family

• The Round House takes place on a reservation teeming with overlapping family connections, connections that are even more important to the characters because of the small size of the Chippewa community and its strong national identity. 
•  Although the families in The Round House are well established, many of these families are not nuclear, and some are not even genetically linked. On the reservation, the reader encounters a plethora of different kinds of families whose dynamics shift as children enter adulthood and as families endure life’s various challenges and traumas.
• Joe’s family is “the perfect family" This stability dissipates, however, in the aftermath of Geraldine’s violent rape, when the family dynamic is upended. Geraldine becomes unable to fulfill many of the tasks that Joe associates with attentive motherhood, and Bazil is so preoccupied with helping Geraldine heal and bringing her attacker to justice that he stops paying as much attention to Joe.
• Although Joe finds himself without parental oversight, the fluid family structure on the reservation seems practically designed to absorb Joe when he feels emotionally orphaned. 
• This inclination towards adoptive and makeshift families is also is reflected in Linda Lark’s story, as Linda was raised in a Chippewa family on the reservation after she was abandoned by her white parents due to a birth defect. Betty’s role as Linda’s true mother shows how parenthood is not defined by blood, but rather by choosing to play a certain parental role in someone else’s life.
• Although this familial flexibility is obviously extremely helpful for people like Linda and Joe, Erdrich does imply that this fluidity can be destabilizing. Because of the flexible roles that community members play in their families, Joe soon finds himself in an unexpectedly adult position in his household.
• Later, as Joe is weighed down by the emotional burden of having killed Linden Lark, he watches his parents interact at the dinner table, feeling “like [he] was the grown-up and the two of them…were the oblivious children.”
• Joe’s experience of coming-of-age extremely quickly suggests the downside of flexible families, as Joe’s topsy-turvy family situation causes him to grow up much too fast.