Plot Summary
"The Antelope Wife" begins with a post-Civil War cavalry raid on an Indian village. Warned ahead of time by her deer relatives that the raid would come, the villager Blue Prairie Woman ties her baby girl onto the back of a dog, which then flees in terror. One of the soldiers, Scranton Roy, deserts the cavalry and chases after the baby. He catches her, suckles her himself, names her after his mother, Matilda, and raises her as his own daughter. Scranton eventually marries Matilda's teacher, and has with her a son he calls Augustus. Meanwhile, Blue Prairie Woman is impregnated by her human husband, a man named Shawano, and gives birth to two twin girls, Josephette (Zosie) and Mary, but soon deserts them to seek out her first-born. She finds Matilda and beckons to her, but almost immediately dies of a white man's disease. Before she dies, she renames her daughter Other Side of the Earth and arranges for her to be protected by a herd of antelope.

The novel then addresses the lives of modern-day descendants of Scranton Roy, Matilda, Augustus, and Zosie and Mary Shawano. The narrator and imaginative re-creator of those lives is Cally Whiteheart Beads Roy, descendant through various lines of several of those characters. Inevitably she is a central character in the story, though she focuses in her narration more on the life of her mother, Rozin. Central to The Antelope Wife is Rozin's stormy relationship with Cally's father, Richard Whiteheart Beads, and her delightful lover and eventual second husband, Frank Shawano. Also central to the novel is Sweetheart Calico, an antelope-related woman whom Klaus Shawano abducts and carries off to Minneapolis, where much of thepresent-day action of the novel takes place.

Some first-time readers will find "The Antelope Wife" to be somewhat experimental and confusing. It may help them to recall that Cally is less a conventional narrator than the imaginative re-creator of long-past events to which she has no direct access. She builds her story out of the interconnecting and sometimes contradictory stories she has heard, known about, or perhaps merely imagined may have happened to explain the history of events and characters who seem strange to her. For example, she knows Sweetheart Calico, a strange woman whose silence and unconventional actions suggest, to her namesake Cally, that she may be part antelope. It may be then, that to explain her modern-day actions, Cally re-creates for her an ancestry that goes back to Matilda, the child of Blue Prairie Woman and the original antelope wife, who had herself run with the deer after her mother's death. Similarly, the chapters narrated by a dog may make most sense as Cally's attempt to imagine what a canine narrator would say if it had the power of speech. On the first page, Cally announces that what she tells is "fading in the larger memory," and that she wants to tell it "that it not be lost." She tells us near the end that "I was sent here to understand and to report."

"The Antelope Wife" is finally a challenging and comic novel, not only in the sense that there is much humor in it, but also that the two unhappy wives, Sweetheart Calico and Rozin, both achieve happiness by gaining freedom from oppressively controlling husbands.

Topics for Discussion
1. How is Scranton Roy able to suckle a baby? What does his ability to do so suggest about Erdrich's view ofgender roles? How is Scranton's act different from Blue Prairie Woman's suckling of a puppy? Is Scranton's ability to lactate meant to be a realistic or a magical act? Are the male characters in this novel realistically portrayed, or are they, as one scholar has suggested, merely pasteboard cutout figures?

2. Does Erdrich give us enough information that we can reconstruct Cally's family tree sufficiently that we can see why she says, on page 110, " I am a Roy, a Whiteheart Beads, a Shawano by way of the Roy and Shawano proximity" ? Can we trace her back to Scranton Roy? To Blue Prairie Woman? To Josephette and Mary Shawano?

3. What is the effect of having Almost Soup narrate two of the chapters? Why, for example, does Erdrich have this dog in Chapter 9 tell the story of Cally's near-death? How would the story be different if Cally's mother Rozin had narrated that chapter? Is the dog narration part of a larger pattern of erasing the sharp boundaries between humans and other species? What do you make of the last sentence on page 73, that humans are " no more and no less important than the deer" ?

4. You will notice that Sweetheart Calico says almost nothing in the entire text. Why is that? When she finally does say something, what does she say, and why that? Why does Erdrich make her the " antelope wife" ?

5. Why do we have several sets of twins in the novel? What difference would it have made if all of those twins had been single births?

6. Interspersed throughout the novel are several phrases and sentences in other languages, particularly German and Ojibwa. Do they contribute in some way to the story?

7. Several motifs and images are repeated:broken teeth, cloth, sewing and beads, food and cooking, etc. Choose one and explain why Erdrich used it in The Antelope Wife.

8. What is the point of the blitzkuchen story? What seems to be the secret ingredient that Frank has been searching for?

9. On page 115, humor is said to be " an Indian's seventh sense." Is The Antelope Wife a humorous novel? Does it suggest in less direct ways that we should never take life so seriously that we forget to laugh? Why does Erdrich give us the humor of Chapter 7 (the story of Almost Soup's escape from the stew pot) immediately after the devastating story of Deanna's asphyxiation in Chapter 6?

10. On page 174, an unnamed uncle at the " Kamikaze wedding" states " We all got to suffer. That's love." Although he is speaking specifically to Richard, Cally's rejected father, is this statement meant more generally?

11. Erdrich could have written a simple novel. Why do you think she make it so complex? Is anything gained by having represented so many generations, races, tribes, species in one novel?

12. The Antelope Wife contains many references to the " pattern" made with the " beads." What larger patterns gradually emerge as the many lives and stories in the novel unfold and intertwine? On page 200, Cally says " Family stories repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and time. Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it." What pattern or patterns are set and replicated? Does the novel suggest, fatalistically, that we can never break the patterns our past has set for us?

"[A] beguiling family sags...A captivating jigsaw puzzle of longing and loss whose pieces form an unforgettable image of contemporary Native American life." (-- People)

"Spiritual yet pragmatic, Erdrich's deft lyricism affirms while it defies the usual lines separating the mythical from the daily." (-- Boston Globe Sunday Magazine)

"A fiercely imagined tale of love and loss, a story that manages to transform tragedy into comic redemption, sorrow into heroic survival."(--Michiko Kakutani New York Times)

One of America's most celebrated writers reconfirms her place as a foremost chronicler of the Native American experience with a powerful story capturing the sense of despair, destiny, and magic through three generations of a family.

The Antelope Wife extends the branches of the families who populate Louise Erdrich's earlier novels, and once again, her unsentimental, unsparing writing captures the Native American sense of despair, magic, and humor. Rooted in myth and set in contemporary Minneapolis, this poetic and haunting story spans a century, at the center of which is a mysterious and graceful woman known as the Antelope Wife. Elusive, silent, and bearing a mystical link to nature, she embodies a complicated quest for love and survival that impacts lives in unpredictable ways. Her tale is an unpredictable ways. Her tale is an unforgettable tapestry of ancestry, fate, harrowing tragedy, and redemption, that seems at once modern and eternal.

Louise Erdrich grew up in North Dakota and is a mixed blood enrolled in the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe. She is the author of eight novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Love Medicine and the National Book Award finalist The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, as well as poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay's Dance. Her short fiction has won the National Magazine Award and is included in the O. Henry and Best American short-story collections. She lives in Minnesota with her children, who help her run a small independent bookstore, The Birchbark.