Trickster Lives in Erdrich: Continuity, Innovation, and Eloquence of a Troubling, Beloved Character

Abstract:Ojibwe/Anishnaabe writer Louise Erdrich embraces the complex, paradoxical, and transformative Trickster character type, whose endurance inspires readers. Each of her Tricksters—Potchikoo, Nanapush, Father Damian—is modern to varying degrees, embodying qualities drawn from Anishinaabeg traditions while speaking volumes to today's audiences. Erdrich echoes her Tricksters' mastery of words, telling stories that reflect a violent history and changing yet hopeful present worlds, stories in which updated Tricksters persist, defiantly mocking even death to delight and puzzle us. Erdrich's loquacious, eloquent survivors teach and heal, even while embracing humor and acting foolish or absurd. They speak with powerful voices to mock, navigate, and explicate both tribal and mainstream culture today. Erdrich allows us to embrace this slippery character, who often provokes anxiety in contemporary scholars and writers, long enough for us to appreciate him/her as neither dead, dangerously off-limits, nor incomprehensible, but rather as a voice of survival in the midst of cultural change, worth attending to today. Erdrich offers us all an enduring character who masters stories, lives boldly in our world, and creatively merges the traditional and the contemporary.