Ojibwe Mimesis in Louise Erdrich’s “The Stone”: Indigenizing the “Unnatural” in Narratology, Normalizing the “Natural” in Indigenous Narrative
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 promo...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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European journal of American studies
2026
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | 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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