Louise Erdrich - Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

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, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at bedside, to be dutifully examined — to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can’t imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you’d longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers , and there it is.

Books. Another reason. I can take home along anywhere in the person of a book, and I do. I pack W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. I bring Jim Crace’s Quarantine and Being Dead . Then I add Saints and Strangers by Angela Carter, and The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, which everybody else has read. That takes care of fiction. As for nonfiction, I never go anywhere without A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe , John D. Nichols and Earl Nyholm. I take along Joe Paddock’s book on Ernest Oberholtzer, Keeper of the Wild . And then I pack a bag containing all of my baby’s books, many of which I’ve laboriously blotted with Wite-Out, removing the English, and replaced with Ojibwe words written in Magic Marker.

Ojibwe

Ojibwe is also slurred into the word Chippewa and in its original form, Anishinaabe, it is pronounced Ah-NISH-in-AH-bay. The word is very loaded and bears a host of meanings and interpretations and theories. I’ve heard that Ojibwe refers to the puckering of the seams of traditional moccasins, or makazinan. Or that the Ojibwe roasted their enemies “until they puckered up.” Gruesome. I’ve heard that Anishinaabe means “from whence is lowered the male of the species,” but I don’t like that one very much. And then there is the more mystical Spontaneous Beings. The meaning that I like best of course is Ojibwe from the verb Ozhibii’ige, which is “to write.” Ojibwe people were great writers from way back and synthesized the oral and written tradition by keeping mnemonic scrolls of inscribed birchbark. The first paper, the first books.

The Blue Minivan

I am connected to and believe in my 1995 blue Windstar Minivan. We have history. I know exactly how to pack this vehicle, and feel its personality is with me as I fill the crevices between, under, behind the blue cloth seats. The blue Windstar is sisterly, accommodating, personable. And a gallant hauler. Used to be, I’d pack six preteen girls, two dogs (large Aussies), and myself in along with a week of food, clothes, games, and drawing materials, for a trip to a whole other island in Lake Superior where I did research while the girls swam, screamed, ate, screamed, roasted marshmallows, screamed, read “Wonder Woman” and “Catwoman” comics, slept, screamed, and woke, screaming happily, for a week or two. I don’t really know how I have accomplished anything, ever. The minivan has been to North Dakota many times to visit Wahpeton, where my parents live, and to South Dakota, bearing my favorite sun dancer, my baby’s father. With the backseats removed, he could sleep comfortably on a futon. The Windstar came back a little bloodstained, loaded with slabs of pipestone, great barrel-sized bundles of sage, a small prayer flag tied to its antenna. It made a traveling home for the sun dancer, the man whom we’ll soon meet, who was named after low-lying clouds over the water of the lake we are going to visit.

Nenaa’ikiizhikok

This is what I have been told. There are four spirit women who take care of all of the waters of the world. One woman cares for the oceans of salt water. A second woman cares for the freshwater lakes, streams, and rivers. Yet a third woman cares for the waters inside of women that surround and cushion their babies. The fourth woman looks after the rains, the clouds, the storms, the waters in the sky. That woman cleans the sky up after a thunderstorm, makes sure the clouds are moving. The stars properly fixed in their places. She’s always hard at work healing and arranging the sky so that things flow in the right order and direction. The baby in the car seat directly behind me is named for that spirit woman, Nenaa’ikiizhikok. Her grandmother on her father’s side had this name, and was called Kiizhikok, Sky Woman, or Kiizhik; Sky, for short.

The original Nenaa’ikiizhikok was an imposing woman, tall and strikingly intelligent. The only image I have of her is from the back row of a boarding school class picture. She’s blurred, of course, but obviously beautiful — not pretty — her features are too strong and cunning for merely pretty. This Nenaa’ikiizhikok is spoken of in Ojibwemowin as Nenaa’ikiizhikokiban. The “iban” at the end puts her in the past, in the spirit world, where I imagine she is still dancing in her jingle dress. She was a well-known expert jingle-dress dancer, and even came to the Turtle Mountains to powwow. My mother, Rita Gourneau Erdrich, grew up in the Turtle Mountains. My family is still there so I visit as often as I can. I like to imagine Nenaa’ikiizhikokiban dancing with one of my mother’s aunts, maybe Jane or Shyoosh.

Baby Nenaa’ikiizhikok also has my mother’s name, Rita. So she’s a grandmotherly little baby, I guess. She even has one gray hair growing on the back of her head. I’m old to be a new mother of course, and so’s her dad. Our baby was born a great-aunt. But we won’t get into that. As my brother Ralph says, a look of distress on his face, “Don’t say anymore about it! I knew she’d be something like a great-aunt already! I just don’t want to know!”

Right now Kiizhikok is playing with her baby cell phone.

The plastic cell phone keeps saying “yellow triangle.” It is a teaching cell phone. She drops it and picks up her teaching hammer. It says, “Can we fix it? Yes, we can!” She drops it, and picks up a musical box that lights up and plays bits of Mozart and Bach. She drops that and picks up a bright baby tape recorder that plays her late great-uncle Kwekwekibiness singing the Lake of the Woods song, which was given to the people in dreams by the lake itself. Eventually, she turns that off. Eats a cracker. As befits a child born with a gray hair, she is a very philosophical baby, personable and good-natured. She fusses for perhaps five minutes. Sleeps for two hours as we travel along a highway that was expanded from a road that was once a trail, an old Ojibwe trade route, heading north.

Songs traveled this route, and ceremonies, as well as pelts and guns. Medicines, knowledge, sacred shells, and secular ideas traveled this road, but never at sixty-five miles per hour. The van is kind, the van is good. She’s got new brake pads and an alignment. She’ll get us there.

Asema, Age, and Gratitude

The word for “tobacco” is asema, and it is essential to bring some for this reason: Spirits like tobacco. Their fondness for the stuff is a given of Ojibwe life. Tobacco offerings are made before every important request, to spirits or to other humans. Tobacco is put down by the root if you pick a plant, in the water when you visit a lake, by the side of the road when starting a journey. Tobacco is handed to anyone with whom you wish to speak in a serious manner. It is given for a story, or as an invitation to join someone in a teaching or writing project. Tobacco begins every noteworthy enterprise and is given as a thank-you at the end of every significant event. Perhaps spirits like tobacco because they like the fragrance of its smoke, or because people like tobacco and they appreciate thoughtfulness.