earticle

영어

This paper explores the portrayal of Native Americans and the American frontier in Louise Erdrich’s children’s books. Up until the late twentieth-century, American children’s book writers often used a set of stereotyped images of Native Americans. Furthermore, rather than accurately depicting Native American’s ordeals during the Westward Expansion, many of these writers looked back at the era of the American frontier in nostalgia. Erdrich’s The Birchbark House books introduce the world and adventures of Omakayas, an Ojibwa girl living in the northwestern frontier in the middle of the nineteenth-century. The Birchbark House books re-tell the silenced history of Native American’s displacement through Omakayas’s innocent eyes. In so doing, Erdrich recaptures the collective violence that accompanied the Westward Expansion and its impact on the Native American’s life, culture, and tradition. Erdrich attempts to enhance the readers’ awareness of the critical period in American history through The Brichbark House books.