Parenthood, Foster Families, and Coming of Age Theme Analysis

The Round House takes place on a reservation teeming with overlapping family connections, connections that are even more important to the characters because of the small size of the Chippewa community and its strong national identity. Although the families in The Round House are well established, many of these families are not nuclear, and some are not even genetically linked. On the reservation, the reader encounters a plethora of different kinds of families whose dynamics shift as children enter adulthood and as families endure life’s various challenges and traumas.

Ever-evolving, not-necessarily-nuclear families seem to be the norm on the reservation: Zack’s mother is divorced and lives with his stepfather, Angus lives with his aunt and his many cousins, Mooshum lives with Clemence and Edward, and Whitey and Sonja are partnered but not legally married. In this context, the Coutts household—Joe and his parents Geraldine and Bazil—seems like an anomaly. Joe’s family is “the perfect family … loving, rich by reservation standards, stable.” This stability dissipates, however, in the aftermath of Geraldine’s violent rape, when the family dynamic is upended. Geraldine becomes unable to fulfill many of the tasks that Joe associates with attentive motherhood, and Bazil is so preoccupied with helping Geraldine heal and bringing her attacker to justice that he stops paying as much attention to Joe. Joe feels that Geraldine is now “someone different from the before-mother,” and he suddenly finds himself trying to take care of the parents who always took care of him.

Although Joe finds himself without parental oversight, the fluid family structure on the reservation seems practically designed to absorb Joe when he feels emotionally orphaned. Whereas in another community Joe’s lack of parental guidance might be more conspicuous, other adults in the reservation community intuitively know to take care of him. Sonja states that she feels like Joe is her son, and she and Whitey take care of Joe by hiring him, making him sandwiches, giving him advice, and letting him sleep over. The Lafournais family brings Joe with their family to the annual summer powwow. Many other adults on the reservation have open-door policies for Joe and his young crew, feeding them when they drop by unannounced and trying to keep them out of trouble. Although Joe feels that he loses his own parents that summer, Joe’s ties to the community ensure that he is cared for.

The way the Chippewa community reacts to Joe’s parents’ absence reflects a larger trend of fostering in Chippewa culture. Mooshum recounts how his own family, who were Métis (of mixed Native and French origin), were taken into the reservation after a military conflict in Canada displaced them. Mooshum’s family was welcomed “by an unusually kind-hearted chief who told the US government that maybe it threw away its half-breed children…but that the Indians would take these children into their hearts.” In this quote, the chief imagines the tribe as adoptive parents of people cast out of white society, suggesting that, while European-American culture has a narrower definition of who belongs to its “family” and who does not, the Chippewa community welcomes orphans of all sorts and makes families out of all kinds of disparate people.

This inclination towards adoptive and makeshift families is also is reflected in Linda Lark’s story, as Linda was raised in a Chippewa family on the reservation after she was abandoned by her white parents due to a birth defect. Betty’s role as Linda’s true mother shows how parenthood is not defined by blood, but rather by choosing to play a certain parental role in someone else’s life.

Although this familial flexibility is obviously extremely helpful for people like Linda and Joe, Erdrich does imply that this fluidity can be destabilizing. Because of the flexible roles that community members play in their families, Joe soon finds himself in an unexpectedly adult position in his household. He takes on a parental role, bringing his mother food and reading to her to help her fall asleep. Though Joe loves his mother and is happy to help her, he also seems unnerved by this sudden role reversal, taking an increased interest in adult activities in his social life to blow off steam. In fact, his drinking progresses from an occasional beer with his friends to the drunk driving incident that kills Cappy. Though these poor choices could certainly be attributed to Joe’s young age, they also seem to be a consequence of him being forced to cope with a situation that is more stressful than he, as a thirteen-year-old, is equipped for.

Later, as Joe is weighed down by the emotional burden of having killed Linden Lark, he watches his parents interact at the dinner table, feeling “like [he] was the grown-up and the two of them…were the oblivious children.” In alleviating his parents’ suffering, Joe has come into his own as an adult. Because of that process, however, Joe also bears the pain of adult responsibility very early in life, which makes him feel alienated from the people he loves. Joe’s experience of coming-of-age extremely quickly suggests the downside of flexible families, as Joe’s topsy-turvy family situation causes him to grow up much too fast.