.” (71-72). We wondered about the meaning of the line. After we discussed the question of narrative voice—how the narrator adopts the voice or point of view of various characters, especially of Tookie—we agreed that this sentence has special meaning for Tookie. Like the writer of the book (a Native American adopted, then abused and more or less enslaved by whites), Tookie has been robbed of her identity. She doesn’t live on the reservation where she might learn about her people’s culture, but she is sentenced to live in the city, in a concrete jungle. Her home with Pollux in the suburbs is a step toward more comfort and more contact with the natural world.
Most of all, Tookie suffers from the continuing problem of colonialism. In America, Canada, Australia, and other colonised places, natives were taught that only white culture counted as civilised or human. But Christine pointed out that for BOTH indigenous people AND for the colonisers, being white means being outside of humanity. Whiteness is a construction that involves white privilege and white responsibility—“the white man’s burden.” Assuming that one has a place in the “master race” necessitates losing one’s human kindness. Flora’s obsession with all things Indian could be a way to evade the guilt of being white.
The movement of book charts how Tookie comes to terms with her identity as Native American. Initially sceptical, she finishes by getting in touch with the spiritual world that Pollux is in tune with. She doesn’t want to wear the jingle dress herself—she’s not ready—but she offers it to Hetta, her adopted daughter. She does join in the dance at the protest, and so participates in a healing ritual designed to put right the world that went wrong with the murder of George Floyd and all the others.
We were all intrigued by the ghost story—the haunted bookstore. Erdrich gives us a new literary ghost story that perhaps conjures up other ghost stories and adds something to them. How does this novel fit in to our ghost lore? Why does Flora return as a ghost? Flora dies on All Souls Day—and the novel explains that it’s a time favourable for communication between worlds. In the Western tradition, ghosts appear when the time is out of joint (Hamlet). Or when there’s some wrong to put right (Hamlet and other revenge tragedies). Or to give advice to the living (Marley in A Christmas Carol). In settler narratives, ghosts can be the disappeared indigenous people angry about their lost lands.
This book is about native people being haunted by white colonialism and white settlerism. The Indian wannabe, Flora, doesn’t just want to act native. She ends up wanting to possess Tookie—to inhabit her—in the same way settlers wanted to possess the continent. She feels she is a chosen subject because she’s more porous, but also stronger than others. At the same time, Flora’s ghost wants both recognition of a debt and forgiveness for the crimes of her ancestors. Tookie’s relationship with her favourite most annoying customer is complex. Flora discovers that her ancestor—a white madam named Truax—was deeply complicit in exploiting, trafficking, and stripping away the identity of an Indigenous woman. We learn at the end that Tookie was given Flora’s name because Flora looked after her mother while she was pregnant and so saved Tookie from the damage that would be inflicted by an addict mother. By the end of the novel, Tookie reveals her real name to the reader: “My name is Lily Florabella Truax Beaupre, named after the woman who helped my mother, the woman who became my ghost” (360).
As Flora’s ghost refuses to leave, Tookie asks for help from the owner of the bookstore: Louise Erdrich herself. The author’s persona tells Tookie that what is haunting her could be a “rugaroo” that she describes as follows: “a wolf person who keeps coming back to life and who returns to certain places” (2021: 160). Is this a red herring or is there something to be gleaned from it? Kathleen looked up the symbolism of the rugaroo and found that its appearance is a symptom of danger or disruption in community.
Julie said that one of the themes or figures found in Native American literature is the trickster. Coyote is a trickster—both wise and destructive. There’s a trickster in the character of Laurent, who is Métis, and who claims an affinity with the rugaroo. He claims an arcane knowledge and writes in an old language that only he can understand. What are we to make of his wolfishness, foxiness? He’s a shapeshifter, “something-fuckingelse” (290). An animal/human mix is usually monstrous in European culture (the loup-garou or werewolf), whereas it can be positive in Indian culture. Laurent’s foxiness—his trickster persona—is useful to the community in the Minneapolis protests. “His face changed, and when I say that I mean visibly changed. For a blink, for a fraction of a moment, he was something else” (290). In the protests, he seems to be everywhere, helping Tookie and leaping onto a runaway truck to save the crowd. He has a positive influence on Tookie: “Maybe he wasn’t a demon. Maybe he was just someone who taught me who I am” (315). In the end Laurent is accepted into the family; he can be redeemed as a father.
The novel can be seen as a love letter to books and bookstores. Louise, the owner is excited when her bookstore is given ‘essential’ status in the pandemic: “books were important, like food, fuel, heat, garbage collection, snow shoveling, and booze” (215). If books can kill (Flora), conversely, how can they save lives? Wendy was “intrigued by this sentence early on: “Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters” (4). What does the novel have to say about “what ultimately matters”? Our group agreed that human contact—the interaction between mother and baby, husband and wife, the family in general—is something essential that can’t be realised in books. The family that Tookie belongs to in the course of the novel isn’t necessarily linked by blood. Aunts can become mothers. The bookstore is a kind of family too. Other human values come to mind: spirituality, ritual, love, belonging, touch. Tookie learns about the importance of all these things when Pollux when he becomes ill. Like the feathers that he patiently straightens over a warm light bulb to make her fan, Tookie changes in the course of the novel: “I knew the feathers actually were me—Tookie—straightened by warmth applied a thousand times” (231)
Confession is a Catholic practice that the characters integrate along with Native American rituals like the jingle dance, the blue door and the four directions. We talked about the significance of the confessional in the bookstore. Who is guilty? Who needs forgiveness? Flora has the “White Savior” complex—she wants gratitude. But for Tookie and Penstemon, Flora needs absolution (and perhaps Flora too senses this). She gets both thanks and forgiveness before she finally leaves off haunting the bookshop. Other characters also need reconciliation and forgiveness. Tookie has to forgive Pollux for arresting her. Hetta has to be forgiven for her previous bitchiness.
We talked about the way the novel integrates many things. Some of us thought it tried to do too much; others took pleasure in the abundance of subjects. In fact, the choice of the eventful year of 2019-20, was somewhat serendipitous. Erdrich explained in the interview with Ann Patchett that she’d been working on the book since 2014 and in 2019 she decided that she had to get it written and that she would use the coming year for the framework. Of course, 2019-2020 turned out to be an incredible year in Minneapolis. There was the Covid outbreak that hit Native Americans especially hard, the lockdown, the George Floyd killing and the ensuing protests. This lends drama and historical interest to the novel, but does it disperse the focus of the narrative or tie in with the central conflict? The group felt that the events underlined the central theme of caring for others. Also they highlight the continuing oppression of Native Americans and African Americans by the police and the state.
We considered how Tookie changed in the course of the novel. Julie explained that a common topos in Native American culture is a vision quest or journey. Tookie could be said to be on a vision quest. She is trying to come to terms with her place in the world. There is a moment when she’s in a kind of trance and her dreams are part of the narrative. Tookie has to deal with her heritage of trauma. She heals thanks to books, the bookshop, her community, Pollux and the family.
Wendy’s last question had to do with a review in The New Yorker. The reviewer wrote: “Whether due to affection for her creations or a desire to uplift, Erdrich seems unwilling to raise more than the spectre of true hardship.” The characters’ “happy endings” are “a register that jostles uncomfortably—at times, fatally—against the fraught subject matter in The Sentence.”
What did the group think? Christine was also bothered by happy ending. She would have preferred a tragedy. Some people thought the novel was going to end badly. They were afraid that Pollux would die. And he was a favourite character for some. Christine thought that Cookie’s marriage with Pollux was a surprise. We discussed the possible motivation for an event that admittedly seemed sudden. Wendy said that she understood that Tookie might be attracted to the man that was her “Potawatomi conscience.” He practices the Native American ceremonies and values that she has missed out on. She’s physically attracted to him too. Most of us didn’t have a problem with the happy ending or with happy endings in general. Novels can give us the satisfying conclusions that life doesn’t grant.
