A New Voice: Personal Connections to the Past
Through different iterations of her own likeness, Erdrich positions her relationship to the Mississippi River in terms of her connection to previous Indigenous relationships. In one scene, Erdrich embodies a cartoon stereotypical traditional Indian as a version of the Land O’ Lakes butter girl:
Screenshot from Erdrich's "Pre-Occupied," (1:37)
As Bernardin has argued, in embodying the Land O’ Lakes butter girl, Erdrich “redirects this enduring emblem of sexual, economic, and environmental commodification” (47). Directly before the scene of Erdrich as the Land O’ Lakes girl, Erdrich emerges as an animated photo with a puppet mouth:
Screenshot from Erdrich's "Pre-Occupied," (1:04)
As a puppet figure, Erdrich ventriloquizes the digital invitations to help the “99%” (opposed to the richest one percent of the population) enumerating, “bake a casserole—send pizza—make soup for the 99%” (1:06-1:11). Behind her, map paper swirls in spirals, and the previous scene shows this paper as the “river walking its message on an avenue” (0:52-0:54). This spiraling representation of the river symbolizes the Indigenous histories that precede and inform her experience with the river, and this imagery indicates that Erdrich’s present-day actions and relation to the river are shaped by the physical and cultural erasure that precede her. Erdrich’s representation as a puppet, then, directly parallels the scene in which she embodies the Land O’ Lakes girl. Such imagery underscores that Erdrich’s relationship to the river is shaped by histories of Indigenous presence and colonial erasure surrounding the river.
Erdrich symbolically embodies Indigenous issues surrounding settler-colonialism, but while her identity is informed by the past, her position as a stereotyped Indian is significantly altered in the contemporary moment. Erdrich maintains a visceral connection with the past through spiraling conceptions of time; as Brooks describes, Indigenous antiquities “[move] through our own bodies in the present, perhaps with a sense of irony” (309). Despite this temporal multiplicity, in the present Erdrich directly rejects her position as a stereotyped Indian offering nourishment to those in need: “No I cannot dump cans of creamed corn and / turkey on noodles and offer forth / sustenance again” (1:29-1:37). By adding that she will not do so “again,” Erdrich places this contemporary scene in conversation with events of the past. In this contemporary moment, Erdrich does not give in to the pleas to help the “99%” as would be expected of the figure in stereotypical Indian dress. Instead, she refuses with a “no” emphasized by a subsequent gap in the line of poetry and a corresponding pause in the poemeo.
By narrating the poemeo in first person, Erdrich gives voice to this stationary and lifeless drawing, allowing the stereotyped Indian a new voice capable of asserting her autonomy. Though her social position is informed by past relations and stereotyped images, Erdrich is ultimately able to transform these restrictions in the present in order to attain self-determination.