51 pages • 1 hour read
Louise ErdrichThe Painted Drum
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “North of Hoopdance”
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary: “The Visitors”
Bernard Shaawano works at the hospital on his Ojibwe reservation. Kind-hearted and obliging, he always answers Chook’s calls for help, even though the old woman’s neediness and self-pity annoy everyone. When she asks Bernard to dig up the grave of her dead husband, he refuses. Her explanation, however, taps into his deepest family secrets: buried with Chook’s husband are the songs of the missing drum that Bernard’s grandfather made.
Bernard drives to the judge’s house, where, according to Chook, two women from the East have delivered the drum. The women are apparently “related to the Pillagers, who have mainly died out” (103). Geraldine, the judge’s wife, greets Bernard at the door; he is “relieved to see that they have kept the drum covered” (103). Geraldine introduces Elsie and Faye Travers, who have travelled from New Hampshire to North Dakota with the drum.
Chook arrives with her son John and quickly commandeers the conversation. She says the drum must be treated with respect and has the power to heal sorrows by setting them free through song.
Faye tells the group that she acquired the drum from the estate of John Jewett Parker Tatro. The name is familiar to Bernard; Tatro played a role in stories Bernard’s father spoke of when sober. After he worked as an "Indian agent," Tatro opened a bar on the reservation and began collecting items like the drum in exchange for alcohol. Bernard looks at the Travers women and thinks, “Those two don’t know who they are, what it means that they are Pillagers” (107). He decides to tell them.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Shawl”
Bernard tells the story of his grandparents, Anaquot and Shaawano. They had two children, a nine-year-old girl and a five-year-old boy, but then Anaquot had an affair and had a child with her lover. Afterwards, Anaquot’s passion for her lover so consumed her; she would cry uncontrollably with longing for him. Although Shaawano loved his wife, he finally decided to surrender her and “sent word to the other man’s camp” (109), which was across the lake.
One winter afternoon, the lover’s uncle arrived to retrieve Anaquot, and she settled into the wagon with her baby and nine-year-old daughter. Realizing his mother was leaving, the five-year-old boy chased after her until he collapsed. When Shaawano collected his son, he spoke of seeing dark shapes pursuing the wagon, and Shaawano feared that wolves had attacked the travelers. Following the wagon’s trail, he found the bones of his daughter with her torn shawl.
The boy was traumatized by the image of his mother throwing his tenderhearted sister from the wagon to appease the wolves and save herself. He grew up, married, and had his own children. After his wife died, he indulged in drinking sprees that lasted for days. To avoid his violent anger, his three children (Bernard was the eldest) fled out the back door when he returned.
At age 13, Bernard resolved to stand his ground. His drunken father entered the house, and after throwing punches and then a chair, Bernard prevailed. As his father sprawled in a pool of blood, Bernard kneeled down and wiped his face with a torn shawl his father kept near. Bernard’s father grasped the cloth tenderly and asked, “Did you know I had a sister once?” (115).
Bernard’s father remained sober after that and eventually remarried. Before his father died, Bernard advised him to burn his sister’s shawl, to “send it off to cloak her spirit” (116). Bernard also encouraged his father to consider the possibility that, given how “tenderhearted and brave” (116) his sister was, she “lifted her shawl and flew” (117) from the wagon, sacrificing herself to allow her mother and the baby to escape.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Wolves”
Bernard opens this chapter with the story of an old man who had once wanted to kill himself. He offered himself to the wolves, but only one displayed much interest and sat by him. The man and the wolf locked gazes. The man asked the wolf how he went on living with the violence people relentlessly inflict on wolves? Through his stare the wolf replied that the wolves “accept the life they are given” (120).
As a young man, Bernard visited Fleur Pillager, an old woman who knew what happened to Anaquot and her baby—because Fleur was that baby. According to Fleur, the lover’s uncle delivered them to a cabin where a pleasant woman received them and introduced her three children, but Anaquot’s lover, Simon Jack, was not there. Assuming the woman was Simon Jack’s sister, Anaquot ate and then slept deeply.
When Anaquot woke the next morning, the woman offered her tea. After several sips, Anaquot felt herself sinking and realized simultaneously that the tea was poisoned and that “someone helped pull her up” (128) from death. With renewed clarity, Anaquot understood that the woman was Simon Jack’s wife; she had discovered everything.
Anaquot reflected that she had done wrong but that she didn’t deserve to die. The “someone” who pulled her from oblivion responded, “You don’t deserve to die? What about your little girl?’” (130). Spoken by the spirit of her nine-year-old daughter, whom Anaquot had loved beyond measure, these words roused the pain Anaquot had repressed after the episode with the wolves.
After Anaquot told the woman, truthfully, that Simon Jack had deceived her into believing he had no family, the woman finally revealed her name: Ziigwan’aage. Warily at first, but with growing mutual trust, the women discussed the man they both loved, dissecting his vainglorious ways until “they had purged themselves” (137) of their attraction to him. Simon Jack returned days later from a trapping expedition. Although surprised to see Anaquot, he concealed it, but was visibly disconcerted to discover wife and lover no longer fell for his charms.
Ziigwan’aage’s family, the Pillagers, accepted Anaquot and her baby into their circle. Grateful for their protection, Anaquot nevertheless withheld her baby’s true name, assigning her the nickname “Fleur,” instead. Meanwhile, Anaquot and Ziigwan’aage began beading together a stunning design on velvet, unaware of its purpose until Simon Jack decided it was an outfit for him—either for dancing or burial.
One afternoon, Ziigwan’aage returned to the cabin dragging a wolf she had shot, and Anaquot heard her daughter whisper, “This is the one who ate my heart, mother’” (147).
Part 2, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In Part 2, the setting shifts from New Hampshire to the Ojibwe lands in North Dakota, and Bernard Shaawano assumes the position of first-person narrator. In chapters two and three, he tells the story of Anaquot to the small gathering of people at the judge’s house, introducing the novel’s theme of storytelling. In stark contrast to Faye, who guards her experiences and feelings from others, the Ojibwe community practices storytelling as a way of sharing significant events and expressing profound, even traumatizing experiences. Such is the importance of storytelling that it is ritualized in the drum ceremony. As Chook explains, to “wear down […] sorrows” (105), you must “talk them over, you live them through, you don’t let them sit inside. See, that’s what the drum was good for. Letting those sorrows out […]” (105).
There are noticeable parallels between the deaths of Faye’s sister and Anaquot’s daughter, and this marks another emerging theme—the interconnectedness of the past and present. For Faye, the impact of her sister’s death long ago continues to reverberate in her life, but because she has not processed her trauma, it surfaces in her life in destructive ways. She has not grown from her past; it has held her captive.
By juxtaposing Netta’s death with that of another brave girl a generation earlier, the narrative suggests that time has a cyclical nature; past events recur in the present, albeit with variations. Such interconnectedness between past and present does not tether time to the past, as Faye would have it; rather, the past weaves through the present to sustain “the world’s order” (187) amidst the changes time brings. As Bernard’s narrative demonstrates, storytelling gives voice to past experiences and emotions that can enhance our understanding of experiences in the present.
While uncovering connections between different historical periods, these chapters also gesture toward a pervasive force or spirit that links together people, animals, and objects. This occurs when Anaquot, while nursing her baby, “saw the two of them together as a dot of light and then they grew and grew until they had no edges at all and were the radiant center of an infinite wheel” (132). Likewise, before returning to his storytelling in chapter three, Bernard says that the sound of wolves howling triggers a longing in him “to pierce through my existence. I am a boundary to something else, but I don’t know what” (118). Both Anaquot and Bernard experience the pull of something beyond themselves, something that pierces boundaries and dissolves the edges between beings. It is a pull toward collectivity from individuality.
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