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Abstract: In the best-selling and award-winning novel The Round House (2012), Louise Erdrich strategically uses the suspense novel genre to engage a wide audience to the sexual violence Native women face in the United States, including the jurisdictional maze those living on reservations experience when seeking justice. Through a close textual analysis (both format and content narrative features), I examine how the novel demonstrates Gerald Vizenor's theory of survivance. Specifically, how Erdrichs maneuvering within the suspense genre, by both adhering to certain tropes but also subverting the form by weaving Ojibwe storytelling to indigenize the text, demonstrates survivance and participates in consciousness-raising by exposing readers to the issues facing Native peoples.
Keywords: Survivance, Rhetoric, Suspense Genre, Subversion, Consciousness-raising, Sexual Violence
There was a state trooper, an officer local to the town of Hoopdance, and Vince Madwsin, from the tribal police. My father had insisted that they each take a statement from my mother because it wasn't clear where the crime had been committed-on state or tribal land-or who had committed it-an Indian or a non-Indian (Erdrich 2012,12)
This excerpt from Louise Erdrichs (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) novel, The Round House (2012), exemplifies the jurisdictional maze the characters face in Indian country and how they must negotiate the colliding cultures and laws of their Native and non-Native worlds. The novel tells the story of Joe Coutts, a thirteen-year-old boy living with his family on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in 1988. Joes life, and that of his family's, is forever altered when his mother, Geraldine, is brutally raped at the round house, a sacred space and place for the Ojibwe community Readers follow Joe as he navigates the array of jurisdictional red tape his family faces when trying to seek justice.
Although the novel is fictional, the depiction of violence against Native women is based in fact. A National Institute of Justice report found that 56.1% of Native women have experienced sexual violence in their lifetimes (Rosay 2016). And for the majority of these women the perpetrators are non-Native, a staunch contrast to most sexual violence in America which is intra-racial (Deer 2015, 6). These "numbers indicate that Native women and girls are uniquely impacted by the violence of settler colonialism" (Wieskamp and Smith 2020,...