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Native American Issues in Novels

Louise Erdrich in her novel Love Medicine and James Welch in his Winter in the Blood each address issues of gender and cultural roles among contemporary Native American populations. Both authors indicate how the Native American of today has been forcibly separated from the land and thought of his ancestors and what a devastating effect this has had on Native American society. In both cases, the writers speaks from a position inside that society. Erdrich shows more concern for feminist issues, as might be expected from a writer of her gender, while both writers express a sense of continuing loss in the Native American community and lay blame for this with the federal government and the institutions it has created for the administration and control of Indian affairs, with the land embodying both the traditions of the past and the tenuous hold the tribes have on the present.

Louise Erdrich's novel is actually a series of short stories held together by a common setting, common characters, and certain shared themes. The work is essentially an attempt to redress the balance as far as how we view the American Indian and his place in the modern world and to show how the Native American has been exploited and what the consequences have been. It would be difficult to call it a feminist novel, though certainly there are some concerns in the book about women and their plight within the world of the Native American reservation, and there is also some indication of a sense of the development of the role of women. However, the book is concerned with the Native American of both sexes, though it recognizes that women hold a more prominent place in Native American society than they do in the larger white society and that women have been especially affected by the treatment accorded all native Americans by the government and by society.

Erdrich's concerns are clearly with the plight of the Indian and not with feminist concerns as such. H...

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Native American Issues in Novels. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:30, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1681313.html