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- Erdrich’s poem serves as a critique of popular culture, specifically through the Western film genre. It describes how film has distorted history and shaped our understanding of Native Americans.
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Quick answer: "Dear John Wayne" is a poem by Louise Erdrich, a member of the Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, that portrays the experience of Native Americans watching a western film...
The poem is replete with images and symbols, most grounded in Native American or mythological tradition. The meanings are invariably left to the individual reader to decipher.
The poem is set in a drive in movie theatre, the narrator (who we can assume is Erdrich herself) and her friends are watching a John Wayne western. The poem comments on the colonization and oppression of native people.
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We get into the car scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small as people are when the movie is done. We are back in our skins.
Unlike King's novel, Erdrich's poem does not revise the movie so that the Indians beat the cowboys. But the audience in Erdrich's poem hears what John Wayne actually says: that American cowboys get to keep everything they see.
Jul 6, 2020 · The first poem is titled “A Love Medicine.”. Another, “The Butcher’s Wife,” prefigures the novel The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, as does a poem about “step-and-a-half Waleski,” the model for a character in that novel.
