Author Louise Erdrich was a teenager when she slept in a football field, by herself, looking up at the stars in the Great Plains skies. This event was tantamount to a rite of
passage into adulthood, from a “difficult” childhood. In an interview, she said, “My clearest
memory of growing up in North Dakota was the space and flatness. . . . I remember how things smelled and felt and
tasted when I went back to Turtle Mountains.”
In her books, those immense and limitless Plains skies
emerge almost as minor characters. In The Blue Jay’s Dance, she is homesick
for them, even as she lived in New Hampshire with her children and
then-husband, Michael Dorris. After
Dorris’ death, she moved back to Minnesota, her birthplace, to resume writing
books about those vast spaces.
Her non-fiction work--Books
and Islands in Ojibwe Country--tells of Erdrich’s trip with her baby and
life partner, Tobasonakwut, from Minnesota
to see rock paintings in Ontario, Canada. Like her previous works, Books and Islands interweaves the themes of Native American
culture, mythology, cosmology, art, and history. In addition, she writes in sacred terms of
Ojibwemowin, the complex language of the Ojibwe people—with thousands of
variations for a single verb.
The book depicts the full life that metamorphosed from a very painful
experience and time. In five
chapters—entitled “Books and Islands,” “Islands,” “Rock Paintings,” “Books,” “Home,”—Erdrich gives a glimpse of her life now: in her late
forties, she had a baby with her life partner.
In Chapter one, she talks unabashedly of her pregnancy: “I wept, I snarled, I laughed like a hyena. .
. . On the wall behind my midwife there
was a framed poster of that obnoxious poem about the woman who looks forward to
getting old so that she can wear purple.
I happened to be wearing purple that day, and I was old, and I was
pregnant.”
Yet, Erdrich is delighted with the baby herself, as the
little family sail in canoe over lakes, rocks, isles. “My happiness”—she writes—“in being an older
mother surprises me. . . .”
Then, she introduces readers to her new love, “Tobasonakwut,
the sun dancer”—who rock-climbs and “can sleep anywhere.” She says,
“He is a one-man spiritual ER.” A
teacher and spiritual healer, Tobasonakwut has created a foundation to further
Native American causes. As a child, he
was forbidden to speak the Ojibwe language.
If he did so, he was beaten or punished.
(By contrast, Erdrich learned Ojibwemowin as an adult—“I wanted to get
the jokes, [and] to understand the prayers . . . and the sacred stories. . .
.”)
Erdrich’s child was named after a mythical
spirit-woman—Nenaa’iikizhikok—who controls the stars and skies. A force of nature herself, Nenaa’iikizhikok
(or Kizhikok, “Sky Woman”) is one of “four spirit-women” in Native American
cosmology. These spirit-women “take care
of all of the waters of the world,” as Nenaa’iikizhikok “cleans up the sky
after a thunderstorm, makes sure the clouds are moving. The stars . . . in their places.”
Though we learn of Erdrich’s emotional renaissance, today a bookstore-owner,
traveler, new mom, with a new life partner, the ghost of her previous life
haunts us. Erdrich herself glosses over
this quickly. In chapter two, she states
that her two brothers helped her immensely after her husband’s death. They lived with her, to “guard my children. .
. and made sure I didn’t stay in bed all day. . . .”
As Erdrich and Dorris were well-known for their literary
collaboration, working on novels together in different capacities, many of us
wondered what her new books would be like?
Would the writing change? Would
we notice?
Fortunately, Books and
Islands continues Erdrich’s valiant effort to tell the complex story of the
Ojibwe people. She continues to be a
voice for her people. The book is a
mature prose volume, more grounded or earth-bound than, say, The Blue Jay’s Dance–a book I love, with
its lyrical, rounded, transluscent tones, a prose poem—a joy to read, filled
with delightful anecdotes of the writer’s life in New Hampshire, alongside
otters, birds, loons, and critters from the woods.
Gradually, a portrait of contemporary Native American life
emerges, filled with innumerable spirits—“The Wild Rice Spirit,” “The Horned
Man,” “ Baby Spirits,” “The Wolverine Spirit.” “The Confused Man” Spirit, with whom the author shares her house. The
“four spirit-women.” Also, the real
Nenaa’iikizhikok—a grandmother—who resides now “in the spirit world.”
Moreover, we learn the importance of “tobacco offerings” in
daily life. The story of “trader’s
rum” chronicles the undoing of a man
through alcohol.
Erdrich also writes of
how reading books has sustained her.
Books such as Austerlitz, Middlemarch, Spirit Horses, Tristram Shandy, Concise Dictionary
of Minnesotan Ojibwe. She shares
with us a universal question she has asked herself and others since she was
aged nine: “What book would you take to a desert island?”
In Chapter four, Erdrich describes a blissful time gobbling
blueberries--“miinan” in Ojibwemowin--with Kiizhikok, her little daughter. She writes, “This is the one traditional
Ojibwe pursuit I’m good at. . . . We eat
with a lot of laughing.” Also, she
relates how one of her daughters—descended from a hunter-people—is a vegetarian. “The joke goes: What is an Ojibwe vegetarian
called? A poor hunter.”
“Home” is the book’s final chapter. “Home,” she writes, “is familiar and it is
disorienting.” It is a recurring theme
for Erdrich. Years ago, in an interview,
she said, “The women in my books are lighting out for home. . . .” And so, in Books
and Islands, as Erdrich approaches Minnesota and her life, “I start
dialing, and talk to my daughters from the road, check in with my household and
with my bookstore people, with my sisters and parents. All of a sudden I am back in the web of
connection. . . . [I ] muddle around
trying to enter the stream of my life.”
Books and Islands in
Ojibwe Country is a slender personal
travelogue that illuminates the history of the Ojibwe nation—while it
acknowledges Native American spirit-women and real women like Nancy Jones, a
female Ojibwe hunter. Also, “Striped
Earth Woman,” and “Acts Like a Boy”—the
author’s female ancestors. And the
ancient Nenaa’iikizhikok. Add to them
Louise Erdrich, the author of this
pensive book infused with the pulses of fierce women.
--Yolanda A. Reid
Note: Earlier in November, 2012, Louise Erdrich won the
National Book Award—which she blogs about at her website, http://www.birchbarkbooks.com/_blog/Birchbark_Blog. Also,
check out an interview of Erdrich at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6055/the-art-of-fiction-no-208-louise-erdrich.
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Copyright © 2012 by
Y. A. Reid
