The Shawl

“In those days, people lived widely scattered, along the shores and in the islands, even out on the plains. There were no roads then, just trails, though we had horses and wagons and, for the winter, sleds.”

This passage depicts life in Anishinaabeg communities prior to urbanization. This kind of rural, sparsely populated environment is a more culturally appropriate way of life for the Anishinaabeg. Erdrich explicitly shows the reader, through her discussions of violence, trauma, and alcoholism, that forced movement into towns and cities was not a positive change for Indigenous communities and, in addition to the conflict that Aanakwad brings to “The Shawl,” urbanization functions as another key threat to Anishinaabeg families.

“His chest was scorched with pains, and yet he pushed himself on. He’d never run so fast, so hard and furiously, but he was determined and he refused to believe that the increasing distance between him and the wagon was real. He kept going until his throat closed, he saw red and in the ice of the air his lungs shut. Then, as he fell onto the board-hard snow, he raised his head. He watched the back of the wagon and the tiny figures of his mother and sister disappear, and something failed in him. Something broke. At that moment he truly did not care if he was alive or dead.”

This quote speaks to the primary conflict in the story, Aanakwad’s abandonment of her family and the death of her nine-year-old daughter, and to the generational trauma that takes root in the family because of that event. Erdrich notes that something “broke” within the boy, a piece of figurative language that signals the depth of his sorrow and pain.

“In those years, the father would tell the boy, who had forgotten this part entirely, that at first when he talked about the shadows the father thought he’d been visited by manidoog. But then, as the boy described the shapes, his father had understood that they were not spirits.”

This passage illustrates Erdrich’s diction, specifically the code meshing of English and Anishinaabeg words. Erdrich does not explicitly define the word manidoog, which typically refers to a spirit or god in Indigenous culture, but she does contextually alert her readers to its meaning when she notes that the shapes were wolves and not spirits. Erdrich’s inclusion of this language is important in representing the multicultural influences in her own life and in the lives of the characters.

“She and her husband had argued right up until the last about the children., argued fiercely until the husband had finally given in. he turned his face to the wall, and did not move to see the daughter, whom he treasured, sit down beside her mother, wrapped in the plaid robe in the wagon bed.”

This quotation is part of Erdrich’s characterization of Aanakwad’s husband. It depicts the depth of his love for his daughter and the extreme grief he feels when Aanakwad takes her away. It also illustrates his willingness to sacrifice his own happiness for that of Aanakwad, which fits the selfless nature that the daughter also exemplifies, and which is evidence of the daughter’s potential self-sacrifice.

“For a time the boy had no understanding of what had happened. His father kept what he knew to himself, at least that first year, and when his son asked about his sister’s torn plaid shawl, and why it was kept in the house, his father said nothing. But he wept when the boy asked if his sister was cold.”

This passage is an early engagement with the theme of generational trauma. The father is initially so traumatized by what he understands to have happened to his daughter that he is unable to speak of it. Ultimately, however, he is not able to suppress the memory and, in telling the story over and over again, passes his trauma on to his son.

“It was only after his father had been weakened by the disease that he began to tell the story, far too often and always the same way: he told how when the wolves closed in, Aanakwad had thrown her daughter to them.”

This quote illustrates the first point of view that Erdrich uses. In this section of the story, the reader is led to believe that Aanakwad has deliberately thrown her daughter to the wolves. In the second section of the story, the narrator provides an alternate interpretation of these events. Telling the story “the same way” also establishes that despite the lack of concrete evidence of what happened to the daughter, the father made an assumption and never allowed himself to deviate from the worst possible scenario.

“When his father said those words, the boy went still. What had his sister felt? What had thrust through her heart? Had something broken inside her, too, as it had in him? Even then, he knew that this broken place inside him would not be mended, except by some terrible means.”

This passage further illustrates the Impact of Generational Trauma and foreshadows the boy’s future struggles with addiction and violence. The “terrible means” he refers to here are unhealthy and damaging coping mechanisms, specifically alcoholism and domestic abuse, which the boy will employ because he does not know how to healthily process his trauma.

“When I was little, my own father terrified us with his drinking. This was after we lost our mother, because before that the only time I was aware that he touched the ishkode waaboo was on an occasional weekend when they got home late, or sometimes during berry-picking gatherings when we went out to the bush and camped with others.”

This passage illustrates the profound effect that loss has on the members of this family. Aanakwad’s husband and son are both heartbroken at the loss of Aanakwad and her daughter, and they manage (or mismanage) the grief of that tragedy through unhealthy coping mechanisms. In this passage, the narrator’s father (Aanakwad’s son) is again plunged into despair by loss, this time of his wife. The narrator notes that prior to his mother’s death, his father had consumed alcohol only on social occasions. It is only after losing his wife that his drinking becomes addictive.

“Suddenly, he was my father again. And when I knelt down next to him, I was his son. I reached for the closest rag, and picked up this piece of blanket that my father always kept with him for some reason. And as I picked it up and wiped the blood off his face, I said to him, your nose is crooked again. He looked at me, steady and quizzical, as though he had never had a drink in his life, and I wiped his face again with that frayed piece of blanket.”

This passage illustrates the ability to heal from generational trauma. Erdrich depicts the beginning of the act of forgiveness, and the narrator’s use of the shawl to wipe blood from his father’s face illustrates its symbolic place within the story as both the embodiment of grief and the key to finally releasing those feelings of pain and trauma.

“First, I told him that keeping his sister’s shawl was wrong, because we never keep the clothing of the dead. Now’s the time to burn it, I said. Send it off to cloak her spirit. And he agreed.”

This passage marks the shawl’s final symbolic position within the story. Initially a symbol of both individual grief and generational trauma, the shawl becomes in this final section of the story a symbol of letting go, moving on, and healing.

“There was a time when the government moved everybody off the farthest reaches of the reservation, onto roads, into towns, into housing. It looked good at first, and then it all went south. Shortly afterward, it seemed that anyone who was someone was either drunk, killed, near suicide, or had just dusted himself. None of the old sort were left, it seemed—the old kind of people, the Gete-Anishinaabeg, who were kind beyond kindness and would do anything for others.”

This passage illustrates the damage done to Indigenous American communities by the governmental practice of moving Indigenous American people from reservations into towns and cities. It also depicts the way that this policy adversely impacted Anishinaabeg culture, for the loss of so many individuals to suicide and murder decimated the ranks of “old” Anishinaabeg, those who embodied a kind of kindness and goodness of spirit that used to characterize Anishinaabeg identity.

“Now, gradually, that term of despair has lifted somewhat and yielded up its survivors. But we still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, sorrows to handle in addition to our own, and cruelties lodged where we cannot forget them. We have the need to forget. We are always walking on oblivion’s edge.”

This passage addresses the need for healing in Anishinaabeg communities. Much in the same way that the narrator has held onto his grief, many tribal members find it difficult to forget past trauma. The narrator argues here that it is time to let all of that pain go and move on.

“There is something terrible about fighting your father. It came on suddenly, with the second blow—a frightful kind of joy. A power surged up from the center of me, and I danced at him, light and giddy fully of a heady rightness.”

This passage illustrates the way that violence is used as a motif in this story. Violence is part of the interpersonal dynamic of each generation of this family, from the death of the nine-year-old girl to the narrator and his father. This speaks both to trauma within the characters in this narrative and to broader issues within Indigenous American communities in the 20th century.