'Ojibwe' artfully weaves tradition, travelogue

Tyler D. Johnson, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 4, 2003 at midnight

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"The land is always stalking people. The land makes people live right." - Annie Peaches

"Stories go to work on you like arrows. Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself." - Benson Lewis

In his insightful 1996 ethnography about the Western Apache, Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso portrayed the inseparable connection between people, land and stories.

For Apaches like Peaches and Lewis, their land and stories represent ancestral history, a cultural wellspring and moral direction. Instructive fables are attached to cliffs, creeks, mountains and trees.

This living within a landscape is a profound trait of indigenous cultures and the same reason that placing people in reservations has wrought such severe destruction. Without their particular land, American Indians fight hard to preserve their very identities.

But no one has a deeper appreciation and understanding of a landscape than those with the deepest roots. 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.

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. The landscape is never background; the landscape lives.

This book is a travelogue pieced together in small segments and it occasionally seems rambling. The flow of Erdrich's novels is missing, but this is no novel; it's a road trip through lakes and books.

Bibliophiles will drool over her visit to an island in Rainy Lake. A great iconoclast named Ernest Oberholtzer lived there and collected more than 11,000 books during his life. 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.

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:

"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif - books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface . . ."

She imagines her trip as if the lakes are libraries and the islands are books. While contemplating a rock painting, she thinks it might be a self-portrait of the artist and, as such, a timeless expression of the same land, spirituality and art that sustains her: "Books. Why? So we can talk to you even though we are dead. Here we are, the writer and I, regarding one another."

Tyler D. Johnson is a multimedia producer at the Rocky Mountain News.

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