Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich #ABookADayInMay No.10

I haven’t read any of Louise Erdrich’s novels, which I know are well-regarded, but that didn’t stop me being very interested in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), which Daunt Books have now republished and sent me as a review copy.

It’s a memoir-travelogue-history in which Erdrich takes her 18-month-old daughter to Ojibwe Country – the area in southern Ontario where her ancestors have lived for years, and where the father of her daughter lives (a man she calls Tobasonakwutiban). It’s never easy to arrange to meet up with him, but somehow they manage.

And it’s like entering another world – one more connected with the past, with the surrounding islands, lakes, and land, and with their identity. Perhaps it is the precariousness of that identity that makes it so vivid – it is an identity that had been routinely attacked by schools that sought to remove anything distinctive from this people, to quash out their language and force them to assimilate.

In the book, Erdrich has been running a bookshop in Minneapolis. It is a world away from Ojibwe Country, but she has some connection – she is Turtle Mountain Ojibwe (as well as half-German) and her grandfather had been a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. If there is a clash of cultures when Erdrich comes to visit Ojibwe Country, it is not the clash of an outsider coming to the place – the clash is within her. Here’s her reflection on the system of deities, and propitiating them with tobacco:

There was a time when I wondered – do I really believe all of this. I’m half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as it if contained sentient spiritual beings. The question of whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant. After I’d stopped thinking about it for a while, the ritual of offering tobacco became comforting and then necessary. Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

There are also elements that are unconnected with her tribal connections or her visit – the fact that, at 48, she is quite old to have a toddler. The girl’s father is in his mid-60s. Erdrich has three teenage daughters too. It’s an unusual life to lead, and Erdrich examines the situation and her reflections on it with the same respect and intelligence that she turns to Ojibwe Country and its customs and history.

My favourite bits of the book, unsurprisingly, were those that dealt with language. In the 2014 afterword Erdrich reveals that one of her teenage daughters (now adult) has invested many hours to a whole-hearted learning of Ojibwe, which is apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records for being the hardest language to learn. I am very much not a polyglot, but I enjoy reading about language learning:

Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb, there are countless forms. This sounds impossible, until you realize that the verb forms not only have to do with the relationships among the people conducting the action, but the precise way the action is conducted and even under what physical conditions. The blizzard of verb forms makes it an adaptive and powerfully precise language. There are lots of verbs for exactly how people shift position. Miinoshin describes how someone turns this way and that until ready to make a determined move, iskwishin how a person behaves when tired of one position and looking for one more comfortable. The best speakers are the most inventive, and come up with new words all of the time. Mookegidaazao describes the way a baby looks when outrage is building and coming to the surface where it will result in a thunderous squawl. There is a verb for the way a raven opens and shuts its claws in the cold and a verb for what would happen if a man fell of a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and drove the stem of it through the back of his head. There can be verb for anything.

I found the historical sections a little less interesting, even though the explain the 11,000 books that were brought to the island, many of which are still housed in a custom-designed library island. It is the fresh immediacy of Erdrich’s experiences and responses that most captivated me.

Books and Islands of Ojibwe Country is an unusual little book. I like its brevity. This is not an exhaustive examination of the region – rather, it is a short and compelling snapshot of one woman’s reconnection with a shared past. And, because of her small daughter, also the forging of an understanding of a shared future.