51 pages • 1 hour read
Louise ErdrichThe Painted Drum
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Painted Drum
Considering Erdrich’s assurance in her Author’s Note that “no sacred knowledge is revealed” (277) in her novel, it would be imprudent to make assumptions about how the drum functions, symbolically or otherwise, as an instrument of Ojibwe spirituality. That said, the symbolic value of the drum within the context of the narrative, as a literary device, is another matter. While the drum is closely associated with healing, community, and the little girl who “gave the drum its voice” (179), it ultimately symbolizes perseverance.
Several characters in the novel have given up, capitulating to their grief or melancholy, until the drum speaks to them and inspires them to persevere. The spirit of Old Shaawano's daughter—not yet embodied as the drum—appears to him when he is crippled with despair and urges him to make the drum. With her guidance, and later, with the drum’s, he perseveres in spite of his losses. Similarly, Bernard reflects, despite “my father’s drinking rage[s] […], I never did search out oblivion in order to forget my father’s harm. Something steadied me. Something gave me rightness in my mind” (179). He believes that that something is the drum’s songs, which he learned as a child. The drum’s song also compels Shawnee to persevere and find her way through the woods to safety. Finally, Faye observes, “over the years I've warped my life around” Netta’s death, allowing grief to hold her hostage. When the drum comes into her life, it doesn’t erase her grief but guides her to an understanding of how to live with it and through it.
Wolves
Wolves appear repeatedly in ways that underscore the interconnectedness of life and colonization’s damaging consequences. When wolves surround Anaquot’s wagon and kill her daughter, it is because animals they would typically prey upon have been over-hunted due to the incursion of white settlers. Old Shaawano accepts that the wolves acted as they must to survive, because people had broken “the old agreement” (111) they had with them.
Wolves are also a metaphor for the oppressed Ojibwe in the story Bernard tells of a man who no longer wanted to live. The man (who is apparently Ira’s father) sits on the ice with the wolves, heedless of his own safety because his life has no value to him. The wolves show little interest except for one that stares “at him with a human’s eyes” (120). In his mind, the man forms a question for the wolf: “Wolf […], your people are hunted from the air and poisoned from the earth and killed on sight […]. How is it that you go on living with such sorrow?” (120). The man’s description of the wolves’ plight is analogous to that of the man’s own people. Because of the sorrows inflicted by colonization, the man does not want to go on living.
The wolf’s response to the man’s question tallies with the drum’s symbolic meaning. Wolves keep going despite adversity, because they “accept the life they are given. They do not look around them and wish for a different life […]. They deal with what they encounter and then go on” (120-121). While searching for the cedar wood to build the drum, Old Shaawano hears wolves howling and considers their perseverance from another angle. The wolves remain faithful “to their nature” (169) and live accordingly, but “humans can choose to change what they are, and change is treacherous” (169). With respect to the novel’s treatment of colonization and assimilation, Shaawano's observations are a cautionary message about changing one’s identity to align with the expectations of the dominant culture.
Ravens
Even before her trip to North Dakota, when she prides herself on being rational and unsentimental, Faye feels an affinity for ravens. She credits them with a “limber intelligence” (15) and admits, “the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. If I have a religious practice, it is the watching of these birds” (15). Her observations lead her to conclude that “[t]he laughter of a raven is a sound unendurably human” (8), but she quickly dismisses that idea: “Of course, there is nothing human in the least about it and its source is unknowable, as are the hearts of all things wild” (8). At this point, Faye views the ravens as symbols of the “unknowable” (8) and associates them with the “darkness” (15) of death.
After Faye returns from Ojibwe country, the symbolism of the ravens transforms. Having heard the story of the painted drum and its healing powers, Faye seems to have gained a greater appreciation for the notion that all lives are interconnected (though her thoughts about the drum’s origin are never revealed to the reader). Accordingly, on the final page of the novel, Faye permits herself to believe that, based on the logic of the food chain, her sister’s spirit is embodied in a raven tumbling playfully in the air. The raven’s laugh is, after all, her sister’s laugh: “she plummets down the cliff again, laughs, and disappears” 276. Ultimately, the ravens symbolize the endurance or perseverance of life, which is forever emerging, receding, and re-emerging in different shapes from the infinite wheel of creation.
Roads and Trails
On the novel’s first page, Faye contemplates the road she lives on, and thereafter, references to roads thread through the narrative. Roads and trails represent the many possible directions that life can take as well as people’s stories. After allowing that, “[f]rom the air, our road must look like a ball of rope flung down haphazardly […]” (4), Faye affirms that “there is order, but the pattern is continually complicated by the wilds of occurrence. The story surfaces here, snarls there, as people live their disorder to its completion” (4). The imagery Faye uses to describe her remarkably tangled road figures it as similar to life in its unpredictability, and she explicitly correlates the journeys along the road with narratives.
While Faye’s own road is “complicated by the wilds of occurrence” (4), such unruliness is at odds with the novel’s more frequent association of roads with order. This is an order imposed by the dominant culture to control populations and institute the “right way to go” (25). As Bernard says, “There was a time when the government moved everybody off the farther reaches of the reservation, onto roads, into towns, into housing. It looked good at first and then it all went sour” (116). The freedom to determine one’s own path was lost, but, given sufficient time, people came to prefer roads to the unknown “wilds” (4) lurking beyond them. Faye observes, “Whenever you leave […] a path or a road […] and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss […] that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go […]” (25)
Like the roads that can limit one’s freedom and mobility, stories can limit one’s perspective about the past. Such was the case with Bernard’s father, who was tormented by images of his mother throwing his sister to the wolves until Bernard offered an alternative story: Perhaps his sister sacrificed herself. Similarly, Faye guarded her story of Netta’s death within her, never sharing it and warping her life around it. Painful as the story was, it nevertheless became her “fixed […] path” (25), and she reveals it to Elsie with trepidation. Elsie responds with her version of the story, and through this process of storytelling, the women discover new, unexpected perspectives and paths forward.
Chains
The novel’s frequent invocation of chain imagery relates to the themes of colonization and the past’s connection with the present. Old Shaawano, regretting how his daughter’s death impacted his relationship with his son, imagines it as an inevitable chain reaction: “It was as though what happened with the wolves had set loose one long string of accidents that seemed like fate” (151). When Old Shaawano’s son has his own family, the string of troubles continues to unspool. He drinks to escape his painful memories and, in drunken fits of rage, beats his children. Many years later, Bernard also acknowledges the chain that links him to the burdensome past, observing, “We still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations” (116).
The sorrows of the early generations resulted from European colonization and are an abiding force in Faye’s life, as well. In Old Shaawano’s case, wolves killed his daughter because the dominance of white settlers upset the balance between predators and prey. With regard to Faye’s grandmother, the white settlers removed her and many other children from their Indigenous communities to re-educate them at boarding schools. This process of forced assimilation left Faye’s grandmother a “cold little woman” (30) who “never felt much in the way of human emotion” (30). Likewise, Faye’s mother and Faye herself seem completely indoctrinated into pragmatic ways of thinking, inasmuch as their relationship with the world is “cold-blooded and analytical” (59). Both women, moreover, have attached themselves to men—one a philosophy professor, the other a German artist —who represent a refined form of white European culture.
The novel depicts the “chain of events” (65) cascading into the present from the history of colonization as inescapable, a chain that forever binds individuals to past wrongdoings. The Eykes’ dog symbolizes this injury. The Eykes themselves are repeatedly associated with a “scruffy-looking” (12) Christian church and a sub-culture of white America that insensitively dominates nature, as the Eykes do by interminably chaining their dog to a tree. Faye identifies with the dog’s suffering, because she cannot free herself from the white culture that dominates her, as symbolized by Kurt, and she reflects, “[w]ithout a word, without a sound, I circle Krahe, dragging my chain” (21).
The dog finally escapes into the woods, but her chain snags on the undergrowth, and she dies there. Finding the dog’s remains, Faye thinks, “Maybe if her collar had been leather […] there would have been some give” (270) and she could have slipped free; “[b]ut it was a heavy nylon thing […]” (270). Faye begins to break free from the chains of colonization as well. Unlike the dog, however, she finds the give she needs by exploring her ties to her ancestry.
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