Food for Thought

A Postcolonial Study of Food Imagery in Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife

By Shirley Brozzo

(Author's note: Ojibwa and Ojibwe are different spellings of the same word. The terms native and Native American will be used interchangeably throughout. The terms Ojibwa/Ojibwe, Chippewa, and Anishnaabe all refer to the same people.)

Whereas Ojibwa author Louise Erdrich's first five novels chronicle the lives of the Kashpaws, Lamartines, Morriseys, and Pillagers, her sixth novel, Antelope Wife, begins the tale of different families: the Roys, the Whiteheart Beads, and the Shawanos. Her new characters face many of the same challenges that the earlier characters did, but this novel integrates an innovative twist to colonialism; almost every page of this intriguing narrative includes mention of food or food imagery. If food is not directly being discussed, then people or objects are described using images of food.

The colonizer's arrival changes everything about life for Native Americans. Not only were the people on the eastern coast affected, but so too were those further inland, like the Ojibwa, as European settlers forced them further and further west. This encroachment leads not only to the physical movement of people, but also to changes in dietary habits of the displaced natives. Not only does Erdrich illustrate actual instances of physical hunger caused by the European invasion, but she makes additional references to other varieties of hunger, such as deprivation and longing. For example, Blue Prairie Woman, who loses her child in the opening scene, yearns for her. Blue Prairie Woman is driven nearly crazy during her search to reunite with her first-born daughter. Klaus Shawano and Richard Whiteheart Beads, two Ojibwa men who have lost their way and succumbed to alcohol (originally brought to the people by early colonizers), crave their next bottle of booze. Cally Whiteheart Beads, one of Richard's twin daughters, longs for the information that will reveal the identity of her grandmother. Knowing her true identity will ground her, making her feel complete.

Food imagery even provides some comic relief, as evidenced by Erdrich's inclusion of the Windigo Dog, a personification of death, and Almost Soup, the storytelling dog. Almost Soup, a pure white dog who gathers up all his "puppiness," his way of tail wagging, sloppy puppy kissing, and false growling that illicit help from the little girl (Cally) who saves him from a grandmother's stew pot, is a kind, helpful creature unlike the Windigo Dog. Although this Windigo Dog provides comic relief in parts of the novel by telling off-color Anishnaabe jokes, a Windigo is generally described as a malevolent spirit likened to greed. Windigo spirits possess an insatiable hunger which can never be satisfied. Icy coldness and strange compulsions are traveling companions of this hunger. The Ojibwa's constant search for food and the European's need to devour land, vegetation, and original inhabitants of this land are prevalent themes in Erdrich's novels. Differing types of hunger, as couched in food imagery, make yet another political statement about the continuation of Ojibwa life despite colonization.

IN THE BEGINNING

Traditionally, the Ojibwa people, like many others, did not have a written history. There was no need for written words because stories would be told that recounted important historical events or battles.3 Storytellers would roam from village to village reciting tales of important deeds, helping the whole community to remember. Writing in vignettes, or short pieces of story or history, is Erdrich's way of staying true to her oral tradition by providing easily digestible snippets of information. Linking these vignettes together to form a novel is consistent with the circular pattern that pervades most Native American works. Laguna Pueblo author and critic Paula Gunn Allen says,

The structure of the stories out of the oral tradition, when left to themselves and not recast by Indian or white collectors, tend  to meander gracefully from event to event; the major unifying device, besides the presence of certain characters in a series of tales, is the relationship of the tale to the ritual life of the tribe. (Sacred Hoop 153)

Erdrich combines all of her stories and characters while letting them roam freely throughout the present, past, and future. An ambiguous portion of the story may reach a subsequent resolution, but not necessarily within the same time period. Time frames are irrelevant within native culture, a concept which runs contrary to the linear model of time used by the conquerors.

Chronological time structuring is useful in promoting and supporting an industrial time sense. The idea that everything has a starting and an ending point reflects accurately the process by which industry produces. (Sacred Hoop 149)

Writing contrary to the European linear fashion, Erdrich obviously arranges her words from a native consciousness using very few historical references, but some of the events can be pieced together, based on what is known about colonial history from the European perspective. In a native retelling of the westward expansion that satisfied the European's hunger for more land, Erdrich's saga opens with a scene in which a cavalry soldier, unable to tolerate the senseless killings of old women and children, follows a dog with a cradleboard strapped to its back. This soldier, Scranton Roy, rescues the infant and tries to keep her alive. This female infant, too young to eat solid foods, wails in hunger until in one desperate move Roy cradles her to his breast where she suckles until she miraculously receives nourishment from him. Roy, the son of Quakers who ironically is sent to annihilate the Sioux, now finds himself the savior of this Ojibwa woman, the first-born daughter of Blue Prairie Woman. Employing typical colonial practices, Roy renames this baby Matilda, after his own mother. Whenever Europeans could not pronounce a name or thought it too long or awkward, they Anglicized it. Changing a person's name is one way in which the dominant culture enforces assimilation.

Scranton Roy's nursing of Matilda mocks Christianity, poking fun at the Madonna, in that males (like virgins) are not traditionally thought of as life givers. Paradoxically, Scranton Roy's ability to nurse a child happens not only once, but twice within this novel. When his wife Peace McKnight dies in childbirth, Roy is once again left with an infant, this time his son Augustus, to nurse and raise. Without hesitation he lifts the newborn boy to his breast, giving him nourishment and life. Roy, who is originally sent to slaughter the natives, instead ends up providing them with first food. These Roys are the ancestors of twins Aurora and Rozina Roy and twins Deanna and Cally Whiteheart Beads.

FOOD AND GRIEF

Death, a common element in most Native American stories, is inevitable given the collective history of the people and the destructive and oppressive practices of the colonizers. Drowning in bereavement, Rozina Whiteheart Beads turns to food to comfort herself when she loses first her daughter Deanna and then her ex-husband Richard. Both are alcohol-related deaths. When Richard gets drunk and tries to asphyxiate himself because Rozina is leaving him for Frank Shawano, the baker and nephew to Richard's business partner Klaus Shawano, he fails miserably in his attempt. Young Deanna is not as fortunate. She hides in the back seat of the yellow truck that her father attempts to use as a means to kill himself, but it is she who falls asleep and dies from carbon monoxide poisoning, while her father lives. Although Rozina chooses bread over wine (booze) by selecting Frank over Richard, Deanna becomes another statistic; an innocent child killed by alcohol, a disease spread by the colonizers.

After Deanna's death, Rozina turns to food to help ease her sorrow. She swam in the grief, she cooked with it, she bagged it up and froze it. She made a stew, burned it out the back yard, dug a hole and threw it in, sacked it for garbage, put it up on a shelf, brought it to the trees she loved, and set it free out on the leaves. (84)

Following Ojibwa traditions she prepares food which sends Deanna on her journey to the spirit world. After conducting proper ceremonies, a feast would have been held, but all of that changes with the coming of the colonizers who outlaw ceremonies and traditional practices.

Rozina, caught between the traditional world and the colonizer's world, as many other natives people are, leaves Richard because she falls in love with Frank Shawano, an urban Indian. Richard cannot accept this, even after Deanna dies and Rozina divorces him. In fact, he tries several more times to win Rozina back, but she is ready to move on with her life. Eventually Richard ruins her wedding night with Frank when he shows up at their hotel and commits suicide in front of them by shooting himself in the head. His death sends Rozina spiraling into another depression in which she is again surrounded by food and food imagery. In her depressed state she cannot fathom feeding her sexual hungers and become Frank's wife until she can accept the tragedies in her life. After seven days of fasting, Rozina tries to fill her grief-laden emptiness with food.

On the table, at the western end because that is the death direction, she sets two places carefully. Spirit plates, with tobacco [. . .] She fills the plates with the wild rice in a heap beside the turkey, the milky, buttery corn, a bit of fruit salad containing strawberries, and beside them, a large bowl of vanilla pudding. Eat it, eat it all up, now, she thinks vehemently, heartsick, setting another smaller plate for her daughter at the head of the stair, then go to sleep. (188)

Rozina uses food and prepares new meals to help her cope with her losses. Her return to traditional ways reveals a tribal memory that runs counter to colonial ways of simply grieving and moving on. In an earlier time period, after losing a husband, Rozina would have gone through a year or more of mourning and self-sacrifice before recovering sufficiently to rejoin the day-to-day activities of her tribal community. She might have gone through a similar experience when Deanna died. Her assimilated family and friends around her in Minneapolis probably expect her to go through only a short grieving period, but she needs to experience a more traditional closure, a feast of mourning. In this respect, Rozina refuses to be colonized.

FOOD AND FEAR

Along with colonization comes change, but change also breeds fear. Apprehension permeates this novel and the life (hi)stories that Erdrich tells. In addition to the deaths of Rozina's loved ones, another memorable event in Antelope Wife is the World War II story wherein the first Klaus is mentioned. Some Ojibwa men liberate Klaus, a young German soldier with no last name, from a detention camp near Minneapolis. In an offer he hopes will spare his life, he proposes to bake a cake for his captors. Unable to speak each other's language, these Ojibwa ogitchida and this German warrior communicate via drawings of a common bond, food. Once the foodstuffs are gathered, the cake is baked. Will Klaus pass the taste-test to earn his freedom? According to Erdrich, these Ojibwa warriors are more accustomed to eating plain food, straight from Mother Earth, things like manomin, weyass, and baloney. But it is Frank Shawano's lifelong ambition to recreate the blitzkuchen that he first tasted there; however, he can never get the recipe right until he stumbles upon the secret ingredient that made that particular cake taste so special . . . fear.

Asinigwesance, or Old Asin, the elder who has Klaus taken as a prisoner, is the one who creates the fear in the first place. Like a hand grenade with a loose pin, Old Asin could explode at any minute. Unknowingly, Asin becomes a colonial mimic. Critic Dee Horne says "the mimic strives to resemble that which is being imitated, but in imitating the other, the mimic reveals -- either knowingly or unknowingly -- his/her difference" (5). In this instance Asin becomes like the colonizers who use revenge as a reason for taking actions that would not normally be taken. Taking Klaus captive as a slave to replace a cousin killed in World War II is not a traditional Ojibwa action, yet after years of forced assimilation Asin begins to act like those who have colonized him.

Another example of colonial mimicry occurs around the Christmas dinner table. Christmas, a Christian holiday, was not observed by natives prior to European arrival, since native people did not worship Christ. After colonization many native people convert to or are forced to accept Christianity. A promise of a food delivery to a starving community often serves as the payment for this spiritual adoption. Throughout Erdrich's Christmas feast scene, various food imagery appears in addition to ample discussion of the actual meal being served. The table itself is "wheat-grained and butter smooth,"some of Elder Mary Shawano's conversation centers on her eventual death and her desire not to have a "commodity funeral," and the salad bowl that cousin Chook holds and passes around the table is constructed of honey-colored wood (202, 203). Grandmothers Mary (Shawano) and Zosie Roy are described as looking like cookie sheets, one newer looking and one well-used and broken in.

Traditional American Christmas feast foods materialize, and include turkey with stuffing, potatoes and gravy, cranberries, and a variety of pies and cakes, most of which are indigenous to the Americas. Cally Whiteheart Beads, Deanna's surviving twin recalls,

My Grandmothers would prefer the burnt-heart of the turkey to the white breast meat and will accept cranberry sauce made from fresh berries only. Mincemeat pie gives Zosie the runs. Pumpkin stops Mary's bowels. Wild rice must be prepared with no salt, and garlic gives both an instant cramp. Otherwise, they are to me the perfect Christmas guests. (194)

Although many Native American families celebrate Christmas holidays today, others have returned to previous traditional ways of celebrating (or not celebrating) holidays or feast days. While some have become fully acculturated, or become colonial mimics, others revive traditional practices.

FOOD AND ASSIMILATION

Before contact by Europeans, early medicine men and/or shaman could find herb, roots, barks, and plants to create concoctions or lotions to cure most ailments. After contact new diseases arrived that could be cured by medicines of either world. One of these new diseases was diabetes, an affliction that makes it difficult to keep a person's natural insulin levels regulated. Changes in diets due to increased consumption of refined sugars and commodity foods have caused this illness in natives, and about one in eight Native Americans contracts diabetes (Diabetes 1). Mary Shawano suffers from this affliction. At the Christmas dinner Zosie tells Cally that "Mary's got the sugar in her blood. She craves it, though. Try not to tempt her. She'll make a pig of herself behind your back and then she'll lapse into a coma" (199).

In yet another example of the effects that settler foods and practices have on the Ojibwa, Zosie herself appears to be watching her cholesterol since she comments that she "eat(s) the whites of eggs only, yolks will kill me" (195). These forced changes in the grandmothers' eating habits can be directly attributed to forced assimilation and colonial mimicry.

Cally's cousin Cecille succumbs to colonial mimicry by assimilating into white culture, perhaps to her own detriment. Through her actions, she starts to look and behave like the dominant culture, even though she will never be fully accepted by them. Erdrich writes,

She runs her kung fu studio right next to the bakery shop. Through this, and peroxide, she has made herself a bicep blond Indian with tiny hips and sculptured legs that she shows off by wearing the shortest shorts. (110)

Cecille's eating habits define who she is. She salts everything before she tastes it as if she knows that her food, like her life, is not spicy enough. She eats mainly health food and swallows vitamin supplements and ginkgo while consuming gallons of bottled water when Cally first meets her. All of these actions point to modern diet fads undertaken by dominant society women in their attempts to stay young, thin, blond, and beautiful. But by the time Christmas comes and the family is feasting together, she "fills her plate three or four times, and devours her food with the slow assurance of a woman of bottomless depth" (204). Just like mainstream women who have harder times sticking to their diets over the holidays, Cecille's dieting days are over. She is a prime example of colonial mimicry in this book. As Horne states, "While the mimic may desire to become like another, the mimic can never be the other" (4). As much as Cecille tries to change her appearance through hair dye and exercising herself into a size two body, she cannot really become a white woman and will not be accepted as such by the dominant culture.

Cally's search for her identity leads her to the city where she moves in with her mother's boyfriend, Frank, who has moved to Minneapolis from the reservation to start his bakery as a part of the relocation program. Their living quarters are above the bakery. In operating this bakery, Frank has become assimilated into the dominant culture, concocting sweets which are not a traditional part of an Ojibwa diet. Traditional sweetening is done with maple sap collected in the spring, boiled until usable, and then utilized sparingly throughout the year. The influx of refined sugar into the daily diets of natives not used to such foods contributes to the rising number of Native Americans with diabetes.

In spite of this setback to native health in general, Frank's bakery allows him the freedom to continue searching for the secret recipe for the blitzkuchen. Even though running the bakery is not a traditional Native American occupation, Frank persists. Horne posits,"As part of their civilizing mission, settlers encourage colonial mimicry in their efforts to facilitate the process of assimilation" (6). Frank Shawano's actions reveal his assimilation. He has a Puritan work ethic, such as rising before dawn to create his confections, and cleaning and recleaning the glass in his display cases. He keeps his recipes a secret and becomes professionally jealous. Frank, in business to make money, obsesses with recreating the blitzkuchen, and does not talk about the old ways or the traditions he is using for the recreation of the blitzkuchen and does not stay connected to his family, even those members who live with him.

Although Frank stays firmly ensconced in his Minneapolis bakery, Mary and Zosie vacillate between their reservation and Minneapolis, keeping their migratory traditions alive. Mary and Zosie are defined as being "off the reservation," a term that Laguna Pueblo activist Paula Gunn Allen defines as "someone who does not conform to the limits and boundaries of officialdom, [one] who is unpredictable and thus uncontrollable" (Off the Reservation 6). Mary and Zosie continue to fit this rebel description by their non-conformity and ambiguity. They are neither reservation nor urban Indians, but simply come and go as they please. The idea of adhering to boundaries is a European concept. Boundaries exist only on paper and are not sufficient barriers to keep someone confined. When Cally searches for her grandmothers in order to find out more about her own heritage, she hears various stories about where the women are sighted, including playing at several bingo games, attending funerals, living in an apartment just down the street from the bakery, and conducting traditional workshops both on and off the reservation. These ladies refuse to be restricted to the reservation that once bound their ancestors. They hunger for a different kind of life, a simpler life, a non-colonized life.

HUNGER

Nearly every page within the novel has a reference to food or descriptions of other objects with food-related qualifiers. Erdrich's stories "turn upon meals, because the Ojibwa and Cree worried enough about food to create a spirit of starvation, the Windigo" (Antelope Wife 1). The Windigo Dog is a prime example of this hunger throughout the book. Early in the novel, Erdrich describes one Windigo Dog as the puppy, Sorrow, who nurses at the breast of Ozhawashikwamashokaodeykwe, Blue Prairie Woman, and helps ease the pain in her milk-engorged teats. Sorrow (literally and figuratively) follows Blue Prairie Woman westward, but even when her name gets changed to Other Side of the Earth, it does not lessen her hunger for her lost child who is raised as Matilda Roy. Now the dog and the woman, as well as their descendants, are bonded together forever through this first food, breast milk.

The second Windigo Dog, Almost Soup, nearly becomes a meal himself because of his white coloring. Erdrich employs a stereotype perpetuated by the colonizers that all Indians eat dogs. Although tribes like the Lakotas did eat dog, often as part of a ceremony, most did not. In one episode, Cally begs her grandmother to spare Almost Soup, and in gratitude, Almost Soup stays by her side to protect her. Both Cally and Almost Soup are descendants of the original woman and dog.
Klaus Shawano is visited by yet another Windigo Dog. His description continues the hunger motif. He is

a bad spirit of hunger and not just normal hunger but out-of-control hunger. Hunger of impossible devouring. Utter animal hunger that did not care whether you were sober or brave or had your hard-won GED certificate let alone degree. No matter. Just food. Klaus was just food to the Windigo. And the Windigo laughed. (127)

Klaus cannot control his hunger for alcohol, and whenever he drinks to excess, he encounters the Windigo Dog. Klaus succumbs to the bottle when he feels that things are not going his way, but the European traders initially created this dependency on alcohol when they began to barter whiskey for furs. Once touted as a source of nutrition, alcohol is really nothing more than a numbing agent, a way to take control over a person by creating dependency and controlling his or her thoughts and actions. Chippewa novelist Gerald Vizenor posits,

Native American Indians bear the burdens of a nation cursed with the manifest manners of alcoholism. Once thought to be nutritious, alcohol has been the earnest measure of temperance, and the sources of enormous excise revenues from the sale of beverage alcohol. (29)

Once the colonizers find out that alcohol can be bartered, they take advantage of native peoples. As the natives become hooked on this addicting beverage, the colonizers then have another means to enforce assimilation. By threatening to withhold shipments, they control the natives. By keeping natives addicted, the colonizers perpetuate the stereotypes of the "drunken Indian," and further manipulate them. Vizenor also notes that "Indians are the wild alcoholics in the literature of dominance" (29). Natives have so often been stereotyped and portrayed as "drunken savages," that they have surrendered to the self-fulfilling prophecy for hundreds of years. Only recently have native peoples, as a whole, taken a serious look at what alcoholism has done to them and made prudent strides to get and stay sober.

Klaus, one of these alcoholics, has been out of balance in his life ever since he captures his "Sweetheart Calico." He doesn't realize that by enticing her away from the Plains, he has upset the balance of not only his world, but the entire world. At one point he comes very close to knowing the secret of being in balance, but then falls into alcoholism. He battles the bottle spirits when he sees the Blue Fairy in the bottom of the Mississippi River. She is a "trembling beauty alive with Jell-O, surrounded by a radiance of filtered sun and nuclear dust and splintered fish scales" (98). When he feels he can sink no lower, he knows what he has to do to survive: he must set his Sweetheart Calico free. She must be returned to the deer people in the western direction from which she was stolen.

Also out of balance is fellow alcoholic, Richard Whiteheart Beads. After downing a bottle of Listerine with Klaus, the men are begging for change outside the art museum. Once they collect enough for more booze, they head for the liquor store on Hennepin to shop. Richard places his order:

I opt for a subtle white [wine]. Something with volume. I don't get too hung up on the bouquet. My circumstances won't permit it. I can tell the difference between a dollar ninety-nine and a two fifty-nine bottle of white port wine, though, you can't fool me. Don't try. (96)

His dependence forces him further down than Klaus and he suffers torturous withdrawals. He weeps uncontrollably and cannot keep down anything except milk.

Not always drunk, Klaus and Richard once shared a prosperous garbage business. While feasting from a buffet Klaus comments,

Used to be us Indians had nothing to throw away -- we used it all up to the last scrap. Now we have a lot of casino trash, of course, and used diapers, disposable and yet eternal like the rest of the country. Keep this up and we'll all one day be a landfill of diapers, living as adults right on top of our own baby shit. (43-44)

They celebrate the successes of their garbage business, the end of the consumption process, by feasting, the beginning of the consumption process. Here is yet another example of the wastefulness of the colonizers and a practice learned by colonized natives.

Alcohol does not directly affect all natives, though. Richard's surviving twin daughter Cally has a hunger that is not physical, but intellectual in nature. She searches for her grandmother's true identity. Who is her mother Rozina's mother: Mary or Zosie? In the colonized world, children are only allowed one birth mother and one birth father. Yet within the tribal kinship system a child, who obviously has only one "real" set of parents, would still call all of her aunties "mother" and her uncles "father." Erdrich continues her confusion about the grandmothers until the Christmas dinner when Zosie finally admits to being Cally's grandmother. Zosie says to Cally after consuming a piece of twelve layer chocolate raspberry cake, "during my motherhood, when I was rocking or nursing my baby, I had a lot of time to think"(215). Finally Cally receives the information she yearns for. Good food and good stories seem to go together.

FOOD AND COMMUNITY

Paula Gunn Allen believes that "besides food, which may be the single most definitive aspect of a sense of place, stories provide a deep sense of continuity within a psyche space" (Off the Reservation 234). All of the stories Erdrich tells in Antelope Wife revolve around strong women figures, including surviving twins Cally (Cally/Deanna) and Rozina (Rozina/Aurora) and grandmothers Mary and Zosie. Food surrounds these women who are a part of an oral tradition which portrays women and men in complementary positions. Men and women's roles are separate, but interdependent. As Allen also states,

The women's traditions are largely about continuity, and men's traditions are largely about transitoriness and change. Thus women's rituals and lore center on birth, death, food, house holding, and medicine -- that is all that goes into the maintenance of life over long term. Men's rituals are concerned with risk, death and transformation -- that is all that helps regulate and control change. (Sacred Hoop 82)

Cooking and eating at the Christmas feast is a natural segue to the return of balance in the world. Once again the women are holding the world together with what they know and the stories they hold and share. Susan Bordo says,

That is, indeed the prevailing gender reality. For women, the emotional comfort of self-feeding is rarely turned to in a state of pleasure and independence, but in despair, emptiness, loneliness, and desperation. Food is, as one woman put it "the only thing that will take care of me. (28)

Rozina and Frank start their second year of marriage after a rocky start. Cally reconnects with her grandparental heritage, and Sweetheart Calico is on her way home. Some of the hunger has been abated and the world is back in balance for this Ojibwa community in Minneapolis.

Journalist and food critic Judyth Hills says, "And we get it. We understand. This is the food that unites us, that tells the story of who we have been, and whom we have met and what we may together become" (39). The native community endures. The colonizers have not won.
 
WORKS CITED
Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border Crossing Loose Cannons. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998.
------. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
¶"The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich." http://www.dancingbadger.com/antelope.htm (accessed 2/15/2002).
Bordo, Susan. "Hunger as Ideology." Eating Culture. Ed. Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
"Diabetes and American Indians." Diabetes Prevention Program. http://www.preventdiabetes.com/statind.htm (accessed 7/11/2002).
Erdrich, Louise. The Antelope Wife. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.
Hill, Judyth. "Corn Dance Café." Native Peoples 14.6 (Sept/Oct 2001): 39. http://www.firstsearch.oclc.org/WebZ/FTFETCH?sessionid=sp01sw07-56531-cyoph (accessed 3/11/2002).
Horne, Dee. Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Hanover, MA: University Press of New England, 1994.

The complete issue of SAIL is available in PDF format on the web at http://oncampus.richmond.edu/faculty/ASAIL/SAIL2/171.pdf

About the Author

Shirley Brozzo, the Associate Director of the Multicultural Education and Resource Center at Northern Michigan University, was born and raised in Ironwood, Michigan and has lived in the Upper Peninsula all her life.  In 1987 she earned her Associates degree from Gogebic Community College and moved to Marquette, where in 1992 she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration.  By 1994 she had finished her Master of Arts in English writing and began her current career with the Multicultural Education and Resource Center.  The following summer she began teaching for the Center for Native American Studies, where she teaches The Native American Experience class as well as a course she created called Storytelling by Native American Women.  In May 2006,  Shirley finished the requirements for a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.  Throughout her career she has published over 30 essays, stories and poems.  In addition to working and writing, Shirley stays in close contact with her children, Jamie, Brandi and Steven.