The Painted Drum

Bernard is a middle-aged Ojibwe who does odd jobs at the hospital on the reservation. He is very kind and helpful to others in his community, though he lives alone and leads a life of relative isolation. Years ago, his wife and children moved to Fargo, but he chose to remain behind in his little house outside the reservation town. Bernard nevertheless suffers from loneliness which he reveals when describing his response to the cries of wolves: “[T]o hear them brings back all the tumult of my younger days. I don’t know why their cries do that to me; perhaps it is because I’ve always had that longing […] to pierce through my existence. I am a boundary to something else, but I don’t know what” (118).

The return of the painted drum brings Bernard back into his community and sets him on the path to opening himself up. Like Faye, Bernard had a difficult and damaging relationship with his father, who was an abusive alcoholic. To the extent that he has survived the cruelties of his childhood, Bernard credits the painted drum, which his grandfather, Old Shaawano, made after his daughter died. Bernard’s grandfather and father taught him the songs of the drum. Bernard believes those songs “steadied” (179) him so that he never drank to “oblivion in order to forget my father’s harm” (179).

At some point, however, Bernard’s father traded the drum for alcohol and it was lost to the reservation. The Ojibwe community lost its center during those years. According to Bernard, “it seemed like anyone who was someone was either dead, drunk, killed, [or] near suicide […]. None of the old sorts were left […] the old kind of people” (116). Once tightly connected through their commitment to community, the Ojibwe people—including Bernard himself—drifted away from each other and their cultural identity.

The drum’s return brings the community back together, initially in the form of a small circle of people listening to Bernard’s storytelling. Later, the drum guides three children to Bernard’s house in the aftermath of their house accidentally burning down during a brutally cold night. Bernard saves the life of the youngest child by holding a drum ceremony beside the boy’s hospitable bed. As the drum empowers him to “pierce through [… his] existence” (118) to connect with the circle of life outside himself, Bernard understands why he remained behind when his wife left: “[I]t was piercingly apparent. He’d stayed for the drum. He had the most intimate knowledge of it, knew the sequence of all the songs […]. He alone could fit the scraps together” (250).

At the end of the 19th century in Ojibwe country, a man named Shaawano releases his wife, Anaquot, to live with her lover Simon Jack after she gives birth to his child. When Anaquot departs for Simon Jack’s house with her baby and her nine-year-old daughter, Shaawano “turned his face to the wall, and did not move to see the daughter, whom he treasured” (109) as she joined her mother in the wagon.

During their journey, wolves attack the wagon and kill Shaawano's daughter. Certain that Anaquot sacrificed the girl to save herself, Shaawano is grief-stricken and blames himself for permitting his wife to leave with their daughter. Despair makes him restless. He abandons his five-year-old son for days at a time as he wanders across the land, finally returning one day to find that someone has taken the boy away.

At his bleakest moment, his dead daughter appears in a dream and instructs him to make a ceremonial drum. Initially believing himself unworthy of such an important task, Shaawano grows into the responsibility, partly by practicing his father’s custom of placing tobacco on a tree stump and thanking “the Creator” (162), and partly by reaching out to other people. After it is finished, the drum “gathers people in” (180) and strengthens the community as a whole. Because Shaawano has strung his daughter’s bones inside the drum, it has her voice; thus she is restored to him in a sense, and his grief is assuaged.

Anaquot is Bernard’s grandmother and Old Shaawano’s wife. Her son, Bernard’s father, is just five years old when Anaquot falls in love with Simon Jack and has his baby. Try as she does to suppress it, her “passion ate away at her” (108), and finally, she leaves with her baby, Fleur, and her nine-year-old daughter to live with Simon Jack.

Anaquot is perplexed to find only a friendly woman and her children at the house, but she is so excited to reunite with her lover, she simply imagines his imminent arrival and fantasizes about their blissful life together thereafter. She also takes pride in her lover’s well-kept house and its new stove. Although her daughter was killed during their journey across the lake, Anaquot is seemingly insensitive to the loss. Eventually, however, when it becomes clear that the woman is trying to poison her, and her dead daughter appears to help her, Anaquot remembered what happened with the wolves, and “her mind cracked open” (130). She loved her daughter more than anyone. Her grief is immense, but, reflecting on all she taught her daughter, she concludes, “she had not always been such a bad mother […]. Not at all” (131).

Unlike Old Shaawano, Anaquot faces her misfortune with courage and a belief in her own ability to prevail. She speaks so candidly to the hostile woman, Ziigwan’aage, who is Simon Jack’s wife, that Ziigwan’aage develops respect for Anaquot. Indeed, the two women find they are kindred spirits. They are both industrious, take pride in household work well done, and are fiercely devoted to their children. Although they are rivals for the same man, as they talk and cross-check their views of him, they begin to see how vain and unimpressive he is. No longer under the spell of her lover, Anaquot collaborates with Ziigwan’aage “in the leisurely destruction of Simon Jack” (173), even as his family, the Pillagers, “gathered [her] into their edges and absorbed” (138) her. Anaquot’s instinct for self-preservation is strong, and, understanding she can never fully trust the Pillagers, does not disclose to them her baby’s true name.

The nine-year-old daughter of Old Shaawano and Anaquot becomes the spirit of the painted drum after wolves devour her. She is kind and selfless and, in that way, she was “of the old sort of Anishinaabeg who thinks of the good of the people first” (117). Even after her death, her generous spirit continues to act on behalf of her community through the agency of the drum. “The Little Drum Girl” (148) heals and saves lives, thereby representing the persistence of life despite death.

Ira is a beautiful young woman with three children, the oldest of whom is nine-year-old Shawnee. After Ira’s husband left her, her father brought her and her children from Minneapolis to live in the house he had built twenty miles outside of town on the Ojibwe reservation. Her father was a spiritual man, who “knew how to give names” (232), and tried to support himself by hunting and other traditional means before he died.

Ira repeatedly distances herself from her father’s spirituality, yet she demonstrates respect for the Ojibwe religion, as when she insists that spiritual matters shouldn’t be discussed in a bar. Indeed, Ira loved her father and tries to honor his traditional way of living by remaining in his house, far from town, and doing beadwork for income. Because this is no longer a viable lifestyle in the 21st century, she must resort to government aid for food and utilities. Ira nevertheless takes pride in her handiwork, as did Anaquot, who lived two generations earlier. Ira is devoted to her children, but (like Anaquot) she makes choices that endanger them.

Ira has an independent spirit. She admits that she “is starting to like” (252) Morris, who is besotted with her. Aware of this emerging relationship, Bernard guesses that Ira and her children would not stay “with him long, not if Morris had anything to say about it” (251). Then, acknowledging that Ira has a mind of her own, Bernard adds, “[…] who knew? Who could tell what Ira was thinking?” (251).

Elsie is Ziigwan’aage’s granddaughter. Her mother, the daughter of Ziigwan’aage and Simon Black, was taken from the Ojibwe reservation to attend the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Elsie shows no attachment to the Ojibwe way of life or belief system. Among the Ojibwe, “[a]ccording to a number of written sources […], the objects left behind by a dead person were regarded with fearful emotion” (33), but Elsie has made a successful career for herself by shrewdly calculating the market value of the estates of the deceased. She is knowledgeable about collectibles, particularly Indigenous American objects, and informs Faye about the respect accorded to a painted drum. After noting that “a painted drum […] is considered a living thing and must be fed as the spirits are fed, with tobacco and a glass of water set nearby […],” Elsie clarifies, “Of course, that is a traditional belief, not mine” (42).

Referring to Elsie’s faith in reason, Faye’s father would say to his children, “Your mother is the Renaissance […]” (81, italics original), but Elsie has passions that lead her astray from level-headed logic. For example, she “regards blue objects with ferocity, assessing and comparing their blueness to the particular hot blue she claims made queens of courtesans and fools of kings” (88). Moreover, she loved another man “[i]nordinately, foolishly” (264) and was with him the day Netta died in the orchard. When Elsie finally discloses this secret to Faye, the guilt they have both endured for decades recedes.

Morris is Chook’s son, who was sent “off to Desert Storm, and he breathed something that upset his system […]” (105). Because his thyroid does not function properly, “[h]is eyes were bugged out, big and staring” (210), and he can’t close them. To protect what remaining vision he has and to minimize his eye discomfort, Morris never leaves his house during the day. His appearance so disturbs him that one day he smashed a mirror. He keeps to himself in his ever-semi-dark house and listens to tapes of every kind, from Mötley Crüe to the Old Testament. His readiness to hear anything and learn everything shows that he is curious, open-minded, and reflective.

Morris behaves boorishly when he coerces Ira to kiss him, but he later apologizes, and Ira believes that he is lonely, not predatory. Morris falls in love with Ira and imagines marrying her, knowing he is going blind and may never see her face again. His feelings for her are less about appearances than about their shared interest in ideas and in spirituality. This becomes apparent when they talk of Ira’s father, who gave Morris the name of the wolf before he went to fight in the Middle East. Ira notes that the name was meaningful to her father because “wolves saved his life” (233), and Morris replies, “My name saved me, too” (233).

Kurt is a German sculptor whose stone assemblages were once widely celebrated, but now “has fallen into what he calls the Zwischenraum, the space between things” (6, italics original) and he hasn’t completed a major work in years. He is Faye’s neighbor and lover, but his arrogance prevents him from pursuing a truly meaningful relationship with Faye, preferring to devote himself, instead, to the “essence, the character of the rock” (7) with which he is working. After his daughter Kendra dies, however, Kurt tries to get closer to Faye. After Kurt’s studio is vandalized, symbolically levelling the playing field between them, Kurt and Faye establish a more balanced, mutually-rewarding relationship.

Faye’s father was a professor of philosophy. Pompous, egotistical, and self-absorbed, he had inflated notions of his intellectual prowess because publishers repeatedly rejected his completed manuscript. He had a volatile relationship with Faye’s mother, and Faye remembers him as “achingly snobbish” (86), mercurial, manipulative, and “a liar” (82). His disregard for the truth, combined with an overarching concern for himself, led him to abdicate responsibility for Faye’s sister Netta’s death and blame Faye.

The son of Old Shaawano, Bernard’s father was just five years old when his mother, Anaquot, took his sister on a journey that would lead to her death. For much of his life, Bernard’s father was haunted by the image of his mother throwing his sister to the wolves to save herself and her baby. Old Shaawano made a ceremonial drum after his daughter died and had his son “sit at the drum just behind the other men, tapping a stick on his knee, learning the songs” (179). Despite the drum’s auspicious power, Bernard’s father succumbs to alcoholism and is abusive. One day, Bernard fights back, and his father finally talks about his sister. By telling the story and considering alternative perspectives, Bernard’s father begins the process of healing.

Named for the spirit of the wolverine, Ziigwan’aage is Simon Jack’s wife and Elsie’s grandmother. She has comprehensive knowledge of plants and of “the most dangerous medicines” (134) and uses this knowledge to poison Anaquot, her husband’s lover, when she first arrives. She is strong-willed and hard-working and comes to have more respect for Anaquot than Simon Jack. An unspoken agreement emerges between the two women that they will rid themselves of him.

Simon Jack belongs to the Pillager clan and is a clever hunter who provides well for his wife, Ziigwan’aage, and their three children. Success makes him attractive: Anaquot has an affair with him and he father’s her child “though he wasn’t even that handsome” (135). He is fastidious about his clothes and appearance and boasts that he is “a two-woman man” (180). His vanity is his downfall. When his two women turn against him and outfit him with a spectacular costume, he is so dazzled by his elegance, he fails to realize the clothes are “to be buried in” (144). Even when they boot him out of the house, he maintains his delusions of greatness as he roams the land in his beaded clothing, growing filthy. Simon Jack dies dancing to the song of the drum, which runs amok when he enters the drum circle.

Kit Tatro lives at the end of Revival Road. Although distantly related to the town’s founding family, the Tatros, Kit is convinced he is an Indigenous American—“though, he cannot decide which kind” (51). He wears Indigenous-inspired amulets, and his yard is littered with the stereotypical trappings of an Indigenous lifestyle: “piled bones and the tatters of a painted tipi” (57). After much speculation on his part, Kit finally decides he belongs to the Winnebago nation when a convoy of Winnebagos averts his collision with a Jeep Cherokee. Faye notes that with his adoption of a Winnebago identity, Kit “has more presence somehow, […] a new gravity” (267).

Nine-year-old Shawnee is Ira’s oldest child, and, like Old Shaawano's daughter, she is caring and self-sacrificing. She takes responsibility for her siblings when Ira leaves them alone, and she leads them to safety after their house burns down on a bitterly cold night by following the sound of the painted drum. Because “[t]he drum talked to” (245) Shawnee, Bernard resolves to teach her the drum’s songs.

Jewett “was an Indian agent on the Ojibwe reservation” (29) where Elsie’s mother was born. After his position was terminated, he opened the first bar on the reservation and accepted various items in exchange for alcohol. This is how he acquired the painted drum from Bernard’s father.

Davan is the teenage son of Faye’s neighbors. Although Davan is reckless and irresponsible, Kurt hires him to help move rocks, but soon concludes the kid is “a brainless punk” (10). Davan ignores Kurt’s warning to stay away from his daughter, Kendra, and, with Kendra in his stolen car, plunges them to their deaths off the side of a bridge.

Kendra is Kurt’s college-aged daughter. In Faye’s opinion, Kendra is thoroughly mediocre but has convinced Kurt she is extraordinary by “achieving small things with great flair” (14). Heedless of her father’s displeasure, Kendra spends time with Davan and joins him in a car ride that ends in their deaths.

John is Chook’s son and Morris’s brother. He makes good money working at the electric plant in the reservation town and lives in a pre-fab house with his wife, Seraphine. When he meets Ira in a bar, he touts his financial success and argues he is superior to those seated around them, but Ira knows better. His choice to spend his time drinking reflects the same spiritual emptiness that pervades much of their community.

John is the descendant of Jewett Parker Tatro and lives in the ancestral home of the Tatros, the founders of Stiles and Stokes. He is killed at an advanced age when Davan Eyke’s careening car strikes him. While doing an inventory of items in the Tatro estate, Faye discovers the painted drum.

Apitchi is Ira’s youngest child. He contracts pneumonia after the children escape their burning house and make their way to Bernard’s. With Apitchi’s life hanging in the balance, Bernard decides “the drum is now ready” (245) to exercise its healing powers once again and prepares to bring its songs to Apitchi’s bedside.

Seraphine is John’s wife. In her capacity as a social worker, she is caring towards Ira, and the scar on her lip symbolizes her loyalty to Ojibwe culture.

Fleur is the daughter of Anaquot and her lover, Simon Jack.

Alice is Ira’s six-year-old daughter.