Louise Erdrich - Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

“Hundreds of Anishinaabeg were conceived on that rock,” says Tobasonakwut. I look at the gray hollow in the rock — it actually looks pretty comfortable. Nobody lives at Niiyaawaangashing anymore, except the bears and eagles, and so we stop only long enough to put down tobacco. Sometimes the bears, especially the curious young, sit in the trees and watch people on the shore. Sometimes a little bear will get caught in the crotch of a tree and hang himself. When such a skeleton is found, it is very sacred to the Ojibwe and is used in religious ceremonies. Once when Tobasonakwut was little, there was a big Midewiwin or Grand Medicine lodge in the grass that is now quickly returning to scrub trees and sumac. A Midewiwin lodge is made of young bent-over popple or birch poles tied together with basswood. Spruce boughs or ferns are tied along the sides for shade. The main events of the religion are carried out in the lodge. When Tobasonakwut was about six years old, a strange event took place at the Mide lodge here at Niiyaawaangashing.

Tobasonakwut’s Memory

He watched six canoes approaching from the west, one bearing a man and dog. They pulled to shore, and the explanation for their coming was given. The man with the dog had suffered an oppressive dream. It was a dream he could not mentally evade even once he woke. In the dream, he’d learned that he once had been a slave owned by the Bwaanag, who were for generations bitter enemies of the Ojibwe. As a slave, this man dreamed that he had been tied up with the dogs and, like the dogs, fed scraps, not fed at all, despised and kicked and beaten. One afternoon he just was about to die of sorrow and loneliness when it occurred to him to speak to the dog next to him, who answered. The dog told him that the dog people had been waiting for the man to talk to them. Now that he had spoken, they were willing to help him escape the Bwaanag.

There will be some feathers, said the dog, and you will chase them. When the Bwaanag look at you, they will not see a man. They will see a dog playing with some feathers. You will run after the feathers until you are far from the Bwaanag camp.

In this way, the man was freed from his degradation. The man who dreamed he was the man enslaved by the Sioux understood when he woke that he and his dog must give thanks to those dream dogs by fasting together. And so the canoes had come, accompanying him to the Midewiwin lodge, where he would fast for twelve days, his dog for four days. During those twelve days, the children were to treat the man just as the Bwaanag had, mean. Though they were to respect the dog. Tobasonakwut could not be cruel to the man, who cried and groaned in his hunger, as he lay in the lodge. The dog fasted alongside his master, and then was feasted like a human being. The man continued until he weakened so badly he could not move. But he survived, and in the end he was feasted too.

There is nothing where that lodge was but poison ivy and grass and a broken table. Tobasonakwut’s dream is to rebuild the lodge there and to teach people all that he knows, including what the rock paintings mean. To this end, he has started a foundation to gather money to put up this lodge. 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.

Perhaps someday a Mide lodge will stand where the table has collapsed. Perhaps the old Midewiwin songs will be heard on Niiyaawaangashing once again.

Nagamonan

Songs belong to these islands. When Ojibwe people fast in these islands, the songs, even if lost for a time, always come back in dreams. The nagamonan. These very old songs are as old as the rock paintings. Songs were composed, often by those who owned drums, for honor, for celebration, for beauty, for love. There is one particular song that haunts Tobasonakwut and has, as well, a special meaning for me. Our friends often sing this song in their sweat lodge. It is a song used to help those struggling with the pitiless, uncanny, and baffling disease that is alcoholism. The words of the song, Kiiwashkwebiishki indigo anishaa dash indigo , are the words of a long-ago drunk who found his way to sobriety not through a twelve-step program, but through the intervention of a powerful spirit. All of this happened during the eighteenth century, when the fur trade began the first wave of alterations that would forever shift the economic, social, and spiritual balance of Ojibwe life in Lake of the Woods.

Tobasonakwut always begins his story of this song by attributing it to his uncle Kwekwekibiness. Very traditional people are very careful about attribution. When a story begins there is a prefacing history of that story’s origin that is as complicated as the Modern Language Association guidelines to form in footnotes.

In this story, there was a young man, an extraordinary hunter, known as unusually strong and of a generous nature. He began to sell his furs to the first trader in the islands. At first, the young hunter acquired blankets, fire strikers, kettles, guns, and ammunition. He traded for things he needed, his family needed, his wife, his children. But eventually, he traded for liquor too.

A form of trader’s rum, mixed with hot pepper and tobacco, became his pleasure. He bought a little more each time he came with piles of beaver skins. The trader began to provide him with the liquor before they finished their negotiations, and soon the young man woke from long binges and found that he owed the trader, that he had drunk up his pay and then some. At last, he began trading for the rum alone. His children left him, his wife left him, his whole family stayed away from him. The animals stayed away from him too. It was no use hunting, so he traded his gun for a keg. It was no use trapping, so he drank away his traps. Finally, it was no use begging either. No use in anything. The trader’s liquor had eaten his life, his loves, his strength, his mind, his will, and all but a fraction of his spirit.

This tiny part of his spirit, this fraction of the man that was still a man, decided that it would disappear into the wilderness. So the young man walked away from the trading house and from all of the trade goods including the rum. He walked off into the snow without a blanket and without a gun. He walked until he was blinded by the snow glare, exhausted to the last degree. In the deepest moment of despair he’d ever known, he threw himself down in a trackless place, at the mercy of the spirits. While he was face down in the snow, and as he determined that he surely would die, he heard a song.

The nagamon began like this, Kiiwashkwe biishki indigo anishaa dash indigo. I am a drunk. I am nothing. The song went on and he sang the whole of it into the place beyond the bottom of a drinking cup that is the darkest place on Earth. As he sang this song, over and over, and as he waited to die, this young man heard a voice.

It was the voice of the Kwiingwa’aage.

The Kwiingwa’aage is a spirit of dark strength and cleverness represented by an animal, the wolverine. Among the Ojibwe, this animal has an almost supernatural reputation. There is one who steals from your traps and cannot be caught. There is one who you know is watching you, but you cannot see him or hear him. There is an animal who follows you just out of sight. It is deathless, lonely, and somewhat strange in his contempt for human intelligence. He easily outwits the smartest hunters. When the creator passed near the Earth in the form of a tailed light, that was the Kwiingwa’aage. When a man feels eyes at his back and experiences a thrill of unreasonable fear out in the woods, that is the Kwiingwa’aage. Perhaps because he is so fearless, so impervious to pain, so dangerously strong, the spirit of the Kwiingwa’aage is the only one that can address the problems of the schkwebii , the alcoholic. For the disease is without pity just as is the animal. Alcohol is cunning, and it is phenomenally deceptive. So when the animal spoke to the young man, and said that he had been watching him, and that he had given this young man a song, it might have been the first time the Kwiingwa’aage was known to pity anyone.