Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands. Islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, teh rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I'm longing to read, are books in themselves. Then there is a special island on Rainy Lake that is home to thousands of rare books ranging from crumbling copies of Erasmus in the French and Heloise's letters to Abelard dated MDCCXXIII, to first editions of Mark Twain (signed) to a magnificent collection of ethnographic works on the Ojibwe that might explain the book-islands of Lake of the Woods.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country begins with author Louise Erdrich piling into a blue minivan with her newborn daughter, Kiizhik. This is an unconventional trip, and at 46 years of age, she's an unconventional mother. The destination is the lake country of northern Minnesota and southern Ontario, Lake of the Woods and Rainy Lake, vast freshwater lakes that are dotted with islands, a place that is still home to the Ojibwe. Erdrich herself is a "plains" Ojibwe, from the eastern stretches of North Dakota, and so the place still retains some of its strangeness, but there's home here, too, not least because she is meeting the mysterious father of her infant, a medicine man named Tobasonakwut. (One reads between the lines to see that the pair are not quite a conventional couple; elsewhere I've read that he was a married man.) In these islands she sees something akin to the books that are her lifelong passion: numerous, inviting, mysterious, and even, in some cases as she explains above, legible.

What a precious object this book is for me. I picked it up at Erdrich's own Minneapolis bookstore, Birchbark Books, after a week of exploring the Ojibwe lands around Lake Superior. We never quite got up to where Erdrich describes in this book, but we did end up a stone's throw from Rainy Lake, at Lake Kabetogama, also now a part of Voyageurs National Park. But I recognized something, just a little, of the awe that suffuses that place, where the islands really do fan out and multiply in an impossible way. The book is just a book, it isn't even signed, but it lies at the crossroads of my own experiences and that of an author who has meant a lot to me. Maybe there's even a small touch of the numinous in the way of Erdrich's visit to the cabin of explorer and naturalist Ernest Oberholtzer, where she sleeps among his vast library, making herself known to his immense store of books.

Beyond that, I was really touched by this book. I've only read Erdrich's fiction, which can be fanciful and goofy, but reading her in this mode, a mix of memoir, naturalism, and travelogue, was really fascinating. She's always had a way of persuasively writing about the way that myth and magic appear in everyday life, and she manages to make the ancient stone glyphs of the Lake of the Woods seem as mysterious and meaningful as anything from Tracks or Bingo Palace. And I was struck by the gentle, strange relationship between herself and Tobasonakwut, as well as the late-coming child, who seems to have a natural attraction for the lake's animals: sturgeon, otters, moose. Even the principle metaphor of the book, which ought to be silly--a book is like an island--seems natural and persuasive in Erdrich's hands. I really enjoyed seeing this other side of a great writer.

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle--the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. 'You may judge now the richness of these prairies,' he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

Kismet Poe is torn between two men: one is Gary Geist, a local football star whose chief attraction seems to be that he is desperately in love with her. His desperation, we learn, has something to do with a horrible accident that killed two of Gary's friends, and which Kismet's proximity seems to allay. The other is Hugo, an oafish redhead who works at the local bookstore. Hugo is sensitive, clever, kind, though he lacks some of Gary's sex appeal. Gary presses Kismet again and again, in quite coercive and abusive ways, into marrying him, but after the wedding, Kismet feels trapped in his parents' large farmhouse. In the margin, other crises rear their heads. Kismet's father disappears, leaving a mysterious mortgage on their property. And the dirt that has supported the local sugar beet crop--from which the Geists derive their fortune, and which supports just about everyone in the region--has become hostile through the overuse of pesticides.

Traditionally, I read fiction by Indigenous authors in January, to get into the mindset of my second semester senior class. In practice, that means I almost always start the year with Louise Erdrich, who is more or less unrivalled among Native American authors still writing in the U.S.A. Erdrich has been going through a kind of late period Renaissance lately, publishing a novel nearly every other year, winning the Pulitzer Prize. I was pleased to get to hear her read from The Mighty Red a few months ago in Brooklyn, and the church hall where she read was entirely full. And yet, The Mighty Red confirmed for me a feeling that Erdrich's late novels haven't quite matched up to her earlier ones, though they share much of the same superficial trappings. A couple of pivotal scenes in The Mighty Red, in which the parents of Hugo and Gary confront one another regarding Kismet's affections, take place at book clubs meetings. (Funnily, the first book is Eat Pray Love and the next The Road.) But it also gave me an unpleasant feeling that The Mighty Red is not unlike the kind of book you might read at a book club (sadly, derogatory).

It's hard to say why I felt this book was so unsatisfying. It might be that the most intriguing theme here--the depletion of the soil because of the deleterious practices of big agribusiness, which is linked to the kind of dystopian future captured in The Road--never gets fully drawn into the light. The central focus is on Kismet's mistake of marrying Gary, and while this story has its highlights, it left the book feeling sort of static and motionless to me, because of the way Kismet is borne along by Gary's desire, unable to assert herself or make any positive choices. A subplot in which Kismet's father, Martin, reappears as a bank robber who dresses in a different theatrical outfit--old lady, elf, nun--for each robbery points toward some of Erdrich's boldness and humor. Short chapters and quickly shifting vantage points left the book feeling rather unfocused to me, and I never really thought that Erdrich was able to bring together all the novel's various strands into something that felt whole.

This is the eleventh (!) of Erdrich's books that I've read. It's probably the least satisfying. But that's OK. It's always a pleasure to return to Erdrich's North Dakota, even if it's not the best of visits. One of my hopes is that sometime she'll return to the historical fiction that feels, at least to me, her strength.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

Many books and movies had in their plots some echoes of my secret experiences with Flora. Places haunted by unquiet Indians were standard. Hotels were disturbed by Indians whose bones lay underneath the basements and floors--a neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history. Plenty of what was happening to me happened in fiction. Unquiet Indians. What about unquiet settlers? Unquiet wannabes? According to Penstemon, the earth's magnetism directs many actions in an unseen world. Maybe the bookstore itself was located on some piece of earth crossed by mystical lines. These invisible runes had touched during what... a shift, perhaps cosmically... a solar storm--something had jostled reality.

What is a sentence? In one sense, it's a judgment, like the sentence handed down to Tookie, the narrator of Louise Erdrich's novel The Sentence, which unjustly keeps her locked up for many years. In another sense, of course, it's a string of words, one of the units from which a book is made, like the books that Tookie sells in a Minneapolis bookstore after her release. For Tookie, the bookstore--the real-life Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, owned and operated by Louise Erdrich herself, who appears in the novel--is quite literally a lifesaver. It's a place where she's given a second chance, and one surrounded by the very things, books, which kept her alive during her time in prison. But perhaps these two kinds of sentence are the same in the end: after all, our words have power to pass powerful judgments, even kill, as one seems to have recently killed a bookstore patron named Flora. But in Tookie's case, words have the power to save, to cleanse, and to heal as well.

The problem in The Sentence is not so much that Flora has died, but that she has come back and is haunting the bookstore, and Tookie specifically. Flora was a Pretendian, a white woman desperate to claim an indigenous identity. When Flora's spirit tries to forcibly enter Tookie, in an event Tookie describes as being zipped open and put on like a wetsuit, the imagery is clear enough. But both Tookie and Erdrich have a kind of sympathy for Flora as well, even in her misguided desperation, and Tookie's investigation into Flora's death suggests that she was killed by a sentence in a historical book that exposed the truth about her racial and cultural heritage. What Erdrich suggests is that, if settlers and Pretendians act on Indians like ineradicable spirits, impossible to fully exorcise, so do they haunt themselves, or cannot keep themselves from being haunted by the truth of their relationship to the world as it is.

The Sentence is almost certainly the most personal book that Erdrich has ever written. By writing herself into the book, Erdrich joins a long list of greats, including Patrick White and Martin Amis, who have fashioned themselves into characters in their own books. But The Sentence has a ripped-from-the-headlines quality, too, that follows those momentous events of 2020: the onslaught of COVID-19, which closes the bookstore and gives Flora the ghost more freedom to prod Tookie, and the killing of George Floyd, which brings a conflagration to Minneapolis. I wouldn't say I loved these parts of the book, mostly because the protests seem to bring a stop to the central plot of Flora's haunting, but given how cringey it might have been and how little I think most of us really want to read a book about this stuff, it seems remarkable that they work at all. Ultimately, Erdrich brings it all back together, and we come to understand that the injustice of Floyd's death, the violent reaction to the protests by the Minneapolis police, even the negligence that leads to COVID running rampant, these are all manifestations of the same specters that haunt our country, like Flora haunts the bookstore. And it doesn't sound as cheesy coming from Erdrich.

What really makes it work, though, is the voice of Tookie: brash, brazen, playful, and profound. The first thirty pages, which detail the madcap scheme that got Tookie sent to prison in the first place--a scheme involving a refrigerated truck and a dead body with cocaine taped beneath its armpits--are some of the best writing to come out of Erdrich's pen in many years. The Sentence can't sustain that momentum. Perhaps it's unsustainable, but it certainly establishes a great reserve of goodwill the novel draws from in its more tedious moments. In keeping with other Erdrich books, there are a few other plot threads I haven't mentioned, including Tookie's marriage to the tribal policeman who arrested her and her stepdaughter's new baby by a Canadian Metis man who may or may not be a wolf creature known as a Rougarou. It's that voice, lively and fresh, which brings all of these together and makes The Sentence worth reading. It's a book that understands that words have power.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Nanapush looked into his mind and saw a building. He even saw how to make the building. It was the round house. The old female buffalo kept talking.

Your people were brought together by us buffalo once. You knew how to hunt and use us. Your clans gave you laws. You had many rules by which you operated. Rules that respected us and forced you to work together. Now we are gone, but as you have once sheltered in my body, so now you understand. The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire my heart. It will be the body of your mother and it must be respected the same way. As the mother is intent on her baby's life, so your people should think of their children.

When Joe Coutts his thirteen, his mother is attacked and raped. In the aftermath of the crime, she becomes skittish and withdrawn, a ghost of her former self. Joe's father, a tribal judge, sets out to find the perpetrator, scouring over the files of the people who have appeared in his court. Joe is allowed, sometimes, to share in his father's search, but for the most part he must look on from the outside, following his own suspicions, and perhaps even taking justice into his own hands. Though Joe's father tries to conceal it, suspicion soon falls on Linden Lark, a malicious white man who works for North Dakota's governor. There's a who, a what, and a why, but the where is what makes things hairy: Joe's mother was blindfolded, and can't remember where exactly the crime occurred, though she knows it's on the grounds of the round house the Ojibwe use for traditional purposes. These grounds are crossed by ornate lines of ownership--reservation land, federal land, private land--and without knowing the precise spot, no one know whose jurisdiction might be invoked to bring Lark to justice.

The Round House suggests at first it will be a kind of mystery novel, in which the reader is invited to follow along as Joe puts clue to clue. But, despite a false start or two, suspicion falls immediately on Linden, a man Erdrich paints as utterly vicious and amoral. The jurisdiction, instead, is the mystery, and it's an intractable one. The Round House presents a version of a story that plays out time and time again on reservations: when non-Natives commit violent crimes against Natives, tribal jurisdiction is powerless to pursue them, and state and federal lawmakers simply don't care. When Joe decides to punish Linden himself, he cuts through the red tape that protects violent rapists. And if we expect Joe to think better, or to disavow vigilantism in the end, we are sorely disappointed: there's no sense of regret or remorse here, because Joe's solution is the only one by which true justice can be done.

Talking in his sleep, Joe's grandfather tells the story of how Nanapush, the lustful, ancient trickster of many of Erdrich's other novels, built the round house on the instructions of the buffalo. The house is a symbol of the buffalo, whose hide and bones protected Nanapush in a snowstorm, and a symbol also of the mother, inside of whom we grow and who surrounds and protects us. When Linden rapes Joe's mother Geraldine, the violation is also a violation of Ojibwe sovereignty and memory, something that is depicted in The Round House as explicitly maternal. The round house is utterly unlike the land on which it sits: its value and ownership are clear and unambiguous. Perhaps this is why Linden chooses it to be the site of his violence.

There's another angle to Linden's story, which is rather convoluted: at birth, Linden's twin sister was left by his mother to die because of a birth defect. But instead she was adopted by a Native janitor, and enrolled as Ojibwe. Linda's story is an inversion of a more familiar one: Linden is helping the governor adopt a Native baby away from her mother. (It's this that seems to have sparked his ire against Joe's mom, a social worker.) Linden and Linda are part of the novel's interest in doubles, doppelgangers, wendigos, but the story also adds to the sense that The Round House is more relevant than ever. The questions of tribal jurisdiction are reflected in the recent McGirt decision, which asserted tribal jurisdiction over a huge section of Oklahoma. And the two adoptions presage a case currently in front of the Supreme Court that may strike down the Indian Child Welfare Act, meant to prevent the kind of child-snatching that Linden--dark father, evil twin--wants to perpetrate.

The Round House is one of Erdrich's straighter novels. Supernatural elements are few--though I enjoyed Joe's grandmother telling Nanapush's story in his sleep--and there's little of the sense of jubilant excess that you find in many of her other novels. But it stands among the best of her work in its depiction of cruelty and grief. And it isn't just limited to Lark: the moment where Joe himself blackmails his (unrelated) aunt to watch her strip is one of her more disconcerting moments. The aunt, Sonja, accuses him of being another vicious creep, another Linden perhaps, a wendigo who consumes human flesh. And the wendigo can take the form of anyone.

The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. She is crying for the stranger to stand before her once again, to open herself. She knows who he is, now, the windigo. He is the original Shawano from way back in time, the windigo man whom the Shawano brothers took into their family in the old days, long ago. Here's how she heard it. They were hunting together way up north, those brothers and their families. Visited by this ice spirit of awful hunger, they let him in the door. They should not have. He was all frost inside, all ravenous snow. Still, she wants him to come to her again. This time she will enter. Cleave to the glossy ice. Pull his cold sky-colored skin around her like a grave.

"Family stories," Louise Erdrich writes in The Antelope Wife, "repeat themselves in patterns and waves generation to generation, across bloods and time. Once the pattern is set we go on replicating it." This is perhaps as good a key to the fictions of Louise Erdrich as any, with their genealogical charts in the flyleaf as complex as a high fantasy novel, or perhaps a biography of a Renaissance monarch. In The Antelope Wife, the family is the Shawano-Roy family, stretching from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the 20th. It begins with a white soldier adopting a young indigenous girl he finds being carried on the back of a dog, until the girl's mother, desperate and raving, comes to find her. In another way, this girl--Matilda--is a dead end, genealogically speaking: the two branches of the family that become the novel's modern characters descend from her sisters by her birth mother and the natural son of her adoptive father, yet Matilda's position between worlds becomes an avatar for all the book's characters. In some way, she is their spiritual mother.

Erdrich finds a motif to express the interconnectedness of these family lines--see how they loop back on themselves in vaguely incestuous ways--in beads. "Who is beading us?" she asks. What are the forces that bind us together, and transmit patterns of life from generation to generation? These patterns show up as generational echoes, like the presence of twins. Young Cally Roy mourns the death of her twin Deanna; her twin grandmothers refuse to tell her mother Rozin which of them is really her mother. (Did I mention the mysterious twin grandmothers are themselves children of mysterious twin grandmothers?) This doubling can be traced back to Matilda's mother, Blue Prairie Woman, whose desperation for her child split her psyche in two and forced her to take on a new name. She recovers her daughter, but the split cannot be repaired; two spirits now live in the world. The doubling resonates with other kinds of transformations and slippages, identities that are fluid. Matilda's adoptive father, struggling to keep her alive in the wilderness, begins to lactate.

There's a certain recognizable Erdrich M.O. here; the interconnectedness of family lines is what makes people call a book like Love Medicine a novel rather than a collection of stories. But The Antelope Wife manages to bind its many threads into a whole piece in a way that Love Medicine never does. It might be the most successful of all of Erdrich's novels in this regard; it leaps time and place and point of view so haphazardly it seems a miracle that the whole thing hangs together at all. Its frenetic energy bolsters its humor, which is often of the lovesick foolishness variety: Klaus Shawano's unbridled horniness for his untameable wife Sweetheart Calico, or Rozin Roy's ex-husband Richard's destructive desperation to spoil her marriage to another man. Erdrich is an expert at weaving humor and tragedy together, as when Richard's abortive suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning ends up killing his daughter Deanna instead.

One character cuts through the tightly woven beads of family history, the title "Antelope Wife." In the modern era, she's Sweetheart Calico, Klaus' wife, who does not talk. She's an avatar of a figure that appears throughout generations, a woman who is--who is, ah--you know, Erdrich's brand of magical realism doesn't make these things easy to explain--also, I guess, an antelope, and who represents wildness, freedom, the fluid and the feminine. Klaus manages to coerce her into marriage by essentially kidnapping her, separating from her daughters, and in Minneapolis she is something like an animal pacing around a cage. Her relationship to the family is frail, oblique; when she is at last "freed" like a character in a fairy tale released from a spell, she returns to the wilderness, the place past understanding, where the bead makers are perhaps, making the story before the story.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

He had been night watchman for seven months. In the beginning, his post as chairman of the Turtle Mountain Advisory Committee could be dealt with in the late afternoons and evenings. He'd been able to sleep most mornings after his shift. When lucky, like tonight, he even grabbed an additional catnap before driving to work. But every so often the government remembered the Indians. And when they did, they always tried to solve Indians, thought Thomas. They solve us by getting rid of us. And do they tell us when they plan to get rid of us? Ha and ha. He had received no word from the government. By reading the Minot Daily News, he'd found out something was up. Then Moses had to pry the papers out of his contact down in Aberdeen. It had taken precious time to even get confirmation, or see the actual House Resolution stating, as its author said, that the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa was targeted by the United States Congress for emancipation. E-man-ci-pation. Eman-cipaton. The word would not stop banging around in his head. Emancipated. But they were not enslaved. Freed from being Indians was the idea. Emancipated from their land. Freed from the treaties that Thomas's father and grandfather had signed and that were promised to last forever. So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved.

Overnight the tribal chairman job had turned into a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at a jewel bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. His name means muskrat, the humble creature who, in Ojibwe myth, descended to the bottom of the waters that covered the world at its birth and retrieved a bit of earth when no other animal could. As night watchman, and as the reservation's part-time chairman--a thankless and unpaid role--Thomas is like his namesake, doing the unseen work that maintains the reservation and its residents. Thomas is about to face his, and the reservation's, greatest challenge in decades: termination.

In his history book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer describes the Termination era as one of the epochs of Indian history after the Wounded Knee Massacre. It comes after the boarding school era, in which Indian children were forced to attend assimilationist schools that would expunge the Indian from them, and termination, too, is a kind of erasure: it would dissolve the reservation completely, forfeiting the responsibility for the land and its people to the state rather than the federal government, and relocating many of its impoverished residents to large cities. Termination, like so much shitty conservative policy today, was justified by arguments about self-reliance. "You learn to walk by walking," a pro-termination Senator tells Thomas on the Senate floor. Thomas thinks: "We didn't get to the Turtle Mountains by riding in a covered wagon." The hard work of countering termination--persuading the residents it's a bad idea, making petitions, commissioning studies--is Thomas' version of descending to the bottom of the waters of the world.

Though he's the title character, Thomas' story is often overshadowed by that of Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau, his niece and an employee at the jewel bearing plant. Patrice, dogged and determined, is worried about her sister Vera, who has disappeared into Minneapolis among pimps and addicts. On a trip to find her, it looks for a moment as if Patrice may follow into her footsteps, impulsively taking a job as an erotic dancer in a lumberjack-themed bar, where she's dressed as Babe the Blue Ox. (It's weird.) Vera's disappearance, and the threat to Patrice, are like sirens warning against what might happen if termination is allowed to go through: forced relocation to the city, to addiction, to crime, to dissolution. Returning home, Patrice's story becomes about her difficulty managing several suitors, including a charismatic Ojibwe boxer and a clueless white math teacher--but I didn't think these storylines had nearly as much energy or cleverness as her odyssey in the city, which ends, I felt, much too soon.

It's touching to know that Thomas is based on Erdrich's grandfather, who really was the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, and who really did spearhead the campaign--a successful campaign--to save Turtle Mountain from termination. But it's Patrice who interests Erdrich most, I think, the headstrong young woman who is on the precipice of deciding who she is and what she wants. How could someone like Patrice do something like that, torn from the community in which she was born, where she knows the names and uses of the plants, where she lives with her mother by the "old ways," where she can sleep in a cave alongside a hibernating bear, where she can see the spirits of her ancestors as the Northern Lights in the sky? Thomas might be the novel's heart, but Patrice represents its stakes.

Erdrich's early novels and stories are interconnected, featuring a huge cast that appears and reappears from different angles in a way that make you feel as if you are deepening your understanding of them the more books you read. Her later work, like this novel and the two before it, LaRose and The Future Home of the Living God, seem like attempts to reproduce the breadth of those early books with fresh faces. Though it doesn't always work, and never as persuasively as in Tracks or The Bingo Palace, The Night Watchman is probably the most successful of these attempts. I hope she'll consider writing more about Patrice and Thomas, the humble muskrat.

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.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

The next morning, I travel the highway north to my Potts reservation home.  I'm having flashes of poignancy.  Everything that I am seeing--the pines, the maples, the roadside malls, insurance companies and tattoo joints, the ditch weeds and the people in the houses--is all physically balanced on the cusp between the now of things and the big, incomprehensible change to come.  And yet nothing seems terribly unusual.  A bit quiet, perhaps, and some sermons advertised on church billboards are more alarming than usual.  Endtime at Last!  Are You Ready to Rapture?  In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God.

It's just a bare field, fallow and weedy, stretching to the pale horizon.


Cedar Songmaker has always known that she was adopted from an Ojibwe family living on a northern Minnesota reservation.  The name, ironically, is not Native at all: it's given to her by her hippieish liberal Minneapolis parents, Sera and Glen.  When we see her for the first time, she's headed to meet her birth mother for the first time, and her birth name turns out to be the much more anodyne "Mary Potts."

It's one of Erdrich's little ironies in a book that has too few of them.  The situation she's set up for herself doesn't lend itself much to irony: evolution, we are told, has begun running backwards.  Sabertooth tigers and archeopteryxes can be found in the yard, chickens are turning back into lizards, human reproduction has become a fraught, dwindling affair.  Cedar, who is pregnant, travels to the reservation to ask about her genetics, not anticipating that her genetics, and her pregnancy, are about to become matters of state interest.  Uncertainty begets violence and violence begets political change; soon an autocratic fundamentalist state is tracking down pregnant women and incarcerating them to maintain control over the precious resource that is the uterus.  Cedar spends the novel evading capture, getting captured, and trying to break free with the help of both her white and Ojibwe families.

The setup sounds so similar to The Handmaid's Tale it makes you wonder what Erdrich felt that Atwood didn't get right the first time around.  Part of the answer might be found in faith: while both novels feature fundamentalist states, Erdrich's protagonist is a committed Catholic convert who even serves as editor of a religious magazine called Zeal.  Visions of Kateri Tekakwitha, the first and only Native American saint, serve as a significant motif, and the novel is scattered with passages from Hildegard of Bingen and Thomas Merton.  It seems strange, actually, next to the lampooned Catholic sourpusses of Erdrich's novels, but the sincerity of Cedar's religion is clearly meant as a counterweight to the shallow opportunism of the state.  Cedar's Ojibwe family, too, turn out to be Catholics.

Of course, there's the Native element too, elbowing in on Atwood.  Such themes seem less present here than in Erdrich's other novels.  But I am considering including this novel in a class I am preparing about contemporary Native literature, and I think it would be a real masterstroke to pair Erdrich's Native future with a novel about the Native past, like James Welch's Fools Crow.  So let me talk myself into it a little: David Treuer's long background chapter in his history Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, which covers thousands of years of Native history before 1890, is titled "Narrating the Apocalypse."  Erdrich is keenly aware that the fantasies of dispossession, death, and diminution that keep our eyes on dystopian fiction have already been visited on the Native people of America.  "Indians have been adapting since before 1492," Cedar's newfound stepfather Eddy tells her, "so I guess we'll keep adapting":

"But the world is going to pieces."

"It is always going to pieces."

"This is different."

"It is always different.  We'll adapt."

The crisis of genetics and reproduction, too, has special implications for Native people.  There are laws, Cedar reminds us (because her parents seem to have flouted them), preventing white families from adopting Native children.  What Cedar is asked to imagine is the end of a bloodline that goes back in this country much, much longer than other folks', but for which the end is a much more conceivable possibility.  When Cedar reflects on the way that time, through pregnancy, becomes incarnate in her, it resonates with a different and deeper frequency.  And as it turns out, the apocalypse turns out to be a kind of opportunity for the Ojibwe, who find themselves able to reclaim the land, recently evacuated, that was lost to them in the process of allotment.  What might a collapse of American institutions, American history, and a return to the past, mean for Native America?

Eddy is a really delightful character.  He shares with Cedar pages from his 3,000-plus page book, still being composed, in which he enumerates reasons not to commit suicide.  These pages are often the best part of Future Home, because they seem borrowed from the Erdrich of Love Medicine, who loved holy fools.  He alone has a kind of loving satire that the book sorely needs.  It contains flashes of lovely weirdness: the archeopteryx, the intrusive face of a Big Brother-type on Cedar's computer screen who calls herself "Mother," her Ojibwe grandmother's story about having sex, in dreams, with the devil.  But those moments are too few and far between.  (Supposedly Erdrich cut nearly 200 pages from the manuscript--it makes you wonder if these flashes were once lightning storms.)  Instead, too much is given to the rote plodding of capture and escape, the recycled Atwoodisms.  It has the sort of dispiriting air of Erdrich, tired after three decades of being so uniquely herself, trying to be someone else, and being perhaps a little too successful.

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement.  Numbers, time, inches, feet.  All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.  I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.  I don't believe in numbering God's creatures.  I never let the United States census in my door, even though they say it's good for Indians.  Well, quote me.  I say that every time they counted us they knew the precise number to get rid of.

One of my favorite stories to teach is Louise Erdrich's "The Red Convertible."  It's about Lyman Lamartine, a Chippewa in North Dakota, and his brother Henry who goes to the Vietnam War.  Before the war, Lyman and Henry co-own a beautiful red convertible that they take on a road trip to Alaska.  After the war, Henry is different, violent, darkened.  Lyman tries to bring Henry back to life by banging up the convertible, pretending he's neglected it, and letting Henry fix it.  For a while, it works.  But then Henry admits that he knew all along it was a ruse, and like all ruses it falls apart once named, and the car follows Henry into the river after he drowns.

It's a beautiful story and good for students.  It has a strong voice and a clear central image worth unpacking.  It has a clear beginning, middle, and end.  I like to use it to talk about narrative economy: no sooner does the hitchhiker they pick up tell Lyman and Henry she's from Chicken, Alaska, than they're up there: "We got up there and never wanted to leave."  2,500 miles compressed into three words--here's an author who knows what matters.  The story is as efficient as the convertible itself, and as familiar to me as the car is to Lyman.

I enjoyed seeing it with new eyes, then, in the context of Erdrich's debut collection, Love Medicine.  The back of the book calls it a novel, and you could make that argument, since the handful of stories here end up dwelling on a few events from different angles.  But maybe because I knew "The Red Convertible" first, I was unable to see it as anything but a collection of loosely connected stories.  It begins with "The World's Greatest Fisherman," in which June Morrissey--Lyman's cousin, if I'm reading the Byzantine family tree correctly--dies in a snowbank.  June's death brings together her large extended family, the Kashpaws and Lamartines all recognizable from Erdrich's other novels.  I found the cast of characters as difficult to keep straight here as in all those sequels--is Gerry the charismatic criminal who keeps escaping from the pen, or is that Gordie?--but I'm amazed how completely developed the whole set was from the very beginning.

If there's something like a central narrative to these stories, it's the love triangle between Nector Kashpaw, his wife Marie, nee Lazarre, and Lulu Lamartine.  As a teen, Nector is in love with Lulu, but a chance encounter with Marie, a white girl and ward of the local nunnery, hooks him for life.  Yet he returns to Lulu, even as an old man, and at one point sets her house on fire by accidentally dropping a cigarette ash into a love letter he's brought around.  It's the fire, not the snowbank, that the book really revolves around: we get to see it from the perspective of each of the three characters.  The title story, narrated by Lipsha Morrissey, the lucky and magical narrator of The Bingo Palace, is a masterpiece of high farce in which Lipsha's attempts to return the attentions of Nector, his now senile grandfather, to Marie from Lulu.  (Nector ends up choking to death on the turkey heart meant to snare him--I guess you'll have to trust me that that's funny.)  I liked Lipsha's canny observation about love among the elderly:

I saw that tears were in her eyes.  And that's when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him.  And it gave me a real shock to the system.  You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good.  I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it.  I thought it curled up and died, I guess.  Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

I really like Lipsha's voice--casual, a little undereducated, but humble and wise.  It's part of what makes The Bingo Palace my favorite of the Erdrich novels I've read.  And it really sells "Love Medicine," as well as the final story, in which Lipsha is a third party to a tense standoff between his half-brother King and Gerry the escaped criminal (not Gordie) who is angry at King for snitching on him--and by the way is Lipsha's real father.  (See what I mean about the family tree?)  The image of the car comes back, this time a sportscar purchased with June's life insurance.  Lipsha wins the car in a card game, and drives Gerry to safety across the border, in a car suffused with the spirit of June, his mother.  It all feels a little bit like one of those vaudeville routines where ten minutes of setup is required for the punchline, but it's so elegant and effective you can't help but marvel at it.  And it works because Erdrich isn't hasty to get there; each story has its own cohesion and independence, but they build on each other in effect--would that final story be as effective if we hadn't the lovely character sketch of the three-hundred pound Gerry, who can disappear like a ghost when the cops come around, in the story "Scales?"

In the end the book's friability, the ease with which it can be separated into parts, ends up making it seem a little less than a novel.  The multiplicity of perspectives in Tracks and The Bingo Palace seems a little bit more to a purpose.  But perhaps it's more accurate to think of those novels as all part of a greater piece, like the stories here are also.

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

There are five LaRoses.  First the LaRose who poisoned Mackinnon, went to mission school, married Wolfred, taught her children the shape of the world, and traveled that world as a set of stolen bones.  Second, her daughter LaRose, who went to Carlisle.  This LaRose got tuberculosis like her own mother, and like the first LaRose fought it off again and again.  Lived long enough to become the mother of the third LaRose, who went to Fort Totten and bore the fourth LaRose, who eventually became the mother of Emmaline, the teacher of Romeo and Landreaux.  The fourth LaRose also became the grandmother of the last LaRose, who was given to the Ravich family by his parents in exchange for a son accidentally killed.

In all of these LaRoses there was a tendency to fly above the earth.  They could fly for hours when the right songs were drummed and sung to support them.  These songs are now waiting in the leaves, half lost, but the drumming of the water drum will never be lost.  This ability to fly went back to the first LaRose, whose mother taught her to do it, when her name was still Mirage, and who had learned this from her father, a jiisikid conjurer, who'd flung his spirit all the way around the world in 1798 and come back to tell the astonished drummers that it was no use, white people covered the earth like lice.

Landreaux Iron goes out one day to shoot a buck he's seen wandering around his property.  He misses the buck and instead shoots five-year old Dusty, the son of his neighbor and friend, Peter.  Overcome with guilt, Landreaux and his wife Emmaline return to the traditional ways of their Ojibwe community--the sweat lodge--and are given a solution: they must give their son LaRose, who was Dusty's friend, to Peter and his wife.

That's a killer setup, and it all happens in the first ten pages of so of Louise Erdrich's novel LaRose.  The boy at first is confused, unsure why he's suddenly been exiled from his family and absorbed into another.  But as it turns out, LaRose has a gift for kindness and rehabilitation, given to him as part of a long line of LaRoses, whose stories are woven throughout the book.  It is LaRose that helps Dusty's sister Maggie comprehend her grief, and LaRose who studiously watches over Dusty's mother Nola to make sure that she doesn't commit the suicide she is contemplating.  It doesn't take long before the two families work out an uneasy arrangement that essentially makes LaRose the shared son of both, and LaRose seems to accept it as his duty as peacemaker.  It's a long process, but you can see where it's going: it's LaRose that will bring these two families together and help them reintegrate, both within themselves and each other.

LaRose asks, how can we atone for what we've done?  It is, to borrow a Christian word that doesn't always fit the traditional Ojibwe religion of the novel, about grace.  The question plays out in the central narrative, but also in a number of subplots, including the sexual assault of Maggie and the jealous contrivance of a loner named Romeo to wreak revenge on Landreaux for a decades-old act of cruelty.  The point gets made, but it's hard not to feel like the novel is overstuffed with these variations on a theme.  Would the novel have worked equally well without the presence of Hollis, Romeo's son, who Landreaux has raised for unclear reasons?  Probably.

I find that I like Erdrich's work best when it's historical in nature.  LaRose is set in the early 2000s and it reminds you of that fact by making repeated distracting allusions to the Iraq War.  Peter is a Y2K doomsday prepper, which might have been, but is not, a useful angle.  But most importantly, a tone of falsity creeps into the novel because of the material culture of the new millennium, perhaps because it accentuates an essential mundanity to the lives of these characters.  I mean, there's a whole passage that milks the drama of a girl's high school volleyball game, and it just doesn't work for me.  I don't know what makes that happen, but I don't think Erdrich is the only novelist who struggles to make the contemporary work.

In fact, the section of LaRose I found most compelling was the interstitial chapter that tells the story of Romeo and Landreaux, who escape from a white-run school for Native Americans and live with the homeless on the streets of Minneapolis in the 1970's.  Landreaux sees one of their teachers everywhere, thinking she's come to drag them back to the school which seeks to erase their identity, as if she stalks the earth like the spirit of white paternalism.  There's a lot about "Indian schools," actually; all the incarnations of LaRose seem to have been forced to attend one.  Perhaps the most powerful thing about the novel's investigation of grace is the idea that it might be projected onto a national scale, and applied to the broken and bloody relationship between the United States and her native peoples.

But at its heart, LaRose is about the possibility of healing between two families in the face of the most profound tragedy that any family can face.  It avoids bromides and easy answers even as it affirms that such healing really is possible.

The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich

He knew from sitting in the still eye of chance that fate was not random.  Chance was full of runs and soft noise, pardons and betrayals and double-backs.  Chance was patterns of a stranger complexity than we could name, but predictable.  There was no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it seemed unrepetitive up close, that is, until you sat doing nothing for so long that your brain ached and, one day, just maybe, you caught a wider glimpse.

What does a Native American fiction look like?  Louise Erdrich's terrific The Bingo Palace answers that question with a lot of what seem like cliches: first, the Indian casino, here a bingo parlor where the protagonist, Lipsha Morrissey, works when he returns to his reservation town and rides an incredible streak of luck.  Second, there's a lot of mysticism, including dreamcatchers and a spirit animal in a vision--a skunk telling Lipsha, who's scheming to sell a plot of land where his grandmother lives to casino interests, this ain't real estate.  Oh yeah, that's the third thing: the importance of land, a theme imported from Erdrich's Tracks.

But those things aren't mere cliches; the idea of the Native American being close to the land is the cultural reward given to her for the wholescale theft of Native lands and the bottling-up of her people in reservations on little islands of land.  The spirit-skunk reminds Lipsha that Native land is important because it's what they've managed to hold on to, despite all odds, through centuries.  And the mysticism is not so different from the magical realism of Latin American writers (though more palatable for me personally), yet it imbues the old stale canards about Native Americans with new vitality and specificity.


When Lipsha returns home, he falls in love with an old acquaintance, Shawnee Ray.  Unfortunately for him, Shawnee Ray is living with Lipsha's uncle Lyman, the proprietor of the Bingo Palace, though she, too, feels a surprising attraction to the vagabond Lipsha.  He makes his money riding that luck-streak at the bingo parlor, and his luck is part of the same force that drives him and Shawnee together, despite the unlikely odds:

Fateful coincidence.  Things happen you can't deny.  Good advice speaks from graves and love hints from the hearts of trees.  Bags of light float through open windows on a summer night.  Horses count with the knock of their hooves.  Children are born who can add up unbelievable numbers.  These things happen.

Chapters narrated by Lipsha alternate with chapters about the "luck" of various members of Lipsha's family--Shawnee, Lyman, Shawnee's toddler son, Lipsha's dead mother, his convict father, his grandmother Fleur, one of the characters from Tracks--in which the luck, good or bad, is not always clear.  But the message seems to be that the spiritual forces that animate Lipsha's luck and his love for Shawnee are ones that run deep through one's ancestors, that they are enacted by the passing of generations.  There's little elegance to this structure--the book is a mess.  (It would be easier, perhaps, if one were to read the series from beginning-to-front, starting with, I think, Love Medicine.)  And it ends weirdly, cut off in a strange moment with little closure.  But it's unified by the subtle beauty of Erdrich's prose, often hovering just past the mark of clarity, and the sharpness of her insight.

Tracks, by Louise Erdrich

First things first: this review isn't meant to stand alone. For a summary of the book and Chris's thoughts, please check out his fantastic review. It's been too long since I read Tracks for me to write anything really in-depth about it, but I wanted to mention a few thoughts here since I recommended it to Chris and it's a great book.

As Chris mentions, Native American authors just aren't a well-known segment, so reading Tracks, and Erdrich's other work, can be a bracing experience. It's one thing to hear about something like the Trail of Tears or the various ways the American government has gone about stealing native land; it's another entirely to read a cycle of novels that looks at the U.S. as entirely unsympathetic, and sees not just the commercial aspect, but also the religious aspect, of what happened to the Native Americans as tragic.

I'll get to the point: I've never read a book that wasn't flat out hostile to all religion that is as hostile toward Christianity, and especially Catholicism, as Tracks is. Or actually, I take that back--the closest analogue for me is Things Fall Apart, which was similarly bracing and hostile toward Christianity destroying an indigenous culture. However, Things Fall Apart is a little different in that the Christians that ultimately destroy the village are villainous. In Tracks, there's no such buffer--the nuns that appear in the story aren't evil. They even try to help. But their religion can really be nothing but hostile or impotent to the natives who've watched as Christians overrun everything they've ever known.

There's also just the general humanization of the various Native American characters that occurs as the story progresses. Nanapush initially reads as a cipher, maybe even a caricature; Fleur seems like The (Wo)man with No Name; Pauline, like your standard sheltered teenager. But as the story progresses, they all reveal vulnerabilities as they are acted on by forces outside their control, and are gradually revealed to be as human and fallible as anyone else.

I'm looking forward to reading The Bingo Palace, which is the next book in the cycle, and continues the story of Pauline and the various families introduced in Tracks. Hopefully that review will be a little better.

Tracks by Louise Erdrich

The Captain and then the lumber president, the Agent and at last many of our own, spoke long and hard about a cash agreement.  But nothing changed my mind.  I've seen too much go by--unturned grass below my feet, and overhead, the great white cranes flung south forever.  I know this.  Land is the only thing that lasts life to life.  Money burns like tinder, flows off like water.  And as for government promises, the wind is steadier.

The people of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Dakota have been in the news lately for protesting the construction of a pipeline which they say endangers the source of their water in the Missouri River, as well as sacred burial grounds.  They have been attacked by private security workers, and set on by dogs.

Reading these stories made me think of Louise Erdrich's terrific novel Tracks, which is about the ways in which, in the early twentieth  century, white business and government interests managed to consolidate their hold on already-scarce Native lands.  The Ojibwe characters of the novel are constantly threatened with the loss of their homes, pressured in lean times to sell to government agents forever.  Old, protective spirits seem to have become powerless:

It was clear that Indians were not protected by the thing in the lake or by the other Manitous who lived in trees, the bush, or spirits of animals that were hunted so scarce they became discouraged and did not mate.  There would have to come a turning, a gathering, another door.

But these problems lurk mostly in the background, as a kind of constant threatening hum.  The main story centers around Fleur Pillager, a headstrong Ojibwe girl in the town of Argus, North Dakota.  Fleur is beautiful and mysterious, and menacingly independent.  She lives way out in the woods, and people speculate about her close relationship with the monster-spirit living at the bottom of the lake.

The novel has two narrators: Nanapush, an old and sly man who rescued Fleur from dying in the snow as a child, and Pauline, an outcast Ojibwe woman who gravitates toward blood-and-doom Catholicism.  Nanapush is witty, crass, and full of practical jokes; Pauline is joyless and too severe in her faith, even for the mother of her convent.  In them, Erdrich contrasts two ways of responding to the weakening of Native communities: Nanapush refuses to deal with the Agents, consoling himself with black humor; Pauline embraces the grim mythos of the white man's religion.

How can a people respond in the face of near-extinction?  I thought Nanapush's response to powerlessness was very profound:

Power dies, power goes under and gutters out, ungraspable. It is momentary, quick of flight and liable to deceive. As soon as you rely on the possession it is gone. Forget that it ever existed, and it returns. I never made the mistake of thinking that I owned my own strength, that was my secret. And so I never was alone in my failures. I was never to blame entirely when all was lost, when my desperate cures had no effect on the suffering of those I loved. For who can blame a man waiting, the doors open, the windows open, food offered, arms stretched wide? Who can blame him if the visitor does not arrive?

What would the Standing Rock Sioux say about that, I wonder?  Perhaps they have more power than the Native Americans of the early 20th century did: the federal government just recently declared that they would halt production on the pipeline, at least temporarily.  But in many ways Native Americans remain impoverished and marginalized, and will probably remain so for a very long time.  That's true in literature, too: how many Native American authors can you name?  (Along with Erdrich, I can only think of one: Sherman Alexie.)  It's not quite fair to ask Erdrich to shoulder the burden of being the literary representation of Native American life in the United States, but you could do far worse than Tracks, which is funny, accomplished, and frequently beautiful.

Brent read this, too.  Maybe he'll write a review about it?