Isolation vs. Interconnectedness with Family
In “Living Home of a Future God,” the narrator and protagonist, Cedar, must contact her birth mother for the first time because she is pregnant and needs information about genetic diseases that may run in the family. While initially Cedar seems to view her pregnancy as an opportunity to build a better future for herself and her unborn child, completely divorced from her family’s past, over the course of the story she seems to…
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Non-Belonging and Forging Individual Identity
In “Future Home of the Living God,” the narrator, Cedar Hawk Songmaker, grapples with a sense of her own identity. Descended from a working-class Native American mother and adopted by wealthy white liberal parents, Cedar has a sense of being caught between worlds and identities, unable to locate herself fully in either one of them. Through navigating her complicated heritage, Cedar is able to forge an individual identity not based on fitting in with…
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Growth and Age as Nonlinear
In “Future Home of the Living God,” both the main character, Cedar, and her younger sister, Little Mary, seem simultaneously childish and very adult. Both are preparing to make major transitions in life: Cedar is about to become a new mother, and Little Mary is a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. While it can be tempting to think of maturing as a linear process, Erdrich challenges assumptions about the trajectory of growth…
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