This article explores Indigenous materiality in Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021) as a decolonial response to settler materiality, a form of cultural domination which sustains the colonial logic of conquest and settlement, and which is exemplified with an encounter with Charlotte Brontë’s moccasins in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Through a close reading of the novel, the article shows how Erdrich represents haunted settings—like an Indigenous bookstore and the city of Minneapolis—and unexpected objects—such as books and a Catholic confessional—to enact relationality, a key ethical onto-epistemological value. In order to do so, it draws on theories of Indigenous materiality and Place-Thought which unveil how the haunted spaces point to unresolved trauma and become sites of resistance, and unexpected objects disrupt the colonial logic of extractivism and asserts reciprocity as an alternative. All in all, this reading underscores the need to attend to Indigenous materiality as a site of survivance where colonial erasure and appropriation are resisted and Indigenous presence is asserted. The novel—and the article itself—invites readers to reckon with the stories that objects carry, and the ones that remain untold.
Silvia Martínez Falquina (Thu,) studied this question.