33 pages • 1 hour read
The Shawl
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Themes
The Impact of Generational Trauma
The profound impact of generational trauma on Indigenous American communities is a key theme present in many of Erdrich’s works, both her short fiction and book-length texts. Generational trauma is the transference of traumatic experiences, stressors, and memories from one generation to the next. Although early studies of generational trauma focused on the mental and physical health issues passed down by survivors of the Holocaust to their children and grandchildren, generational trauma has also been studied in Black and Indigenous communities in Canada and the Americas. Erdrich is interested in the way that genocide, colonization, the reservation system, forced migration, forced sterilization, and other issues faced by Indigenous communities impact the individuals who directly experience them and how they reverberate through successive generations and lead to shortened life spans, addiction, domestic violence, and mental health conditions such as anxiety disorders and depression.
Erdrich examines generational trauma both within Aanakwad’s family and in the community as a whole. In “The Shawl,” the death of Aanakwad’s daughter, and to a lesser extent, Aanakwad’s abandonment of her family, function as the sources of generational trauma. When her son recalls seeing his mother leave, he describes that something inside him “broke” (363). Years later, when his father finally tells what he believes to be the whole story of the young girl’s death, the narrator adds that “he knew that this broken place inside him would not be mended, expect by some terrible means” (364). These two passages illustrate the way that trauma takes root in an individual. The “terrible means” of which he speaks here will be the unhealthy coping mechanisms of addiction and abuse.
This boy, who will become the narrator’s father, is ultimately incapable of managing his grief, and after being further triggered by the loss of his wife, descends into a state of violent abuse and alcohol addiction that will damage his own children. This is the passage of generational trauma from one set of family members to the next: The young boy’s pain becomes a force so great that it targets his own sons and daughter. His son, too, will be capable of violence and it will not be until after a physical altercation with his father that healing begins to take place.
Erdrich ties the experiences of Aanakwad’s family to the community as a whole through her discussion of the ways in which Indigenous American families were damaged by urbanization, or forced movement into cities. Although not discussed as explicitly in this short story, a large part of the reason that urbanization was so damaging was that it removed Indigenous populations from natural, rural settings in which communities functioned as part of nature. Indigenous communities lived for the most part harmoniously with the land, taking only what was needed and giving back to the ecosystem that they were part of. This loss of connection to nature is a key theme in much of Erdrich’s work and within the Native American Renaissance as a whole and provides critical context to this story.
Storytelling and the Healing Process
During the Native American Renaissance, Indigenous authors developed a renewed interest in traditional forms of storytelling, in Indigenous American myths, and in finding new ways to transcribe and disseminate narrative material that had previously been included only in oral histories. Storytelling in particular became a key focal point for writers because it was seen as a way to recover lost pieces of culture and to showcase that culture for younger audiences who might have grown up in urban environments where Indigenous languages were not spoken, Indigenous ceremonies were no longer practiced, and Indigenous foods were no longer prepared. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller is perhaps the most emblematic of this trend. Published in 1981, the text weaves stories and poems that the author heard as a young woman growing up in New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo with folktales, autobiographical vignettes, and images. Through her writing, Silko builds a bridge to the past and provides her audience with a narrative that builds a portrait of Indigenous American identity grounded in oral storytelling traditions and traditional cultural practices rather than the troubled stereotypes so often ascribed to them by a broader, mostly-white readership in America. Although not as explicitly complex as Silko’s text, Erdrich, too, engages with these themes in “The Shawl.” In this story, storytelling has the power to wound, but also the power to heal, and it is through the recovery of a lost story (in this case, the narrator’s new, more accurate interpretation of Aanakwad’s daughter’s actions) that the narrator and his family are able to lay down the burden of grief and begin to move on.
Aanakwad’s husband, his son, and his son’s children are all emotionally wounded by abandonment, but also because they assume that Aanakwad had thrown her daughter to the wolves. Their grief is based, in part, on a story that is ultimately framed to be inaccurate. Aanakwad’s son turns this grief into anger and violence, and then passes on that predisposition toward violence to his own son, the narrator. It is not surprising, then, that when the narrator chooses to confront his father, it is through a physical altercation. That altercation forms the climax of “The Shawl,” and although it results in forgiveness, that forgiveness is ultimately possible because of storytelling. The narrator’s father had believed, from the time of his boyhood, that his mother was responsible for his sister’s death. That was the story that he had been told. His son suggests a new interpretation, based on Aanakwad’s daughter’s kindness, her role as caretaker to her younger siblings, and her understanding that, because of the threat posed by the wolves, “one person on the wagon had to be offered up, or they all would die” (368). The narrator revises his father’s version of the story and figures the young girl’s action as one of self-sacrifice. Based on this new understanding of his sister’s death, the burden of his grief is eased, and he is able to heal.
Self-Sacrifice and Cultural Identity
Texts written during the Native American Renaissance showed a marked interest in Indigenous cultural identity and sought to impart to their readers a more in-depth understanding of Indigenous American identity, one that placed Indigenous American identity within the context of Indigenous histories that pre-dated not only urbanization and the reservation system, but also genocide and colonization. In this way, writers sought to counter understandings of Indigenous American identity that located it solely within the troubled contemporary landscape of Indigenous life, which many in America looked at and saw little other than the endemic issues that plagued Indigenous communities such as poverty, violence, and suicide.
Erdrich engages with these common representations of Indigenous trauma through directly in “The Shawl.” She notes that after Indigenous peoples had become urbanized, “anyone who was anyone was either drunk killed, near suicide, or had just dusted himself” (367). The narrator’s own father has fallen victim to this pattern, and the narrator and his siblings grow up in the shadow of his alcoholism and violence. Erdrich also discusses poverty in Anishinaabeg communities, noting that the narrator and his family ate little other than “oatmeal and commodity canned milk” (365). (The term “commodity” refers to governmentally provided, basic foodstuffs that were often low quality, nutritionally void, and unappetizing.)
However, like many of writers of her era, Erdrich goes beyond such stereotypes to present her reader with an alternate portrait of Indigenous American cultural identity. In “The Shawl,” she specifically locates Anishinaabeg identity within a tradition of goodness and self-sacrifice. She describes the Anishinaabeg as a community that values the “good of the people” (368) above the needs of the individual. The first character who embodies this spirit of self-sacrifice is Aanakwad’s husband. Although he loves his wife and children, he realizes that his wife is no longer happy, and makes arrangements for her to move in with the father of her new child. Even though he loves his nine-year-old daughter fiercely, he agrees that she may accompany Aanakwad and the new baby. The husband gives up almost everything that matters to him in order that his family group, although it will fracture, might be happier.
The nine-year-old daughter’s act of self-sacrifice, which is not truly identified until the story’s conclusion, is where Erdrich fully unpacks the importance that self-sacrifice plays within Anishinaabeg culture. Aanakwad’s daughter is characterized as “tenderhearted” and “brave,” as a wise girl who “understood that the baby she loved would not live without a mother” (368). It is because she sees the entirety of the situation, as the wolves’ attack is imminent, that she chooses to give up her own life so that her mother and young sibling might live. Thus, Erdrich goes beyond stereotypical representations of Indigenous peoples in order to construct an image of Indigenous American cultural identity that showcases the inherent good of the Anishinaabeg people.
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