Collaborative Interpretation of "Father's Milk"

Here is another product of our interpretive collaboration with the Visual Art LLC, which was focused on the first chapter, “Father’s Milk,” of Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife. “Father’s Milk” sets up what we need to know about history in order to understand the chapters that follow, which is set primarily in modern-day Minneapolis. In this chapter, a U.S. cavalryman named Scranton Roy participates in a raid on an Ojibwe settlement. After he bayonets an old woman and sees his own mother in her face, he runs away, following a dog with a newborn strapped to its back. The chapter is called “Father’s Milk” because, by some miracle, Scranton Roy is able to breastfeed the baby, who he names Matilda after his beloved mother.

Below, you'll find an image created by Calley in response to "Father's Milk," with text from the chapter selected by Abbey that we think interprets her art.

It occurred to him one slow dusk as he looked down at her, upon his breast, that she was teaching him something. This notion seemed absurd when he first considered it, and then, as insights do when we have the solitude to absorb them, he eventually grew used to the idea and paid attention to the lesson. The word faith hooked him. She had it in such pure supply. She nursed with utter simplicity and trust, as though the act itself would produce her wish. (7)

Here we've got a picture by Fly with text selected by Nikhil.

Sometimes across the room, at night, in his sleep, her father gasps as though stabbed, dies into himself. She is jolted awake, frightened, and thinks to check his breath with her hand, but then his ragged snore lulls her. In the fresh daylight, staring up at the patches of mildew on the ceiling, Matilda watches him proudly from the corners of her eyes as he cracks the ice in the washing pail, feeds a spurt of hidden stove flame, talks to himself. She loves him like nothing else. He is her father, her human. Still, sometimes, afflicted by an anxious sorrow, she holds her breath to see what will happen, if he will save her. Heat flows up the sides of her face and she opens her lips but before her mouth can form a word she sees yellow, passes out, and is flooded by blueness, sheer blueness, intimate and strange, the color of her necklace of beads. (11)