Louise Erdrich

Author: Louise Erdrich

Publisher: National Geographic
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So it is a fine event that Louise Erdrich has written a travelogue of her Ojibwe country.

Erdrich, author of the recent The Master Butchers Singing Club, is, in many ways, this country's Gabriel Garcia-Marquez; her nine novels combine the harsh realities of modern life for American Indians with the imagination and spirituality of their rich cultures.
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In Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Erdrich takes a more conversational tone as she loads up the minivan with her baby girl (whom Erdrich bore at 47) and roams with the baby's father through the lakes, rock paintings and islands of southern Ontario.

Tobasonakwut, Erdrich's partner, is ". . . a traditional healer, as well as a politician, teacher, and negotiator. . . . He is a one-man spiritual ER."

He is also a man who grew up along the Lake of the Woods within a traditional community and then saw it devastated by Canadian government policy.He knows what was lost.He is raising money to restore the site of a tribal religious lodge and he has a keen sense of social justice about it:

"He has also filed a claim for compensation against the Oblate Order of the Catholic Church.They were in charge of his education, but instead they stole life, innocence, and spirit from him and from his people.He thinks they should be responsible for helping to reconstruct what was lost."

Traveling by boat to several islands, Erdrich interweaves traditional Ojibwe stories with lively descriptions of the rock paintings left by her ancestors.

Some of the paintings are thousands of years old and still vivid.The northern woods are alive with bears, moose, otters and a leaping sturgeon.

The great gift of the book is being led through the woods and water by Erdrich and Tobasonakwut; it allows for a commingling of field biology, humor, eloquence, sadness and spirituality that non-native eyes rarely see.
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Oberholtzer was a friend to the Ojibwe (with a significant library on American Indian life), and Erdrich visited the island with an Ojibwe language group.
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Throughout, Erdrich mulls her obsession with books and what they mean to her.In describing her Minneapolis home, she revels in what many would trip over: