Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. The following passage from “The Painted Drum” sums this up quite well. Erdrich, by juxtaposing the stories of Native Americans with the stories of others, allows us to consider the similarities rather than the differences between people.

Some of the stories necessarily involve human weakness and maliciousness.

People being human, they sometimes make major mistakes. Some are joyous stories, some not so happy, even tragic. The novel then tells the story of the creation of the drum and then a story of the Indians living there today.Īs time goes on, the stories that are part of our lives accumulate. She takes the drum all the way to North Dakota to return it to them. She knows the Indian agent took the drum without the tribe’s consent, and since she is one quarter Indian herself she realizes how valuable this ceremonial drum would be to the Ojibwe people it was taken from. In the house of the recently died son of an ex-Indian agent, an antique dealer discovers a large Indian drum. “The Painted Drum” begins in New Hampshire, which happens to be the home of Dartmouth College where Erdrich graduated from college. Louise Erdrich is a tremendous storyteller who learned the lessons of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor very well. In “The Painted Drum”, Louise Erdrich again does what she does best, juxtaposing the lives of native Americans with the lives of people whose ancestors arrived here much later. Through the difficulty of embracing our own contradictions we gain sympathy for the range of ordinary failures and marvels.” – Louise Erdrich The truth is that my background is such a rich mixed bag I’d be crazy to want to be anything else. Psychically doomed, another mixed-blood friend once joked. There are times I wish that I were one thing or the other, but I am a mixed-blood. “The Master Butchers’ Singing Club” – a play at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, Minnesota “The Painted Drum” by Louise Erdrich (2005) – 276 pages

The painted drum book review