The Native American lore of Minnesota’s lakes and islands

Louise Erdrich intrigues with her very first sentence: ‘My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me.’ She explores this integration in her astonishing account of her trips to the lakes and islands of Minnesota and Ontario, where ancient painted signs on rocks inspire her to perceive some islands as ‘books in themselves… You could think of the lakes as libraries.’

There is a productive tension between German logic and Native American spirituality in her refreshingly unusual take on the world: she calls herself a ‘mixed-blood’, born of a German-American father and French-Ojibwe mother. When considering the Ojibwe ritual of offering tobacco to spirits, for instance, she reflects: ‘There was a time when I wondered – do I really believe all of this? I’m half German. Rational!’ Then she explains how she came to realise:

The question whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant… Whenever I offered tobacco, I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

She is accompanied on her trip by books (‘I can take home along anywhere in the person of a book, and I do’) and also by her youngest daughter, Kiizhikok, a nursing toddler, who arrived unexpectedly when Erdrich was 47, her other daughters being already teenagers. When she discovered that she’d ‘gone from perimenopausal to violently pregnant’, she was both ‘dazzled’ and ‘struck by the awful burden of it all’. She found ‘a most wonderful consolation’ in books – ‘to read and read while nursing a baby’. She accompanies this statement with a pencil sketch of herself, tenderly holding a book and a baby.

Erdrich is quietly assured in her ability to mother while pursuing her own work.