Marie Kashpaw is a formidable matriarchal figure in the novel, and one of the novel’s most influential protagonists. She struggles throughout her life to ensure that her family has a strong sense of community, including the foster children she takes into her home and treats as her own. She responds to misfortunes with fortitude, highlighting the importance of enduring maternal love, and emphasizing how strong the women of the novel learn to be in response to disappointment, financial instability, and marital infidelity.

Marie is one of the few characters whom Erdrich portrays at several different stages of life. After Marie is introduced as Albertine’s grandmother in “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” much of the first third of the novel concerns Marie’s adolescence at the Sacred Heart Convent and early marriage to Nector Kashpaw. Marie self-sacrificial nature, endurance, spirit, and intelligence are all established in her early conflicts with Sister Leopolda, and her desire to be a saint foreshadows her eventual role as community leader and a source of support for others. Marie’s successful relationship with her mother-in-law, Rushes Bear (Margaret), after years of mutual dislike establishes a narrative pattern that Erdrich repeats several times throughout the novel: two characters, often women, who learn to appreciate their similarities over their differences and join in mutual friendship and support.