The Shawl

The profound impact of generational trauma on Indigenous American communities is a key theme present in many of Erdrich’s works, both her short fiction and book-length texts. Generational trauma is the transference of traumatic experiences, stressors, and memories from one generation to the next. Although early studies of generational trauma focused on the mental and physical health issues passed down by survivors of the Holocaust to their children and grandchildren, generational trauma has also been studied in Black and Indigenous communities in Canada and the Americas. Erdrich is interested in the way that genocide, colonization, the reservation system, forced migration, forced sterilization, and other issues faced by Indigenous communities impact the individuals who directly experience them and how they reverberate through successive generations and lead to shortened life spans, addiction, domestic violence, and mental health conditions such as anxiety disorders and depression.

Erdrich examines generational trauma both within Aanakwad’s family and in the community as a whole. In “The Shawl,” the death of Aanakwad’s daughter, and to a lesser extent, Aanakwad’s abandonment of her family, function as the sources of generational trauma. When her son recalls seeing his mother leave, he describes that something inside him “broke” (363).