Fiction and Justice: The Round House
11/3/14
By: Shannon Long

For decades, when a Native American woman has been assaulted or raped by a man who is non-Indian, she has had little or no recourse. Under long-standing law in Indian country, reservations are sovereign nations with their own police departments and courts in charge of prosecuting crimes on tribal land. But Indian police have lacked the legal authority to arrest non-Indian men who commit acts of domestic violence against native women on reservations, and tribal courts have lacked the authority to prosecute the men.
In Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Round House the main character’s father explains his understanding of “ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do kinds of justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions”(306). Those who avenge killings, when the legal system can’t or won’t act, bear the consequences of having taken a human life. In the end, Joe’s parents “know everything. The sentence was to endure . . . I don’t remember that they even looked at me or I at them after the shock of that first moment when we all realized we were old” (317). When Joe hears that the judge handling his mother’s case is uncertain whether the accused man can be charged at all, the 13-year-old boy whose mother was raped pursues his own quest for justice. Narrating this gripping story years later, having himself become a public prosecutor, Joe shows how a seemingly isolated crime has many roots. The Round House is a gripping and emotional search in the name of justice. The Round House is about the complex issues of justice on reservations where “86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men and few are prosecuted” (Erdrich, 319). Questions Geraldine can’t answer because her face was covered would provide the avenue for justice: Where did it