The U.S. Government, the Anishinaabeg, and the Consequences of Interference Theme Analysis

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 this period of despair was when his mother died and his father began drinking and became violent. Yet while the efforts of the U.S. government to control the Anishinaabeg sits at the heart of the story in “The Shawl,” it isn’t the only example of such efforts at control. The conflict Erdrich depicts in the story is not just one between an oppressed people and the government, but also a more general one between what she frames as a state of untamed but natural balance in conflict with an artificial effort to control and organize.

Through the story of what happened when the government pushed the Anishinaabeg into towns, Erdrich demonstrates the negative consequences of U.S. governmental interference in the culture and lives of the Anishinaabeg. The story’s narrator describes how the Anishinaabeg used to live spread out on the reservation. This is indicated in Aanakwad’s story too—the uncle arrives to fetch Aanakwad in a wagon with sled runners, because at that time, “people lived widely scattered along the shores and in the islands, even out on the plains.” When the U.S. government disrupted this way of life and “moved everybody … onto roads, into towns, into housing … it all went sour.” This effort by the government was a kind of interference in traditional Anishinaabeg culture and society, such that the members of that culture lost their sense of self and “anyone who was someone was either drunk, killed, near suicide, or had just dusted himself.” Though the narrator describes the depths of that “term of despair” as having now passed, the negative impact of the governmental interference extends beyond just the people who were moved. The narrator notes that the survivors and their descendants “still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, sorrows to handle in addition to our own, and the cruelties lodged where we cannot forget them.” The disruption to the Anishinaabeg people is not just a brief interruption but rather a crisis with far-reaching and radiating effects, a fact that underscores Erdrich’s critique of interference.

The impact of interference on the Anishinaabeg way of life is also clear in the way their relationship with their land and its animals changes. In Aanakwad’s story, the wolves attack the cart carrying Aanakwad, her daughter, and her infant because, at that time, “guns had taken all [the wolves] food for furs and hides to sell.” This brief explanation is loaded with a history of contact between Native Americans and Europeans. The Anishinaabeg people came into possession of guns through European merchants and settlers. They hunted small animals (the wolves’ prey) in order to participate in the fur trade, an economy imposed on them by the Europeans who invaded their land. The fact that the result of this contact was at odds with an “old agreement between [wolves] and the first humans” implies that things had once been different for the Anishinaabeg people, that they had once had a harmonious and balanced relationship with these wolves who are now hunting them. This balance was disrupted by outside interference, specifically by the European invaders who eventually founded the United States. This means that there is a direct line between the wolves’ hunting of Anishinaabeg people and the despair brought on by the government forcing the people to move into towns.

When the narrator describes the government effort to move the Anishinaabeg into towns, he specifies that they are moved “onto roads”—something they did not have in the past when Aanakwad’s story took place. A road (as opposed to trails traversable by wagons and sleds) is presumably built according to an organizing logic that connects a place (in this case the reservation) to a larger network of roads, making it accessible and comprehensible for outsiders. From the perspective of the merchants, settlers, or the U.S. government, this kind of interference may have looked like necessary, if violent, progress—giving the Native Americans technology in the form of guns, sometimes letting them participate in the dominant European economy, later forcing them to organize their living situations according to a logic the government recognized as valid. But through the destructive impacts that these changes had on the Anishinaabeg people, Erdrich shows how these imposed changes were in fact incredibly damaging.

Though Erdrich illustrates the long-term disruptions caused by such impositions, she also seems to indicate that it is possible to restore the way of life that once existed. She illustrates this possibility with the story of the father’s nose. The narrator says that his father’s nose is perfectly straight, but this straightness is a result of it having been punched out of place during a drunken fight, and then punched back into alignment during another drunken fight. In other words, his nose may look straight from the outside, but it is like that because of his awful personal state. In the story’s climax, when the narrator and his father fight, the narrator’s blows make his father’s nose crooked again. This, however, is not represented as a bad outcome. Rather, the re-breaking of the father’s nose comes at the moment when the father suddenly becomes sober and then reveals for the first time the story of his dead sister, which begins the healing in the narrator’s family. The story presents the restoration of what looks like disorder as the solution to the disease of artificially imposed order.