The path-breaking documentary video, The Spirit of Crazy Horse, opens with a scene of Milo Yellow Hair walking on the prairie and singing. After offering tobacco, he narrates in a flat, matter-of-fact voice, “My people have not adapted well to the white man’s world.” As he speaks, the camera pans to an upturned car marooned in the middle of a field. Despite waving grass and other natural integration, the car remains alien to this setting. Turned on its head and abandoned, the car is useful now only as a den for enterprising animals. The car’s original function has been thwarted. Even its value as scrap metal is disregarded. Yet it does offer a metaphor for how acculturation and adaptation have always been key issues in Indian-white conflicts in the United States. The car is a valuable site of analysis because it has such vastly different significance for each culture. Its difficult fit within Indian cultures provides one entry point for understanding those differences and for better understanding the work of contemporary American Indian writers and filmmakers. Automobiles serve, in much Native literature and film, as expressions of characters’ differences from and relationships to the larger culture. The automobile has assumed near mythic proportions in mainstream American life. The federal government has actively supported the car industry in a variety of ways ranging from a subsidized highway system to deductible interest on car loans. Indeed, so much of US culture has developed as a result of and in response to the automobile that it would be difficult to determine the extent of its effects. These car-induced cultural developments include suburban living and the loss of small, tightly knit neighborhoods; interstate trucking that expands markets and delivers goods from all over the country; drive-through services at banks, restaurants, liquor stores, dry cleaners, chapels, funeral parlors, movie theaters, and video rental stores; chains of motor inns; the development of tourism; and, on the more negative side, the limitless air pollution and diminishment of fossil fuels.

The cautionary figure of windigo has lurked at the edges of Louise Erdrich’s writing since her first collection of poems in 1984. In The Antelope Wife it finally emerges into full view. A windigo is defined as a cannibalistic monster set loose by human greed, envy, and jealousy. Traditional Ojibwe windigo stories usually focus on the starving time of winter when food is in short supply and anyone taking more than their share effectively eats into the bodies of those around them. These cautionary tales strive to impress upon their listeners the absolute need for balance and self-restraint in human relations, as in human interaction with the natural world. Once the windigo is set loose, it might devour anyone and everyone, including the one who gave it life. In order to conquer the windigo, the protagonist in the tale frequently must take the form of a windigo in order to do battle with it. Family or friends stand prepared to restore the protagonist to normal, by making him drink boiling hot fat to melt his icy heart. Windigo behavior can become a source of power if used sparingly and with the assistance of those who can restore one’s proper self. If not, it is a curse that can affect multiple generations. Erdrich’s use of Ojibwe stories and symbols has attracted critical attention from the first. Most scholarly work in this area has focused on three main tasks. One task has been to examine the ways in which these stories enrich her novels, providing layers of narrative that ripple outward. Another task has been to look at how Ojibwe culture complicates the lives and identities of Erdrich’s characters. Still another has been to unearth the ways in which the stories and symbols orient readers to Ojibwe worldviews. Much of this scholarship seems to focus on tracking the sources of Erdrich’s Ojibwe content and on interpreting this content in light of contemporary narrative. Two essays in particular, Jean Strandness’ “When the Windigo Swept Across the Plains” and Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak’s “When the Grandfather Ate His Own Wife: Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine as a Contemporary Windigo Narrative,” establish precedence for looking at the role of windigo. Strandness addresses the ways in which Sister Leopolda functions as a kind of windigo and Mermann-Jozwiak examines the added chapters to the second edition of Love Medicine, which, she argues, develop Lulu Nanapush as a windigo character.