Even though it’s the week before spring break, typically the busiest week of the second semester (“hell week” in common Grinnellian parlance), for me it’s all felt a long, slow cool down from the insane levels of stress I felt when presenting a paper at the Grinnell Peace and Conflict Studies Conference last weekend*. Grinnell has a strong social justice community, which is one of the things I love about the school and one of the reason I chose it, but it means that you have to be on your toes when you’re a straight white cisgender middle class Christian male talking about something you’ve got no authority on. And since my paper was on the Chippewa identity in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and my only substantive contact with Native American culture was a two-day field trip to Fort Snelling led by two people of the Dakota tribe (which, importantly, is not the same as the Chippewa tribe), I’d say I didn’t have much authority to go on. It got the point where I was so sure I was going to flub that I told anyone who asked about the presentation that it was taking place in the cornfields at midnight.
I think I played off my anxiety pretty well. My opening remarks, best as I can remember them were, “I’ll be honest, I’m really nervous, and since this is a Peace and Conflict Studies Conference with a bit of a religious theme going on, I think it’s appropriate to say that forgiveness and mercy would be greatly appreciated.”
I wrote my paper for a class for a global Christianities class, and picked the topic because I thought it would be something familiar. I figured that the novel was set in the midwest and I knew the midwest, it was Christian and I knew Christianity, it was a novel and I knew novels, and I wagered that I could work my way through whatever parts of the Chippewa identity I didn’t know about (i.e.: all of it).
It turned out, though, Love Medicine took what I thought would be familiar and made it unfamiliar, showing me new sides of worlds I thought I knew. Yes, it took place the midwest, but it was a midwest of rural, impoverished Indian reservations worlds away from the preppy suburb I grew up in (Edina gets a callout as a “wealthy suburb” where a Native American boy who manages to hide his socioeconomic class gets invited to parties). It portrayed a sort of Christianity, but placed it in the context of harsh missionary boarding schools that kidnapped Chippewa children, and the context of the indigenous religion that those schools robbed them of, which makes the way that Christianity seeps into the heart of the novel despite its violent history even more powerful. It even defied my expectations of a novel: It had no main character, no linear time, not even an overarching plot, just a collection of individual struggles all tied together with deeply personal connections.
I wrote about how the Chippewa characters deal with a sort of identity anxiety of being unsure how to define themselves in the wake of settler colonialism. Instead of turning to broad, often oppressive cultural labels they define themselves in relation to each other, through moments of profound empathy which are loaded with Chippewa and Catholic symbolism without fitting wholly into either religion. I said that this empathy paralleled the empathy that Erdrich was offering to the reader, especially the non-Native American reader, that by reading the book they could achieve a deep connection with a community that far too many people assume just disappeared with manifest destiny.
The presentation went pretty well, I think, even though in order to get through under the fifteen minute time limit I had to speak so fast that it probably sounded like a really terrible rap with an unusual number of scholarly quotes. After the applause and questions for the panel, I slipped my paper into my backpack, left the classroom, went for a run, and nearly forget everything I’d just said, like I do with far too many assignments.
But, for once, my Facebook newsfeed actually saved me from apathy. The other day I noticed an article about a proposed bill in Minnesota, sponsored by a vocal conservative faction at my high school (who just settled a frivolous and very confusing lawsuit), that would limit the political content a teacher could deal with. Meanwhile, the school is considering changing the English curriculum to focus less on works by authors of other cultures. I agree that ideally classes shouldn’t make students of any reasonable political leaning feel out of place, but when politics get tied up with the core missions of a school, things get complicated (and this is a discussion we’re going to have to have when we’ve got a president who makes comments that would get any kid detention or worse). And I do think that teaching empathy, especially through fiction, should be one of the core missions of a school. I discovered Louise Erdrich’s work in a high school English class, and the two-day field trip to Fort Snelling, as little as it was, was still education about Native American culture than I’d gotten in the other eleven years of schooling. Both Erdrich’s place on the reading list and the field trip will probably be scrapped if the Young Conservative Club and their backers have their way.
If you only teach novels born from one point of view, you limit the expansive potential for empathy that reading can offer. You live your life seeing only one midwest, one Christianity, one view of what a novel can be, one the world.
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*Couldn’t find a natural way to incorporate this into the post, but I just want to take a second to say that the rest of the presentations were awesome. The great thing about Peace and Conflict Studies is that the topic is so broad that you can write about practically anything, so presentations ranged from the contemporary reality of child slaves of Ghanian fisherman to the way that medieval beliefs about disease subtly influenced the German rationale for the Holocaust. Not particularly fun topics (mine was one of the happier ones, which isn’t saying much), but fascinating and well-researched. The other presenters on my panel especially tackled some very big, very real issues with a sense of immediacy that made them very impassioned.
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