justice

• The Round House explores a tricky concept: how to ensure justice for people belonging to a culture—the Chippewa culture—that the legal system has been built to disadvantage and ignore.
• After Geraldine’s rape, Joe and Bazil want to bring her rapist to justice, but this process is full of bureaucratic complexity and infuriating roadblocks.
• As Erdrich follows her characters’ path to justice, she reveals the pitfalls of both the American justice system and the Chippewa concept of wiindigoo justice, delicately balancing criticism of the legal system’s treatment of Native people and hope for future change.
• Joe, who grew up with a tribal judge as a father, is familiar with the case law from the past several hundred years that forms the basis of contemporary Native autonomy and rights.
• While the legal history of Native people is quite disheartening, Joe does not feel the brunt of it until after his mother’s rape, when Joe’s engagement with this legal history becomes much more urgent and personal. The legal system, which is built on cases designed to disadvantage Native people to the advantage of white Americans, ultimately limits Geraldine’s ability to get justice, since her assault by a white man occurred on Native land.
• Since, ironically, the United States justice system prevents Geraldine from actually getting any justice, Joe must reach back into the traditional, pre-colonial Chippewa legal system for other options, learning about the traditional practice of wiindigoo justice from his grandfather Mooshum’s stories. 
• Wiindigoo justice is not arbitrary, as it requires community consensus to determine whether someone is, in fact, a wiindigoo. Wiindigoo justice does, however, lack the formal procedure of a modern trial, and it focuses more on communal values and harmony than on abstract values like “justice,” “truth,” or “innocence.” 
• It is with this understanding of wiindigoo justice that Joe makes the choice to kill Linden into order to restore his community’s stability and safety.
• Unlike the United States justice system, in which no individual person is directly responsible for punishing other people, wiindigoo justice means that “the person who killed Lark will live with the human consequences of having taken a life.” Certainly, Joe feels the effects of his crime profoundly, as he is plagued by nightmares and the anxiety that, in killing Linden, he has become a wiindigoo himself.
•  Erdrich shows wiindigoo justice to be an imperfect system, in that it is easily overwhelmed by a mob mentality, as is apparent in Mooshum’s story of the buffalo woman.
• By presenting both the wiindigoo justice system and the judicial system as differently flawed, Louise Erdrich suggests that neither wiindigoo justice nor governmental justice is ideal. However, Erdrich does seem to imply through Bazil that the judicial system could be reformed to better serve the Chippewa community.
• It is unclear whether Erdrich believes that this idealist fusion of Native and legal justice is really possible, as Joe expresses impatience and skepticism when Bazil brings up this idea. However, Joe’s choice to become a lawyer and therefore become a part of the justice system seems to imply that, ultimately, Joe and Erdrich believe it could be possible to reform the justice system from within.