What is it about?
Ever since its publication in 2012, many readers have been trouble by the climax to Louis Erdrich's Native American novel "The Round House," wherein young Joe Coutts kills his mother's rapist, in an apparent idealization of vigilante violence. However, Erdrich's repeated references to the Anishinaabe legend of the windiigo--a nightmarish, man-eating monster--as well as to the long, sordid history of U.S. legalism discriminating against Native Americans, and especially the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Skin of Evil," all help to clarify the necessity of Joe's actions.
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Why is it important?
Not just this novel but this topic matters, because as Erdrich's own Afterword assures us, there are still far too many of these sorts of unpunished rapes and discrimination generally on our Native American reservations even today.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Louise Erdrich's <em>The Round House</em>, the Wiindigoo, and <em>Star Trek: The Next Generation</em>, The American Indian Quarterly, January 2018, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.5250/amerindiquar.42.2.0141.
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