SOURCE: "Race and Gender in Louise Erdrich's The Beet Queen," in Ariel, Vol. 25, No. 1, January, 1994, pp. 45-57.

In the following essay, Meisenhelder argues that Erdrich addresses problems of race and gender in her portrayals of white women and men of color in The Beet Queen.

To a number of reviewers and critics, Louise Erdrich's novel The Beet Queen is unusual in Native American literature because of its apparent silence on the issue of race. As Louis Owens has argued, the "excruciating quest for an Indian identity in late twentieth century American that haunts other fiction and poetry by Indian writers is simply not here." Certainly the most strident expression of this idea has been a review of the novel written by another Native American writer, Leslie Marmon Silko. Although she praises Erdrich's style, Silko attacks the novel for its failure to treat the social and political dimension of...