Biopolitics, Indigenous Identity and Belonging in a Dystopian World: Reading Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017)

This research paper discusses the effacement of Indigenous populations and governmental control over women’s bodies as practices of biopolitics and biocolonialism. By examining Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), the essay sheds light on the strategies of the US government to claim Indigenous peoples’ land, misappropriate their genetic material and violate their rights to culture and self-governance. At the same time, it investigates the struggles Indigenous people face in order to attain belonging in the US society. Erdrich’s Future Home follows the quest of an Ojibwe woman, named Cedar Hawk Songmaker, raised by a white, middle-class family in Minneapolis, as she seeks to discover her biological parents and reconcile with her Indigenous origins. The story unfolds in a dystopian setting: species suddenly face devolution and, to ensure humanity’s survival, the US government imprisons women in special institutions, where they are forced to bear children. At the onset of the narrative, Cedar is four months pregnant and starts writing a diary addressed to her future offspring; in doing so, she chronicles her experiences as an Ojibwe in female gravid detention and grants the world a historical record of the atrocities instigated by the government’s totalitarianism. Tracing the connections between genomics and biocolonialism, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim Tallbear criticizes the misappropriation of Indigenous genetic, natural and cultural resources by Western scientists as well as the limited underpinnings that heavily base race and Indigeneity on biology. Other Indigenous scholars, like Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe) and Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), expose the ongoing colonial forces that compromise Indigenous identity and belonging, but also consider Indigenous futurisms, such as Erdrich’s narrative, as depicting a potential resistance or reversal of colonialism. Drawing from Indigenous research on biopolitics and biocolonialism, the current research paper critically analyzes Future Home as a speculative literary work that portrays Indigenous oppression by Western science and the US government in a future Apocalyptic world.