26 pages • 52 minutes read
The Leap
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Background
Authorial Context: Louise Erdrich
Erdrich is a prolific American author born in 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and refers to herself as Ojibwa and Anishinaabe. She also has German and French heritage.
At the time of the publication of “The Leap,” Erdrich had already published three novels: Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks. Erdrich’s novels are frequently set on an Ojibwa reservation near the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, and while “The Leap” takes place in an unnamed town in New Hampshire, the narrator alludes to having a “failed life where the land is flat” somewhere “in the West” (Paragraphs 15, 4)—which could well be the Dakotas. Erdrich’s works also feature recurring characters and motifs and an interest in following the consequences of experiences and stories across generations and throughout communities. The narrator’s deeply invested retelling of her mother’s history in “The Leap” is an example.
Erdrich often incorporates her short stories into her novels or publishes parts of her novels as short standalone pieces. “The Leap” later appeared (with some modification and expansion) as part of Erdrich’s 1996 novel Tales of Burning Love, in which the narrator and three other women tell each other stories amid a life-threatening blizzard. The women promise to tell each other “something that [they]’ve never told another soul, a story that would scorch paper, heat up the air!” (Erdrich, Louise. Tales of Burning Love. New York: Harper Collins 1996, p. 206). After telling the story, the narrator (called Eleanor in the novel) thinks to herself, “I won’t freeze to death […] She’ll save me. She always does” (Erdrich, p. 216). This context within the novel amplifies the stakes of storytelling: The Unlikely Miracle of Life hinges not only on the narrator’s mother (as the story states) but also on her stories. In fact, even within the short story, the mother’s life stories are figured as leading to her offspring—even when doing so requires the imaginative erasure of the first child, whom the narrator “consider[s] […] a less finished version of [herself]” (Paragraph 11). The final line, where the mother’s heart stands in for “thunder” and “drums,” allows the narrator to insert herself into the story of the last performance of the Flying Avalons (Paragraph 25).
Literary Context: Native American Literary Renaissance
Erdrich is a significant writer of the second wave of the Native American Literary Renaissance. This term was coined by scholar Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 to describe an upsurge in literary production by Indigenous American writers (Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California, 1983). The first wave of the renaissance dates to the publication in 1969 of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and also includes James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Written in the political era of the American Indian Movement and Red Power, these writers’ works often centered Indigenous characters reaffirming traditional cultures, frequently through a return journey to the space of the reservation.
Second-wave writers like Erdrich and Sherman Alexie—and newer contemporaries like Tommy Orange, Rebecca Roanhorse, Angeline Boulley, Stephen Graham Joes, Joshua Whitehead, and Beth Piatote—have found ever broader readership. Second wave texts tend to explore more varied settings and genres and reflect diverse ways of living as a 21st-century Indigenous person. Many of these contemporary writers depict various enactments of what Gerald Vizenor called “survivance,” which he defines as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry” (Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners. U of Nebraska Press, 1999, p. vii). One of Erdrich’s more recent novels, The Sentence, published in 2023, participates in this renunciation of tragedy by featuring an Indigenous American bookstore (based on her own Minneapolis bookstore, Birchbark Books) that is haunted not by a ghostly Indigenous presence but by the spirit of an annoying white customer. Erdrich has also written more richly drawn non-Indigenous characters, including main characters, than first-wave writers of the Native American Literary Renaissance. “The Leap,” with its racially unspecified cast of characters, is part of this range.
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