“Where No One Has Gone Before”: Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and its Star Trek Intertext

Abstract:Even as Louise Erdrich mounts her exposé of the woeful legal situation governing Indigenous peoples in The Round House, the novel suggests a way forward in its chapter titles (almost all borrowed from Star Trek: The Next Generation). Only by listening to the resonances between the narration and the TNG intertext to which its chapter titles allude can we understand the ways young Joe formulates out of his personal trauma an ethical critique of his people’s legal conditions, a theory and model for forging justice from within that condition, and a path toward healing the trauma he suffers.