It reveals an author who believed - as many wanted to - that some seismic shift in race relations could not help but be underway. Erdrich’s treatment of these moments reads as undigested. But then 2020 happened, swelling up the book’s back half with scenes inspired by the pandemic, from its most mundane, panic-shopping details to its twin inflection point: the Black Lives Matter protests of last summer.
The first half of the novel is signature Erdrich and then some: righteously funny, magically eclectic, and refreshing in its moral clarity. The Sentence begins in pre-pandemic days, with the story of a Chippewa bookseller named Tookie who is being haunted by the ghost of a recently deceased customer: Flora, a white woman whom Tookie calls a “wannabee,” and who toted around a black-and-white photograph of an allegedly Native American ancestor for so long that she lost herself in an “earnest, unaccountable, persistent, self-obliterating delusion.” This is a type that Erdrich briefly and incisively skewered in her 2020 masterpiece The Night Watchman, and the prospect that we would get her fleshed-out take on the white psychodrama of racial forgery - couched within a ghost story, and just in time for spooky season - was too exciting to be believed. You could read this immediacy as an act of defiance. So am I out of line for finding the book too current, for wishing it had put some distance between itself and the events of the last year? This society-wide denial that indigeneity is an active living thing is what animates my anxiety as I read Louise Erdrich’s novel The Sentence, the setting of which is a Native American bookstore in a Minneapolis reeling from the pandemic and the murder of local resident George Floyd. As the essayist Richard Rodriguez put it in Days of Obligation, “Indians must be ghosts,” for “Indians represented permanence and continuity to Americans who were determined to call this country new.” It’s not uncommon for Americans to claim Indigenous ancestry, often with no more evidence than a great-great-grandparent with “high cheekbones” - an epidemic of self-identification that some Indigenous scholars have called “ Cherokee syndrome.” Time and distance are key here: They allow for the distinction between native and settler to be collapsed, while preserving as much racial purity as possible.
In the 1960s, countercultural movements adopted Native American dress and customs like peyote as markers of pre-industrial, pre-urbane simplicity. In horror movies, the trope of the Indian burial ground is deployed as a threat to the fantasy of white suburban innocence. Save some recent wins, like the Hulu series Reservation Dogs, Indigenous people have more often appeared in the American imaginary as relics of a conveniently distant past. popular culture could assume Native Americans were extinct. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photo by PublisherĪ casual consumer of U.S.
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