Tracing the Chiasmic Tracks of Louise Erdrich’s Omakayas and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Abstract

Native American writer Louise Erdrich’s recent series for young readers, The Birchbark House (2002), The Game of Silence (2006), and The Porcupine Year (2008), follow the footsteps of a young Ojibwe girl, Omakayas, from age 7 to 12 during the mid-19th Century, as she and her family are dislocated and forced westward by white settlers. This paper reads Erdrich’s relatively new “Birchbark House series” against Laura Ingalls Wilder’s widely popularized and canonized “Little House series” in order to critique the myth of the frontier that presents Manifest Destiny as an unbroken linear movement of progress into an empty virgin land. Rather than focus on comparison of the two series, this paper contextualizes Erdrich’s series with John Gast’s 1872 painting, American Progress, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical series as well as the televised version of Wilder’s books (Little House on the Prairie, NBC,1974-1983), landed television Westerns such as Bonanza, and contemporary popular culture texts such as AMC’s 2006 miniseries, Broken Trail to show that Erdrich is not simply presenting a revisionist version of Wilder’s series but is participating in a larger ongoing dialogue about historical narratives and the construction of American identity through literature and culture. Further, this paper argues that Erdrich’s series simultaneously reveals gaps in national narratives and sutures narrative breaks by participating in intertextual conversations that restore diverse and multilayered narratives hitherto silenced and erased from the American master narrative, resurrecting the American West as the complex, global and glocal convergence space it historically was from the simplified and mummified myth of a clearcut frontier dependent upon the assumption of progress as unilateral westward movement and conceptualization of the American West as an empty virgin land.