Four—
What If Your Mother Never Meant to?
The Novels of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

No matter how we strain to decipher the sound it never quite makes sense, never relieves our certainty or our suspicion that there is more to be told, more than we know, more than can be caught in the sieve of our thinking.
—Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

Following in the footsteps of her father and her paternal grandmother, Meridian Hill taps into the power of Native American traditions when she has her first ecstatic out-of-body experience in the Serpent Mound, an ancient Cherokee burial ground. Mr. Hill is obsessed not with the collective trauma of his own enslaved ancestors but with the injustice done by Euroamerican conquest and settlement to the people who already inhabited the New World. As Meridian discovers through a dream, his outrage is a legacy that she carries with her into the civil rights movement. The rarely explored connection between African Americans and Native Americans as both victims and survivors of American history, only alluded to in Walker's novel, becomes more apparent when we consider the crisis of motherhood in both subcultures.

A familiar image of the Native American mother appears in the photograph that young Meridian sees on the wall of her father's shed, "a frozen Indian child (whose mother lay beside her in a bloody heap)" (Meridian, 53). Interrupted as she reaches out to touch the photograph, Meridian runs away from both the sight of her father's tears and their cause: the history of murdered Native American mothers and the children they cannot protect and nurture. The Native American mother, in Meridian as in most discourses, remains in parentheses. But we can revisit that photograph and remove the parentheses by turning to the recent fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, where women very

much like Meridian and her foremothers—women who lose or surrender their children—abound. Many of these Native American mothers are only a little more clearly and fully seen than the mother in Mr. Hill's photograph, but, read in light of my project as a whole, they confirm and extend what Meridian suggests about the function and meaning of the mother without child.

The Pocahontas Perplex

That women mother in a variety of societies is not as significant as the value attached to mothering in these societies. The distinction between the act of mothering and the status attached to it is a very important one—one that needs to be made and analyzed contextually.
—Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses"

Recent scholarship by and about women of Native American heritage suggests that their place in what was once a large number of societies has been misunderstood by European colonists and their descendants. Rayna Green proposes that in commonly accepted accounts of Native American women over the course of the last five hundred years, women have not been forgotten but remembered in selective and damaging ways that add up to what she calls "the Pocahontas perplex: Indian women have to be exotic, wild, collaborationist, crazy, or 'white' to qualify for white attention." In the earliest period of contact, according to Green, "distant princesses were acceptable, but matriarchal, matrifocal, and matrilineal societies were neither acceptable nor comprehensible to members of European patriarchies."^[1] More recently, Green observes, studies have tended to be interested less in the romance and more in the pathology of Native American women, seen as emblems of a dying culture.

Paula Gunn Allen has insisted that although the power of women in most gynocratic precontact cultures was rooted in their bodily reproductive function, motherhood was also understood in many Native American tribes as a spiritual and social condition separable from biological identity or sexual behavior—like the "nonprocreative motherhood" we see in Rule's fiction or in Meridian's "Othermothering"—and associated with intellectual and verbal powers, with thinking and

creativity. "The status of mother was so high that in some cultures Mother or its analog, Matron, was the highest office to which a man or woman could aspire," Allen claims. Women who did not have children were not excluded from power but "had other ways to experience Spirit instruction and stabilization, to exercise power, and to be mothers."^[2] They were also embedded in cultures where, traditionally, care and responsibility for children was dispersed and collective, and so again the link between biological procreation and mothering work was looser. Among the Crow, Brooke Medicine Eagle notes, "There is a beautiful and very functional tradition. When a person has no children, then all the children are their children."^[3]

Late-twentieth-century feminism, Allen and others have suggested, needs to recognize its connection with and roots in the gynocratic tribes and principles of precontact cultures. As Kate Shanley puts it, the nuclear family and the "American lifestyle" that white middle-class women are fighting against today has not been adopted by many Native American communities. In fact, she argues, "In many ways, mainstream feminists now are striving to redefine family and community in a way that Indian women have long known."^[4] So, too, Beth Brant suggests that while Native American women have been ignored by mainstream feminists, they have "for centuries" been doing what feminists do:

We are angry at a so-called "women's movement" that always seems to forget we exist. Except in romantic fantasies of earth mother, or equally romantic and dangerous fantasies about Indian-woman-asvictim. Women lament our lack of participation in feminist events, yet we are either referred to as etceteras in the naming of women of color, or simply not referred to at all. We are not victims . We are organizers, we are freedom fighters, we are feminists, we are healers. This is not anything new. For centuries it has been so.^[5]

Just as African American women scholars have pointed to the inappropriateness of judging black motherhood by white models, writers like Allen, Shanley, and Brant suggest that Native American women don't need to be liberated because they have not been oppressed in the same way that Euroamerican women have. We will want to be cautious about assuming that Native American mothers feel the need to be relieved of either the burdens of child care or the dominant myths of motherhood in order to develop the kind of autonomous selfhood or freedom from the oppressions of femininity that mainstream Euroamerican culture—along with many of its feminist critics—valorizes.^[6]

Arguments emphasizing the ongoing, culturally specific presence and importance of Native American mothers and childrearing traditions may counter the tendency to reify, romanticize, and possibly overstate the case of the vanishing American Indian, male or female. At the same time, they do not mitigate but instead deepen the enormity of an historical reality: despite the spiritual power and communal face of motherhood in indigenous myths and norms, despite the social and political status of women in contemporary tribal affairs, generations of mothers descended from and in some cases still participating in Native American societies have had their children taken from them, along with all the other things they need and value. As lesbians have been denied legal custody of their children, as slave mothers watched theirs sold by their owners, so too Native American mothers have lost children to disease, to boarding school, and to adoption, so that here again the figure of the mother without child is more likely to represent the historical norm rather than the exception. And again the problem goes beyond the pathos of individual losses to systemic injustices that persist into the present time. As Louis Owens points out, "On reservations today, more than 90 percent of Native American children up for adoption are adopted into non-Indian families, an institutionalized 'mainstreaming' of Indian children into Euroamerica that results in widespread loss of cultural identity as well as a feeling by Indian people that their children are being systematically stolen away."^[7] Patricia Hill Collins, seeing this as one dimension of the widespread crisis of maternal empowerment for women of color, also argues that "physical or psychological separation of mothers and children designed to disempower racial ethnic individuals forms the basis of a systematic effort to disempower their communities."^[8]

Until very recently, an increasingly recognized and growing body of contemporary fiction written by and about various Native American people has focused on the traumatic history of deculturation in which the mother appears as victim of the colonizer's efforts to disempower native cultures. Like most scholarly approaches, these novels exemplify Green's "Pocahontas perplex" in their obsession with the painful pathology of absent mothers and lost or orphaned children in twentiethcentury Native American life.^[9] In many versions of the same story, the mother stands for a lost past of harmony with nature and tribal wholeness. Native Americans are abandoned by the Mother Earth who once protected them, and their children are seen, as in the final dream vision

of James Welch's novel, Fools Crow, standing alone, without mothers or fathers, outside a circle of happy white children. In other novels of the so-called Native American Renaissance, the image varies only to admit a more complicated narrative about broken homes, homeless men, lost children, and the dead mother or absent maternal function.

Much of the fiction written as recently as the mid-eighties contains two specific versions of the figure of the Native American mother without child. In the first version, she is a secondary female character who would mother if she could, but either her biological children (usually male) are killed by forces associated with white domination or she has lost most or all of her "native" maternal powers, including her childbearing capacity. In Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Tayo's surrogate mother, Auntie, is one good example of this kind of mother; in Welch's The Death of Jim Loney, Jim's successful, childless sister Kate, in very different ways, might be another. A second version of the mother without child overlaps the first in presuming the fundamental absence of maternal function. In several of these latter instances, a birth mother is either dead or as good as dead, missing from the main narrative and the waking lives of its characters yet often appearing as a nameless figure who intrudes, like unassimilated trauma, in dream or flashback. She is consciously remembered only as a crazed victim, who has abandoned her child or children as well as her culture. She may have done so in a desperate attempt to save her victimized self or even her child, but we cannot know this, because her story is as lost to memory and verbal representation as she is lost to her family and her people. Jim Loney's absent, probably institutionalized mother, Eleta, and the dead, unnamed woman who bore and then abandoned Tayo are just two of the many examples that might be cited.

Judith Antell has discussed in detail this absence of "the loving Indian mother as a significant literary character" in novels where all the heroes lack mothers, suffer deeply, and may even die from endemic maternal deprivation.^[10] As Antell points out, the figure Jim Loney meets in a central dream vision without knowing who she is might speak for these elusive Native American mothers when she describes herself as "a Mother who is no longer a mother."^[11] To account for what she sees as this "truly disturbing figure" of the dead or otherwise absent mother, Antell offers interesting suggestions. As she sees it, Native American men as fictive protagonists may serve as more "tragic" figures than their

female counterparts because their traditional function has been more completely destroyed. They represent more clearly the defeat of what "white America" sees as most threatening in Native American culture, and so at the same time their alienation is more comforting to the dominant culture. Often thought to represent continuity rather than tragic disruption of traditional ways, Native American women are more easily "discounted," in Antell's view, by the "colonial scenario," the maledominated Euroamerican cultural tradition within which to varying degrees these novels are written. But implicitly agreeing with Allen that many traditional Native American cultures centered on the figure of the mother, Antell argues that these novelists in fact also record the importance of "the feminine principle"—entailing survival, continuity, healing, and ritual transmission of the culture—by dramatizing the suffering of a male protagonist in his alienation from the mother; she points out that the plots of these novels often entail reunification with the feminine and maternal after ritual healing.^[12] In light of the recent work by Green, Brant, and many others, we might worry, however, that the repeated fictional picture of the absent (Native American) mother serves less to celebrate than to limit or distort woman's traditional power and obscure her active presence.

In the last decade, the publication of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris's fiction has foregrounded and complicated the representation of Native American motherhood.^[13] Most obviously, their stories challenge both the homogenization and the erasure of these women, so that what we may think of as "Native American literature" can no longer be said to reify either woman-as-absent-mother or "the feminine principle" in quite the same way. Although there are significant numbers of abandoned children and dead or maimed mothers in Erdrich and Dorris's fiction, at last there are also complex, fully present female characters and narrators, some of whom are even nurturant and devoted mothers. ln her first novel, as Robert Silberman has noted in an essay subtitled "Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman," Erdrich "takes apart and puts back together the traditional narrative" of the alienated Native American male.^[14] Reversing the familiar trajectory, the story begins rather than ends with the death of June, whom Silberman and many other readers see as the central figure of the book. June, like earlier fictional mothers, may be dead, but her "sadness" lives on, not unconscious or repressed but a "fundamental subtext." With more particular attention to the question of Native

American mothers, Hertha D. Wong has also pointed out that mothers and mothering relationships are prevalent in Love Medicine and the next two novels Erdrich published, The Beet Queen and Tracks . Wong suggests that these novels represent the realistic plight of the Native American woman, unable to sustain bonds or protect and nurture children, after conquest and defeat of the culture. For the most part, she argues, Erdrich's mothers are what I would call mothers without child, "strained" and "troubled" figures.^[15] Wong suggests that this reflects the cultural alienation of the entire Native American community; under the circumstances of white conquest and reservation life, "abandoning one's child is not an act of selfishness; it is an act of despair or an act of desperate mercy."^[16] Wong observes that the novels also represent the survival of the long-standing custom of sharing mothering among other members of a clan. On the reservation at least, someone cares for abandoned children, and the hope of the future, in Wong's view, are these "thrown away" children and the mothers who adopt them.

With the recent publication of the much-anticipated fourth novel in the tetralogy, The Bingo Palace, the subject of mothers and mothering in Erdrich and Dorris's fiction becomes even more prominent and difficult. This latest novel brings back June Morrisey (from Love Medicine ) as a ghost and Fleur Pillager (from Tracks ) as a trickster and wise woman living once more on the margins of the reservation and pushing even harder against the limits of realism. It is strikingly clear that neither June's death nor her abandonment of her son Lipsha has been fully exorcised, as readers may have logically but erroneously assumed, and that the representation of mothers and the value of mothering exceeds, although it by no means ignores, the demands of a realistic picture of either cultural alienation or the resources of collective child care. In retrospect, it is evident that Erdrich and Dorris's novels to date consistently engage the possibility of recovering the role of the mother and revaluing the status and power of Native American women. At the same time, however, haunting figures of the mother without child become more rather than less disturbing in successive narratives. In what follows, I trace in detail this increasingly vexed figure of the mother without child, which I understand to be a centripetal force, an insistent goad to storytelling, and a key to reading five collaboratively written novels—the four published under Erdrich's name and Dorris's Yellow Raft on Blue Water .

My efforts to track this one motif throughout several novels may at points run counter to what I see as the best work to date on this fiction, which has stressed Erdrich and Dorris's innovative and powerful use of multiple voices, fragmented plots, and inconclusive, ambivalent, and pluralized themes.^[17] There are many other ways to approach and make sense of these five books, individually and collectively, and I hope that concern for this one thread (admittedly, in my view, the most vital one) in a complex pattern is not construed as a quest for the single or definitive key to their meaning. Taking a cue from the collective, communal, and metafictionally engaged "we" narrating parts of The Bingo Palace, it may be appropriate to claim an urge to interpret that, like an urge to tell, can separate the quest to know from a guarantee of security or certain discovery: "We were curious to know more, even though we'd never grasp the whole of it. The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, until we are lost in the connections."^[18]

The mother without child is the salient figure in these novels because she stands at the critical point where connections are inevitably sought, and she represents the epistemological possibility of a difficult, limited, entangled knowing that acknowledges loss. Like Meridian and Beloved, these are novels of trauma and recovery, and "this is not a story to pass on." I try to "make sense of things" by constructing a trajectory leading from the earlier novels up to The Bingo Palace . Throughout, the appearance of the mother without child, realized with variation and constant revision as Ida George, June Morrisey, Adelaide Adare, Pauline Puyat, and Fleur Pillager, manifests both the inevitable, imaginative raveling back and the impossibility of grasping the whole of it. Read in a certain sequence, these novels increasingly discover that (Native American) mothers cannot be recovered or remembered in narrative as a fixed origin. Like the figures of maternal trauma in Alice Walker's and Toni Morrison's fiction, they are not so much memorials to lost plenitude as elusive points of a persistent presence and connection. The mother without child motivates the quest to know yet is always perceived in unassimilable forms, disruptive to rational ways of understanding the past and everyday notions of making sense. Focusing on this figure concomitantly suggests and accounts for a generic drift in these postmodern Native American novels from the mystery story to the ghost story.

I Am the Story:
Yellow Raft On Blue Water and Love Medicine

At Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, "Who is your mother?" is an important question . . .. Of course, your mother is not only that woman whose womb formed and released you—the term refers in every individual case to an entire generation of women whose psychic, and consequently physical, "shape" made the psychic existence of the following generation possible. But naming your own mother (or her equivalent) enables people to place you precisely within the universal web of your life . . .. Failure to know your mother, that is, your position and its attendant traditions, history, and place in the scheme of things, is failure to remember your significance, your reality, your right relationship to earth and society. It is the same as being lost—isolated, abandoned, self-estranged, and alienated from your own life.
—Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop

In both Yellow Raft on Blue Water (1987) and Love Medicine (1984), the paradoxically absent center of much previous Native American fiction, the mother, is brought to life and to diffuse, decentered narrative presence.^[19] What was a seemingly inevitable and monotonous story of maternal abandonment turns out to be the primary subject of variation and revision. It is misleading to speak of the plot in these fragmentary, nonlinear, multiply told narratives, formally analogous in ways to the "crazy quilt" of Meridian . But it is fair to say that as novels these texts cohere around the quest to know mothers' true stories—already "we are trying to ravel back to the beginning," where the beginning is apparently both cultural or historical (the social, the past) and psychological (the personal, the unconscious, the preoedipal). As this difficult, elusive knowledge is pursued—and to varying degrees attained—in the course of the storytelling, a child's perspective on the mother is frequently corrected. As the trauma of Native American experience is revisited, the fact or perception of abandonment may not be completely erased and the mother may still be dead or dying, but the story is never what the abandoned child originally assumed it to be. Directly or indirectly, the woman known as mother may be understood and forgiven, if not in all cases fully recovered as mother. What links these two novels, then, is their seeming optimism about understanding and coming to terms with lost connections and their common equation of storytelling that is culturally and personally empowering with rediscovered and revalued matrilineage.

Although published three years after Love Medicine (and one year after The Beet Queen ), Yellow Raft serves to introduce this perspective more directly and single-mindedly. The novel structurally as well as thematically foregrounds both the difficulty and traditional importance of knowing who your mother is and why she acts as she does. It comprises three distinct but overlapping first-person narratives, presented in reverse chronological order—moving from youngest to oldest speaker and hence in part from present to past—by three generations of women: Rayona, a biracial teenager; Christine, her Native American mother; and Ida, Christine's mother. Although fragmented and overlaid, the pieces are clearly connected by their presentation in novel form into something like the clinical tool known as a genogram, one story about matrilineage that situates individual mothers in wider contexts and understands them as having other lives, beyond the maternal function.^[20] As genogram, the narrative is full of secrets and surprises for the daughters, Ray and Christine, each of whom misunderstands her mother's history, behavior, and feelings. Even as the story moves backward in time and maternal generations, it also looks forward to newly discovered truth about mothers' love, more complex notions of maternal experience, and the heightened possibility of (re)connection between the persons and positions of daughter and mother. Most notably, for my purposes, what looks like the problem of maternal abandonment in each of the first two sections turns out to be something different, and the daughters, first Ray and then Christine, move in their respective sections as readers move in the novel as a whole: from misreading and mistrust to fuller and more accurate understanding of the complexity of the woman who has apparently abandoned her child. This prepares the way for the final narrative, where one mother without child speaks.

At the outset of the novel, in Rayona's section, the first misreading of the often disguised and disingenuous mother establishes the basic pattern of each segment and the overall narrative. The story opens in an Indian Health Service hospital in Seattle where the teenaged narrator is playing cards with her sick mother, Christine. Although she is losing, bored, and eager to leave, Ray is reluctant to go home to the empty apartment she and her mother share. Loitering around the hospital and then walking slowly to the bus stop, Rayona comes upon what she thinks is a "fat candy striper" trying to steal her mother's aging Volare from the parking lot. Determined to stop the theft, she rushes to the attack, only to discover that the thief is none other than Mom herself,

who escaped from the hospital in a stolen uniform and intends to drive her car off a cliff so that Ray can collect the insurance money. This is a variation on a recurring theme of maternal abandonment rewritten as maternal sacrifice, seen first in Love Medicine when King Jr. buys a car with the insurance money from his mother June's death, which was perhaps suicide. Completely baffled in this instance by her mother's bizarre behavior but stubbornly clinging to her, Ray refuses to let Christine go alone, and then the plan is foiled when the car runs out of gas. Having failed to commit suicide, Christine decides to take Ray back to the reservation in Montana, where she abruptly deposits her in the care of Christine's mother, "Aunt Ida," and disappears.

What Ray can see only as her mother's sudden and inexplicable act of abandonment turns out to be something else. In the second part of the novel, Christine is the new first-person narrator who reveals what neither readers nor Ray previously knew: the IHS doctor has just told Christine that she has six months to live. In increasing pain, afraid to tell Ray that she is dying, and deeply worried about her daughter's future, Christine brings her to Ida because she is the only person who might care for the girl after Christine dies. In this section of the narrative, we learn how wrong Ray is to doubt the strength of her mother's love for her. Although she has not always provided Ray with the material and emotional stability assumed in dominant models to be the best environment for child development, Christine views her daughter and her own motherhood as the only good things in her life, as sources of identity and compensation for the failure of other female roles and familial connections: "I was nobody's regular daughter, nobody's sister, usually nobody's wife, but I was her mother full time" (222).^[21]

We go on to discover that Christine herself, as daughter, misreads her mother. She believes that Ida never wanted her and always loved her less than she loved Christine's younger brother, Lee, who is now dead. But in Ida's section, the third and in some ways most important story is told. Christine's reading of her disguised mother, like Ray's, turns out to be another oversimplification of the story, flawed by vital, missing information and a foundational lie about biological maternity. Ida reveals that she is in fact Christine's cousin and half-sister, not her birth mother. Christine's birth parents were Ida's young aunt, Clara, and Ida's father, who impregnated Clara during Ida's mother's illness. To keep the scandal quiet, the family asked Ida to pretend that she was the pregnant one; Ida and Clara were sent to a convent in Denver where

Clara bore the child and wanted to give her up for adoption. Young Ida resisted Clara's plan and took the newborn Christine back to the reservation, where she brought her up as her own child (and again had to outwit Clara when she came back, when Christine was four, and tried to reclaim her daughter).

Christine's feelings of rejection reflect an even more complicated mix than Rayona's of the misunderstandings and realities surrounding the mother's story. The woman Christine thought was a bad birth mother turns out to be a good enough adoptive mother, yet Christine was abandoned by the woman who bore her. The novel thus validates the oftnoted collectivity of mothering in Native American groups without sentimentalizing or oversimplifying the social or psychic difficulties of this practice, in postcontact times, for both the child and the Othermother. Ida's insistence that Christine call her "Aunt Ida" rather than "Mother" enunciates deeper, conflicting truths. Christine assumed, like other people, that Ida wanted to be known as "Aunt" because she was ashamed, but in fact what was perceived as a lie and mark of rejection ironically reveals the secret Ida otherwise refuses to tell, except finally in the narrative addressed to readers of the novel. And Ida's reason for insisting on being called "Aunt" turns out to be a form of self-defense against her well-grounded fear of losing Christine to her biological mother. Suggesting what we have seen in earlier chapters and what we shall see again throughout Erdrich's tetralogy as the possibility of resistance inherent in the figure of the mother without child, Ida self-consciously adopts the name of Aunt rather than Mother as a kind of self-inflicted torture to toughen her self, ironically made vulnerable and connected by maternal work, against the constant threat of loss: "And every time she said it, the feelings for her I couldn't help, the feelings that came from being the one she came to when she was hurt and the one who heard her prayers, the feelings I fought against, got flaked away. That was as I intended. Someday Clara would arrive at the door and might steal Christine back" (325).

Both maternal concern and fear of loss are at the center of each mother's tangled story. Motherhood, the novel implies, can be comprehended only as a highly complicated narrative, told from sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping perspectives, full of selective recall and secrets that are perceived as necessary and strategic in situations where women are at once highly vulnerable to loss and all too aware of both the value and risks of holding on to a child. Conversely, nar-

rative is driven by the need to know, and repeatedly, the daughter's misunderstanding of who her mother is, what she feels, why she does what she does, is to some extent corrected. Collectively, the stories not only revise what individual daughters think they know about their mothers, but also rewrite several dominant myths about motherhood. For example, Yellow Raft debunks the notion that mothers are the only influence that determines the identity of children. Important as the bond between mother and daughter is in each woman's life, these stories also speak repeatedly to the limits of the mother's power and the impact of other psychological, social, and political forces. Relations with peers and siblings, for instance, are especially critical to the development of a gendered identity, as we learn from the role of her brother Lee (Ida's biological son) in Christine's story. In Rayona's case, the absent father of another race is a fact to be reckoned with.

Similarly, these maternal revelations call into question the association of motherhood with women's lack of volition. Until recent technology brought us to the so-called age of choice, women were assumed to have little control over their procreative lives. Both Ida and Christine, however, stress the fact that they chose to become mothers, and in a world where they otherwise have little control, motherhood is a clear source and proof of identity and agency. The power to choose is also demonstrated by decisions not to mother: Christine refuses to have a second child because she fears that Ray would feel "out in the cold" (232), as she did when her brother Lee was born. Sara Ruddick has recently argued that the first step in reconceiving childbirth in a "respectful" way is "to represent birth as a chosen activity requiring commitment and responsibility." As Ruddick adds, "In current political conditions . . . it is an anticipatory utopian act even to begin to represent birth as a chosen activity."^[22]

Yellow Raft is not utopian fiction; Ida remains an isolated, somewhat resentful woman, and Christine will soon die, perhaps without even knowing what readers know about her biological mother. (The only follow-up to the story so far comes in The Bingo Palace, where there is an allusion to the lavish memorial dance a woman named Ida sponsors in memory of her dead daughter.) But the novel is nevertheless optimistic: Ray, half Native American and half African American, is conspicuously presented as the hope of the future.^[23] Not only is she smart and brave and probably luckier than Christine and Ida, but she is potential heir, at last, to the story never before heard, the story that

Ida as the first woman "carries." As Ida announces at the beginning of her section, third and last in the novel:

I have to tell this story every day, add to it, revise, invent the parts I forget or never knew. No one but me carries it all and no one will—unless I tell Rayona, who might understand. She's heard her mother's side, and she's got eyes. But she doesn't guess what happened before. She doesn't know my true importance. She doesn't realize that I am the story, and that is my savings, to leave her or not.^[24]

Lacking either a vital traditional community or a viable place in mainstream culture, Native American mothers in this story give voice to their worries about finding or constructing an inheritance for their children. Yet there is a growing richness and indigenous, self-reflective, and self-constructive quality to the things Christine and then Ida decide to leave to Ray. At first Christine suggests that two rented video tapes will serve as her legacy to Rayona, but later proposes to leave her a silver ring in the shape of a turtle, valued as a symbol of her self: "'He always reminded me of me,'" Christine tells Ray; "'Slow but gets there in the end'" (292). Ida's even more valorized and essential bequest (which she may or may not choose to make) is her story, at once answering and complicating the question, "Who is your mother?" Her claim that the narrative of her life is the most valuable heritage she can pass on to Ray is in keeping with the fundamental importance of storytelling and the Grandmother or Spiderwoman figure in so many Native American myths and ritual practices. Louis Owens argues for the power of resistance inherent in this figure: "Ida becomes a storyteller, like Nanapush in Tracks, the grandmother in Winter in the Blood, or Francisco in House Made of Dawn, the bearer of the identity and order that are so fragile they may perish in a single generation if unarticulated. With Ida resides the power to abrogate the authority of that 'other' discourse assaulting Indians from the media of Euroamerica."^[25]

As Ida's claim suggests, the authoritative western theory that culture and language are founded on the loss or absence of the mother's silent body is reversed in Yellow Raft, where the mother speaks. So too the tale of how Rayona got her name, told in two different versions, indicates how the mother, in naming, may use language to exceed the limits of referentiality. Ray has been told repeatedly that her name comes from "rayon," the word printed on the tag in Christine's nightgown. But Christine later explains it another way, saying that "Ray-

ona" was "like nothing," invented in part as a feminine version of Raymond, the name she had chosen for a son, but also a totally new name. Like Ann and Evelyn in Desert of the Heart or like Meridian, Christine thus arrests the pattern of repetition that actually blocks matrilineal development. Similarly, Lee and Christine never know the name of the father; they come from "nothing" but Ida, and patrilineage, like referentiality, can thus be set aside. And Ida, we are told, speaks Indian in preference to English in order to preserve her "soul and grammar" from salvation by the nuns; throughout all the stories, the native tongue, which Ray only partly understands, appears as a kind of secret (maternal) language.^[26]

An anecdote reported in an interview with Dorris and Erdrich underscores my claim for this novel's central mission. Hertha Wong, the interviewer, observes that Rayona (whom Wong describes as the "protagonist" of the novel), was initially conceived of as a male character, and asks why she became a female. Describing the collaborative process of writing and revision by which all their fiction is said to be generated, Erdrich answers that the couple occupied themselves during a drive from Dartmouth College to Minnesota discussing the novel, and Dorris adds:

When we left New Hampshire the book was about a young boy who was coping with his mother's death, and by the time we reached Minnesota it was about a young girl whose mother lives. Since then it has expanded into three parts. One of which is the mother's voice, and the next is her mother's voice. All of that really evolved out of changing the main character from a male to a female. Louise, I think, proposed that originally.^[27]

Somewhere on the road from New England to the upper Middle West, Native American literature took a major turn. What was once the classic story—"a young boy who was coping with his mother's death"—was altered slightly: the boy became a girl. What "evolved" from this sex change was startlingly different in certain ways. The girl's story grew into a braid, three intertwined tales told by her mother and her grandmother too.^[28] With the female character brought (back) to narrative life, a univocal tale of absence became a multivocal tale of complicated, ambivalent, intermittent, and powerful presence, nurturance, flexibility, and continuity. It is tempting to add that obviously it would be Louise who "originally" urged this change, because this is the same

tale, I argue, that she is telling in the four novels published under her name to date, although doing so in the straightforward way of Yellow Raft becomes increasingly more problematic. Maternal absence and the problem of lost children, tragedies in the lives and literatures of Native American people, are not forgotten or triumphed over. Instead, the question of how to represent these problems is at once consistently central, increasingly complex, and unsatisfied by narrative realism.

Love Medicine, published three years before Yellow Raft, chronologically initiates the effort made throughout the tetralogy published under Erdrich's name to pass on a Native American (maternal) heritage, paradoxically by reconsidering the commonplace cultural and psychic story of the Indian mother who voluntarily or involuntarily abandons her child. The "original event" of this narrative, as Silberman points out and as so many other commentators have observed, is in conventional plot as in actual experience more often thought of as an ending point: the death of the mother without child, June Morrisey, in chapter 1.^[29] Much of what follows that death can be read as a mystery story, with a secret about parental identity and intention at the center. The mystery is more fragmented and more difficult for readers to solve than the one told in Yellow Raft on Blue Water, as we must try to figure out, from a slim assortment of narrative clues, who June was and why she acted as she did. (There is also a significant hint here of the ghost story, when June's former husband Gordie thinks that the deer he has run over and put in the back seat of his car is June, but this approach is not fully developed until The Bingo Palace .) Although the overarching narrative structure of Love Medicine in this way might suggest the theory discredited in Yellow Raft —that is, the notion that the loss of the mother's body requires and hence instigates symbolic practice—the diffuseness of the plotting and voicing in the novel counters any such simplistic notion of what stories do and where they come from. Moreover, conventional assumptions about the fictional archetype that June so clearly evokes, the missing Indian mother, are undercut in two key ways that correspond to and develop the central revelations of Yellow Raft . First, through two female characters in Love Medicine, Lulu Nanapush and Marie Kashpaw, the presence of the loving Native American

mother who faithfully nurtures the children she bears or adopts is reinscribed as both social reality and psychic fantasy. Second, from the increasingly important perspective of June's son, Lipsha Morrisey, a biological mother's failure to hold and nurture is understood in a new way and, in the climax of the novel, overtly forgiven.

Love Medicine reaffirms the presence of the strong, enduring, and nurturant Native American mother and grandmother, who was concealed and protected in the misunderstood figure of Ida in Yellow Raft, by delineating her traits in more than one female character. Although, as Wong notes, there are many "strained" maternal relationships in the novel, we also observe mothers in Love Medicine who do not abandon their own biological children or who take in children whom others have orphaned or left behind. We learn in the later novel, Tracks, that the two most important of these good mothers, Marie and Lulu, were abandoned or sent away by their own biological mothers, so in retrospect the popular notion that one can only parent as one was parented is countered. In the "new and expanded edition" of the novel, it is made even clearer that these two are also figures of the Native American (grand)mother as political activist and traditional leader, a role only prefigured in Ida as the grandmother-storyteller.

Marie is at first the more fully and realistically evoked figure of the loving, hardworking Native American mother. As a girl of fourteen with a "mail-order Catholic soul" (41), she envisions herself as a saint with diamond-tipped nipples. Ironically saved by the loss of her borrowed faith, she grows up into a different kind of Saint Marie, at once more down-to-earth and nurturant. To her husband Nector, at the peak of her fertility she seems to have babies tucked everywhere, her own and other people's. When she believes that Nector has left her for Lulu, she responds by peeling all the potatoes in the house and waxing her linoleum floors, finding strength in mundane and fragile acts of independent maternal work, labor that at once recognizes constant threat and takes action against lurking danger to the child: "It was one of my prides to keep that floor shined up. Under the gray swirls and spots and leaves of the pattern, I knew there was tar paper and bare wood that could splinter a baby's feet. I knew, because I bought and paid for and put down that linoleum myself. It was a good solid covering, but under it the boards creaked" (127).

From the perspective of western ideas about good mothers, Lulu is presented as a more ambivalent figure, combining prolific and devoted

biological motherhood with a seductive sexual power that threatens erstwhile western-style monogamous families like Nector and Marie's.^[30] Her behavior suggests that the creative order of Native American motherhood, as we see in Yellow Raft and elsewhere, has little to do with the social order controlled by the Euroamerican institution of marriage and dominant notions of licit female sexuality or chastity. With no permanent husband or father in her home, Lulu raises a large family of children variously sired by undomesticated men and in extradomestic relationships with other women's husbands or lovers. Her numerous sons adore her and obey her completely, although the realistic limits of her control are recognized in the fate of Henry Jr., a Vietnam veteran who commits suicide. But in a key scene in which Lulu feeds her pack from her spotless kitchen, in a half-comic, half-lyrical vision of her powers, the novel invokes the magical capacities of the nurturant mother and parodies the image of the vanishing Indian woman:

Lulu was bustling about the kitchen in a calm, automatic frenzy. She seemed to fill pots with food by pointing at them and take things from the oven that she'd never put in. The table jumped to set itself. The pop foamed into the glasses, and the milk sighed to the lip . . .. The boys began to stuff themselves with a savage and astonishing efficiency. Before Bev had cleaned his plate once, they'd had thirds, and by the time he looked up from desert, they had melted through the walls. The youngest had levitated from his high chair and was sleeping out of sight. The room was empty except for Lulu and himself . . .. She turned to the sinkful of dishes and disappeared in a cloud of steam. (86–7)

Near the end of the novel, when both Marie and Lulu are old and Nector, the man who came between them, is dead, Marie also becomes an odd, fantasylike surrogate mother to her former rival. After eye surgery, Lulu needs drops put in every day, and Marie volunteers to do the job. As Marie administers the eyedrops, Lulu's thoughts confirm that Marie is a figure for preoedipal perceptions of the plenitude of mother love: "She swayed down like a dim mountain, huge and blurred, the way a mother must look to her just born child" (236).^[31]

Marie and Lulu thus bring to life and celebrate maternal powers previously represented in contemporary Native American novels as tragically lost, or as something that even Ida and Christine are able to speak about only in retrospect. At the same time, the novel complements this perspective by replaying the story of the mother without child in the figure of June, who frames the novel. June's son Lipsha

Morrisey's quest for his parents is sometimes read as primarily important for his closing discovery of and reunion with his still living father, Lulu's son Gerry. But the maternal side of the quest seems to me more critical, because it is what links the end of the novel—Lipsha's new understanding about June, his recently discovered birth mother—with its beginning, June's death.

Lipsha is a minor character in the first section of the novel. But when his voice takes over the first-person narration of the last two chapters, he assumes a privileged narrative position in this multiply told story. For Lipsha, the discovery of his biological parentage serves as a traditional epiphany. An "odd" and "troubled" figure, a "lost" youth in earlier episodes, Lipsha indicates a new sense of identity, purpose, and connectedness at the novel's conclusion. At the same time, however, thanks to Erdrich's complex narrative presentation, readers have in fact known since the first chapter who Lipsha's biological mother is, as have many members of the community he grows up in. The conventional force of epiphany is thus diminished by the privileging of a secret that is not really a complete secret, an effect that might be compared to the ironic protection of the secret of maternal (non)identity in Yellow Raft that is achieved by spelling it out in the name "Aunt Ida." The important thing about Lipsha's new understanding is not only or not so much the identity of his mother, but the way he changes his mind about why she gave him away in the first place (a question that never arises, it seems, in his thinking about Gerry).

In the first chapter, when the narrator Albertine Johnson begins to hint that the Aunt June they have just buried was his mother, Lipsha refuses to listen. He interrupts Albertine with a melodramatic rendering of the moment of his abandonment:

"Your mother . . . " I began.

"I can never forgive what she done to a little child," he said. "They had to rescue me out of her grip." . . .

"She didn't do that," I said. "She wanted you."

"No . . .. even if she came back right now, this minute, and said 'Son, I am sorry for what I done to you,' I would not relent on her." (36)

Albertine tries one more time before she gives up; "'What if your mother never meant to? . . . What if it was just kind of a mistake?'" But Lipsha cannot hear. At the end of the novel, however, after his paternal grandmother Lulu forces him to listen to the truth about his

parentage and he meets his biological father, Gerry Nanapush, Lipsha implicitly revisits Albertine's question. The novel ends with Lipsha's new, corrected understanding of what June's abandonment meant, which now accords with Albertine's opening hint. "I tell you," says Lipsha in the penultimate paragraph, just before heading home to the reservation with his maternal legacy, the car purchased with his mother's insurance money, "there was good in what she did for me, I know now. The son that she acknowledged suffered more than Lipsha Morrisey did. The thought of June grabbed my heart so, but I was lucky she turned me over to Grandma Kashpaw" (272).

Lipsha's change of heart is retrospectively supported by scraps of information about June embedded elsewhere in the novel and seemingly designed to ensure a sympathetic reading of her character. Marie, known to Lipsha now as "Grandma" Kashpaw, was also June's adoptive mother, and from her we learn that June herself was an abandoned child, left in the woods to survive on pine sap when her own mother died. Marie tried to care for the vulnerable, appealing June, but the girl preferred to be raised by her Uncle Eli, a "traditional" man who lived alone in the woods until June came along. Everyone in the family, even Eli who adores her, agrees that grown-up June wasn't much of a mother, but Albertine testifies that she was a good aunt. When Lulu finally tells Lipsha about June's affair with young Gerry, she insists that "'June was real upset about the whole thing'" and "'Gordie [June's husband, a Kashpaw] couldn't handle another man's son.'" When Lipsha wonders whether June ever mentioned him, Lulu says, "'She watched you from a distance, and hoped you would forgive her'" (245). Lipsha at last fulfills that hope; the framing lesson of the story of the dead mother offers a revised and compassionate understanding, as in Yellow Raft, of why she acted as she did and (at least some of) what she really felt.

In this newly heard version of the story of the mother without child, forgiveness is possible in part because the mother herself is construed as a victim who made the best choice she could for her child, and in part because the community has a well-established tradition of providing alternatives when the biological mother cannot or will not care for her child. And just as maternal responsibility is a collective responsibility, shared among male as well as female adults in this Native American community, so too a child himself or herself is shown to have a responsibility for identity formation, where identity is a matter both of knowing kinship and of making choices.^[32] Gerry Nanapush passes

on these words of wisdom to his son Lipsha: "Belonging was a matter of deciding to" (255). This principle extends the argument of Yellow Raft that the fate of the child is not the exclusive and enduring responsibility of the biological mother. Just as others may help to raise the child and many forces shape identity, so the child must take action and accept responsibility.^[33]

If the story of the mother without child ended here, with Lipsha's recognition and forgiveness of June, a reading of the novels in the order in which they were published—first Love Medicine and then Yellow Raft —might emphasize a positive movement toward the articulation of what was silenced, the recovery of what was lost: a maternal voice, a mother's presence. First the mother (June) is more clearly understood by the narrative and forgiven by the child, and then she (Christine, Ida) is allowed to speak for herself, to tell her own story. However, as readers of the subsequent novels know, the mother who abandons her children or who is at least thought to do so reappears in the form of both new characters and, in Erdrich's fourth novel, old ones—the ghost of June and the person of Fleur Pillager, from Tracks . In retrospect, we can begin to identify in Love Medicine part of the reason why the problem of maternal abandonment refuses to go away and why the mother's story is so hard to discover and represent in a narrative form that attains closure or puts doubts to rest. What I have identified in Love Medicine as two complementary ways of revising the fictional story of the absent Native American mother—Marie's and Lulu's stories, on the one hand, and June's, on the other—also have something in common: their quality of fantasy. Lipsha's forgiveness of his mother resembles those other moments of idealized maternity in the novel: Lulu's magical nurturance of her pack and Marie's seemingly inexhaustible store of maternal energy for the protection of her children and later for her former rival, Lulu. These moments are depicted in romantic and tender scenes, contesting in important ways the novel's more realistic emphasis on "strained" maternal relationships, and thus echoing the message of Yellow Raft while evoking a kind of sweetness not seen there. But thinking back to Lulu's analogy, when Marie puts the drops in her eyes, suggests one problematic implication of this fantasy: even as we are relieved of our blind misunderstanding of the mother, can we really ever see her as anything but "huge and blurred"?

In Love Medicine, it would seem not. Indeed, Lipsha's belief that his mother abandoned him is amended, and Marie and Lulu represent both

the reality and the myth of the strong, present, nurturant Native American (grand)mother. However, it is still the absent mother's full story that remains a motivating mystery, resists discovery, and appears only as a lost connection that cannot be fully recovered in language. June has no narrative voice, no speaking part; we never hear her version or understand her choices. The only time we even see events briefly narrated from her point of view by a limited omniscient narrator, we know little about what she is thinking, and we glimpse her feelings of fragility and fragmentation from some distance. What we have of June's story includes two possible attempts at suicide, one as a child, when she lets her cousins try to hang her, and the other, in the opening scene of the novel, when she sets out to walk home to the reservation in a wind that some say she must have known portended a blizzard. But no one ever decides whether she meant to kill herself on either occasion. Representing her voice, identity, and intentions with any kind of certainty remains outside either the interests or, more likely, the self-defined capacities of this novel, even as it desires to know her story. Albertine's initial question to Lipsha—"'What if your mother never meant to?'"—remains only partially answered, and the mystery of June bears witness to the difficulty of escaping the circumstances of both psychic and social loss that simultaneously blur and enlarge the picture of the mother, so that there is always more to try to bring into focus.

The One You Will not Call Mother:
The Beet Queen and Tracks

Erdrich's second novel, The Beet Queen, turns to a largely new set of characters but is tightly connected to the other novels in the tetralogy by the way it reengages the plot of the mother without child. Like Love Medicine and Yellow Raft, it substitutes a closing vision of maternal presence and revision of the child's perspective for an initial scene of abandonment, so that overall narrative movement is toward recuperation of and reconciliation with the mother. The Beet Queen, however, balances in a different way the forces of maternal idealization, seen previously in Lulu and Marie or in Ida as she finally reveals herself, with those of maternal absence, seen in June or in Ida as she is thought by Christine to be. Whereas in the earlier novels it is the absent mother herself—Christine as seen by Rayona, Ida as seen by Christine, and June as seen by almost everyone—who is more or less recovered and at least partially understood in the course of the storytelling, this is not the case

in The Beet Queen . Instead, the mother with whom a child is reconciled at the end of the novel is not the same character whose abandonment of her children instigates the plot. The problem of maternal abandonment is initially represented in a story that in some sense stands, like June's death, as an original event, never to be fully explained: Adelaide Adare's flight from her children, Mary, Karl, and Jude. The strong, loving (Native American) mother, in contrast, is represented in the realistic, nonmysterious, and far more fully developed story of half-Chippewa Celestine James and her daughter Dot, the eponymous Beet Queen. The dichotomy between the present mother and the absent mother contained in Ida, or represented by Marie and Lulu, on the one hand, and June, on the other, becomes in part at least a difference of race: the absent mother, Adelaide, is apparently white,^[34] whereas the present mother, Celestine, is half Native American.

Celestine resembles Ida, Marie, and Lulu in that she is a strong, "statuesque" (31), sexually and socially independent woman, the daughter of a Chippewa woman and a white man.^[35] As adults, Celestine and Mary Adare together run a butcher shop, and eventually Celestine takes Mary's ne'er-do-well brother Karl as a lover. She becomes pregnant, and from the moment her baby Dot is born, she adores the child as much as Christine adores Rayona, with what can only be called "passion," a feeling "even stronger than with Karl. She stole time to be with Dot as if they were lovers . . .. Her love for the baby hung around her in clear, blowing sheets" (175).

Although such motherlove is enormously powerful in this novel, it is not particularly pleasant, peaceful, or in any way sweet. Dot is a difficult child, full of violence and passion herself. Celestine is the kind of mother who brings jello laced with nuts and bolts to the school potluck supper as a practical joke. She has to compete with two other childless adults—Mary, the baby's aunt, and Wallace, Celestine's neighbor and Karl's ex-lover—who also want to parent Dot. Her jealousy and her empathy with them are vividly depicted; we are reminded that parents, both biological and surrogate, need children as much as children need parents and can feel abandoned when children leave them, as they usually do. We see this too in the briefly glimpsed figure of Catherine Miller, whose husband Martin finds (or steals) the abandoned baby Jude Adare and brings him home three days after their own child has died. Catherine cherishes the clothes the found child was wearing "on the night he came to her rescue" (47).

Despite all the historical and psychological problems that realistically strain Celestine and Dot's relationship, the novel ends with an image of patient, enduring maternal love and a reconciliation of sorts between the daughter and half Native American mother. The final scene inverts and rewrites the opening "flight" of the white mother, Adelaide. At a fair in Argus where Dot has been named Beet Queen (and has just discovered that Wallace has rigged the contest so that she will win), Dot flies away with the skywriter who has been hired to spell out her name. This move on the part of the daughter, escaping the overly intense, often embarrassing, and unwieldy passion of her mother (and in this case her surrogate mothers, Mary and Wallace), seems at first to enact the more familiar late-twentieth-century white mother-daughter plot, but such a reading is quickly blocked when airsick Dot returns to the fairgrounds a short time later. Only Celestine is still waiting for her when Dot comes back down to earth, and they go home alone together. After a meal, Dot thinks, "I want to lean into her the way wheat leans into wind," but she resists the urge and each woman goes to her own room. As she waits to fall asleep, Dot welcomes the sound and smell of rain, and the last image is of a fragile, nonverbal, prospective, and imaginative bond between late-adolescent child and mother, in separate but adjacent parts of the same house: "I breathe it in, and I think of her lying in the next room, her covers thrown back, eyes wide open, waiting" (338). Although there is still distance between the mother and daughter and no dramatic scene of reconciliation, closure comes with Dot's implicit recognition of her biological mother's persistent, fertile, patient, and expectant love. Like the forgiveness of the mother at the end of Love Medicine, this scene suggests that narrative resolves not only with homecoming but also with a sense of beginning, anticipation, and going forward together rather than ending.

The final chapter of The Beet Queen addresses not only Dot and Celestine's strained yet enduring relationship, but also the larger problem with which the story began—Adelaide Adare's flight from her three children, Mary, Karl, and baby Jude, at the Orphans' Picnic in Minneapolis. The position of this flight at the chronological beginning of the plot indicates an originary cause or at least instigating narrative complication. The setting ironically suggests a perverse carnival of lost familial connection and a subworld of mothers (and fathers) who abandon their children, willfully or not. The story begins in 1929 as the Depression sets in. Adelaide and her children have recently been cast into utter desperation by the death of the married man, Mr. Ober, who fa-

thered and supported this illicit family. Homeless and penniless, Adelaide spends what is probably her last dollar for a ride with a stunt pilot, a ride from which she never returns. The baby she leaves behind is taken by Martin Miller, that passing stranger whose own newborn recently died, and the older children, Mary and Karl, run away to North Dakota, where they hope to find their mother's sister, Fritzie.

Adelaide's initial abandonment complexly marks several of the main characters of the novel for life, and none of them ever forgives or fully understands her. Mary, the daughter, is in some sense complicitous in their lifelong separation. She was already jealous of what she perceived as her mother's preference for Karl, although the only independent evidence we have suggests that Adelaide was more worried about Mary's future than her son's. When Adelaide, who seems to know that her children are with Fritzie, sends a postcard that attempts to make contact—"I am living down here. I think about the children every day. How are they?" (56)—Mary uses her aunt's name and handwriting to break any future link: "All three of your children are starved dead" (58). Conversely, in order to cement their budding friendship, Mary tells Celestine that her mother is dead and that she is an orphan, like Celestine. In contrast to Mary, Karl tells himself that his mother couldn't have run away from him; he can only imagine that she was kidnapped by the pilot. Both children, then—the daughter who never relents against the mother and the son who immediately forgives and never recovers from her loss—get the story wrong. Late in the novel, Mary and Karl's cousin Sita, who has also been shaped by Adelaide's flight and Mary's usurpation of her place as only daughter, adds another perspective. Disagreeing with those unspecified persons in the community who saw Adelaide's flight as "cold-hearted," Sita says that she wishes she had flown away too. Since Sita has no children, her comment links the mother's flight to an escape not just from the weight of maternal responsibility but from a feminine role of passivity and dependency.

Any clear-cut judgment that Adelaide was either selfish or desperate—or maybe even subversive—is complicated by the fact that her story is told chiefly from the disparate points of view of the children she left behind or of the other characters who figure in their subsequent searches for love and connection. Only in two brief chapters do we get a closer perspective, still not from Adelaide herself but from Omar, the pilot who flies her away. Twice we see Omar watching Adelaide in pain. The first time, she lies in a hospital bed after their plane has crashed;

Omar is unhurt, but he is worried that Adelaide will die. Her first words when she regains consciousness make him jealous: "'I've got to send Mary a sewing machine . . .. If Mary learns how to sew, she'll always have a skill to fall back on'" (60). At this point, Omar delivers the brutal postcard from Mary, announcing the children's supposed death, which he has previously concealed. Adelaide's response is unnarrated; her embryonic language, as a mother, never develops beyond the telegraphic speech of her own postcard, which her daughter mimics in their only narrated exchange.

We meet Omar a second time, several years later, now settled down in the aviary he and Adelaide run (and hence still associated with flight and air). Listening to Adelaide breaking every glass in the kitchen in what seems just one of many wordless, self-destructive rampages he has witnessed over the years, Omar waits with empathy and frustration for her rage to pass: "He felt her pain like it was inside him, but could do nothing" (231). In our final glimpse of Adelaide, she stands with a broom in the middle of her kitchen, her feet bleeding and her hands shaking. How much of this rage is grief for her children, who never rescued her, we cannot say, just as it seems impossible to determine whether there is justification for a sympathetic reading of this character, or whether the novel takes its own revenge against her. But in either case, the specter of the silent woman bleeding on the floor covered with glass that she herself has shattered manifests the enduring pain, inexplicable rage, self-inflicted punishment, and wordless grief of the mother without child. Associated with the birds whose flight is arrested because they are trapped in the aviary, Adelaide never tells us how she feels, and the interpretations offered by other characters in the novel are limited and inadequate. Adelaide was not simply a powerless victim, forced by circumstances to abandon her children, but neither was she "cold-hearted" or liberated by her flight. What she was remains a mystery.

Tracks takes us back to the familial past of several of the characters from Love Medicine, mostly full-blood or self-defined Indians, and it too arises out of—and revises—misunderstood or never-before-told stories of maternal abandonment. Two first-person narrators, Grandfather Nanapush and Pauline Puyat, speak alternately; both tell parts of the story of Fleur Pillager, a character mentioned only briefly in the

earlier novels, who emerges here as another Native American mother who at the time of the novel's telling is no longer a mother, who has lost one baby and is accused of abandoning her daughter, the same Lulu Lamartine we met in Love Medicine . The motive for Nanapush's storytelling, explicitly addressed to Lulu as audience, recalls Albertine's efforts to change Lipsha's mind in the first chapter of Love Medicine . Nanapush says he speaks in order to revise Lulu's understanding of why Fleur, "the one you will not call mother" (2), sent her away to the dreaded Indian boarding school, from which he eventually rescues the child: "Maybe once I tell you the reason she had to send you away, you will start acting like a daughter should. She saved you from worse, as you'll see. Perhaps when you finally understand, you'll borrow my boots and go out there, forgive her, though it's you that needs forgiveness" (210–1).^[36] The hope that his storytelling itself can heal the breach and reconnect Lulu to her mother corresponds to what we see elsewhere as the positive role of words, both spoken and written, in resisting physical and cultural loss and restoring Native American life. In two earlier moments of rescue Nanapush saves Lulu from freezing to death by talking to her, and he resorts to learning the white man's written discourse in order to manipulate bureaucratic channels and retrieve her from boarding school.^[37]

In Tracks itself we never learn how Lulu responds—that is, whether she, like Lipsha, is persuaded to revise her understanding and forgive her mother, as Nanapush hopes she will do. However, as Nanapush tells it, the story of Fleur, like the story of June, insists that such forgiveness is justifiable. Neither woman acts arbitrarily or selfishly but because circumstances make it impossible for either of them to hold onto her children. June is prevented from mothering in part by the traumas of her own childhood. Fleur is prevented by the tragic and collective consequences of white conquest. Fleur's case for forgiveness is stronger than June's in two regards. First, she is portrayed not as a broken woman who lacks maternal competence, like June, but as a strong woman and a good, loving, nurturing Native American mother who suffers deeply when she loses her second baby and clings all the more strongly to Lulu, her firstborn, until she loses her too. Second, Fleur is explicitly associated with supernatural powers, and Fleur sends Lulu away only because she must use her powers to protest and subvert conquest.

Mystery surrounds Fleur's inherited, ancient spiritual force, and she is feared by the remnants of the Native American community. She has

many characteristics of the traditional trickster figure more often noted in the character of Nanapush.^[38] Twice as a girl she comes back to life after drowning, although drowning is "the death a Chippewa cannot survive" (11). Each time she is resurrected, according to Pauline, she is thought to send others to death in her place. One of the last two survivors of a family that is decimated by contact with whites, she is reputed to be a witch who is desired by Misshepeshu, the monster of Lake Matchimanito, a devil attracted to "the strong and daring especially, like Fleur" (11). Again according to Pauline, many want to drive Fleur off the reservation but do not dare to do so, and before they can find a way she leaves for Argus, where again "things happened" once she arrives (12). The paternity of her children, born after she returns from Argus, is questionable: Lulu could have been conceived when Fleur was raped by white men in Argus, or perhaps Eli Kashpaw, who falls under her powerful spell, is the father. When Fleur becomes pregnant a second time, Eli wonders if he or Misshepeshu, the spirit under the water, is responsible.

But in this time of conquest and extinction Fleur's archaic, supernatural powers cannot coexist with an endangered maternal practice; at this point in history, her deep and threatened love for her biological children only weakens her. After a difficult first childbirth, Fleur is brought back to life by Lulu's cries, but she almost loses her powers when her second baby is born prematurely and dies. The novel does not blame the loss of children solely on white conquest but suggests that the old gods have stopped favoring their people: Fleur gambles with the dead for the life of her baby, and whereas she always beats white men at cards, this time she does not win. After that she clings to Lulu obsessively until the white-owned lumber company moves to evict her from her land. In such historical circumstances, the strong Native American mother who bears traditional powers ironically has to relinquish custody of her child to exercise her destructive force without destroying the child too. As in the story of Ida, who tries to toughen herself against the potential and dreaded loss of Christine by denying her bond, the strength and cunning needed for a Chippewa woman to survive on or off the reservation may be at odds with the vulnerability born of postconquest maternal experience. The point seems clear: the victimization of mothers is an effect of white cultural domination. And unlike the mature Ida, the otherwise forceful Fleur at this point in her life lacks the power of storytelling. As Nanapush puts it, "She was too young and had no stories or depth of life to rely upon. All she had was

raw power and the names of the dead that filled her" (7). Here, it is the figure of the grandfather, not the (grand)mother, who tells Native American stories and uses the power of words, saving both himself and Lulu by talking and later writing.^[39] Nanapush's purpose, with its personal as well as political ramifications, recalls Ida's: he too is passing on his "savings" in the form of the mother's true story to the future generations.

Although Fleur, caught between the roles of native trickster and loving Native American mother, cannot tell her own story, another mother without child, Pauline Puyat, is the second first-person narrator of the novel. Pauline's narrative develops Fleur's story from an alternate, often far less sympathetic point of view than Nanapush's, but at the same time it also relates Pauline's own history. Her story surprises readers of Love Medicine, as the book's characters are often surprised, by a sudden revelation of an intimate and mysterious secret about maternal origins: Pauline turns out to be none other than Sister Leopolda, the crazy nun who torments Marie in Erdrich's first novel and is now shockingly discovered, in the later one, to be Marie's birth mother. Ironically, this mother—one of the few in Erdrich's books to have a first-person perspective—speaks chiefly of her desire not to be a mother. Long before the baby is born, she utterly repudiates the product of her affair with Napoleon Morrisey. Hoping to induce an abortion, she repeatedly thrusts her stomach against an ax handle but is prevented from further self-mutilation by Bernadette, Napoleon's sister and a mixed-blood widow who has given Pauline a home and a job. Later, in the final stages of labor, Pauline tries to hold the baby in by refusing to push, but Bernadette ties her down and delivers Marie with forceps.

Pauline's most obvious motive for refusing motherhood is her shame, born of her obsession with Catholicism; she rejects her child, "already fallen, a dark thing" (136), as tainted with the sins of her own flesh. Just before the delivery, another aspect of her resistance to giving birth may also be suggested. "If I gave birth," she says, "I would be lonelier"; she tries to hold the baby inside her body, "clenched" around the child "so that she could not escape" (135), and when Bernadette succeeds in pulling the infant out, Pauline says simply, "We were divided" (136). There is a sense in which Pauline seems at this most gruesome, unnatural of moments to belong with other women who are forced to separate from their children. Her resistance to delivery itself marks in a perverse way her impossible desire not only to

escape her unloved, unconnected body and the role of mother in the dominant religious discourse, but also to hold on to what no mother of any culture can keep—the perfect and inviolable intimacy with the child inside her body before birth.

Pauline has been read in a variety of ways. She is perhaps most frequently understood as a version of the unreliable narrator, characteristically disrupting any smooth, linear flow of plot or any single narrative of interpretation.^[40] Thought to be crazed by the demise of her clan and her jealous desire to be loved both as Fleur is loved by men and by Fleur herself, Pauline has been described as "a mean-spirited woman who is a proven liar," "confused and psychologically damaged," with "a bizarre amalgamation of Chippewa belief and Catholicism."^[41] In more mixed readings, Pauline is seen to have certain powers and to wield her own distorted version of the native supernatural force that Nanapush and Fleur possess. According to Nancy J. Peterson, Nanapush's perspective is finally the one that the novel affirms, but it is the contrast between the interpretations offered by Nanapush and Pauline that grounds history here in conflicting visions and thus guarantees an "'indigenous' account of what happens," one that comprehends both oral and textual history.^[42] In contrast to most other readers, Daniel Cornell is suspicious of the view, promoted by Nanapush, that Pauline is insane and ludicrous. To accept this, he argues, implicates us in Nanapush's efforts to "objectify" Pauline and deny her demand for the "constituting gaze" of subjectivity that belongs only to men in the Euroamerican order.^[43]

Although it is important to recognize the disruptive voice and practice of Pauline, it is equally important to distinguish between what it means to reject the position of woman as mother in Christian tradition from what the refusal to mother might signify in what is left of the Chippewa community. Nanapush may be misread if he is too simply understood as a figure of maleness who wants to dominate and objectify women. Like any good trickster, he occupies many positions, including the role of surrogate parent first to Fleur and then to Fleur's daughter Lulu, and he aims in his storytelling to repair one forced breach in the matrilineal order that has been opened up by white encroachment. Whatever else it does, his narrative follows the yearning of narrative in Yellow Raft, Love Medicine, and even The Beet Queen toward the forgiveness of the mother who appears to have abandoned her child. Pauline's story represents among other things a counter-narrative in which a mother defies on her own behalf this appeal for

forgiveness—this mother asks nothing of her child, at least at this point—in a quest for self-definition that can only look unstable and irrational, given the options for survival. Read this way, both Pauline and Fleur are not only tragic figures, whose spiritual powers at this historical moment of racial and cultural erasure are not strong enough to permit them to hold onto their children, but also trickster figures, in their own ways, certainly defying among other things "the Anglo bias of identifying Indian women with stability" (18).^[44]

Pauline's story further suggests that it is not just having a voice that matters. Language is explicitly politicized as it is in Yellow Raft, so that it is not just whether you speak but what tongue you choose or are allowed to speak in that matters, and nonnative languages can constrain more than they can express the (maternal) subjectivity of Native Americans. Whereas we are asked to believe that Ida tells her empowering, self-fashioning story in the old language, Pauline will speak only English. She repudiates her mother tongue along with her Native American heritage—both of which have been almost obliterated. She comes from the Puyats, a mixed-blood family "with little to say," and from a "clan for which the name was lost" (14). Pauline is lighter-skinned than her sisters, and when she leaves the Chippewa to go to the white town, she says: "I wanted to be like my mother, who showed her half-white. I wanted to be like my grandfather, pure Canadian. That was because even as a child I saw that to hang back was to perish. I saw through the eyes of the world outside of us. I would not speak our language. In English, I told my father we should build an outhouse with a door that swung open and shut" (14). But Pauline's dreams of self-improvement and survival, initially tied to speaking English and learning from the nuns how to make lace, are impossible. When she goes to the white town to live with her aunt, she ends up sweeping floors in the butcher shop where Fleur works. Longing to survive, suffering from guilt over her part in the deaths of the men who raped Fleur, extremely jealous of Fleur's sexual allure, and frustrated over her own failure to attract a husband, Pauline begins to have visions and seeks her vocation in the Catholic church. The Church, however, "discounts" Native American women. The order receives word that no Indian girl can join, so Pauline cunningly has a vision from Christ, who sits on the stove beside which she sleeps and tells her that she is not who she thought she was: "I was an orphan and my parents had died in grace, and also, despite my deceptive features, I was not one speck of Indian but wholly white. He

Himself had dark hair although his eyes were blue as bottleglass, so I believed" (137). "'The Indians,'" she begins to say, "'them.' Never neenawind, or us" (138). She learns from Christ, however, that she has a mission not to turn her back on her native ways but to convert and save the Native Americans. In return for the powers of salvation that she will wrest from the Satanic force of Fleur, her own powerful will must completely submit: "I must dissolve" (141).

In the Christian symbolic order, woman's highest and oldest road to salvation demands this repudiation of the self, the flesh, the literal, the Eve-like desire that brought sin into the world. One inevitable cost of that repudiation, in Pauline's case as in so many early female saints' lives, is the abandonment of her own child, a mark of sin. The perfect Christian mother is Mary, whose image compensates for the loss of the real mother and represents the fantasy of total and absolute maternal omnipotence together with submission of the female self to the male child. Mary defines woman as mother and only as mother, but paradoxically the mother of no human being, a mother who is no longer a mother, who has lost her child; she is a disembodied figure of self-sacrificial power, alien to the mythic and social figure of the Native American mother. The power of the native mother is erased, silenced, and distorted into Pauline's nightmare visions. The novel raises the question of whether the ability to talk only in this language, to know and be only this story, is perhaps worse than having no voice at all.

From Love Medicine through Tracks, Erdrich's novels thus register what we have seen in Desert of the Heart and Meridian: increasing rather than decreasing difficulty in representing—in English—an unproblematic, unified, individual maternal subject, a synthetic maternity, or the mother as nonvictim and not absent. In Love Medicine, forgiveness is made possible by epiphany, and alternative models are presented in Marie and Lulu, but the mother also remains "huge and blurred." Problems are displaced onto a white mother, Adelaide, in The Beet Queen, while Celestine carries on the maternal lineage of Ida, Marie, and Lulu—women who are not sentimentalized but represented as strong, nurturant, and present mothers. Tracks, however, returns to problems inherent in the Native American mother figure who is almost synonymous with problems of recovering the cultural past, the precontact identity and community; two versions of the problem are explored in Fleur and Pauline. Both are tricksters, figures of resistance, inciting narratives, pursuing alternative paths in an effort not to be victimized, but both

paths necessitate voluntarily occupying the difficult position of a mother without child, giving up the child who cannot be held.

There Is More to Be Told:
The Bingo Palace

The red rope between the mother and her baby is the hope of our nation. It pulls, it sings, it snags, it feeds and holds.
—The Bingo Palace

The Bingo Palace introduces a major new female character, Shawnee Ray Toose, who seems to inherit the maternal powers of creativity, nurturance, and sexuality suggested in Marie and Lulu in Love Medicine or Celestine in The Beet Queen, while countering even more unambiguously than they do the old images of "strained" mother-child relations and pointing to a new, anticipatory model of cultural revival. Shawnee is a young unmarried mother who is beautiful and talented in both traditional and new ways. She wins dancing prizes wearing her brilliant homemade costumes; she uses her prize money to go to college. She is unswerving in her devotion to her young son, Redford, fathered by Lyman Lamartine, successful tribal leader and owner of the casino. As the collective voice of the novel's opening chapter suggests, it is as a result of her motherhood and the strong pull of that "red rope" binding her and her baby that Shawnee is saved from wildness and pulled back to the world of responsibility and care, "outraged and tender" (6). Notably, the alternative to wildness here is not the holy ground occupied by the white models of nuclear family and heterosexual marriage; it is the resilient, extramarital connection of mother and baby, sometimes supported by the extended family (Shawnee's sisters and a surrogate grandmother, Marie's daughter Zelda) but also capable of moving outside the community. In the interests of herself and her son, Shawnee is resourceful and independent: she refuses to marry either Lyman or the more appealing, unstable Lipsha Morrisey, who returns to the reservation and falls desperately in love with her. Lipsha's passion for Shawnee is the realistic motive for much of the action, and it is made explicit near the end of the novel that he wants her to be his mother as well as his wife.

The optimistic cultural and personal future imaged in Shawnee is at the same time deferred by the complications of the plot; there is old business to be settled with the earlier maternal figures. Picking up threads

from both Love Medicine and Tracks, the plot of The Bingo Palace takes Lipsha not forward to fulfillment of his sexual desire for Shawnee but back to sadder and more terrifying, ancestral female figures: his birth mother, June Morrisey, and his paternal great-grandmother Fleur Pillager. The status of the mother without child as a liminal figure reaches its fullest realization here. June returns as an alluring, enigmatic ghost, and Fleur is an ancient, still-powerful, and highly feared "medicine woman" living geographically on the margins of the tribal community but psychologically and spiritually at its center. With the reappearance of these characters, we revert to the problem that is a driving force in Erdrich's novels—the difficulty of knowing or telling the story of maternal abandonment in any single, true, or empowering form, together with the impossibility of forgetting it. But now, after three attempts that in different ways treat the mother's story as fundamentally a mystery story, the narrative turns more completely to the genre glimpsed in Love Medicine and then reintroduced in Tracks, where events we would normally divide into realistic and supernatural spheres are interwoven in a ghost story.^[45]

June

Just as the mystery of June's death and the question of her maternal intentions frame Love Medicine, so too the haunting tale of her return as an apparition frames The Bingo Palace . In the opening chapter, the first-person-plural voice of the community—or some unspecified portion of that community, suggesting what Kathleen Sands calls the force of gossip—is watching and talking about Lulu Lamartine and her son, the famous criminal Gerry Nanapush.^[46] This collective persona self-consciously understands itself to be "trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things" (5). But starting with Lulu quickly leads to one thing and another, "until we are lost in the connections," and one of the unavoidable tangles is June, suddenly recalled along with the thoughts of a late spring blizzard. June is identified from the outset by this "we" as a ghost, said to be walking still in the snow but also recalled as "a beautiful woman, much loved and very troubled" (5).

In the chapter entitled "Transportation," the ghost of June appears for the first time to Lipsha alone, in the middle of the night, to take back

the car that appeared at the beginning and end of Love Medicine, a blue Firebird purchased by King Jr. with June's life insurance and then won in the poker game by Lipsha and his father, Gerry Nanapush. After a brief conversation with her son, June gives Lipsha a lucky set of bingo tickets; her appearance thus entails both cultural updating and maternal rebuke, as she takes back the previous maternal legacy, the car from Love Medicine that no longer runs, and proffers a dubious new heritage, the winning bingo cards. By way of both explanation and outcome of this provocative nocturnal visitation, June's life is revisited and revised at several points in the novel. In these additional episodes of her story, the supernatural, the fictive, and the actual are complexly and unstably mixed in the memories and visions of the living characters.

Near the beginning of the novel, from Marie Kashpaw's singular and somewhat more intimate point of view, June is remembered differently than she was in Love Medicine . There Marie tried to assure Lipsha that his mother loved him. Now June is recalled as a child Marie tried to mother, "but it had been too late to really save her . . . June was damaged goods . . .. Some children, you could not repair" (27–8). Marie's daughter Zelda is the next to offer us a contradictory and less pleasant version of June's story. Her tongue loosened by unaccustomed amounts of gin, Zelda shocks Lipsha by bringing up "the raw specifics" of his mother's abandonment, the story he has heard alluded to before but has dismissed as a joke. "'I hate to talk about it in front of you,'" Zelda claims, and then goes on to insist that she was there when June threw baby Lipsha into a slough, in a gunny sack filled with rocks. "'I should know. It was me who dragged you out,'" she adds. What bothers her still is the mystery of why the baby, who was under water "a long time," didn't drown. Without complete success, Lipsha tries to convince himself at this point that Zelda is wrong, that the story he accepted at the end of Love Medicine is the truth: "I was given to her [Grandma Kashpaw] in a sad but understandable way by a mother who was beautiful but too wild to have raised a boy on her own" (52). But then he dreams of "frightening water," and when he goes back to the bar for a drink he encounters June, looking the way she did when he was a child and offering no excuses.

The next brief chapter, following Zelda's revelation and June's first visitation, is entitled "June's Luck." Here, it is as if her ghost has finally brought into narrative reach some fragment of her consciousness, in this instance a classic "recovered memory." In the third-person past

tense but clearly from June's point of view, we hear the grim tale of June's childhood before her mother's death. June is treated more and more cruelly by her mother, Lucille, especially when Lucille is drunk. One night, when June fails to heed her brother's warning to run away and sleep in the woods, her mother ties her up, and sometime later her mother's drunken boyfriend rapes her. June survives the ordeal, as victims of abuse are so often said to do, by dissociation, becoming

just a burning dot, flung star moving, speeding through the blackness . . . until she finally escaped into a part of her mind, where she made one promise before she went out.

Nobody ever hold me again . (60)^[47]

After June's trauma breaks through forgetfulness and voicelessness into narrative, so does Lipsha's. In the wake of this newly presented information about June, just before her second and last appearance in the novel as a ghost, he has a vision in which he reexperiences his drowning as an infant and connects it to June's own trauma and subsequent inability to hold or be held. As at so many points in this novel, comedy and tragedy as well as phantasmagoric and rational worlds easily intersect in Lipsha's experience. The memory of his infant self has been summoned up by Lipsha's apparently unsuccessful ritual quest, where he has met only a mysterious speaking skunk. Felt as well as understood, this traumatic memory now escapes from Lipsha's consciously forgetful self into his first-person narrative. With the conviction that comes from the irrational knowledge gained by intrusive sensation, Lipsha feels certain that he knows what June did to him and that June meant to do it. At the same time he interprets and rationally encodes her act in a way we can understand, as an inevitable repetition of her own trauma: "I remember the sensation I spent my whole life trying to forget . . .. I hear my mother's voice, feel her touch, and by that I know the truth. I know that she did the same that was done to her—a young girl left out to live on the woods and survive on pine sap and leaves and buried roots" (217).

More uncannily still, Lipsha finds in his own recovered memory the answer to the question that bothered Zelda: How did he survive for so long under water? Appalling but plausible experience, the mother's attempted infanticide, is inextricably accompanied by the implausible and supernatural, as Lipsha remembers being under the water, in the sack, for an indefinite period, and then being saved by something with

"fins and horns . . . and long and shining plant arms" that rock him: "Its face is lion-jawed, a thing of beach foam." To Lipsha this "something else" has the face of "unburied goodness, the saving tones" (218), yet it also resembles Pauline's description in Tracks of Misshepeshu, the demon of Lake Matchimanito with "horns, fangs, claws, fins" and "the body of a lion . . . made of black moss" (Tracks, 11) that saved Fleur from drowning.

From this moment on in Lipsha's story, real and unreal, comic and tragic are not only permeable but completely confused. In a surreal closing escapade in which Lipsha's "luck" seems to take a serious turn for the worse, Gerry is on the run again, and the Nanapush father and son are escaping in a car they have stolen without realizing that there is a baby in the backseat. As they drive through a blizzard that clearly echoes the opening storm in Love Medicine, the ghost of June, driving the Firebird, suddenly reappears to both Gerry and Lipsha. Gerry drives off the highway to follow June across a snow-covered field. When the Firebird comes to a halt, Gerry stops too, looks at Lipsha "with an air of sad puzzlement and hard choice," and then joins June, "lost in the surge of his own feelings" (258). Reversing the movement toward reconciliation and reunion at the end of Love Medicine and indeed all the earlier novels, Lipsha is once again abandoned by his parents. Yet the last time we see Lipsha, stranded in the field of snow where Gerry and June have left him, he simultaneously relives his psychic conviction that he was abandoned and acts with confidence and clarity to invert his mother's legacy, to save as he was saved. To do so, like Nanapush who mothers Lulu, Lipsha takes the maternal part, as he zips the baby he and Gerry have accidentally kidnapped into his jacket with just one resolve: "At least I can say . . . here is one child who was never left behind" (259).

Among all the puzzles and ambiguities of The Bingo Palace, readers may well wonder how much to trust either Lipsha's visions or his explanations of June, given the way the apparent "truth" achieved at the close of Love Medicine is exposed as self-deception in The Bingo Palace . Even the way Lipsha formulates his newly recovered memories here—"I know the truth. I know that she did the same that was done to her"—recalls the wording he uses at the end of Love Medicine —"there was good in what she did for me, I know now" (emphases added)—and thus the finality and reliability of what he knows is rendered problematic. But whatever else we believe, it is difficult not to

conclude that here June has been reclaimed as the restless ghost of the mother who really does "mean to" abandon her child. Maybe Lipsha is right now, and she did mean to hurt him as she was hurt; or maybe he is still wrong, and she acted to put the child she could not hold out of its misery. In either event, June's return as an embodied ghost with her own traumatic history prompts (or perhaps is prompted by) an undoing of the resolution and forgiveness of the mother that closed and for many readers unified Love Medicine . In the last chapter of that novel, Lipsha says, "I couldn't linger too long on sad facts" (265), but in The Bingo Palace he has been forced to do just that, when his hopeful reconstruction of his mother's act of abandonment as a blessing in disguise is explicitly revised again, this time apparently irrevocably.

Although June's behavior is far more difficult to judge than Sethe's in Beloved, the story of June and Lipsha may best be understood as analogous to the story of the slave mother and her baby daughter in that it is "not a story to pass on." Like Beloved, it is told and understood as a ghost story in which there is no question that the ghost is real. Both narratives seek to record what is an affront to understanding, what is impossible to know in rational, historical modes of knowing, even, perhaps, what must be kept secret lest it, too, be stolen, at the same time that the story must nevertheless be brought to consciousness and memory. This story, as constructed by the sequence from Love Medicine to The Bingo Palace, does not go fully or only forward to the mother who holds and offers hope, but also goes back to June as a figure of traumatic loss and failure of connection who cannot be repaired or recovered or forgiven, even as she is still "much loved." Attempts fail to assimilate or repress either the real atrocity that "damaged" her to begin with or the disorientation that her own abandoned child in turn undergoes. At the same time, Lipsha, unwitting agent in the separation of another parent and child, tries not to "pass on" the story as he received it.

Fleur

In The Bingo Palace there is a partial, tenuous, and enigmatic reconnection of that other liminal mother without child, Fleur, to her descendants. In Tracks, readers never find out what Lulu, a virtually uncharacterized listener in that novel, thinks of Nanapush's attempted vindication of her mother, Fleur. In The Bingo Palace, however, when

Lipsha assumes that Lulu still hates Fleur, Lulu quietly corrects him in a way that suggests she was able to hear Nanapush: "'I don't hate the old lady . . . I understand her.'" In the chapters Erdrich has recently added to Love Medicine, we learn more about Lulu's longing for her mother, and at times of trouble Lulu still hears her mother's comforting voice saying "'N'dawnis,' my daughter" (69, 83, new and expanded edition). In The Bingo Palace, however, what Lulu or anyone else might "understand" about Fleur is rendered, like June's story, in such a way as to exceed what we might normally think of as rational understanding. And although it might have seemed to be the case in Love Medicine and Tracks, as Scott Sanders has observed, that "the wisdom of healing and intimacy with the ancient gods is dying with the old women" (9), this conclusion too is revised by Fleur's role in The Bingo Palace .^[48]

Already associated with ghosts, the dead, and fearsome supernatural powers in Tracks, Fleur returns in The Bingo Palace as a surpassingly old but still extraordinarily powerful woman, a "healing doctor witch" feared by the community, which assumes that she is waiting to pass on her knowledge to Lipsha, her great-grandson, before she dies.^[49] When Lipsha timidly introduces himself to Fleur, she leads him back to her home in the woods around Matchimanito Lake. There Fleur has apparently learned what she did not know in Tracks: she has tapped into the power of words and writing that only Nanapush wielded in the earlier novel, appropriating writing for her own purposes of resistance and cultural survival, not assimilation.^[50] Lipsha finds his greatgrandmother's house full of papers stacked to the ceiling, and every available surface, including walls and tablecloth, is covered with a spidery writing that Lipsha cannot decode. When he asks her for love medicine to help him court Shawnee Ray, the already surreal scene fades as Fleur seems to turn into an animal and Lipsha faints. Just what the old woman means or does remains, as ever, terrifying and unclear.

But at least a little more of the story can be told. Just as the story of "June's Luck" follows on Lipsha's first sighting of her apparition in the bar of Lyman's casino, his uncertain and frightening meeting with Fleur brings another piece of her experience into narration in the next chapter, with the parallel title "Fleur's Luck." Here we learn more about one segment of Fleur's mysterious life after the end of Tracks (although we still lack many details). This chapter tells of her last return to the reservation, at some unspecified point, with an expensive white car,

wearing an elegant white suit and bringing with her a mysterious white boy, who may or may not be her son. Whoever he is, she uses the boy in her successful effort to resist the colonizer, to win back the Pillager land by playing cards with the white agent. Whereas "June's Luck" confirms and accounts for the damage done to June as victim, "Fleur's Luck" extends the story of Fleur as trickster and avenger.^[51] In both cases, what happens in the traumatic or supernatural moment or what the ghostly, dissociated June or magical figure Fleur intends is obscure, but the consequences of Lipsha's encounters with them are clear. Somehow they afford at least a window onto understanding, a slightly fuller but by no means fully rational or complete narrative of that which is so difficult and crucial to know and tell, the mother's story.

The novel closes with what we can take to be Fleur's death, following on and seemingly in response to Lipsha's failed attempt to rescue his father. The last chapter in Fleur's story and the novel, however, does not have the status of epiphany or final revelation or even clear, coherent narrative. From the point of view of the first-person-plural voice with which the novel opened, it is represented as a puzzle whose solution resists or escapes certain knowledge: those who come to Fleur's house after she is gone partly "decipher, " partly "imagine " what happened. According to their recreation of events, Fleur sets out in the blizzard on her last journey, at once imitating and reversing June's journey into the snow at the beginning of Love Medicine . Fleur goes to take her place among the dead at last, standing in for "the boy," presumably Lipsha, whom we last saw marooned in the snow: "Annoyed, she took his place" (272). On the basis of imagined "tracks" in the snow, as mysterious and unreadable as the "tracks" on her walls, it is rumored that Fleur turned into a bear as she headed back to the cave on the island where her cousin Moses and all the dead members of her family waited for her. It is also said that "she still walks"—like and unlike June, who still drives at least—and watches the community at their gambling. Read as figures of the mother without child, Fleur and June both remind us of the intricate patterns of loss and desire, of all that we will never fully understand, while promising that there is more than can be known and narrated.

Making Do and Doing Something

Two recent short stories by Linda Hogan, a member of the Chickasaw tribe, and Georgiana Valoyce Sanchez, from the Pima/Papago and Chumash tribes, may help to clarify the two main threads of a tradition

within which the figure of the mother without child works in the juxtaposed stories of June and Fleur.^[52] In Hogan's "Making Do," an unidentified third-person speaker briefly recapitulates the story of Roberta James's experience as a young mother. Roberta "became one of the silent people in Seeker County" when she lost her first child, a daughter who died at the age of six. In quick succession, Roberta loses a second child, a son who is strangled by his umbilical cord at birth, and then her third and last child, a daughter who dies of some unspecified fever. Leaving her family of equally bereaved and "broken" people, Roberta goes alone to a small town in Colorado where she works part-time in a convenience store, whittles small birds "as toys for the spirits of her children," and otherwise waits in vain for her soul to leave her body. In the second section of the story, a first-person speaker who appears to be Roberta's sister comments on her reasons for deciding not to go to comfort Roberta when she hears the news of her troubles. "I knew this much," the narrator says:

Roberta would need to hold on to her grief and her pain.

Us Chickasaws have lost so much we hold on to everything. Even our muscles hold on to their aches. We love our lovers long after they are gone, better than when they were present. (204)

In what remains of her part of the story, the speaker appears to forget Roberta. But in fact she transforms Roberta's experience into parable, as she elaborates on her theory of how her people "make do," saving and reusing whatever comes to hand—bottlecaps, old jars and cans and shoes—in order to save themselves from the repeated history of losing everything. For many, the price of this kind of saving (in both senses of the word) is denial, the speaker adds; the occasional act of angry protest is just "a tidal wave in the ocean of our history, an anxiety attack in the heart monitor of our race" (205). However, she ends with an anecdote that suggests how quiet, apparently submissive "making do" can be, in its own way, a means of simultaneously remembering and surviving loss:

Once I saw a railroad engineer's hat in a museum. It was fully beaded. I thought it was a new style like the beaded tennis shoes or the new beaded truckers' hats. But it was made in the late 1800s when the Lakota were forbidden to make traditional items. The mothers took to beading whatever was available, hats of the engineers of death. They covered colony cotton with their art.

We make art out of our loss. (205)

In this story, the mother who loses three children does not, like Adelaide Adare or June Morrisey, purposely abandon them, but like Adelaide and June she is one of the innumerable "silent" ones, "damaged" and "broken" in some irreparable way, who cannot use words to reconnect to others, to express or relieve their loss by telling their own story. Her sister, the contemporary storyteller writing in English, respects this silence and the grief it contains, recognizing both as ways of holding on to loss when loss itself is paradoxically all that is left. Like the storytellers in Erdrich's novels, she thereby seems to frame and reinforce the impenetrability of the mother without child. In her telling, Roberta's story becomes both a paradigm of the traumatic history of "Us Chickasaw" and a springboard to reflection on how survival and art—as well as survival through art—are possible in the face of the decimation of families, tribes, and cultures. In the last anecdote, "the mothers" are also those who represent this continuity—not immediately or easily recognized as such—despite loss, and who express it in their "saving" art forms.

In Sanchez's "The Heart of the Flower," a more active, immediately recognizable, although not necessarily more effective political response to maternal loss (that is, a woman's loss of a child) is imagined. The story sets a tale of private tragedy inside a historical crisis, an episode of dramatic public protest. The time is March 1973, and the pregnant first-person narrator gives birth to a stillborn baby on the tenth day of the siege at Wounded Knee. Before the loss of the baby, she has been daydreaming about joining American Indian Movement (AIM) activists and finding herself in increasing disagreement with her husband Ed, a veteran who disapproves of AIM's militancy, prefers to ignore his Native American identity, and believes "the old days are gone" (258). Afterwards, the narrator associates her own stillborn fetus with the death and pathology of Native American culture. Despite Ed's disapproval, she decides she must take some small part in the action at Wounded Knee by donating food to the AIM headquarters in Los Angeles. As she sets off with the groceries, she cries because of the growing rift between herself and Ed, but she sees and articulates clearly the way in which loss of the child has politicized her: "There I was going off on some maybe hopeless vision quest only I couldn't pull out because the child had died. Would never be born. And, oh God, I had to do something" (263 ). Here, as in so many other historical circumstances, the mothers—especially the mothers who are no longer mothers—survive to do something, in

this case making trouble as well as art out of loss. The point is the same as Ruth's claim, in Jane Rule's The Young in One Another's Arms —"What you lose is what you survive with" (3).

Erdrich and Dorris's insistent recursions to and variations on the theme of the mother's loss or fear of loss evoke these two fundamental patterns (and in many cases, one character can do both). In the first, recording and making "art" out of loss without assimilating it or forgetting it recognizes the mother's silence as a way of holding on to the loss itself, when loss may be all that is left. In the second, finding in her loss the impetus to take action with what is left opens the possibility of "doing something," however hopeless it may seem. June's story, in the context of many others, might be understood primarily as a version of the former, Fleur's a version of the latter. In the trajectory I trace here from Yellow Raft on Blue Water to The Bingo Palace, there is decreasing certainty that the story of the mother without child can be told once, resolved, recuperated, known, and forgiven. Instead it is divided into these two complementary myths, both of which require a narrative that finally turns into a full-fledged ghost story. Like the sister's narrative intervention in "Making Do," the ghost story in Erdrich's latest novel puts June back into the narrative without violating her silence or taking away her pain and the pain she has given, without absorbing pain and loss into our normal ways of remembering, which can also be ways of forgetting. Like "The Heart of the Flower," The Bingo Palace underscores the simultaneous political resistance and commitment to survival through tradition that is at the heart of Fleur's actions, her mysterious existence, and her supernatural force. The story of the mother without child can thus represent both the trauma out of which we can never—and should never—quite make sense and the power that exceeds the sieve of rational thinking.

With this development of the Native American mother without child, we see the obverse of Judith Antell's argument about the figure of the absent mother in much previous fiction. Contradicting their images in Euroamerican representations, women of Native American descent have been able to play their traditional role and sustain the continuity of their tribal culture through times of crisis. To the extent that they do so, female figures—like Fleur or June or Pauline—are even more threatening to the "colonial scenario" and certainly cannot be "discounted." Erdrich and Dorris put the mother without child into narrative as a figure of both "tragic," irrecoverable loss and the "threat" of survival and resistance.