The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich

Father Damien was both a robber and a priest.  For what is it to entertain a daily deception?  Wasn't he robbing all who looked upon him?  Stealing their trust?  Shameful, perhaps, but Agnes was surprised to find that the thought gave her only satisfaction.  She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any.  She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation.  He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined.  He would be Agnes's twin, her masterwork, her brother.

In 1996, Father Damien Modeste of the North Dakota outpost of Little No Horse, who has spent his life ministering to the Ojibwe who live there, is visited at last by a representative from the Church.  It's just a priest from nearby Argus, but that's all right; he's been writing to the Pope for decades now.  The visitor, another father named Jude Miller, has come to investigate the possible sainthood of a local nun, Sister Leopolda.  He pries into her history, but the history he gets is really that of Father Damien, who harbors a secret much more shocking that any miracle wrought by Leopolda: for nearly eighty years, he has really been a woman named Agnes.

Reading Erdrich's interconnected novels can sometimes feel like you've missed out on some essential, original text.  Who's Mary Kashpaw again, and how is she different from Margaret Kashpaw?  And who's just Kashpaw?  But there is no ur-text to guide you; you have to take these novels as pieces of the whole.  The more I read of them, the more satisfying they are, and the more these characters come into life for me.  The only one that has remained bell-clear is Nanapush, the lusty, elderly trickster who is modeled on the first man of the Ojibwe religion, Nanabozho.  In this book Nanapush dies of severe flatulence, but that hardly seems like a spoiler when he returns in so many other novels.  (Or given the fact that he "wakes up" twice, once to let out one more unholy fart, and then again to get laid one last time.)

Little No Horse is best read, however, next to Tracks, the first of Erdrich's novels that I ever read.  That book centers on Fleur, the beautiful and wild woman adopted by Nanapush.  I don't remember if Father Damien features much in it, but I do remember the murderously pious character of Pauline Puyat, who--as we learn in Little No Horse--becomes the famed Sister Leopolda.  Leopolda's reputation for holiness has spread throughout the church, but only Damien/Agnes understands the truth about her vindictiveness and her violence.

Damien/Agnes is drawn as an explicit contrast to Leopolda.  She may be a fake as a man, but not as a religious adept, having been a nun before the extraordinary circumstances that led to her donning the guise of Father Damien.  (I won't recount them, since they're not so material to the book as a whole, but they are really fun--some of Erdrich's best magical realism.)  She, too, is pious; her main worry in being found out is not damage to her personal reputation but the possibility that all the work she has done, the baptisms, the confessions, the sacraments, will be wiped clean as invalid.  Unlike Leopolda, who is only ever respected or feared, Damien/Agnes becomes loved by the Ojibwe--one of those who Robin Wall Kimmerer might compare to the plantain, or "white man's footsteps," a non-indigenous plant that integrates productively into indigenous ecologies.

Over time, in fact, something strange happens: as she lives among the Ojibwe, she finds herself being converted to the Ojibwe religion by friends like Nanapush.  Damien/Agnes calls conversion "a most loving form of destruction," which is true in both directions; while settler Catholicism threatens some of the most fundamental qualities of Ojibwe life, Damien/Agnes' conversion to the Ojibwe religion goes hand in hand with the dismantling of her old self and the creation of something new.  Though Erdrich is hypercritical of the Jesuitical severity of Pauline/Leopolda, she fashions in this novel and others a kind of convincing syncretism between indigenous and European religion.  Toward the end of the novel, Father Miller has a vision of world religion as a tree, "the branch of his own beliefs, the dogma and history of the Catholic Church not even a branch but a twig not strong enough for a bird to perch on, just a weak and slender shoot."

I think Little No Horse, along with The Bingo Palace, might be my favorite of the Erdrich novels I've read.  It's Erdrich at her funniest and most poignant, and her prose is at its most accomplished.  Its scale, which occupies eighty years of Damien/Agnes' life, allows a wider scope on the knotty genealogies that animate these novels, and create an epic tone that fits the magical realist elements perfectly.  I'm still thankful for the family tree printed on the flyleaf, though.