Louise Erdrich - Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

I’m getting anxious about my daughters.

The fact that they are utterly responsible and I know they are safe doesn’t matter. I have got to worry.

I’m also getting anxious about Tobasonakwut.

All of this time, Tobasonakwut is trying very hard to get to us. I always know that. I imagine that he must find a way to tow his boat to the lake, and then to dry out some spark plugs in the motor, probably. As well, he will encounter various other delays, all based on quirks of the boat and requests from other people. Besides, it is summer and that is the busiest time for Ojibwe people.

For the past two months, Tobasonakwut has been helping people meet their spirits. He does this by putting them out to fast for visions. He puts people in his sweat lodge, then into his boat, drives them out to an island, leaves them there for four days, worries and prays for and checks on them during those four days, then picks them up and feeds them ceremonially and assists them in understanding their experience. He has put out hundreds of people and picked them up hundreds of times and listened to their dreams and helped them understand their insights and their suffering. When he picks them up, as they have not eaten or drunk water during those four days, as they have heard or seen things unexpected, as they have been alone in the night and often frightened, they can barely speak. They have a certain look in their eyes. He is very careful with them.

He has been very careful with the three people, friends, who arrive the next day. I’m very glad. Now I have people to wait for him along with me. These people have fasted at the pictographs that we will visit. Every time they come to Lake of the Woods, they come prepared to become extremely hungry. This time they have decided to experience the lake in a new way — full. On the way here, however, they couldn’t help stocking up on food and drink. They have developed a Pavlovian response to the lake and find it hard to believe that they will be fed. But they are fed, and copiously. The food at the fishing lodge, provided by a dedicated cook named Donna, is right out of small-town North Dakota — it is haute cuisine if you lived in Wahpeton during the mid-’70s. A relish plate. Prime rib, thick cuts of ham, tiny bowls of cauliflower drenched in cheese sauce, always some form of potato — mashed, fried, scalloped — and pitchers of iced tea. Homemade bread. Baked chicken. Pie. Salads of iceberg lettuce and pale tomato. Kiizhikok sits high on her booster seat and eats with a fork. (She’s talented at this. We think it betokens an unusual and preternaturally advanced hand-eye coordination. Perhaps she’ll be a famous baseball player. I won’t allow her to become a fighter pilot.) Her red napkin is tucked around her neck. All around us great stuffed fish leap and gape on the walls. I feel increasingly like one of them.

The Lake, or Tobasonakwut, or

Tobasonakwut, the Lake

Tobasonakwut arrives. During the last fifteen minutes of northern dusk light he pulls up to the dock. There he is, looming toward us with fixed weariness. I have just decided that he and the lake are one person. That is a relief. For if to describe one is also to describe the other, I am set free. Both are so vast and contradictory and full of secrets that I both despaired of and was delighted with the prospect of never getting an adequate handle on them. But now that he has actually arrived, I feel that I should introduce Tobasonakwut.

To do so, I must go back to 1688 when a twenty-year-old French explorer named Jacques de Noyon wrote about a group of people who nearly killed him when he raided their gardens of squash, corn, pumpkins, beans, and potatoes on what is now Garden Island in Lake of the Woods. According to Tobasonakwut, as de Noyon and his men approached the gardens, an arrow was fired from the woods and landed at their feet. As any rational people would, they stopped, and then from those trees there emerged a giant people, taller than any native people they’d ever met, and very frightening. He got to know them a little, and called them the People of the Cat.

Those people were Tobasonakwut’s ancestors, who became the Big George family and are of the Bizhiw or Lynx dodem. Tobasonakwut’s people still tend to be tall, rawboned, rangy (handsome, I think), and with a wariness that can shift from kind to belligerent. They are not a people to be trifled with. But for all that, Tobasonakwut is exceedingly gentle. Babies seem to know this. Around my extended family, he’s always the one who sits and talks to the babies. Yet he’s tough in a way people who have been through too much are tough — he can sleep anywhere. Or go for days without really sleeping when his presence is required in ceremonies. Yet although he went hungry as a child, he won’t eat just anything. He’s finicky about his food now. He doesn’t eat much meat, passes on frybread, orders salads in restaurants — unusual eating habits for an Ojibwe. As I said, he’s full of contradictions, like the lake. Tobasonakwut grew up on a spit of land called Niiyaawaangashing, in a time before the Ojibwe or Anishinaabeg were removed from their homes in the islands. He is fortunate to know something of the time when his community was intact, when the bays were dotted with cabins and camps, when his extended family lived more or less by the spiritual seasons of the Midewiwin , the Grand Medicine teachings, and those ceremonial teachings formed the moral and social center of the community. The teachings made sense of the beauties and hardships of Ojibwe existence. He was also unfortunate, for that world was thrown asunder in just a few years. After his people had stabilized their lives and partly recovered from the wave of nineteenth-century invasions and diseases, the Canadian government invented devastating aboriginal policies. It is his burden to have seen what survived of the Ojibwe world around him nearly demolished by death, removal, forced relocation, the poison of alcohol, and to have experienced an education that amounted to kidnapping and a brutal attempt at brainwashing.

The place where Tobasonakwut grew up, Niiyaawaangashing, is about three or four miles by water from the fishing lodge. It is very useful for us to have a base of operations so close to the places we want to visit, but it is not uncomplicated. Camp owners have become almost the only residents in land that once belonged, and by treaty rights should still belong, solely to the Ojibwe. The only native people staying at the lodge now are the fishing guides, Riel, and two other men. Tobasonakwut once worked as a fishing guide. But he knows and is part of the lake in a much more profound way than where to catch walleyes for wealthy non-Indian sport fishers. He knows the lake in a way that only indigenous people can truly know anywhere.

At one time, everyone who lived near the lake was essentially made of the lake. As the people lived off fish, animals, the lake’s water and water plants for medicine, they were literally cell by cell composed of the lake and the lake’s islands. Tobasonakwut’s father once said to him, The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake . Tobasonakwut shows us the place in the heavens from which the creator descended. Their origins are familiar. The cosmology is in the surrounding landscape, in the stars, in the shapes of the rocks and islands, and in the mazinapikiniganan, the paintings that his people made on the sides of the rocks.

Niiyaawaangashing

The next day, we get into a sixteen-foot Alumacraft with a 115-horsepower motor, and we buzz out onto the lake. Before anything else, we go to visit Niiyaawaangashing. There are still two fish-camp houses standing and one tumbled-in cabin of weathered wood. Two docks twisted and upended by ice. A strong little black bear stands next to the first dock, watching us calmly. We cut the motor. The bear slides into the channel and dog-paddles with powerful assurance to the other side, where he doesn’t hide himself at all, but stands up and rakes the berry bushes underneath a tree containing a huge eagle’s nest. One eagle hulks stubbornly next to the nest, watching over an eaglet, whose head pops up, curious, from time to time. We skirt a long, pale boulder with a crease down the middle, just opposite the former camp, romantically secluded.