Gerry Nanapush Character Analysis

Lulu’s son, Dot’s husband, and Lipsha’s father. As a young man, Gerry meets and falls in love with June, and it isn’t long before she is pregnant with Lipsha. Gerry wants to marry June, but she is already married to Gordie with an infant King at home. After Lipsha’s birth, June hands him over to Marie, and he is not told that Gerry is his father. Gerry spends most of the novel in and out of prison after getting into a bar fight with a man who calls him a racial slur. Most of Gerry’s prison time, however, is not related to his initial charge, but is instead due to his continued escape attempts. Gerry believes in justice not laws, and since he has served his original sentence, he refuses to spend one more minute in prison. Law enforcement considers Gerry a hardened criminal—an animal to be caged—but his reservation sees him as a local wonder, and a bit of a hero. He is like a legend of sorts to the Ojibwe people, one who evades capture and resist the oppressive white government, and they tell stories about his daring escapes. Gerry and King do a stint in the state penitentiary together and they grow close, but King betrays Gerry and snitches on his planned escape, adding years to Gerry’s sentence. At the end of the novel, Gerry again breaks out of prison and goes to King’s Minneapolis apartment to seek revenge, where he meets Lipsha for the first time. After the police beat down King’s door looking for Gerry, he escapes and hides in the trunk of Lipsha’s car. Lipsha agrees to drive Gerry to Canada, and along the way, they come to terms with their relationship as father and son. Gerry serves to illustrate the systemic and institutionalized racism of American society. Gerry is not a violent or dangerous man, yet he is criminalized by a racist justice system that seeks to imprison him simply because of his Native American identity.