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The Shawl
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Shawl, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inheritance, Reinterpretation, and Personal and Cultural Legacy
Louise Erdrich’s story “The Shawl” is a story about inheritance—of stories, material items, and traumas. The narrator begins by sharing an anecdote told among the local Anishinaabeg (a name that refers to several related Native American tribes that live around the Great Lakes region of the U.S. and Canada) about a mother named Aanakwad, who leaves her husband for a different man, taking her nine-year-old daughter and infant with her while leaving her…
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Communal Storytelling
The narrator of the “The Shawl” begins his story by sharing another story told “among the Anishinaabeg” about a woman named Aanakwad. This tale, in addition to being well known within the area where the narrator lives, is important for the narrator’s grandfather (Aanakwad’s husband), his father, and the narrator himself, making it clear that, for Erdrich, storytelling is a powerful force. As different stories are told throughout “The Shawl,” it becomes…
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The U.S. Government, the Anishinaabeg, and the Consequences of Interference
One of the underlying narratives in “The Shawl” is that of the Anishinaabeg people and their relation to the U.S. government. Louise Erdrich’s narrator describes the profoundly negative effects of the government’s effort to force a specific way of life onto his people by moving them from their traditional living situations into towns, which led to alcoholism, suicide, and general despair among the Anishinaabeg. For the narrator, these consequences were personal, as it was during…
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