Immersion in Indian spirituality with Bingo Palace

It is therefore not surprising that any derogation from this ritual is spied on with great attention, recounted at will by all those who were lucky enough to be eyewitnesses – and even others for that matter. … –, commented and interpreted.

A hasty departure at the wheel of his “Citation” could not fail to attract all eyes and all questions.

At the post office where she actually went, Cheval-Jumeau, who saw her consulting the collection of wanted notices, surreptitiously tearing out a page, making a photocopy which she very quickly slipped into an envelope immediately thrown into the mailbox. Not fast enough, however, for Josette not to have time to read the destination on the envelope: Fargo, North Dakota!

It was only later that everything could finally be reconstructed: the visit to a shop where she bought a frame, the return to her home where she carefully installed the photo stolen from the register at the post office, said photo which featured her son, Gerry Nanapush, recently incarcerated and of whom it was the most recent portrait she had of him, and finally, the recipient of the missive, Lipsha Morrissey, her grandson, Gerry’s son, the one whom all the Chippewas were convinced would do no good despite the hopes of Fleur Pillager who saw in him her worthy successor, a boy witch.

And it is true that, if years of more than satisfactory studies had been able, for a time, to give the change and the hope, Lipsha had missed his chances in shady companies and with even more shady individuals.

However, upon receiving his grandmother’s letter, he put all his things in his car, money, radio, clothes, books, tapes… and he returned to the reservation where he arrived for the pow-wow. d’hiver who stood in the gymnasium where he slipped among the crowd who did not immediately recognize him as one of their own. But he returned just in time to see his cousin Albertine Johnson, dancing with a woman who seems “collected [ir] the shine of [sa] cousin [… le] street lamp [r et l’] dazzle!

No doubt, soon arrived, soon in love with Shawnee Ray.

Shawnee Ray who is soon to marry Lyman Lamartine, Lipsha’s half-uncle, the “largest cheese in the reserve“, a man who “has hands in all the baskets and a nose that smells tricks“, an entrepreneur who has done everything, cunning, with whom Lipsha has a complicated relationship that will not get better with this sudden love at first sight shared with Shawnee.

For this new immersion in the magnificent universe of Louise Erdrich, the back cover announces that, in this novel, the reader “to regain [a l’] love [de l’autrice] for the Indian people and their traditions“. And there, no doubt, it is indeed in this adventure that we are carried away.

Here is a world which, despite the vicissitudes, despite the denigration and abandonment, the ostracism and the refusal of conquering America to admit it into its midst, with its particularisms and its differences, continues to perpetuate a culture, beliefs, a mental universe which can seem to us (which are to us!) almost inaccessible.

Because they seem devoid of reason and Cartesianism. Because they don’t meet, no longer have they ever met, those Western standards. Because they continue to respond to stimuli with shifted frames of reference that confuse us. Because this sidelining has regularly resulted in a shift to alcohol, drugs, violence and this cocktail always ends in rejection on the fringes of our society, which is quick to cast shame on those to whom we were never really given a chance to qualify.

The world of Louise Erdrich’s novels is not a world of “care bears”. His characters also have access to the worst human behavior (but we cannot say that Western culture is the world of Love, Pure Reason, Tolerance and Sharing…).

Lipsha puts it this way:When we read a thing like Lyman and me, what would have happened [au temps des anciens grecs], there would surely be one who would die or maybe both. But we Indians are so used to inside twists that we just laugh about it“. Without giving up.

Louise Erdrich walks her characters through all the streets of their contradictions, those where personal desires mingle with the still strong influence of the collective. These streets where everyone’s strengths and weaknesses make them puppets that events lead up and down hill in a kind of whirlwind from which it is very difficult to emerge unscathed.

Family relationships made implausibly complicated by stories where the straight genealogical line does not exist are as much sources of stability as of rupture. They are unmistakably similar to the feudal ties of our long-forgotten Middle Ages. Still put forward today, the notions of fidelity and loyalty are nevertheless shamelessly overused in practices that completely forget the morality behind which those who want to justify their errors then take refuge!

It is astonishing to note how easy it is always and everywhere to deny to others, what there is no difficulty in allowing oneself.

By looking at things through the prism of the successive gazes of her characters, Louise Erdrich shows multiple truths arising from the different hold on each of the power, the significance of this cultural environment which, despite everything, managed to survive the attempt at acculturation.

In the interview he granted me, Craig Johnson confirmed to me that he had had access to Indian spirituality thanks to the intercession of his native friends.

This spirituality, I have the feeling of having brushed against it, once again, in these pages of Louise Erdrich.

Immersion in Indian spirituality with Bingo Palace