The Shawl

Although “The Shawl” focuses ostensibly on one Anishinaabeg family, Erdrich grounds her story firmly within the shared lived experiences of many Anishinaabeg communities during the 20th century. Through her depictions of the character of Aanakwad and her descendants, Erdrich’s story speaks to broader issues of generational trauma and healing within Indigenous American communities, the role of oral traditions such as storytelling, the recovery of lost culture, and the migration from rural areas and reservations into towns and cities. “The Shawl” thus bridges the gap between individual and group and paints a portrait of Anishinaabeg life in transition.

Perhaps the most overt theme in “The Shawl” is The Impact of Generational Trauma on Indigenous American communities. The story’s inciting incident, Aanakwad’s act of familial abandonment and the death of her daughter in a wolf attack, impacts not only her husband and remaining child, but each successive generation of her family. Her husband initially believes that Aanakwad sacrificed her own daughter so that she and her infant child might live, and that knowledge becomes too difficult for him to bear. Due to the emotional weight of their family trauma, the men in “The Shawl” develop alcohol addictions and violent behavioral patterns that in turn affect their children. Erdrich emphasizes that it is generational trauma that is often responsible for high rates of suicide, rampant violence within families, and the struggles with addiction that plague Indigenous American communities. In seeing her characters through this lens, one can empathize for them and for the real-life Anishinaabeg families whom they represent.

In exploring the connection between Storytelling and the Healing Process, “The Shawl” does, however, posit that it is possible to heal from trauma, especially through traditional cultural practices like storytelling. Oral tradition, or stories passed down through generations orally rather than in writing, has long been an important piece of traditional Anishinaabeg culture. In this story, when Aanakwad’s descendants are finally able to accurately interpret and tell her story, they begin to heal from their generational trauma. The power of storytelling therefore becomes a critical part of the healing process. Recovering lost cultural traditions like oral storytelling is a theme that runs through much of Erdrich’s work. In “The Shawl,” this manifests in the connection between Self-Sacrifice and Cultural Identity, namely the importance of innate goodness and prioritizing the needs of others above the needs of the individual.

“The Shawl” is set within an Anishinaabeg community in an unnamed location. Erdrich does not provide her readers with an exact, geographically identified setting, so the reader may universalize the narrative and interpret the events of this story as those that could take place within any Anishinaabeg community: Aanakwad’s story could be the story of many Anishinaabeg families within the lands of the Anishinaabeg people (primarily North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin), making it possible to find connections between Aanakwad’s family and real-life Indigenous American communities in the United States.

“The Shawl” utilizes point of view, ambiguity, characterization, and diction to develop the identities of its characters and to connect its key moments and conflicts to the broader ideas and themes at play in its narrative. The structure of “The Shawl” is noteworthy and speaks to the way that the narrative engages with traditional elements in Anishinaabeg culture. The story is broken into two separate sections and each employs a different point of view. The first section is narrated using the third person, and the following section switches to the first person. What is so critical about this shift in perspective is that a portion of each section depicts different versions of the same sequence of events. The physical altercation between the story’s narrator and his father that comprises the climax of “The Shawl,” as well as the resulting conversation between the two that marks the tale’s denouement, each return to the inciting incident of Aanakwad’s act of abandonment and the gruesome death of her daughter.

Characterization and diction both play an important role in “The Shawl” and help Erdrich to paint a portrait of life in Anishinaabeg communities. Erdrich utilizes figurative language to craft her characters, and especially in the case of Aanakwad, descriptive simile and metaphor are derived in large part from words associated with nature. Aanakwad’s name means “cloud” and her moody, protean personality is often described using words like “stormy,” “flashing,” and “gray” (362). This language depicts Aanakwad as a deeply conflicted and volatile woman, but it also suggests an association with nature and the natural world. Erdrich overtly mentions the catastrophic disruptions caused in Anishinaabeg communities through the forced migration from rural areas into towns and cities, and Aanakwad’s characterization locates her, for the reader, within past, still-rural generations of Anishinaabeg people. Erdrich’s interest in traditional Anishinaabeg culture can be further observed in her diction, specifically through the inclusion of Anishinaabeg words and phrases within an English language text. This kind of diction characterizes Erdrich’s work as a whole and is an important point of analysis within “The Shawl.”

“The Shawl” is rich with symbols and recurring motifs, each of which helps Erdrich to connect her readers with her story’s underlying thematic structure. The story’s very title names one of its most important symbols, the shawl which Aanakwad’s daughter wraps herself in when, exhausted from a day of performing the parenting duties and household chores that Aanakwad isn’t able to accomplish, she falls into a deep sleep. Upon her death, her father keeps the torn scraps of the shawl left behind by the wolves. He passes the piece of fabric down to his own son and it becomes emblematic of the way that generational trauma passes from one family member to the next.

One of the story’s recurring motifs is the violence that plagues each generation. The first act of violence to which the reader bears witness is the death of Aanakwad’s daughter. Aanakwad’s surviving son, because he cannot comprehend a mother who would murder her own child, developed an alcohol addiction and ultimately abuses his own children. His son, raised in this atmosphere of suppressed grief and anger, uses violence as a problem-solving method during the scene in which he confronts his father. Initially, he does not speak to the man: He hits him. Thus, Erdrich depicts the way that generational trauma causes not only internal pain, but also that, directed outward, that pain manifests as physical violence. It is, however, through the shawl that Aanakwad’s descendants ultimately find the ability to forgive and move on, for it is at her grandson’s suggestion that his father follow Anishinaabeg custom and burn what is left of the shawl so that it can be returned to the girl’s spirit.

The shawl also helps the characters in this story to resolve the issue of generational trauma. During the conversation in which he urges his father to relieve himself of the burden of the shawl, the narrator also suggests a new interpretation for the story of Aanakwad and her daughter: Arguing that the young girl embodied the traditional Anishinaabeg sense of duty, self-sacrifice, and goodness of spirit, the girl chose to die in order to save the lives of her mother and young sibling. This ending is left open to interpretation by the reader. While the girl’s kind and selfless nature when she takes care of her family is evidence that she may be capable of such a sacrifice, and such a sacrifice is culturally consistent with Anishinaabeg ideals, the ending is ambiguous in that there is concrete answer as to what happened that day. What is relevant regardless of the actual events of the past is that with the narrator’s optimistic and sensitive approach to long-standing trauma, one which reframes an oral story that has influenced the lives of the characters, the father figure is finally able to begin healing from his emotional wounds that have caused generational trauma.