FOOD OF THE WOODS AND PLAINS

Abstract

The chapter is comparative, exploring how Erdrich’s Birchbark series offers a counternarrative to Wilder’s Little House books through Ojibwe food and foodways. It showcases the competing cultural values of the two nineteenth-century families in the stories as well as those of their twentieth-century writers. Wilder chronicles the transplantation of European methods of agriculture into the American Midwest with its attendant restructuring of the environment. Erdrich’s Birchbark series works as a challenging counter-history to Wilder’s colonialist affirmation and depicts a people whose foodways have long worked in concert with their local ecology (as the author’s research into Ojibwe practices of cultivating wild rice and, maple syrup, and berrying, as well as buffalo hunting, made clear.) Through food, Erdrich remaps the region, recreating it as it was before the invasion of European agriculture, producing a richer comprehension of the region’s food and foodways than Wilder’s pioneer vision.