Word: nanapush
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Dates: during 1988-1988
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This time, Erdrich goes to the sources of her saga's bloodlines. Nanapush, a Chippewa elder born in 1862, begins with a stark account of an epidemic that devastated his people during the winter of 1912. "Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken," he laments. Pauline Puyat, born around the turn of the century, picks up the pace with a fanciful tale about one of the survivors, Fleur Pillager, a young girl | who grows to inhabit the book as the central symbol of endurance and revenge. Fleur...
Historically, Erdrich is writing about a time when her maternal forebears were losing what little land they had left. Nanapush sees his clansmen tempted out of their holdings with quick-cash offers. He remains an eloquent holdout. "Land is the only thing that lasts life to life," he warns. "Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier...
Girded by the white man's religion, Pauline renounces her people: "They could starve and fornicate, expose their young for dogs and crows, worship the bones of animals or the brown liquor in a jar. I would have none of it." Nanapush survives, largely because it seems he has been charged by the author to be around in 1924, when a lumber company starts dropping the trees in whose branches his ancestors once stored their dead...
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