The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Throughout the novel, Agnes DeWitt’s lifelong embrace of her role as Father Damien Modeste challenges many traditional notions of gender and identity. Erdrich uses this central conceit to suggest that identity is not an innate state but a fluid performance that is continually shaped and reshaped by a complex blend of social expectations, personal willpower, and spiritual conviction. Through Agnes’s “sincere lie”—her performance as Damien—the novel indicates that adopting a new gender role can be an act of profound sacrifice and radical liberation, for as Agnes fully embodies the identity of Damien, this new reality becomes more authentic to her than the identity that she was born with. Her unusual life therefore blurs the boundaries between male and female and between deception and truth.

Agnes’s transformation into Father Damien is a conscious, deliberate performance of masculinity, and as the narrative demonstrates, this process is far from monolithic. Whenever Agnes suffers doubts about her role as Damien, Erdrich temporarily refers to the protagonist with female pronouns and signifiers, indicating that the true core of the priest’s self is a complex, volatile mix of all her various “selves.”

Even in Agnes’s earliest moments, after she survives a traumatic kidnapping and devastating flood, she already undergoes a systematic shedding and rebuilding of identity.