The search for a place in the world has been a significant issue for Native Americans since they were forced from their homelands by white settlers, a fact made crystal clear by those Native American writers whose mission is to rediscover literature for their children, as well as their their historical roots and cultural heritage.

At the same time, these writers have taken on the responsibility for representing their history and culture both to their own descendants and to non-Native Americans. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of Native American works emerged to form a literary canon; this was the so-called ‘‘Native American Renaissance.’’

Among the numerous Native American writers of this golden literary era are Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and James Welch. Before these writers penned their masterpieces, oral tradition played an essential role in passing down Native American history and culture through the generations; oral tradition thus also had a significant effect on Native American writings. The goal of many of these writers today is to inscribe their history, particularly the period of encroachment and colonization by whites, from a Native American perspective.

Among living Native American writers, Louise Erdrich is one of the most prolific and diverse. A member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwa, she focuses on the delineation of Ojibwa in her novels. In "The Game of Silence" (2005) and sequel to "The Birchbark House" (1999), Erdrich examines the complex history of the Ojibwa people’s forced removal in the 1850s from their beloved homeland on an island in Lake Superior, following the government’s orders.

Writing from a child’s perspective, Erdrich exposes the anxiety, fear, and sadness of the Ojibwa people when confronting the loss of their home. Using "The Game of Silence" as a case study of Native American views on place/space and the concept of home, particularly the relocation of home.

Through her writing, Erdrich not only constructs a space to represent a lost Native American history through which Native American children can learn their history and culture, but also rebuilds the ancestry of her tribe; in so doing, she manifests the possibility of cultural survival for Native Americans.

Erdrich’s title, The Game of Silence, has at least five meanings:

(1) silence as a kind of child’s game;

(2) the silence of the Ojibwa people who are compelled to move west;

(3) the fearful silence of the Ojibwa people as they enter the territory of their enemy, the Bwaanag, in a game of life and death;

(4) the lack of any alternative but to remain silent as the Ojibwa people endure the loss of their land during the colonial period;

(5) the silencing and marginalization of Native American history, a history that must not be forgotten.

Within this discourse on silence, is the following question: what does home signify for Native Americans? Native American writers on place/space and the concept of home offer a number of possible answers. Here, my textual analysis of "The Game of Silence" shows how Erdrich represents both the dilemma of the Ojibwa people as white people encroached upon their homeland, and their struggles in locating a new home for the Ojibwa tribe.

Place and space are intertwined and inseparable. Vine Deloria, an eminent Native American philosopher, regards space as a paramount element of Native American thought and religion: the concept of space shapes the relationship between Native American people and the land.

Space can be defined as the dynamic relationship between an ensemble of different categories of textual elements such as characters, places, and other spaces, but also mythology, flashbacks, memory, and stories.

Place contains many spaces. Space can be constructed through memory, history, culture, or imagination. Oral stories are thus a construction of space. As Leslie Marmon Silko puts it, ‘‘The telling, retelling, and refiguring of stories is a way in which human beings participate in the construction of space. The performance of oral stories is expected to locate the listener within the landscape of the story’’

Erdrich’s works are also a kind of space-construction: her writing of oral stories. She describes her novels as ‘‘an imagined place consisting of landscapes and features similar to many Ojibwe reservations’’ and ‘‘an emotional collection of places dear to her.’’

Erdrich’s characters are extremely close to place. She underscores the magnitude of place for Native American identity: ‘‘We can escape gravity itself, and every semblance of geography, by moving into sheer space, and yet we cannot abandon our need for reference, identity, or our pull to landscapes that mirror our most intense feelings.”

In her desire to construct a Native American identity, Erdrich recaptures in her works her people’s lost terrain. Her search is not for an individual identity, but for a tribal Identity. Native American writers’ seem to search is a self ‘‘that is transpersonal and includes a society, a past and a place.’’

Accordingly, for Native American writers, it is imperative to create a space for their tribes, to bring their voices from margin to center.