Louise Erdrich - Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

My grandfather made the old-time kinnickinnick, red willow tobacco, a smoking mixture of shaved willow bark, sage, and other local herbs. Ojibwe people still use and make red willow tobacco, but the tobacco offered these days is most often bought in pipe shops or purchased in small foil packets. Sometimes I’m offered cigarettes to help with projects or to listen to someone’s problem. I quit smoking years ago. I began to cut down once I started running, for I soon realized that rolling a Bull Durham ciggie after a painful three-mile jog and puffing away to recover was counterproductive. So as I am now pure, I dismantle the cigarette, place the tobacco on the ground, then either bury or throw away the filter. My favorite tobacco comes from a pipe shop in Minneapolis and is called Nokomis, the Ojibwe word for grandmother. It is a rich, black, softly shredded moist stuff with a darkly sweet scent. Before I take a trip like the one I am taking now, I always buy a pound or two of this tobacco and divide it into smaller bags. Some are for the baby to give to other people, and some are for the spirits of the places we’re going to visit.

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 if it contained sentient spiritual beings. The question 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.

Therefore, I’ve taught my children to offer tobacco (at the same time that I rail at them not to smoke it). The baby is adept at dipping her hand into the bag and waiting for the right moment to scatter the flakes. If allowed to, she’ll keep offering tobacco until the bag’s used up. She does it with such a sweet solemnity it’s hard to stop her. N’dawnis, my daughter. I still am amazed to find her here.

Actually, I put down a lot of tobacco when I found out that I was going to have a baby. I needed every bit of spiritual help I could get. Maybe I’ll get used to the fact that she is here by the time I’m sixty-four years old and clapping wildly at her high school graduation. When I walked into my midwife’s office with a positive pregnancy test, one of my first questions was, “What kind of statistics are there on women who have babies at forty-seven?” Gently, I was told that statistics were unavailable because “there just aren’t that many women having babies at forty-seven.”

Still, I was dazzled. I felt like Mary at the Annunciation. Mary with PMS. I wept, I snarled, I laughed like a hyena. I knew that I was frightening to others, filled with a bewildering array of hormones. I’d gone from perimenopausal to violently pregnant. 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. What did this mean? Along with the dazzled feeling I was struck by the awful burden of it all. How would I do it? I don’t suppose the Virgin Mary felt sorry for herself, but I did. Then suddenly, I thought of a most wonderful consolation.

Books. Why?

To read and read while nursing a baby.

The Problem of Meeting Up

in Ojibwe Country

By the end of the first day we are in Bemidji, Minnesota, home of giant replicas of Babe the Blue Ox, Paul Bunyan, and, most importantly, where my brothers live now. Louis Erdrich, named for my German grandfather, is an environmental engineer who oversees all of the systems managers throughout the northern tier of Ojibwe country down here in the United States. He is in charge of making sure that reservations all through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota have adequate water and sewage and waste disposal systems. This is a vast job, but Louis deals unflappably with toxic waste and buried gas tanks. My other brother, Ralph Erdrich, Jr., is the head emergency room nurse at Red Lake Hospital on Red Lake Reservation, just north of Bemidji. He sews up local brawlers, delivers babies, and extracts quantities of fishhooks from various parts of Red Lake Ojibwe bodies. We have some difficulty deciding where to meet for dinner, at Perkins or Country Kitchen. As we all worked at a Country Kitchen in Wahpeton, North Dakota, me as a waitress and hostess, and my brothers as cooks, there is a nostalgia factor. But as, therefore, we also know exactly what went on behind the scenes at Country Kitchen, we opt for Perkins.

The interior is crowded, steamy, loud with families. Between the two of them, my brothers have five sons and one tiny new daughter. We’re sitting around three pushed-together tables, ordering baskets of onion rings and hash browns and chili and sandwiches, when I am suddenly overcome by a great feeling of happiness. My brothers are loyal and kind fellows, and they have seen me through tough times. When my husband died in 1997 they took off work to come and stay with me, to answer the telephone and guard my children. They also made sure I didn’t stay in bed all day, or chew the woodwork. They helped the household keep on functioning. They kept my world partly normal. They are tall and sturdy and they make me feel safe. Now, as we sit in Perkins eating deep-fried foods and dressing-drenched salads, I am again comforted by their solid presence. We don’t have to be analytical, we don’t have to be literary, we don’t have to talk about anything at all, really. It is enough to be together to enjoy the continuity and the weird Erdrich history.

They are tireless professionals in their work, but sweet and nonjudgmental in their personal lives. They are what women in the Midwest call “guy guys.” They do guy things like fish and watch football, refurnish furniture, and tinker with dangerous electrical wiring. In their guyness they relate easily to my guy, Tobasonakwut, the sun dancer and the father of Kiizhikok. They ask about him and about my plans for this trip. I am forced to say that, as usual, I have no exact idea how I’ll actually meet up with him. Although, as always, I am sure it will happen.

Meeting up is always complicated in Ojibwe country, and never seems to happen as it was planned. Tobasonakwut, who is a traditional healer, as well as a tribal politician, teacher, and negotiator, is always being called on life or death missions. He has devoted his life to helping people. He is a one-man spiritual ER. And so, when making plans, I have found it best to be prepared to wait. I have found it best to understand things will always change and take a long time. Important and essential items will be lost, mislaid, then found, and then they will need to be repaired. I have found it best to travel with everything I need in order to spend a comfortable night, anywhere, even in my car. I spend one, though at Bemidji’s Holiday Inn Express. The next morning, as soon as Kiizhikok and I have investigated the “continental breakfast” and partaken of four kinds of dried cereal, including Froot Loops, we drive straight north past Red Lake Reservation on US 72, heading for Baudette, where I’ll cross the border.

I’m revved up on a cup of unfamiliar coffee. Holiday Inn Express coffee. Kiizhikok drifts off after operating a plastic blender that chimes “Old MacDonald” in the barks of dogs, the croaks of frogs, or the mews of cats, or all at once. This strangely complicated toy was made in China. I am very happy as I now get to glimpse some of my favorite country. The great mashkiig , or bog, between Red Lake and Lake of the Woods, is traditionally the great Ojibwe pharmacy. It is full of medicines. There is Labrador tea, or swamp tea, makigobug. Snakeroot, which I should be carrying for good luck and health on this journey. There is balsam, a laxative. Ininiwunj , or milkweed, used on whistles as a charm for drawing deer. Pitcher plant or omukikiwidasun , which makes great toys. The Ojibwe name means “frog leggings.” There is willow for indigestion, for basketmaking, the inner bark for kinnickinnick and headaches. Makibug , sumac, for dysentery. White cedar for coughs. Highbush cranberry, blueberries, Juneberries, wild currants, gooseberries. Winabojobikuk , for snakebite. That’s “Winabojo’s arrow.” Winabojo nokomis winizisun , painted cup, or “Winabojo’s grandmother’s hair,” used for rheumatism and for the diseases of women.