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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “North of Hoopdance”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Little Drum Girl”
After Shaawano found the bones of his nine-year-old daughter, he endured a period of deep anguish. During this time, he was cruel to his son, and would leave the young boy alone for weeks while he wandered. One day Shaawano returned home to find “[s]omeone else had stepped in, taken the boy home and barred Shaawano from visits” (151). Alone in his cabin with his guilt and despair, Shaawano was tormented by apparitions of “tiny skeleton children who flitted and zipped across his ceiling like spidery bats” (130).
To earn money, Shaawano began constructing pine pole furniture. Blaming his weak spirit for the loss of his daughter and wife, he tried to poison it with alcohol but was still haunted by memories of his daughter. She visited him in “a sort of dream” (154) and charged him with making a drum. For more than a century, Shaawano’s people had been curing a set of cedar logs, developing the wood’s resilience and resonance. Only the chosen keepers knew its location, but Shaawano’s daughter told him where to find the logs, out of which he would make the drum.
Shaawano believed himself unworthy of crafting a community drum out of the long-cherished cedar and felt obliged to consult with someone about the matter. Finally, he visited a quiet, old woman who “was always in the lodge listening […] and absorbing all that happened” (157). She heard his full story and told him to do his daughter’s bidding. Knowing that the drum “made of that special wood […] would attract the spirits in a powerful communion” (160), Shaawano considered the task beyond his abilities and occupied himself with furniture-making for many months.
One spring morning, Shaawano decided to find the cedar logs. His daughter had said that the wood was across the lake, so he procured an old, dilapidated canoe from Albert Ruse, a fisherman and restored it. After Shaawano explained to Albert the purpose of his journey, the fisherman revealed that his grandfather was a “keeper of that wood” (168). Albert assures Shaawano that “this is the time, and it was said that our drum would be brought to us by a little girl” (168). With Albert and his son, Shaawano sets off in the canoe and finds the logs on a cliff ledge.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “The Ornamental Man”
Shaawano hollowed out the finest of the cured cedar trunks to create the drum’s body. Uncertain how to proceed with designing the drum, he put it in his canoe to continue working at home. As he crossed the lake, the setting sun condensed into a radiant yellow line, and a girl called from the shore. Pictures spontaneously flickered in Shaawano’s mind: “Little girl. Hand. Wolf. The bowl of reflecting water cut in half by the yellow strip of light would be the design on the head of the drum” (175-176).
Before Shaawano put the finishing touches on the drum, his daughter visited his dreams and said, “I’ll tune the drum. Put me inside, Deydey” (176). Perplexed by these instructions, Shaawano offered tobacco and water to his daughter’s bones, which he had nestled into a birch tree, and waited for clarification. He then strings his daughter’s bones inside the drum, telling no one until, years later, he divulged the secret to his grandson, Bernard.
The finished drum was very powerful and attracted people near and far. Like the little girl inside it, “the drum was so kind it cured people of every variety of ill” (179). Meanwhile, Shaawano’s son was drinking. While his son slept it off, Shaawano kept the drum near him, hoping it would heal him. When his son became a father himself, he remembered the songs and, during sober moments, taught them to his own son, Bernard.
Although the drum was treated with great care, the little girl inside “was subject, as children are, to rages” (185). One day, Simon Jack—the man in some ways responsible for the girl’s death—entered the drum circle. Simon Jack’s circumstances had declined. Anaquot and Ziigwan’aage had united to rule over him and his household, then they threw him out. As he wandered with nothing but the clothes on his back, which happened to be the dazzling beaded costume his lovers had made, Simon Jack became filthier and crazier. On the day he danced in the drum circle, “a dark outpouring of energy” (184) made him spin faster and faster until “he fell dead” (184). After that, Shaawano decided to retire the drum for 40 years.
Bernard tells his listeners that those forty years have now passed.
Part 2, Chapters 4-5 Analysis
These chapters reveal how the painted drum came to be and the ability it has to heal trauma. Before his daughter tasks him with making the drum, Shaawano is isolated from his community and prepared to drink himself to death to relieve his guilt and despair. The great responsibility of creating the ceremonial drum alarms Shaawano, but also drives him to seek advice and help from other people. The process of accepting himself as “the man for it” (161)—as the man to fashion the cedar wood into a powerful, community drum—reestablishes Shaawano’s connection with other people, and this connection is central to healing.
In an author’s note, Louise Erdrich explicitly states that “no sacred knowledge is revealed” (277) in The Painted Drum, which explains why the narrative refers to drum ceremonies and songs without providing details. Exactly how the drum “cured people of every variety of ill” (179) remains outside the bounds of Bernard’s storytelling, but he does say, “that’s what the drum is about—it gathers people in and holds them” (180). From this observation, along with Chook’s assertion that the drum’s songs release sorrows, readers can imagine that the drum ceremony rituals establish a deep connection between participants, and through this connection, sorrows are dispersed.
At the end of chapter five, Bernard reveals that Anaquot and Ziigwan’aage “were to die in the appalling illness that shook our tribe” (186). Ziigwan’aage’s daughter, Niibin’aage “was lost into the east” (186), taken away by a mission teacher to a boarding school—and, although not explicitly stated, she will presumably become Faye’s grandmother. With its frequent references to alcoholism, and more muted allusions to disease, government boarding schools, and enforced relocation, the novel registers how the white settler invasion of their homelands tore apart Indigenous American communities, severing connections between people and between people and their land.
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