‘The Last Time It Snows on Earth’: Environmental Violence, Gothic Pregnancy, and Multivalent Loss in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God

ABSTRACT

Erasure, loss, and ‘lessness’ are ever-present in Louise Erdrich’s 2017 novel Future Home of the Living God, a resistive narrative of ecological and reproductive nightmares. Yet the novel has been repeatedly maligned by reviewers who have critically misunderstood the intricate complexity of its themes and methods. In this essay, I build on a growing chorus of intersectionally minded defences of Future Home by exploring how Erdrich’s intertwined representations of Euro-American settler colonialism, ecological and climate crisis, and pregnancy function as gothically dystopian, drawing on politically charged tropes of horrific excess, rot and decay, helpless imprisonment, uncanny doubles, and family curses. The result of Erdrich’s underappreciated experimentation with genre is an Indigenous feminist Gothic theorisation of the terrifying relationship between environmental violence, reproductive oppression, and settler colonial values.

KEYWORDS:

• Gothic fiction
• ecoliterature
• settler colonialism
• reproductive justice
• intersectional approach

In the papers of Sandra Cisneros at Texas State University, archival readers can spend hours sifting through alphabetised ‘people’ files featuring Cisneros’s letters of recommendation for, newspaper clippings about, and other ephemera related to an array of contemporary writers. Among the gems that this collection of files offers to researchers is one on Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich, which includes a copy of her essay ‘Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place’, published in The New York Times on 28 July 1985. Cisneros made careful annotations on her copy of this article, underlining Erdrich’s remarks about the ‘mutability’ of western culture, which Erdrich sees as contrasting with Indigenous patterns of ‘inhabit[ing] a place until it became deeply and particularly known in each detail’ (Erdrich 1985, 1). In one painful moment, Erdrich explicitly connects this concept of ‘mutability’ to ‘a systemic policy of cultural extermination’ through which ‘the population of Native North Americans shrank from an estimated 15 million in the mid-fifteenth century to just over 200,000 by 1910’ (23).

The idea of ‘mutability’ as Erdrich frames it has a haunting relevance to her 2017 novel Future Home of the Living God, a ‘speculative/dystopian’ (Mootz 2020, 264) narrative of ecological and reproductive nightmares. Deeply cognisant of European settler colonialism’s deadly encroachment on Indigenous life in North America, the novel is assertive in stating what the arrival of Europeans on ‘American’ shores really meant for Indigenous people: ‘First Thanksgiving’, says the husband of the narrator’s birth mother near the close of the book, ‘we ended up with our heads on pikes’ (Erdrich 2017, 248). The book’s unwillingness to tolerate US mythologies of benign or heroic white settler culture is a thematic through-line that is equally visible earlier on, when Erdrich’s narrator-protagonist – named Cedar by Glen and Sera, her ‘adoptive’ white parents – remembers ‘the people who navigated the sea to South America. And the ones who dropped from the stars. Over a hundred million of us until de Soto’s pigs got loose, Pizarro coughed, Captain John Smith sneezed’ (4, 135).¹ For those who have been listening carefully to Erdrich over the years, of course, none of these ideas are new. It is not just that Cedar’s rendering echoes Erdrich’s own commentary in The New York Times; there are also clear thematic linkages between Erdrich’s genre experiment and her extensive body of children’s fiction – which, in the Birchbark series, vivifies the familial impacts of a smallpox epidemic alongside depictions of the ravenous ‘chimookomanug’ populating stolen land with ‘cabins, forts, barns, gardens, pastures, fences, fur-trading posts, churches, and mission schools’ (1999, 110, 76).² We know, then, that Erdrich’s persistently diverse oeuvre is systemically and variously engaged with exposing these histories and their contemporary analogues, while also contributing to a larger history of literary production by women writers of colour who have ‘actively confounded’ Eurocentric ‘expectations of narrativity’ (Sweet Wong 2000, 101).

And yet Future Home of the Living God in particular has been repeatedly misunderstood and maligned, having met with bursts of rather hyperbolic resistance since its publication in 2017 – including pronouncements that Erdrich had produced a ‘well-intentioned disaster’ (Schaub 2017) that was also ‘oddly derivative’ (Winik, qtd. in Bladow 2021, 141). More positive reviews were often littered with caveats, including less than favourable comparisons to Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler.³ They also tended to acknowledge Erdrich’s indigeneity and that of her protagonist in superficial terms that did not capture the mutually constitutive influence of race, nation, gender, and ecological and climate crisis in the world of the novel. To some, it seemed that the book was both less artistically and less politically effective than the types of narratives that readers had come to expect from a writer ‘like Erdrich’. Nevertheless, those interpretations betrayed more about their authors than they did about the book itself, engaging the kinds of pigeonholing constructions of Indigenous authorship that have been so effectively problematised by thinkers like David Treuer, with his critique of racialised and culturally essentialising expectations for so-called ‘authenticity’ (2006, 39) in novels like Love Medicine (1984).⁴ In essence, because Erdrich did not produce the sort of novel that critics were used to anticipating when they opened a book by an Indigenous writer, they could not conceive of this work that so surprised them as being any good.

The relatively few articles that have been written about Future Home since its publication have tended to unite in resisting these more popular trends in the reception of Erdrich’s approach. For Silvia Martínez-Falquina, Future Home is an innovative ‘feminist dystopia[n]’ narrative that is ‘aimed at prompting people to actively engage in the fight against climate change and the attack on women’s reproductive rights’ while paying rigorous attention to the specifically intersectional experiences of ‘poor and marginalized women’ (2021, 272–273). For Kaylee Jangula Mootz, the novel provides an essential answer to the question of how ‘humanity will survive climate catastrophe’ by posing ‘the body as a storehouse of knowledge, as a living archive’, reflecting discourses of ‘Native Apocalypse’ (2020, 263–264).⁵ Kyle Bladow interprets the novel as a work of ‘oblique cli-fi’ with intense ‘political significance both as a response to the 2016 US presidential election and in its calls for reproductive justice and land restoration’ (2021, 133).⁶ In other words, Bladow’s interpretation, like Martínez-Falquina’s and Mootz’s, connects Future Home’s interventions in discourses of climate catastrophe to the text’s intersectional engagement with issues of racial and gender justice, while recognising but not decrying the book’s ‘departure from Erdrich’s “standard” literary fiction’ (Bladow 2021, 133).

In this essay, I want to build on this small but growing chorus of intersectionally minded literary-critical defences of Future Home by exploring how the novel renders historical and continuing patterns of violent Euro-American ‘mutability’ and connects them with experiences of environmental, ecological, and reproductive erasure, loss, and ‘lessness’: with compromises of fundamental rights and lived experiences that oppressive powers-that-be either do nothing to arrest or even actively pursue, purportedly in the name of human survival. Shaped by an acute consciousness of legacies of settler colonialism that themselves have entailed dramatically violent forms of loss, Erdrich’s novel imagines a future world in which these erasures are echoed by the losses that acute climate crisis brings with it – evoked in the book’s descriptions of ‘the last time it snows on earth’ (2017, 267) – as well as by the escalating loss of pregnant women’s agency in a nightmare scenario that sees them imprisoned and separated from their newborn infants because ‘evolution has reversed’ (62). This painful constellation of erasures forces women and their families to confront various forms of traumatic ‘lessness’ in their daily lives that ultimately are traceable to colonial, environmental, and gendered violence, reflecting damningly on transnational American history and the US present. Within this larger thematic landscape, I am especially interested in how Erdrich’s intertwined representations of figurative and literal Euro-American pestilence, ecological and climate crisis, and pregnancy and its aftermath might be understood not just as dystopian in general but as gothically dystopian in particular, drawing on politically charged tropes of horrific excess, rot and decay, helpless imprisonment, uncanny doubles, and family curses. In accessing these tropes, I would argue, Future Home both extends a longstanding Indigenous Gothic ‘prehistory’ and literary tradition (Burnham 2014, 234) and makes complex and politically resistive use of some of the most recognisable elements of the Euro-American Gothic as they have manifested from Ann Radcliffe to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and beyond. If the result of Erdrich’s sometimes unappreciated experimentation with genre is a ‘deliberately selective adoption of conventions of dystopia’ (Bladow 2021, 141), it is also an Indigenous feminist Gothic theorisation of the terrifying relationship between environmental violence, reproductive oppression, and the ghoulish colonial values that made the horrific spectacle of Indigenous people’s ‘heads on pikes’ a welcome sight for racist white settlers.

In short, as we will witness in the pages that follow, Erdrich’s Gothic dystopian aesthetic allows Future Home to grapple effectively with historical realities and contemporary legacies of genocide as well as their very specific impacts on women’s experiences of pregnancy, childbearing, and motherhood, all set against a backdrop of environmental and ecological devastation that turns out to be intimately connected with – rather than ancillary to – these other traumas. We are left with a book that stands to play a critical role within the discursive and ideological worlds that it engages: a book that both vivifies and resists the material and cultural losses and erasures of a nightmarish future.

Amidst its dystopian imaginings, Future Home occupies itself with telling ‘the stories of contemporary survivors’ of settler colonial ‘cultural extermination’, whom Erdrich also references in ‘Where I Ought to Be’, and whose attempted erasure and experiences of loss are portrayed as being tightly bound up with associated forms of environmental and reproductive violence (1985, 23). From the book’s opening pages, the present-day complexities of identity that have been wrought by the settler colonial legacy are put pointedly on display. Erdrich’s first-person narrator identifies herself as ‘Cedar Hawk Songmaker… the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals’ and the biological daughter of an Ojibwe woman named Mary Potts (2017, 3). Cedar explains in biting, rueful tones how she became ashamed when she went to college, met other Indigenous students and became, in her words, not an ‘Indian Princess’ but ‘ordinary’, with ‘no clan, no culture, no language, no relatives’ (4–5). As the book progresses and Erdrich develops its strangely familiar world – this world in which the evolution of plant and animal species appears to be happening in reverse and in which a repressive evangelical Christian government is dead-set on revoking the rights of women – Cedar references ‘the colonization of this region’ and, by implication, all the other regions affected by the North American sequence of genocides and displacements that accompanied the Europeans’ arrival, suggesting that these events are unavoidably connected (5). Future Home envisions pregnant women being removed from their homes at gunpoint, with women of colour like Cedar appearing to be uniquely targeted. It is after Cedar reveals that she is Ojibwe and her sometimes-partner is white that her doctor exhorts her to ‘get the hell out of here’, indicating that if she does not move quickly, she will be in grave danger (51). These imaginings of the not-too-distant future do not just metaphorically echo the traumas of forced displacement of Indigenous people or the denial of Indigenous women’s reproductive rights; they represent a literal continuation of a centuries-long history in which ‘Native women’s sexuality was seen as a threat to the political order’ of the United States as a settler colonial power, ‘making it necessary to control their fertility’ through ‘[i]nvoluntary sterilization, the promotion of unsafe and long-acting contraceptives, and the denial of federal funding for abortion’ (Silliman et al. 2004, 111).⁷ Likewise, it is impossible to understand climate change within Cedar’s world, where snow has been impossible for decades even in the northern setting of Minnesota, without recognising how the tendency to ‘fuck … up’ ‘Mother Earth’ is associated with the rapacious, environmentally destructive appetites of a Euro-American culture still rooted in the delusions of Manifest Destiny (Erdrich 2017, 54). This, too, is a longstanding reality that Erdrich has consistently telegraphed in her work for age-diverse audiences, with upper elementary-aged readers as well as cross-reading adults learning from the child protagonist of The Birchbark House (1999) how the ‘greedy’ (79) savagery of white fur traders led to food scarcity as well as disease, critically disrupting the fabric of nineteenth-century Anishinaabe lives.⁸

In these ways, even apart from its more specifically Gothic impulses, the narrative’s dystopian vision becomes a pointed critique of a US society built on a larger foundation of theft, murder, and multivalent loss. In scenes that happen on the reservation where the narrator’s birth mother and her family still live, however, Erdrich’s Gothic aesthetic also becomes palpable, paving the way for an escalating series of politically potent genre references that will be tied to the narrative’s resulting explorations of ecological and other forms of erasure, loss, and ‘lessness’. At first, Future Home’s invocations of the Gothic feel playfully tongue-in-cheek: a kind of deflection from the real dangers that will come to populate the narrative more and more. Cedar’s biological grandmother has hands that are described as ‘little delicate curled claws’ and teeth that would fit perfectly into a canonical European Gothic fairytale, a connection that Cedar herself exploits in a burst of awkward humour:

Most remarkably, I notice when she happens to yawn, she still seems to have most of her own teeth. Though they are darkened by time, her teeth are still strong. Suddenly she’s looking at me, those bright eyes tack sharp. Startled, I say, ridiculously, ‘Grandma, what sharp teeth you have!’ (Erdrich 2017, 33–34)⁹

The bedroom occupied by Cedar’s newfound half-sister, the teenage Little Mary, offers up a constellation of Gothic tropes that is echoed by Little Mary’s sense of fashion: while the room ‘has the odor of rank socks, dried blood, spoiled cheese’, and other markers of rot and decay, with a ‘tiny haze of baby flies’ circling ‘an old can of orange Sunkist’, Little Mary’s clothing strikes Cedar as ‘cutie-pie vampire’, matching her expression when she ‘screws up her mouth like a wooden doll’s’ at the idea that Cedar ‘isn’t even a good Catholic’ (36–37). There is a delicious literary-historical linkage between this satirical detail and the English Gothic’s ‘very real and persistent investment in anti-Catholic concerns’ (Hoeveler 2014, 10). When Cedar briefly entertains the idea that Little Mary may have been the one to turn her in to the government authorities who imprison her in a hospital for pregnant women in the second part of the novel, she focuses in on possible motives that are themselves quintessentially Gothic: ‘In fact, the more I think about it’, Cedar reflects, ‘the easier it is to convince myself that it was definitely my sister, jealous, lying, high or enraged, my sister who called the tip-line, the UPS line, Unborn Protection Society’ (Erdrich 2017, 124). This invocation of potentially ‘fatal jealousy’ (Potter 2021, 179) recalls the emphasis in countless earlier works on the deadliness of Gothic envy.¹⁰ Yet Cedar’s theory is proven incorrect, establishing the novel’s early gothically tinged moments as a sort of collection of red herrings: signs of an impending peril that does not actually exist. It is in other settings apart from the Potts’ reservation community that Erdrich’s dystopian Gothic mode becomes genuinely interconnected with critiques of settler colonial, environmental, and gender violence, showing where the real danger lies.

Future Home’s core ecological catastrophe, in which the evolution of plant and animal (including human) life is believed to have ‘reversed’, is itself described in terms that feel essentially synonymous with literary constructions of Gothic excess, even as they come to represent and trigger experiences of disappearance, loss, and deprivation. Imprisoned at a second ‘birthing center’ housed in a former prison, Cedar is served ‘a salad with odd thick leaves and gnarled tomatolike vegetables’, the altered produce having replaced the lettuce and tomatoes that she would once have eaten (249, 251). When ‘some kind of great cat, all muscle and powerful guile’, attacks and ‘chokes down the bleeding haunches’ of a neighbourhood dog, Cedar perceives the attack as symbolising the larger erasure of the neighbourhood’s former rhythm and sense of normalcy (105). What these two descriptive and narrative passages have in common is their reliance on imagery of deformation and gore that is traceable to mysterious and only partly understood circumstances – as visible in the ‘gnarled’ vegetables and especially in the dog’s ‘bleeding’ body. This imagery exemplifies the ‘excess of the Gothic mood’, emphasising ‘the mysterious [and] grotesque’ within ‘a setting of terror and horror’ (Lee 2015, 177, italics in the original). In the world of the novel and for the readers immersed in it, such erasures of the life-that-was trigger not only the form of grieving that Cedar expresses when she speculates that ‘there will never be another August on earth, not like this one’ (Erdrich 2017, 61), but also an abiding revulsion at the ‘grotesque’ awfulness of each change, which is so terrifying that at times Cedar can only laugh. The gothicism of Cedar’s narration thus plays a key role in its affective impact, rendering a portrait of ecological disaster that, although it is not explained as a clearly comprehensible result of human action or the cult of Euro-American violence, remains implicitly tied to both. As Glen, an environmental lawyer, comments, ‘Mother Earth has a clear sense of justice’ (54). Meanwhile, the parallel between Erdrich’s early characterisation of Euro-American ‘mutability’ and the novel’s depiction of the shifting genetic character of plant and animal species creates a tempting intertextual rationale for reading the two catastrophes as somehow, however obliquely, related.¹¹

While Cedar herself may not agree with Glen (‘That’s not what I meant’, she tells him [Erdrich 2017, 54]), this argument becomes increasingly persuasive as we take in the more direct invocations of human-generated climate crisis that bookend and provide a frame for the novel, and which themselves are described in Gothic terms that lay blame justifiably at the feet of ravenous whiteness. The first reference to a changed climate in Cedar’s home state of Minnesota occurs only seven pages in, when Cedar expresses admiration for Glen and Sera’s ‘prescience’ in predicting their ‘first winter without snow’ (9). The reference foreshadows a much longer passage at the close of the book in which Erdrich’s narrator, continuing to write to her now-missing infant, asks, ‘Where will you be, my darling, the last time it snows on earth?’ (331). This final line is so moving in its contemporary resonance that it now appears on the back cover of a limited-edition version of the book. It also speaks to the narrative’s more general approach to these questions of climate disaster, which, in Erdrich’s hands, are inherently treated as questions of erasure: snow, which gives the narrator a feeling ‘like ecstasy’ in her childhood (331), disappears and leaves in its place a traumatic wound. The Gothic enters in when Cedar refuses to allow readers to forget that these changes in climate patterns are culturally tied to the violence of settler colonialism. A few sentences before the now-famous final line, Cedar makes a pronouncement with an ominous double-meaning: ‘Whiteness fills the air and whiteness is all there is’ (331). Ostensibly, Erdrich’s narrator is talking about the snow she remembers seeing during her childhood, but it is impossible not to also read this declaration as evoking the culture of insatiability that has enacted such extreme forms of violence on the North American continent and globally as well. The sense of ‘whiteness’ as suffocatingly omnipresent positions it as horrifying in its excess and in its inescapability, echoing a much earlier moment when Cedar notices that there are no more people of colour on television:

The women are fewer, the ones who appear seem awkward, all in their twenties, white with white teeth, yellow or brown hair, sparkling eyes. The men are all white with white teeth, sharp jawlines, sparkling eyes. I switch through the few channels that come in, over and over, increasingly panicked. There are no brown people, anywhere. (44)

In each instance, the message is clear. When ‘whiteness is all there is’, it is a harbinger of loss and nightmarish erasure: of people and communities; of the places they once inhabited; of the snow that used to grace the earth, a whiteness of a different kind.

So far I have written more about these ‘ecoGothic’ (Smith and Hughes 2013, 1) dystopian gestures and less about the associated, intersectional horror of reproductive injustice in Future Home, but in fact they cannot be divorced from one another. At the most foundational level, this is because Erdrich invents an ecological crisis to which a white supremacist, evangelical Christian government responds by imprisoning women of colour, including Cedar and her Asian American roommate Tia, whom a white nurse refers to using the derogatory term ‘China doll’ (2017, 135). These circumstances of imprisonment are so obviously Gothic in nature that at least one other critic has drawn a rightful comparison between Future Home and Gilman’s now-canonical ‘Female Gothic’ short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), thus situating Erdrich’s work within a longstanding and diverse hemispheric American tradition of feminist experimentation with Gothic conventions.¹² The more particular circumstances of Cedar’s imprisonment are gothically devastating in their details: the first time she is taken away at gunpoint, she is held in a ‘drab’ room with ‘stained and peeling’ paint where she is served food that is equally repulsive, so that one lunch features ‘a tan piece of seared flesh-substance’ (131). The food in general is ‘always … spoiling’, embellishing the array of other ‘rank smells – shit, fear, chemical exhalations’ (131). The hospital atmosphere is characterised by a rot and decay that deepen our sense of horror at Cedar’s loss of bodily agency and her threatened separation from the baby she will give birth to. In the clearest echo of Gilman, Cedar speculates that the floor she is being forced to live on ‘may have been the Psych Ward before’, giving additional dimensionality to the dynamics of oppression that Cedar’s imprisonment invokes (145). When Cedar and her roommate must murder a nurse in order to escape, we are hardly surprised at the macabre conclusion of Cedar’s first period of captivity, which leaves her burdened with a traumatic sense of guilt. Such moments bring into focus a constellation of contemporary realities, insisting that readers grapple with the usurpation – or in other words, the erasure – of women’s reproductive rights alongside ecological forms of crisis and loss, the settler colonial history to which both are explicitly or implicitly connected, and the persistence of anti-Asian racism in the United States.

Questions of reproductive justice are also at play in the novel’s most personally painful revelation, which is that Glen is Cedar’s biological father rather than an adoptive one. Revealing a period of sexual infidelity on Glen’s part and years of dishonesty by both Glen and Sera as they sought to obscure the truth, the revelation epitomises what happens when the Gothic protagonist ‘unravels’ a ‘dark family secret’ (Botting 2014, 59, 125) as Erdrich joins in a literary tradition that extends back as far as Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790). What is distinctive here is the intersectional nature of the ‘family secret’, which has especially disturbing implications in light of the extended history of deliberate usurpation of Indigenous women’s reproductive rights within North American settler colonial systems. Having had to manoeuvre within an asymmetrical relationship with a married white man who at the time was ‘representing the tribe’ in a ‘land case’ (Erdrich 2017, 233), Cedar’s birth mother characterises the loss of her daughter as a perennially haunting experience of ‘lessness’, of self-reconciliation to unavoidable pain: ‘It was because I was stupid’, she says. ‘Not one day has gone by, since then, when I have not thought about how stupid I was. … Not one day has gone by … when I have not thought about you’ (19). Although Cedar was not illegally adopted as she has long suspected, the circumstances of her separation from her birth mother involve a pained intersection of ethnoracial and gendered marginalisation that then repeats in Cedar’s imprisonment and separation from her own infant child, making the two women – who were both named Mary at birth although neither uses the name in adulthood – into unwilling doubles of one another.¹³ If Sera’s and Glen’s respective careers as lawyers who take cases involving midwifery and environmental law symbolically invite readers to see reproductive and environmental justice as intertwined, the connection between Glen’s ‘land case’ and Mary Potts’s loss of her parental rights similarly underscores the close relationship between territorial and reproductive injustice while highlighting the colonial roots of both. The Gothic secret, then, as well as the ‘mother-daughter doubling’ (Wallace 2013, 37) that its disclosure reveals, has a potent political significance in Future Home.¹⁴

Notably, Erdrich’s novel is not just a narrative of multivalent loss: it is also a narrative of resistance to each of those forms of loss. Bladow has written convincingly about how Future Home ‘offers new possibilities, especially for its Ojibwe characters’, using ‘dystopian conventions not as a mere whim … but instead to develop a story that engages real-world concerns while imagining and affirming Indigenous presence’ (2021, 144). The most immediate illustration of this idea arises as Part III of the novel begins with a campaign spearheaded by Cedar’s stepfather, Eddy, who is working amidst the book’s various environmental, ecological, and political disasters to restore tribal ownership of formerly tribal lands. ‘The lake-home people have gone back to the Cities’, Eddy announces, suggesting that his listeners ‘pray for their plight’ (Erdrich 2017, 214). The campaign represents a resilient form of resistance to systematic, state-sponsored attempts at erasure of Indigenous people, one that demonstrates how apocalyptic scenarios of ‘climate catastrophe’ and other crises might be reimagined as opportunities to ‘recover ancestral traditions’ (Mootz 2020, 272). In Future Home, this is particularly true for those whom Eddy refers to as ‘returning urban relatives’ (Erdrich 2017, 214): Indigenous people affected over multiple generations by the attempts of settler colonial governments to achieve ‘the disappearance of Indian people’ through processes of ‘relocation’ and acculturation (Harjo 2002, 210). In a book in which the connections between environmental law and ‘land rights’ are explicitly acknowledged, such acts of recovery have the potential for environmental ramifications that are just as important. Something equally powerful happens when Cedar asserts that she is ‘not at the end of things, but the beginning’ (Erdrich 2017, 92), refiguring what is supposed to be a terrifying apocalyptic pregnancy as a state of anticipation that is full of promise.

There are similar patterns of resilience and resistance encoded in Erdrich’s invocations of the Gothic, which, as I hinted earlier, devolve at regular intervals into bursts of humour. These generatively disruptive bursts defy both the seeming inescapability of ecological and reproductive forms of erasure and loss and a reception culture of enforced ‘lessness’ in which readers have attempted to mandate a narrow range of ‘authentic’ modes for Indigenous writers and texts. While some reviewers have puzzled over the humorous moments in Future Home, suggesting that its comedic energies are ‘slightly forced’ (Felicelli 2017) or mistaking for ‘melodrama’ (Hyde 2017) what reads more accurately as deliberate and often hilarious satire, the book’s comedic tendencies in general and its Gothic humour in particular prove purposeful in these multiple ways. With Cedar’s entertainingly and ruefully precise description of Glen’s affair with a ‘Retro Vinyl Record Shop clerk’ (2017, 4), Erdrich joins Treuer in pushing readers beyond narrow notions of what ‘authentic’ Indigenous American literature is supposed to be. Gothically charged quips about Cedar’s sister Little Mary as ‘a sort of nightmare kitten’ or about Little Mary’s room as an ‘apocalyptic … opening to hell’ serve a similar function (35, 38). And as the ecological and gender implications of Cedar’s dystopian Gothic narration intensify, so too does the political import of her comedic style. When the imprisonment of pregnant women is described as being ‘for [their] own safety’ in the midst of evolutionary turmoil and Cedar tells us how they ‘are required to go voluntarily’, her chosen contradiction in terms renders what is deeply disturbing also a little bit funny (72). When Cedar questions her political loyalties as she considers how she might protect herself from captivity, admitting, ‘I actually think I like the Custer’s Last Stand Tribute Rifle’, the loose foreshadowing of her future act of murder dovetails with her comedic impulse to call the gun by its full, marketing-ready name (89). Without decreasing the intensity of the novel’s terrifying future possibilities and its horrifying series of presents, Cedar’s comedic agency asserts her capacity for survival – as an Ojibwe woman, as a future and then an actual mother, as an occupant of a ravaged planet, and as a person facing the suite of real and anticipated losses that are associated with all of these identities.

Perhaps it is telling that the reviewers who least liked Future Home also seemed to be least likely to notice its engagement with the sorts of pressing environmental questions that are essential to the narrative. In the review that referred to the novel as a ‘well-intentioned disaster’, there is no mention of its contributions to the genre of climate fiction or its deep awareness of environmental violence as a settler colonial problem. Meanwhile, what really makes Erdrich’s novel a work of genius is not just its dystopian rendering of reproductive injustice but its intersectionally rich perspective, which vivifies the linkages within this constellation of issues and which uses multiple genre allegiances to do so. If part of the resistance to Erdrich’s novel indeed stems from critics’ misplaced hope that Erdrich would adhere to stereotypes of Indigenous literature that do not square with the book’s gothically excessive, darkly humorous dystopian mode – for instance, if they fail to understand the political relevance of Cedar’s mid-crisis shopping for ‘apples and wheat crackers’ (Schaub 2017) because the scene’s casually suburban horror is not recognisably, stereotypically Indigenous – then Erdrich’s assertion of her own and Cedar’s right to confuse unsuspecting readers like this is all the more significant. Either way, thinking intersectionally through questions of erasure, loss, and ‘lessness’ in Erdrich’s novel opens a door to more perceptive ways of understanding her work and its importance to the environmental humanities.

Of course, it is true that Future Home presents readers with a disorienting narrative in which, even at its close, questions remain unanswered: about exactly what is happening to propel the march of evolution backward instead of forward, about whether Cedar’s baby has died or is still alive in captivity or perhaps has been rescued by a rebel OB-GYN. While this ambiguity, too, has annoyed some critics, leading to complaints that the book ‘cram[s] in too many ideas’ without having ‘evolved’ enough to flesh them out (Merritt 2018), it yet again serves a strategic function, allowing the book to capture the spectre of a not-too-distant future in which real terror resides not just in what is known but in what is not. Like Cedar, we would much prefer to fully understand, to know for sure. For us as for her, this proves impossible, so that our discomfort, if only on a microcosmic scale, mirrors and allows us to understand her own.

But the certainty that Future Home does leave us with is equally key. The interlocking historical and contemporary erasures, losses, and ‘lessness’ represented by genocide, by ecological and climate crisis, and by the denial of reproductive justice may at times appear gothically excessive, but they are far from being fictional. They need to be honestly reckoned with and continually resisted, and Future Home both does and encourages readers themselves to do this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen. Her monographs include Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas (2022) and They Also Write for Kids: Cross-Writing, Activism, and Children’s Literature (2023).

Notes

1. As we eventually learn, Cedar is ‘not adopted’ (Erdrich 2017, 232); instead, Glen is Cedar’s biological father.

2. The glossary included at the back of The Birchbark House clarifies that ‘chimookoman’ means ‘big knife’ and is ‘used to describe white people or non-Indians’, specifying ‘chimookomanug’ as the ‘plural form of chimookoman’ (1999, 241). As Erdrich notes, ‘spellings are often idiosyncratic’ in Ojibwa because ‘Ojibwa was originally a spoken, not written, language’ (240).

3. See, for instance, Anita Felicelli’s (2017) review published in the LA Review of Books, which claims that the ‘symbolic connection between mothers and power that Erdrich wants to make is handled much more thoughtfully by Octavia Butler in her strikingly prophetic 1998 novel Parable of the Talents’.

4. As Treuer notes, ‘While some readers have made comparisons between Erdrich’s novels and Chaucer, Herman Melville, Cormac McCarthy, and Gabriel García Márquez, most discussions of Love Medicine focus on the elements readers take to be “authentically” Indian’ (2006, 32). Meanwhile, he argues, ‘[A]s much as critics would like Love Medicine to act out old-time traditional Indian techniques, it does not’ (39).

5. With reference to the work of Grace Dillon, who is Anishinaabe and introduced the term ‘Indigenous Futurism’ in her anthology Walking the Clouds (2012), Mootz characterises stories of ‘Native Apocalypse’ as ‘futuristic narratives that imagine a reversal of historical events in which Native peoples triumph over colonialism (8) and narratives that expose the state of imbalance (or aakozi in Anishinaabemowin) created by the violence of colonialism and facilitate a return to balance through apocalyptic upheaval’ (2020, 264).

6. Although Erdrich mentions in the book’s acknowledgements having shared its ‘beginnings on a road trip in 2001’ with her daughter Persia, the ultimate result is distinctly evocative of the political and cultural crisis represented by Trump’s election in 2016. Erdrich commented on this connection in a late 2017 interview, noting, ‘I worked on this book on and off, but published other books, including The Round House. I left Future Home of the Living God in an old computer. After last year’s election, I knew that I had to finish it. Trump had indicated that his first act would be to sign the global gag rule. Although this book is speculative fiction, it did feel like I was telling a form of truth’ (Erdrich and Merchant 2017).

7. Regarding the state-sanctioned denial of Indigenous women’s reproductive agency, see also Gunn (2015); Smith (2015).

8. Importantly, Erdrich makes these thematic moves without allowing readers to indulge in the mythological white fantasy of the Indigenous person who is uniquely in touch with nature, instead satirising this racist stereotype as Cedar (whose name also makes the same point) remembers how her ‘observations on birds, bugs, worms, clouds, cats and dogs were quoted’ because she ‘supposedly had a hotline to nature’ (2017, 5).

9. As I have written elsewhere, Hirst (2018), Bridgwater (2003), and Abbruscato (2014) offer helpful treatments of the overlap between the genres of the Gothic and the fairy tale. See Manizza Roszak (2022).

10. This exact phrase was used in the title of an 1807 English Gothic pamphlet that recounted ‘the death of the beautiful Bellarmine, through the artifice of Sofronia, her rival’ (qtd. in Potter 2021, 179, italics in the original).

11. In the final section of this article, I will address an alternative reading of this more immediate catastrophe – evolution’s having ‘reversed’ – which we might also interpret as exciting in how it allows nature to ‘reclaim … its territory’ (Martínez-Falquina 2021, 278).

12. See Martínez-Falquina. Although that article does not explicitly mention the genre of the Gothic, the stated connection between Gilman’s and Erdrich’s works as narratives of ‘imprisonment’ (2021, 278) makes this type of reading a logical next step.

13. Cedar references the Indian Child Welfare Act early on with a view towards the possibility that the family lore surrounding her adoption may be a fabrication.

14. That Wallace (2013) uses this term in analysing the eighteenth-century English Gothic fiction of Sophia Lee again speaks to Erdrich’s membership in a diachronic and in this case transatlantic community of women writers who have produced diversely influential Gothic narratives.