The Associated Press
MINNEAPOLIS — In her new novel, “The Plague of Doves,” Louise Erdrich explores a dark secret of North Dakota’s history — the lynching of three American Indians, one of them a 13-year-old boy, in 1897.
“I wanted to try and do some sort of justice to that event,” Erdrich said about the killings in her home state. “It was such a wrenching event in my mind.”
Erdrich’s response was to write about what happens “when vengeance is done ... but no justice is done.” The result was “The Plague of Doves,” which has won rave reviews from critics and is in its third printing since being published in April.
In “The Plague of Doves,” three Indians are lynched after a family is murdered on the edge of a North Dakota reservation in 1911. All three are innocent; the real killer escapes detection and punishment.
Erdrich named one of the lynching victims in her book Paul Holy Track, after the 13-year-old victim of the historic lynching.
“You know 13-year-olds — they’re children. How can you lynch a child?” Erdrich asked in amazement.
Erdrich, of European and Ojibwe descent, sees parallels between the hunger for vengeance that followed the murders of six members of a North Dakota farm family in Emmons County more than a century ago and the aftermath of 9-11.
“I think vengeance, rather than sitting back and allowing justice to be done over time, is really so much a part of our history. And unfortunately, it’s part of our present, as well,” Erdrich said.
“This is common after any sort of horrific event. There’s a terrible thirst for someone to blame, for someone to be caught and punished right away, and immediately. We saw that after 9-11. I felt the same thing in my own heart. ... And it became twisted around until we’re in this terrible situation we are in now.”
“The Plague of Doves” draws its title from now-extinct passenger pigeons. Many of its chapters originally appeared as magazine stories. Erdrich was struggling with writing a science fiction book that had ballooned to 400 pages when she turned to the stories that make up the novel.
“Finally, I looked at them and realized they all connected, and I had this wonderful experience of realizing I’d written a mystery. Then I had to go and put the clues back in,” she said.
In the real-life Emmons County lynching, a mob of 40 men stormed the jail, dragged off three defendants with ropes around their necks and hanged them from a beef windlass used to suspend cattle carcasses.
No one in the lynch mob ever was prosecuted.
Erdrich, whose first novel “Love Medicine” was published in 1984 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, opened the way for other Native American authors, said novelist David Treuer, an Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota.
“Just the brilliance of (her novel ‘Tracks’) helped me imagine myself as a writer and my world as worthwhile material for exploration,” said Treuer, who cites the lyricism and “emotional complexity” of Erdrich’s work.
©Salina Journal