Human Rights and the Novel After UNDRIP: On Louise Erdrich's Justice Trilogy

Abstract:This essay extends Joseph Slaughter's argument that the genre of the novel and human rights discourse are "mutually enabling fictions," by examining three novels by the celebrated Native American author Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) created in the wake of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). UNDRIP presented a significant innovation in human rights discourse, extending the concept of human rights not just to individuals but to whole communities and transnational collectivities of Indigenous people. Erdrich's The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016) have been grouped together as her "Justice Trilogy" for their common thematic exploration of justice as a concept in its various legal, theological, metaphysical, and personal meanings. And yet the books all remain essentially unsatisfying in their inability to resolve the central question of whether justice was, or ever can be, done. I propose that this is because the real aim of the books is not to elaborate on a unitary concept of justice at all, but rather to think through the problem of the enabling conditions of justice, namely human rights. Together, the novels loosely describe a history of human rights discourse related to Native Americans, with The Plague of Doves exploring the absence of human rights and the impossibility of justice in the moment of non-Indigenous settlement of the Great Plains, and The Round House exploring justice and human rights in the context of the compromised sovereignty of reservations during the era of "self-determination." The final book, LaRose, explores problems of justice, mourning, and revenge in the context of a fictional world in which cultural rights and Indigenous sovereignty are taken as givens; in other words, within a regime of human rights similar to what is proposed in UNDRIP.