Analysis of Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2025

This novel diverts the saga started in Love Medicine with the Morriseys, Lamartines, and Kashpaws by introducing new families and therefore, different realities and conflicts. For the difficulties resulting from assimilation conflicts and annihilation present in Erdrich’s earlier novels, Erdrich substitutes problems of identity, searches for roots, and attempts to come to terms with one’s ancestry.

The Natives of The Antelope Wife are Christian Indians assimilated to Western culture, trying to make sense of their backgrounds by confronting issues of adultery, family, names, war, and the realm of the supernatural. Duplicity, duplicate identities through sets of twins, and multiple visions of motherhood complicate these questions.

In her attempt to return to a lost past, Erdrich revives the indigenous name of her tribe, calling her people “Anishinabe,” as they call themselves, instead of “Chippewa,” a name imposed by the colonizers, and therefore the official name for U.S. governmental purposes, or “Ojibwa,” the popular name by which their enemies addressed the tribe.

Apart from duplicity and motherhood, Erdrich also deals with the question of miscegenation through a peculiar scene: Scranton Roy, a German soldier, breastfeeds Matilda, an Indian baby, whom he finds, wearing a blue necklace, in the middle of the forest. This event takes place, paradoxically, after the soldier has bayoneted an ancient Indian woman who, the reader learns later on, was an ancestor of Matilda’s mother, Blue Prairie Woman.

At the same time, Matilda’s mother soothes the pain in her breasts, giving her milk to a puppy whose descendants, as a consequence, start showing human attributes. Milk proves to be the link that joins both lineages, whose descendants will meet in the figures of Rozina Roy and Frank Shawano when they become lovers.

Upon growing up, Matilda takes the reins of her destiny. She goes in search of her mother, whom she finds in the forest on the verge of death from a European disease. Matilda still has time to take her name, thus abandoning Scranton Roy and the family he had created to settle in the forest with the antelopes. Animals behave like human beings, dogs talk, and antelopes couple with women, a match that gives birth to a new species and affirms the existing bond between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Erdrich’s stories always involve the whole community. Her studies of individual characters focus strongly on the conflict of belonging to two different cultures: European and Native American like herself, from both German and Anishinabe traditions.

Lineages find their meeting point in food preparation: Klaus Shawano, the embodiment of the urban Indian, gets his name from Klaus, the German soldier who saves his own life by cooking “the blitzkuchen” with the special ingredient revealed to his descendant only at the end of the novel.

The urban Indian Klaus confronts the native of the wilderness, Sweetheart Calico, whom he kidnaps, giving her a new name and forcing her to be his wife. Cally, deprived of a voice of her own, remains silent throughout the novel until she reveals at the end that she has been hiding the blue necklace.

Meanwhile, the question of heritage, along with the practice of storytelling, proves crucial to disentangling the mysteries hidden generation after generation. As the recipient of tradition, Cally becomes enchanted with the past and begins a new life that will cure the sufferings she endured after her twin’s and her father’s deaths.

The narrative is structured around family ties and the ceremony of naming, the meaning of which Cally understands when she receives her ancestral inheritance from both grandmothers: Cally is “Magizha,” the namer, the one who receives the names.

Marie Shawano and Zosie Roy, twins and mothers of Rozina Roy, are the progeny of the antelopes cohabiting with Indian women. By telling their own life stories, these women start the task of reconstructing the forgotten memory of the tribe, protected and kept secret by them for years.

In the figures of Zosie and Marie from the Shawano clan, Erdrich rescues a typical figure of Ojibwa folklore: the windigo, a monstrous figure of the forest whose inner beast inhabits a human form, and under whose influence humans eat human flesh.

Life and death, and the thin veil that joins and separates both realities, seem omnipresent in the novel through several interrelated events that take place: the accidental death of Deanna, Cally’s twin sister; the suicide of Richard Whiteheart Beads, Rozina’s husband; the rescue of Matilda as a baby from a sure death; and the birth of Augustus Roy, among others.

The transcendent meaning of the afterlife and the supernatural for the Anishinabe people provides the context for Erdrich’s writings. Deanna and Richard come back from death, unable to cross the line between one reality and the other, and the old woman whom Scranton Roy kills haunts him and his descendants until her story is rescued and told to Cally.

Erdrich weaves stories with a fine thread—as, when the novel opens, the twins sew the beads—to create the pattern of life. Beadwork, the art of sewing beads into pieces of clothing, is an ancient tradition in Ojibwa culture. The pattern and the sewing do not start or end, like the round necklace of blue beads that Matilda wears when she’s found by Scranton Roy. They symbolize the circularity of Native time, a continuum with cycles, in contrast to linear Western time, giving Native American reality its distinct perspective.

Analysis of Louise Erdrich’s Stories

Analysis of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine

Sources
Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Larson, Sidner. Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.