Storytelling and cultural identity: Louise Erdrich's exploration of the German/American connection in The Master Butchers Singing Club

To understand stories, one must understand the spirit of the stories and the spirit of the person and the family who is telling them. Above all, one must know oneself. For Louise Erdrich, the American writer of Mtis/Cree/Chippewa (also known as Anishinabe or Ojibwa) origin on her mother's side and German/ Jewish/Catholic heritage, on her father's side, this has meant a lifelong commitment to writing in order to maintain a sense of sanity and stability. For it is this mixed identity that continually confronts her with a sense of, as she describes it, unziemliches Verlangen, unseemly longing. Erdrich writes about the interaction between Natives and Europeans in her novels and as writer and storyteller she incorporates not one, but several cultural identities. In much of the research about Erdrich these German/American connections have been all but ignored. This article seeks to address that anomaly.