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Ojibwe Mimesis in Louise Erdrich’s “The Stone”: Indigenizing the “Unnatural” in Narratology, Normalizing the “Natural” in Indigenous Narrative

Deborah Madsen

Abstract

Theorizing of “unnatural” narrative is a recent development in narratology that betrays significant Euro-American cultural bias. Narratives that are categorized as “unnatural” violate the physical, logical, and cognitive principles (both what “is” and what is “possible”) that define narratives promoting anthropocentric perceptions of the “real” world. This world, reproduced in “natural” narratives, is based on conceptions of personhood and characterization, time, space, and narration that are contradicted by Ojibwe understandings of nature and the decentralized role of humans within it. Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Stone” exemplifies the differences between Ojibwe and non-Indigenous approaches to literary worldbuilding or mimesis. In this essay, I argue that Erdrich uses “unnatural” elements of Indigenous and specifically Ojibwe narratives that violate the defining norms of non-Indigenous understandings of “the natural.” Through the attribution of sentience to the eponymous stone and the construction of it as an other-than-human narrative focalizer, grounded in Anishinaabe origin myths, Erdrich’s story works to normalize Ojibwe conceptions of the natural while presenting an opportunity to rethink the project of unnatural narratology through an indigenizing lens.

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1The fields of narratology and Indigenous literary studies rarely intersect. The few exceptions would be Helen May Dennis’s Native American Literature: Towards a Spatialized Reading (2007), James J. Donahue’s Contemporary Native Fiction: Towards a Narrative Poetics of Survivance (2019), and Donahue’s contribution to the collection edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner, Marijana Mikić, and Mario Grill, Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology (2023). The primary reason for this is not far to seek: the textual corpus deployed by narratologists is overwhelmingly European, even in the domain of postclassical narratology. This Western focus has not passed unnoticed, and the recent effort named by its early practitioners “unnatural narratology” is a significant attempt to question the methodological biases of narrative theory, based on inherited understandings of mimesis. This essay takes a critical Indigenous approach to “unnatural” narratology, using its interrogative capacity to expose the normative and Euro-centrist concepts of the “natural” that continue to inform non-Indigenous narratology through colonial understandings of literary mimesis.

2Louise Erdrich’s short story “The Stone” (2019) offers a counter-narrative example of the strategies by which an Ojibwe text restores and normalizes the “abnormality” or “unnaturalness” of an Indigenous world when it is seen through the corrupting cognitive lens of settler colonialism. Erdrich’s narrative offers an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between Indigenous (here, Ojibwe) onto-epistemologies, on the one hand and, on the other, the practice of mimesis to build “natural” Indigenous storyworlds that are grounded in specific tribal national understandings of reality and its knowability. I hope then to follow a dual argumentative path in this essay by showing how Erdrich uses narrative strategies that appear to be “unnatural” in order to normalize Ojibwe reality through what I am calling “Ojibwe mimesis,” while at the same time highlighting the potential contribution of Indigenous onto-epistemology to the decolonization of narrative theory.

1. The “Un/natural” in Unnatural Narratology

3Erdrich’s story “The Stone” represents a complex instance of Ojibwe literary mimesis that, from a non-Indigenous mimetic perspective, appears to be “unnatural.” Per Krogh Hansen poses the key issue: “[t]o speak of ‘unnatural narratives’ and ‘unnatural narratology’ presupposes a common understanding of what is ‘natural’” (162). “The Stone” is a story of erotic love between a human woman and an other-than-human stone, the plot of which is significantly propelled by the stone, and the chronology of which is better described as geological rather than human. These elements violate the fundamental principles of literary mimesis upon which “natural” narratology, following the work of Monika Fludernik, is based. In the introduction to A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative (2013), Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson define “unnatural” narratology in opposition to what they term “mimetic reductionism” or “the claim that the basic aspects of narrative can be explained primarily or exclusively by models based on realist parameters” (1). In defining the characteristics of unnatural narratives, they remark that

[m]any innovative practices and projected storyworlds differ radically from those of the actual world. The narrator may be an animal, a mythical entity, an inanimate object, a machine, a corpse, a sperm, an omniscient first-person narrator, or a collection of disparate voices that refuse to coalesce into a single narrating presence. A fictional narrative … may resist or refuse … features of tellability, and seem instead (from a conventional or ‘natural’ perspective) relatively plotless, pointless, arbitrary, unconnected, or contradictory. (2)

4Turning their attention to the fictional characters that inhabit these storyworlds, they emphasize the ontological difference between verbally-constructed fictional worlds and the phenomenal world that exists outside the parameters of the fictional text, observing that these worlds cannot interact no matter how similar and “human” they may appear (2). These observations lead to two basic challenges posed to “natural” narrative theory: (1) that innovative and impossible narratives resist mimetic understandings of narrative, and (2) that the existence of such narratives has consequences for the general conception of what a narrative is and what it can do. By building narrative worlds according to “impossible” logics, “unnatural” narratives can expose the limitations of literary mimesis at the same time that they expand potential understandings of the power of narrative world-building.

5Certainly, Erdrich’s eponymous stone violates a fundamental principle of “natural” narratology as formulated by Monika Fludernik, that narrativity depends upon a human(ized) or anthropomorphic protagonist (Introduction 13). But as Stefan Iversen notes, it can be problematic to assume, “[a]s seen from inside natural narratology [that] if something is a narrative, it will always allow the reader to recognize experientiality and this experientiality will always be cognizable” (90). Of paramount importance to this issue of experientiality, he continues, is “the risk of creating blindness toward some types of texts, which most would call narratives but which present the reader with storyworlds, narrative acts, or experiences that act according to other logics than those that we consider to be normal, prototypical, or natural” (90). In this respect, “natural” narratology has not moved much beyond William Dean Howells’s characterization of the work of the literary realist, in Criticism and Fiction (1891), as “his relation to the human nature, known to us all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret” (8). This universalizing impulse excludes certain kinds of narratives; as Iversen describes: “some narratives may present experiences that resist being recognized as parts of what we would typically refer to as a human mind” (93). The other-than-human stone is the eponymous focalizer, a protagonist, and the primary causal agent in Erdrich’s narrative. Yet the stone is neither humanized nor anthropomorphized or personified; it remains a mineral or “other-than-carbon” being. In “The Stone” it is this resistance to experientiality via an anthropocentric human mind that potentially denies the story “natural” narrativity when read within non-Indigenous cognitive frames.

6Differing understandings of what the human mind may or may not construct as “possible” within the confines of “the natural” accounts for the uneasy relationship shared by unnatural narratology and developments in cognitive narratology. Theorists like Jan Alber define the unnatural in relation to notions of the “impossible,” or what Brian Richardson calls the “non-mimetic” (4). In his 2009 essay, “Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them,” Alber uses cognitive narratology to identify reading strategies by which to normalize “unnatural” storyworlds; that is, narrative worlds “which are governed by principles that have very little to do with the real world around us” (79) and in which events “and scenarios are physically or logically impossible according to known laws and accepted principles” (80). Following Monika Fludernik, he accepts that readers normalize storyworlds with reference to real world experience and also familiarity with interpretive literary schemata (81). In his continuing work in this field, Alber focuses on identifying the reading strategies by which “impossible” narrative elements are normalized and reintegrated within a coherent cognitive frame: “one way of responding to the interpretive challenges of unnatural narratives is to create new cognitive parameters by reshuffling and/or recombining existing frames and script” (Unnatural Narrative 129, emphases added). Alber’s approach is evaluated by Henrik Skov Nielsen in “Broken Narratives, Unnatural Narratology, and Unnaturalizing Reading Strategies” (2016), where he explains that, in his own usage, he is in broad agreement with Alber:

[u]nnatural narratives are a subset of fictional narratives that—unlike many realistic and mimetic narratives—cue the reader to employ interpretational strategies that are different from those she employs in nonfictionalized, conversational storytelling situations (cf. Fludernik). In unnatural narratives none of these rules of real-world communication (as concerns, for example, memory, thought access, deixis, knowledge, ontological levels) necessarily apply. (90)

7However, Nielsen resists these attempts to negate the power of the unnatural through hermeneutic processes of normalization. He wants to preserve the unnatural quality of impossible narration and he repeats: “For me unnatural narratives are narratives that work by a set of rules that is different from that of natural, conversational stories. Unnatural narratology is the investigation of these rules and especially the different interpretations they prompt” (93). This claim evokes the question: what if the set of “unnatural” narrative rules, and accompanying cognitive frames, apply to a storying culture with which Nielsen is not familiar? Together with his co-authors, Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, and Brian Richardson, Nielsen acknowledged this question in the conclusion to the earlier 2010 essay, “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models,” where they asked: “To what extent do we have to account for cultural differences between different authors and readers in order to say what counts as unnatural? Is it possible to say what is natural and unnatural without taking cultural or historical differences into account? What if the sender’s notion of naturalness differs greatly from the receiver’s?” (131).

8It is here that unnatural narratology offers a potential decolonizing strategy, by deconstructing the central pillars of mimetic literary theory. Biwu Shang, in Unnatural Narrative across Borders: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (2019), calls for a transnational and comparative narratology to counteract “the dominance of European and Anglo-American narrative theories [which he references as a “hemispheric blindness”] and the absence of narrative contributions by those in marginalized countries and regions” (23). He offers analyses of Chinese and Iraqi writers in a gesture of compensation for the Euro-American imperialist lens that dominates contemporary narrative theory. Fludernik’s definition of narrative in An Introduction to Narratology as “a representation of a possible world in a linguistic and/or visual medium, at whose center there are one or several protagonists of an anthropomorphic nature who are existentially anchored in a temporal and spatial sense and who (mostly) perform goal-directed actions (action and plot structure)” (6) is opposed to his own observation that “in unnatural narratives, the mimetic component of character or the anthropomorphic and human-like feature of character is missing. The character is no longer considered as a person or human being but appears increasingly nonhuman-like” (9). For instance, the protagonist may be characterized as an insect, an animal, an object or, we might add, a stone. Among the benefits of studying this kind of unnatural narrative Shang includes the realization of “ideological purposes” (12). Citing the work of Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson, Shang argues that unnatural narratives “provide an interrogation of the basic elements of realistic narrative practices and a critique of overused narrative conventions. Such narratives offer original vehicles for representation, including … the self-representation of marginalized or colonized peoples” (12). Indeed, in the introduction to their co-edited book, Unnatural Narratives—Unnatural Narratology (2011), Jan Alber and Rüdiger Heinze claim that unnatural narratology “is interested in various kinds of narrative strangeness and in particular in texts that deviate from the mimetic norms of most narratological models” (2).

2. (Un)Natural Narrative and Ojibwe Mimesis: “The Stone” (2019)

9Ojibwe mimesis is the term I am using to approach the ways in which Erdrich’s narrative world-building respects a specifically Ojibwe cosmology, starting with the title and eponymous subject of the narrative—the stone. In the context of Ojibwe storying, the mythical stone, Chakekenapok, has a special significance as the brother of the trickster hero, Nanabozho. The following version of the origin story of Nanabozho and Chakekenapok was originally published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1907):

Nanabozho is the eldest of male quadruplets, the beloved Chipiapoos being the second, Wabosbo the third, and Chakekenapok the fourth. They were begotten by a great primal being, who had come to earth, and were born of a reputed daughter of the children of men .… Chakekenapok, named from chert, flint, or firestone ..., was the impersonation originally of winter, and in coming into the world ruthlessly caused the death of his mother. (Hodge 331)

10Gerald Vizenor retells the story of the origin of the mythical brothers, with variations, in an interview with Larry McCaffery and Tom Marshall (1993) in response to a question about the common origin of Nanabozho’s brother and the Chinese Monkey King. Vizenor recounts:

You have the trickster brother of the stone that can’t move any more, so trickster has to come back all the time and tell him what he has been doing. Eventually he gets more or less pissed off and wants to do his brother in. So he says to the stone, I’m getting sick of this! I mean, I hit you, I try to break you, but I can’t do it. How can I kill you? The stone replies, that’s easy! Just heat me up and then throw cold water on me; I’ll break into a thousand pieces. Well, the brother does that and, sure enough, in the early tellings, the trickster-stone bursts into millions of pieces and covers the earth—and today every stone from anywhere on this world is metaphorically from that first break-up of the trickster. (50-51)

11Vizenor’s characterization of the stone that cannot move anymore, that is unable to move of its own volition, is also used by Louise Erdrich in the interview accompanying publication of her short story. Erdrich asks Deborah Treisman the rhetorical questions: “Every time I’ve moved, I’ve left behind a small pile of foreign stones in the garden. Have these stones used me to get from one place to the next? .... One might think that stones have no actual power—after all, we throw them, build with them, pile them, crush them, slice them. But who is to say that the stones aren’t using us to assert themselves? To transform themselves?” (Treisman n.p.).

12The animacy, sentience, and agency possessed by stones, as one element of the interconnected, non-hierarchical, and non-anthropocentric unity of Creation, is addressed by D’Arcy Ishpeming’enzaabid Rheault in the context of communication with and between other-than-human entities. He describes how, searching for rocks to participate in a Sweat Lodge ceremony, he was unable to see any rocks of the kind that would be suitable. However, his friend offers tobacco (asemaa) and explains that help is needed: “He held the asemaa and addressed the rocks asking them to awaken themselves to us. He went on to explain aloud that we needed them for our Sweat Lodge and we would care for them well.” The rocks then “seemed to pop out of the background of the field. They were always there, but they were now showing themselves” (114). Rheault accepts this encounter as evidence of a non-anthropocentric reality: “we, as human beings, are not separate and distinct from the ‘stuff’ of reality. Human Beings are only one aspect of the whole” (109). Further, this is evidence that “during Manidookewin they [sacred objects] are alive with all the qualities of sentience usually attributed to humans. This is not to say that these asiniig, dewe’ganag and zhiishiigwanag experience a radical shift from inanimation to animation at the whim of a human being, in other words a social and conceptual construct created by human minds, but rather that they are actually alive” (115-116). Rheault’s experience of communication with other-than-human entities (like stones) reveals that they are alive and sentient, but they only reveal this fact under privileged circumstances. In Books and Islands in Ojibway Country (2003), Erdrich gestures to the trickster-stone and she uses almost the same terms as Rheault to describe the animacy of “grandmother” and “grandfather” stones; a characteristic indicated by the linguistic representation of stones in Anishinaabemowin:

Nouns are mainly designated as animate or inanimate, though what is alive and dead doesn’t correspond at all to what an English speaker might imagine. For instance, the word for stone, asin, is animate. After all, the preexistence of the world according to Ojibwe religion consisted of a conversation between stones. People speak to and thank the stones in the sweat lodge, where the asiniig are superheated and used for healing. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand. (86)

13The intentional use of humans by stones to gain mobility that they otherwise lack motivates the plot of “The Stone,” as detailed below, and this suggestion is repeated by Erdrich in the interview with Treisman that accompanied the publication of the story.

14The sentience and agency of stones are demonstrated in Erdrich’s 2017 novel Future Home of the Living God, in the chapter “The Pebble,” when Cedar, trapped in the birthing detention center, reads from Eddy’s manuscript. Having determined to hang himself from a tree, he is headed for the forest when a small pebble “flipped into” his shoe so that “each step was painful” (260). Upon removing the stone, he reflects: “The stone was a bit of ferric oxide, earthy banded hematite, strayed from the Mesabi Range, where one-third of the world’s iron ore was at one time located. This piece of stone was laid down as a sediment in the Animikean sea sometime during the middle Precambrian period in Minnesota, and was probably between 2.6 and 1.6 billion years old. The pebble was rich, deep, hot, clay red, striated and shaped like a tiny toaster” (260). Continuing down the path into the woods, another stone lodges itself in his shoe; this one “no ordinary rock, but a shard of graywacke or greenstone, a basaltic lava that was perhaps shoved to the surface of the earth 3.5 billion years ago during the Keewatin. Howah! Lotta time” (260). He discards the stone but it is replaced by another: “This pebble was a dime-sized circle of black basalt shaped by lake waves and probably poured out at one time from a deep volcanic fissure under the sea that covered us. The lava cooled and was broken into bits that washed away, eventually to the shore, changing on the way to this lovely water-stroked smoothness. This one I placed carefully upon a stump. The youngest pebble, it was probably no more than several million years old” (269). The next and final rock actively assaults Eddy, cutting him as he steps on it: “An agate, inexplicably shattered, it showed the grain of the fossilized wood and algae that it had once been. What colors! A light bronze, gray, black, and deep red. There was a landscape within its features. Chert surrounded by jasper. A living thing” (260). Recall that “chert,” along with “flint,” is one of the names of Chakekenapok. Eddy is able to perceive the web of relations presented by this stone, which is alive in the present and yet is the product of deep time that represents here a crossing of human and other-than-human temporalities. Finally, Eddy gives up his self-destructive plan and reflects, “I don’t know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don’t know why they care about me as they do. I only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself. I turned back, my fingers rubbing the little agate. All the way back to the store not a single rock slipped underfoot” (261). This interaction of human with geological time, and the expression of intentionality by stones that act within their physical capacities to assert their agency, are characteristics of “The Stone,” published two years after this novel.

  • 1 Note that the text of Erdrich’s story quoted throughout is the first online publication, which is n (...)

15In “natural” mimetic terms, the figure of a sentient rock is “impossible” and “unnatural.” Yet, from the opening line, Erdrich’s narrator offers explicit clues to the Ojibwe cosmology within which the narrative world is located and the Ojibwe mimesis according to which this literary reality is constructed. The action begins at the family’s summer house “at the end of an island in cold Lake Superior”: La Pointe or Moningwunakuaning on Madeline Island, the point to which the sacred miigis shell led the Anishinaabe people, and from which they dispersed, after the long period of migration from the Atlantic coast.1 In The People Named the Chippewa (1984) Gerald Vizenor tells the origin story of the Anishinaabeg (the people who were named the “Chippewa” by settler-colonists):

The sacred miigis shell of the Anishinaabeg spiritual world, a shell resembling the cowrie, arose from the eastern sea and moved with the seasons, it is told in the oral tradition, through the inland waters, guiding the Anishinaabeg through the sleeping sun of the woodland to bawitig, the long rapids in the river.
The Anishinaabeg tell stories that wisdom and the color of their skin were given to them from the sun reflecting on the sacred miigis shell during this long migration. Five hundred years ago, in mythic ceremonies, the miigis shell appeared in the sun for the last time at Mooningwanekaning, or Madeline Island, in Anishinaabe Gichigami, Lake Superior, the great sea of the Anishinaabeg .… There the Anishinaabeg told stories of the summer past while the snow fell and the lakes froze. (21)

16It is here that Erdrich’s story begins, on the sacred land of Mooningwanekaning.

17How the narrative begins also evokes sacred Ojibwe stories. One summer, in the woods, the stone attracts the attention of the girl: “She had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at her. Looking around, she saw the stone.” The circumstances and telling of this event gesture to stories like the encounter between the West Wind and the mother of Chakekenapok (Naanabozho’s stone brother). In The People Named the Chippewa Vizenor retells the story as collected by Victor Barnouw in Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales. The narrator opens the story with a warning that this story “won’t be about this earth. It will be about a different world” (8). This world is occupied by only an old woman, and her daughter who gathers food in the woods every day:

Then one day somebody saw her traveling all alone by herself in the woods. That person seemed to take a liking to her. He even wanted to marry her. He knew what to do. When she was out berrying one nice hot day, when there was no wind, at noon-time, she heard a noise like a gust of wind. She looked around in the direction of the noise and saw a wind coming. When the wind reached her, she couldn’t pull her dress down for some time, until the gust of wind went by. She didn’t think anything of it, because no one was there to see her. She started picking berries again .... It wasn’t long afterwards that the girl found out that something else was going to happen. She left that place where she and her mother had been living and went into the woods. There she gave birth to some children—three of them. The first looked just like a human baby boy. After it was born, she held him in her arms .… Then the next baby was born. This one didn’t have human features exactly, but he looked like a human baby to some extent. Just a little while later another one was born. This one didn’t look like a human child. This one was a stone. (9)

18The origin story of Chakekenapok is a story of erotic relations between a human girl and a sacred spirit being, a story that in setting, neutral third-person narration, and the indirect report of the action, is similarly styled in Erdrich’s narrative. Both stories begin in Summer with a girl alone in the woods where she encounters and becomes involved with an other-than-human being. By reinventing the story in contemporary terms, Erdrich respects the responsibility of the storyteller in the Ojibwe oral tradition to keep the stories relevant by not simply repeating them but reimagining them in original ways (Gross 260) While Erdrich is not retelling the specific story of Chakekenapok’s origin, the traditional story is the starting point for the telling of a parallel story about the erotic relations between the girl and the stone. It is in the woods, on the sacred land of Mooningwanekaning, that the unnamed girl picks up the stone. One of the names by which it has been known is later identified as “nimishoomis, or ‘my grandfather,’” which is another clue to the Ojibwe cosmology that is mimetically represented in the narrative.

19Throughout the story the stone remains unnamed—“The woman had not named the stone. She had thought that naming the stone would be an insult to its ineffable gravity”—and, for this reason, as Erdrich explains in answer to Treisman’s question, the girl remains unnamed: “There is a line in the story about why she doesn’t name the stone. I thought the central character in the story should be elemental too.” Other, minor, characters are named but not the primary characters. This complicates the identification of the narrative protagonist. According to Monika Fludernik’s “natural” mimetic definition, narrativity depends upon a human(ized) or anthropomorphic protagonist or “experiencer” (Towards a “Natural” Narratology 13). But Ojibwe mimesis allows for the personhood of entities that would be classified as “supernatural” in the context of Fludernik’s “mimetic reductionism” (see Alber et al. “Introduction”). In his classic work “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View” (1960) Irving Hallowell stresses that in Ojibwe ontology, other-than-human beings are persons within a cosmic network of kinship relations and are not to be considered “supernatural.” Grandfather stones, Thunder Birds, the sun, the winds, and all other-than-human persons possess personhood independent of any anthropomorphic traits that might be attributed to them. These are not personifications but animate beings in their own right (29). As Erdrich and others have explained, the linguistic category of animate nouns to which the names of these beings belongs constitutes an “a priori [recognition of] potentialities for animation in certain classes of objects under certain circumstances” (Hallowell 24). Thus, within Ojibwe mimesis both girl and stone are protagonists, sharing the same narrative ontology within this world of ontologically equal social and kinship relations.

20The opening of the narrative connects plant-persons, bird-persons, human-persons, and stone-persons as an initial step in Ojibwe narrative world-building. The kinship network of the forest, into which the girl enters as the story begins, is evoked first by the “birch clump” besides which she sits. Birch, or Nimishoomis wiigwaas is known as Grandfather birch (see Geniusz), and it is in this clump of birch that the stone lies “nestled.” Later, after carrying it away with her, the girl makes a home for the stone “at the bottom of her least used drawer. There, she imagines it “nestled among her summer T-shirts and shorts.” The repetition of the word “nestled” not only links the two locations in which the stone is at home but also suggests a familial relation between girl and stone. The stone that has been “staring” at the girl until she picks it up and holds it, has a “face,” “eye sockets,” and its size is compared to that of a human skull. The “eye sockets” also give it an “owlish look” and suggest that the stone “nests” like a bird in these familial environments. The stone is likened specifically to an owl which, in Ojibwe cosmology, has the capacity to mediate between the phenomenal and spiritual worlds, as Michael Pomedli explains: “the owl presents several layers of meaning and several relationships in the Ojibwa world. An owl summons the dead and becomes a relative, a grandfather mediating between life and death” (54); it “intelligently mediates with and guides the winds to bring in the appropriate seasons” (53), evoking the sacred winds of Ojibwe origin stories. The Ojibwe association of the owl with bad fortune motivates the stories that Pomedli tells of parents threatening their children to behave well or else an owl will come and take them away. But in one of these abduction stories, according to Pomedli, a reversal takes place: “During the period of abduction, the owl and girl share a kindred spirit, for the child is never afraid, is nourished and clothed by the bird for four years, and is returned safely to her home” (48), evoking the peace and well-being experienced by the girl who “abducts” the stone or, alternatively, is abducted by the stone who uses her as the vehicle while she takes it home with her.

21Within this world the stone is not vocal, in the sense of possessing speech; as the narrator remarks, it is “not biological.” However, this does not mean that the stone is without agency or intention. In his commentary on Hallowell’s account of Ojibwe ontology, Kenneth Morrison observes: “Hallowell writes that the Ojibwa are not at all interested in dominant non-Indian modes of thinking. They do not ask: What causes? They ask instead: Who causes? (169-72) … recognizing that the Ojibwa philosophical system requires a shift from impersonal to personal and interpersonal modes of causality” (31). Linking causality to animacy, he goes on to explain what this implies: “The animate identifies the potential presence of intentionality (desire, need, purposefulness, selfishness, selflessness), and thus the existence of self-conscious and other-oriented beings whose actions must be taken into account in the course of daily life” (26). Other-than-human persons, like the stone, possess both intentionality and an external orientation towards other beings. Thus, within the logic of Ojibwe literary mimesis, the laws of causality that govern intentionality and agency derive from the interpersonal—but non-hierarchical and anti-anthropocentric—quality of social relations. Issues of narrative focalization and plot are correspondingly complicated in works of Ojibwe mimesis, where there is no single human(ized) figure to direct experiential encounters with the narrative world.

22In “The Stone” the eponymous character functions as the story’s focalizer, in the sense that the stone organizes the actions that are narrated. The temporal structure of the narrative spans the life of the girl (later the woman), from childhood to death, and throughout this timeline only events that directly relate to her relationship with the stone are narrated: what the stone comes to mean to her and how that relationship influences her life. Indicative of this, the majority of paragraphs begin with a reference to the stone and go on to describe the consequences or impacts of the stone on the girl/woman. A notable exception concerns the narration of her relationship with Vic who, as a young boy, teasingly cuts the girl’s hair during art class. The stone is not mentioned. But when no answer is offered to her mother’s reported question, “Why did you do that?” the narrator describes how the girl offers the lock of hair to the stone and is rewarded with an immediate sense of peace. This marks the beginning of the girl’s more intimate relation with the stone as a source of comfort. In the following paragraph, this evolves into an erotic relationship:

One night, as she lay in the hot [bath] water, she became acutely aware of the stone. The smooth, empty scoops in its face seemed profoundly interested in her. A gentle, thrilling ripple spread through her body. After a while, she took the stone into the water with her and held it on her chest, then slid it down her body until it rested, heavily, between her legs. There was the weight and the pressure of the stone and the heat of the water. She put her hand on the stone and pushed against it. Then she put the stone back on the edge of the tub and closed her eyes.

23Juxtaposed with this incident, the narration returns to the teenage girl’s relationship with Vic and specifically his attempt to fondle her hair which, in contrast to the offering made to the stone, she refuses: “Gently, she tugged her hair from his fingers.” And in the next paragraph the narrator reveals that since that night the girl sleeps with the stone in her bed beside her. The arrangement of action-episodes via juxtaposition creates through implication cause-and-effect relations. In this way the narrator dramatizes a causal logic that includes the intentionality of human and other-than-human beings alike. The human character Vic functions only as an antagonist clarifying, through his failed attempts to create a romantic bond with the girl, the implicit and evolving relation between her and the stone.

24If the girl is seen as the object of the narration, then the stone is the subject, acting upon her through non-verbal forms of communication. She takes the stone into her bed because, after leaving Vic and entering the house, “Something rustled in the drawer where she kept the stone. She opened the drawer quickly, but there was only the stone, its eye sockets calm. Everything was understood.” This intuitive communication characterizes their relation from the beginning when, “[s]he sat down beside a birch clump, and after a few moments her neck prickled. She had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at her. Looking around, she saw the stone.” The stone acts upon the girl in ways that recall Erdrich’s suggestion that stones may act through human affordances, using humans to assert their agency: “Every time I’ve moved, I’ve left behind a small pile of foreign stones in the garden. Have these stones used me to get from one place to the next? …. Who is to say that the stones aren’t using us to assert themselves? To transform themselves?” (Treisman). A dramatic instance of this occurs at the college, where the stone is known as the girl’s “sleeping companion” and is stolen by a possibly envious fellow student. Mariah “put the stone on her highest bookshelf, above her bed, and waited to see what would happen.” The narrator reports objectively that the stone “fell off the shelf,” fracturing Mariah’s orbital bone, and creating chaos within which the girl is able to take her stone back by placing it under her blouse. Here again, juxtaposition works to create the powerful implication that the stone uses its limited capacity for independent movement to assert its own intentions and preferences.

25The impersonal narration that mediates human experientiality explicitly—and implicitly that of the other-than-human stone—works to construct interpersonal causality. Logical words or phrases are not used to connect motives to events and their consequences. The causes of narrative events are conveyed through the absence of words; the narration communicates in factual terms, reporting thoughts and feelings, but resists explanation of “what” and thus focuses on “who” motivates the narrative action. Departures from the predominantly chronological trajectory of the narrative contribute to the indirect, interpersonal assignment of causality, as in the account of the woman’s sudden decision no longer to carry the stone in its special leather bag to accompany her piano recitals. The narrator offers no explanation, simply reporting her habit and that “one evening years later, the bag was not with her .… The bag did not return.” Note that the stone’s bag is grammatically located as the subject here; the woman is without her bag but it is the stone that acts by failing to accompany her. The following paragraph reverses chronology, to reveal the “quarrel” that precipitated her separation from the stone. In an earlier moment, while lifting the stone into her bath, the woman “dropped the stone on her knee. Tears sprang to her eyes, not so much from hurt as from betrayal.” No explanation is offered for this betrayal except the juxtaposition of this event with the stone’s action to remove itself from Mariah’s possession. A further juxtaposition underlines the erotic nature of the relation that the woman feels has been betrayed. She smashes the stone on the ceramic floor, breaking it in two, and closes it in a rarely-used drawer. Immediately, and concluding the paragraph, there follows the sentence: “Then she dialled the number of a man who had been hounding her for months.” Feeling betrayed and rejected in her relationship with the stone, the woman rebounds into a new romantic relationship. This is further confirmed in the next paragraph, which offers a very abbreviated account of their courtship—“They married”—and the information that when invited to perform in Europe “[s]he took her husband and left her stone behind.”

26The influence of the stone on the ending of her marriage is similarly implied by juxtaposition. Between the paragraphs devoted to the beginning and ending of her marriage, narrative chronology is dramatically broken by the narrator’s shift of focus from the girl/woman to the entire lifespan of the stone. Adopting now the geological perspective of the stone, the experientiality of the girl/woman is located within the temporality of geological time—“The wave-worn piece of basalt that the woman had slept with for more than a decade was thrown from a rift in the earth 1.1 billion years ago”—ten years of human time is contextualized within the billion years of the stone’s existence on Earth and the actions of beings that have shaped its form and appearance: water, sand, and trees, as well as humans like “a woman who revered it as a household spirit and filled its eyes with sweetgrass” (just as the girl filled its eyes with her hair). The narrator reflects that “A stone is a thought that the earth develops over inhuman time. It is a living thing to some cultures and a dead thing to others.” The girl appears to have intuited this, always referring to her “stone” and hiding it protectively from her mother and Mariah both of whom dismissively call it “a rock.” She is attuned to its animacy and refuses to name it in order to avoid, as mentioned above, “an insult to its ineffable gravity.”

27This contextualizing paragraph not only situates human experience within an other-than-human temporality that exists in parallel with human chronological time but also contributes causality to the feelings of the woman's husband about his marriage. Adopting Ted’s perspective, the narrator describes his characterization of his wife’s attitude towards him as “a glassy distraction. He could feel it, though he could not describe it in a way that makes sense.” This intuitive communication that defies spoken articulation is the method by which the stone communicates with the girl/woman. They met when “She had the distinct feeling that someone was staring at her” and then noticed the stone. Implicitly, the stone is now communicating with Ted and it is significant that Ted describes the woman’s attitude as “glassy” given that natural glass (like obsidian, for instance) is a kind of stone. On a timescale comparable to geological time, his wife has been “pulling away from him, gradually and so gently that it was a long time before he understood that, while he’d been adjusting to each tiny, incremental motion, she’d been shifting entirely.” The terms in which Ted feels the growing lack of intimacy in the marriage suggests the intentionality of the stone underlying this unspoken communication. After Ted’s departure, the woman rediscovers, repairs, and restores her previous life with the stone. Responsive now to its needs, she oils it when it looks dry, carries it to the window when it looks bored, placing it next to her while she reads at night and, finally, dying in her sleep with the stone beside her. This is a life engineered—slowly—by the stone. And it is the other-than-human, geological temporality of the stone that controls the woman’s dying dream.

28The shared ontology of Ojibwe personhood, the sameness of human-persons and stone-persons becomes clear in the dream-vision.

As the blood seeped into her brain, she dreamed that she had entered a new episode of time, in which she and the stone would become the same through the endless repetition and decay of all things in the universe. Molecules that had existed in her body would be joined with the stone’s molecules, over and over in age after age. Flesh would become stone and stone become flesh, and someday they would meet in the mouth of a bird.

29As Jim Dumont explains, “[t]he Anishinaabeg [are] a dream conscious people who understand that dreams and visions are a doorway into the more expanded dimension of actual reality” (qtd. in Rheault 112-113). Dreams enable the perception of simultaneous realities and “mythical times become present when we approach the realm of the sacred through the dream or the vision quest. Perhaps this can be expressed as simultaneous realities. What we have called mythical time is eternally present, and it occurs simultaneously with our present” (113). In her dying dream the woman enters a mythical yet physical molecular temporality and a condition of complete ontological connection with the stone. Within the expanded world opened by the dream, Hallowell explains, “the individual comes into direct communication with the ätíso´kanak, the powerful ‘persons’ of the other-than-human class” (39).

30This ending resolves the falling narrative action, following from the final “recognition” scene. The narrative depicts a number of recognition scenes in each of which the girl/woman (re)discovers the stone; first feeling or sensing it, then physically encountering it: in the woods at the beginning of the story, in her bedroom after leaving Vic and, following the main complication of the narrative—her marriage to Ted—again in her bedroom drawer. In each case the stone indirectly manipulates circumstances to bring about a renewal of their intimate relationship. The resolution of the narrative crisis is signaled less by Ted’s departure than by the woman’s feeling of well-being after she and the stone reconcile: “The woman placed the stone on a sunny kitchen sill, and felt so well that she began to cook a nourishing dinner for herself.” This resolution implies what Hallowell terms a “personalistic theory of causation” (44). The woman is able to create a “comfortable” life due to the influences of the grandfather stone. As Hallowell explains, “other-than-human grandfathers are sources of power to human beings through the ‘blessings’ they bestow, i.e., a sharing of their power which enhances the ‘power’ of human beings” (21). This is a relation of profound responsibility and mutual obligation that is dramatized in the final “recognition” and resolution of the narrative.

3. Conclusion: Denaturalizing Narrative Theory

31The primary object of Ojibwe literary mimesis is Mino-Bimaadiziwin or the principles of living a good life that are the core of Anishinaabe cosmology. Rheault explains: “At the centre of Mino-Bimaadiziwin is a spiritual apprehension of the world and the understanding that we are related to all beings” (106). In this interconnected, interpersonal world there is no distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Taking his cue from the origin story of the sacred stone, to whom he refers as Flint, Hallowell describes how “[t]he conceptual reification of Flint, the Winds and the Sun as other-than-human persons exemplifies a world view in which a natural-supernatural dichotomy has no place” (29) because the Ojibwe world is a unified cosmos. There is no place in the Ojibwe worldview for what Kenneth Morrison calls “cosmic hierarchy, ontological dissimilarity, impersonal, objective, mechanical, and supernaturalistic modes of causality” (35). However, these principles are fundamental to the dualistic Cartesian view that divides mind from body, nature from spirit, and human from all other kinds of beings whether animal, vegetable or mineral. These Cartesian categories are encoded in mainstream “natural” narratology, as Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson note: “Most definitions of the term ‘narrative’ have a clear mimetic bias and take ordinary realist texts or ‘natural’ narratives as being prototypical manifestations of narrative” (“Unnatural Narratives” 114). While they acknowledge that their concept of the “unnatural” is culturally-specific, the way in which they account for their entire theoretical project is not culturally neutral: “the study of unnatural narrative seeks to describe the ways in which projected storyworlds deviate from real-world frames, and, in a second step, it then tries to interpret these ‘deviations’” (116, emphasis added). These “deviations” most notably include other-than-human fictional entities interacting within a storyworld constructed according to “impossible” geographies, temporalities, psychologies, and ontologies.

32Anchoring the project of unnatural narratology, then, is a fundamental assumption concerning “core” versus “marginal” epistemologies or “real-world frames” of cognition that have historically resulted in the diminution to the point of invisibility of Indigenous narratives as “Literature.” Indeed, Andrea Moll in her essay “Natural or Unnatural? Linguistic Deep Level Structures in AbE: A Case Study of New South Wales Aboriginal English” (2011) observes in the context of traditional Aboriginal stories that these narratives are “[m]ore often than not, ... dismissed as ‘fairy tale stuff,’ that is apt for the entertainment of children only” (246). This is the case precisely because of ignorance of the Indigenous cosmology that builds the narrative world. Moll clarifies that “[w]hat makes a ‘serious’ interpretation of traditional Aboriginal stories particularly problematic from a Western point of view is the fact that they often include references to mythological creatures and wondrous events. They thus often stretch the boundaries of what is considered to be physically and logically possible and thereby blur the distinction between fiction and reality” (246). “Fairytale” is the term used by Brian Richardson in his 2015 book, Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice, to describe a kind of non-mimetic narrative that establishes a parallel between fictional and “real” worlds and “merely adds supernatural components to its otherwise mimetic depiction of the actual world” (4). The neglect of cultural onto-epistemologies is sustained in his chapter entitled “Oppositional Literature and Unnatural Poetics,” where Richardson describes “oppositional” literature in relation to symptomatic transgressions of “five basic categories of narrative fiction—story, time, narration, character, and frames” (143-144) but without any attempt to evaluate the function of culturally-defined world-building strategies that might condition textual engagements with “reality”—not even of the Indigenous texts that Richardson mentions. He concludes that “[u]nnatural narrative analysis is especially well situated to help us identify and appreciate unusual narrative strategies in U.S. ethnic, postcolonial, and feminist narratives both for their ideological aspects and for their innovative formal features; in fact, it can draw important attention to the ways in which the thematic material informs the narrative effects” (159).

33The suggestion that Indigenous narratives are defined by “thematic material” that generates particular “narrative effects” fits with Richardson’s inclusion of Indigenous cultural production in the categories of “ethnic” and “postcolonial” narratives. Indigeneity is not, however, defined by ethnicity; nor can the condition of Indigenous communities in North America be defined as “postcolonial.” Rather, Indigeneity is an original blood relationship with land that is cosmological, ontological, and epistemological. Native story and storyworld are inseparable. Read as “deviations” from “real-world frames” (Alber et al. “Unnatural Narratives”), Indigenous texts risk false normalization. Andrea Moll pinpoints the danger of reading to normalize contradictions between Eurocentric expectations of narrative mimesis and seemingly “unnatural” Indigenous storyworlds. Moll argues that, for instance, superficial similarities between Aboriginal English and Australian English can encourage the assumption that Aboriginal storytelling is “fully comprehensible to speakers of other varieties of English” while deep semantic elements, “related to culture and worldview, often go unnoticed” (266). The illusion of intelligibility then leads to profound cross-cultural misunderstanding. In relation to culturally-specific methods of narrative world-building, “unnatural” Indigenous features may be falsely naturalized within a normative non-Indigenous reading or, as Moll concludes, “what may seem an ‘unnatural’ narrative element or strategy from a Western perspective may be fully ‘naturalized’; that is, cognitively conventionalized and internalized by members of another culture living in a different social and cultural environment” (267).

34False naturalization is a particular risk for Indigenous narratives in the context of US settler-colonial interests. As Sue J. Kim astutely notes in her introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory devoted to “Decolonizing Narrative Theory,” there is a profound political difference between a concern with racial formations in studies of postcolonial narratives and the fundamental focus on nationalism and sovereignty in Indigenous writing (235). Indigenous sovereignty is a counter to the settler-colonial claim to permanent occupation and appropriation of Indigenous lands, to the ongoing settler-colonial process of Indigenous elimination and assertion of judicial control over territory, and to the false settler-colonial narratives of settler belonging and Indigenous extinction. In “Land and Literacy: The Textualities of Native Studies” (2010) Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss describe “land as the glue that binds Native communities” (241), providing the foundation for the complex interrelations that intersect in Indigenous texts. They provide an account of how

stories, songs, and even words attach themselves to landscape features, recounting their narratives to those who are able to ‘hear’ or ‘read’ them. The literary concerns of Native studies thus are profoundly political—as land and language intersect, the exercise of political, intellectual, and cultural sovereignties as well as tribal nations’ relationships with settler governments are all to be understood through a careful and nuanced reading of a variety of textualities. (242)

35Addressing Louise Erdrich’s sensitivity to alternative Indigenous textualities, Fitzgerald and Wyss argue that “in the context of Ojibwe history, [she] links literacy and the written word to land tenure, legal discourse, and ultimately, to tribal sovereignty. Her characters strategically deploy and engage with competing systems of literacy in the form of ‘tracks’” (246). In the context of this intersectionality, they go on to wonder “how would a consideration of the Agawa pictograph at Lake Superior depicting the great horned lynx benefit and inform a reading of Misshepeshu in Erdrich’s Tracks (1988)?” (247). Erdrich addresses directly the intersections among land, pictographs, literacy, and Indigenous belonging in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country:

I figure books have been written around here ever since someone had the idea of biting or even writing on birchbark with a sharpened stick. Books are nothing all that new. People have probably been writing books in North America since at least 2000 B.C. Or painting islands. You could think of the lakes as libraries. 2000 B.C. is only the date of the oldest archaeological evidence found in the area we are going to visit. Traditional Anishinaabe people find the land-bridge theory a concept convenient to non-Indians and insist they’ve been here forever. And in truth, since the writing or drawings that those ancient people left still makes sense to people living in Lake of the Woods today, one must conclude that they weren’t the ancestors of the modern Ojibwe. They were and are the modern Ojibwe. (5-6)

36Within Ojibwe cosmology it is “natural” that books are made of bark, lakes are libraries, and the people are of the land. Erdrich’s eponymous grandfather stone is an archive of stories. After it is repaired by the woman, “only the thinnest line told the story” which is added to the many stories encoded in the physical appearance of the stone over the billion years of its lifetime. Erdrich’s narrative challenges and resists the worldview crystallized by the mainstream narratological concept of “the natural” and offers an instance of Indigenous literary mimesis based on Ojibwe cosmology. Her narrative denaturalizes “natural narratology” while naturalizing the “unnatural” in Indigenous narrative, making the impossible possible.

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Notes

1 Note that the text of Erdrich’s story quoted throughout is the first online publication, which is not paginated.

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References

Electronic reference

Deborah Madsen, Ojibwe Mimesis in Louise Erdrich’s “The Stone”: Indigenizing the “Unnatural” in Narratology, Normalizing the “Natural” in Indigenous NarrativeEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 21-1 | 2026, Online since 07 April 2026, connection on 08 May 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/25869; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/166g4

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About the author

Deborah Madsen

Deborah Madsen is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She began her academic life with a specialism in literary allegory, which has led to a research career largely devoted to the ways in which different forms of rhetorical expression respond to social and cultural crises: American Exceptionalism, Feminism and Ecofeminism, and US settler colonialism in relation to Critical Indigenous Studies. Her recent publications include the edited volume American Futurisms (2026).

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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