Reader: Tiffany Klein

Respondent: Robert Hodson

“Dear John Wayne”

By Louise Erdrich

Unsettling America pg 54

Louise Erdrich (1954-  )

Biographical Information:  

Louise Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota to a Chippewa Indian mother and a German American father.  She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where both of her parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school.  She attended the first coeducational class at Dartmouth College in 1972 through the first Native American studies program.  At Dartmouth, she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, the program’s director.  After graduation, she became the editor for the Boston Indian Council Newspaper, The Circle.  In 1979, she earned a Masters degree in creative writing from John Hopkins University.  Afterwards, she returned to Dartmouth to become their writer-in-residence.  In 1982 she married Dorris, who she often collaborated with on her writing.  In 1982 she won the Nelson Algren Fiction award for her story, “The World’s Greatest Fisherman.”  The story was later published in her 1984 novel, Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.  She bases her Native American themed poetry and stories on her life and those of her family and ancestors.  After 15 years of marriage and 6 children, Erdrich and Dorris separated.  Dorris committed suicide in 1997.

Objectives:

Obj 1a: Involuntary participation—Native Americans did not choose to join the dominant culture….consequences of “choice” or “no choice” echo down the generations, particularly in terms of assimilation or separation. 

Obj 3b:  Loss and Survival—Native Americans defy the myth of the “vanishing Indian,” choosing to “survive,” sometimes in faith that the dominant culture will eventually destroy itself, and the forests and buffalo will return.  

Obj 4:  assimilation or resistance—i.e. do you fight or join the culture that oppressed you?

Term:

(From The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms pg 482)

Tone—The attitude of the author toward the reader or the subject matter of a literary work.

Interpretation:

The poem starts out with several Native Americans watching a John Wayne movie at the drive-in and ends with them feeling small and back in themselves once the movie is over.  Erdrich points out several things that symbolize endings such as SAC missiles (which indicate nuclear war and the destruction of the earth), death of the settlers, and the sign of the bear.  As Mary Arnold states in a previous class, the Hopi’s sign of the bear stands for the vision of the world’s end.  The poem refers to Objective 3b because there is hope that the dominant society will destroy itself.  The American Indians laugh at the movie’s idea that everything belongs to the dominant culture.  They return into their selves after the movie ends because they know the truth; Hollywood portrays the white man’s belief that Native Americans are barriers to progress and should be removed.  By their reaction and acknowledgement of Hollywood’s false portrayal, they seem to resist assimilation. 

Erdrich’s tone seems bitter.  She uses John Wayne as a symbol of the dominant society and yet describes his face as scarred and vengeful.  In the last stanza, she refers to the dominant culture as responsible for keeping the Native Americans down, “drunk, and running” so they will give up their land or anything else society needs.

Questions:

Why are the American Indians portrayed as columns of SAC missiles that kill the settlers when historically, it is the dominant culture that destroys Native Americans?

Why is John Wayne’s face described as larger than life and part of the earth/sky?

Why does Erdrich use Wayne and not some other popular western actor like Clint Eastwood or Roy Rogers?

What does Erdrich mean by “The heart is a strange wood inside of everything we see, burning, doubling, splitting out of its skin?”