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Louise Erdrich
Author, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Director, Commonwealth Club Book Awards
Barbara Lane: Your new novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, brings us back to the reservation that's been depicted in many of your books - an imaginary place similar to the reservation in North Dakota where you were raised.Louise Erdrich: I grew up in a small town called Wahpeton, North Dakota. My mother grew up on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, about six hours away. I would visit there and be with my grandparents and relatives. It's surrounded by Dakota and Ojibwe Reservation land, but the small town itself is very much like the town in The Beet Queen - an agricultural town in the flattest part of North Dakota, the Red River Valley.
BL: What was the relationship between the people who lived in the town and those who lived on the reservation?
LE: It's a complex relationship, but for me - as I grew up in a mixture of Native and non-Native backgrounds - it was seamless. I didn't really think about my identity in a political way at all. Everybody knew who I was. It was a very familial small town setting.
BL: So there was never a point in your life then when you tried to distance yourself from your Native American side - it was always something that was part of the whole, organically, and you embraced it?
LE: Yes, but I didn't know a lot about it. What I knew was really the acculturated side of things. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was very interested in teaching children how to be model U.S. citizens. Although I learned how to dance and do beadwork, I didn't know the language that my grandfather spoke and I didn't know the religion. So there was a great deal of the culture that was missing in my life when I was a child.
BL: When did you begin to explore it at a deeper level?
LE: When I grew up I slowly began to understand that I had missed a great deal; I remember traveling back to be with my grandfather in the years before he died just to listen to him talk and to absorb some of what he knew. He was able to synthesize, or syncretize, his Ojibwe religion and his Catholicism in a very interesting way. He was able to bring his sacred items into the mass and the priest was very accommodating; I found that compelling in this particular book. I was informed by that experience of being around my grandfather and seeing that he was able both to pray in his native language and to feel a very devout connection to Catholicism.
BL: Let's turn to your new novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and I'd love to have you read a passage from the book to give the flavor.
LE: I will and I've never read this piece before so you'll have to forgive me. You know, it's really amazing. I'm a new mother again at 46 and one of the first things I found was I was trying to find the reading distance - the place where I could actually see my baby clearly. It was a moment for me of reality. Now this is a piece from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse:
"The day continued mild and glorious, and as the sun's light strengthened the Catholics fell in line behind the cart bearing a borrowed statue, for the parish hadn't one of its own yet. As they passed along, men fell to their knees in the dust of the road and women raised a trill - a high pitched tongue of wild joy, a sound that never failed to tighten Damien's throat. Kashpaw's washed, white horses pulled the wagon with nervous alacrity, rolling their eyes and starting suspiciously at the supplicants. The newly baptized and morose Kashpaw drove it, with Quill sitting just alongside him.
"White scarf alight in the sun, Quill sat bolt upright, stiff in her abashed fear. She threw back her head from time to time, eyes rolling, and laughed. Mary Kashpaw, huge in a white dress, crept to her mother and stroked her hand. Quill swiped her daughter's hand like a fish from a stream, madly tore at it with her teeth, continued to laugh. Her daughter winced at the bite, but did not cry, just turned and hunkered low in the back of the wagon with her cousin and the borrowed statue.
"The poor, chipped Virgin wore an expression of distaste, but she was decked brightly with wreaths and a crown of wild lilies and arum. At her feet, the two girls sat and threw the petals of prairie roses, pink and blushing, from baskets made of willow withes the red black of old blood. Damien stepped on the petals as he walked behind them, bearing the Sacred Host.
"Held visible in an intricate glass lunette, the wafer trembled before his eyes as he prayed. These days, Agnes and Father Damien became one indivisible person in prayer. That poor, divided, human priest enlarged and smoothed into the person of Father Damien. As though the unseen were a magnetic draw upon Father Damien's spirit, his thoughts leaped like iron filings. His requests, sharp black slivers of metal pierced the sun, and his praises melted, in his ears. Now, in that rapt concentration, he moved along the road. Sometimes he held the Sacred Host aloft, feeling a soft power flow through his arms. Sometimes he held the Host before him at a more intimate level. With each step, gentle waves of air brushed around him as though the earth cheerfully flexed underneath each footstep. Each breath was sunlight. Green love surrounded him. Present on the hillside with the body of his Christ, he breathed an easy adoration. One step. The next. Sorrows, confusions, pains of flesh and spirit, all melted into the sweet trance of the moment.
"Then, he tripped.
"Agnes thought, later, how odd - odd or typical - that she should stumble in the full flow of the gift, in the radiant immediacy of pure grace. What happened next, and next, followed from the first misstep. Father Damien went down holding fast, but, as though an unseen hand yanked, the monstrance bearing the Host bounced upward, turning in the sun. The moment, fluid as he rolled over swamped in flowing vestments, could have been rescued. Had he jumped directly to his feet. Had only the procession halted….But no, it appeared that he was part of something larger. Uncanny, the design. For now it happened. Just as he went to earth, the presence white as flowers and dead as bone, the Puyat woman with buffalo skulls and jackal face, emerged from a hidden spot. Barefoot, dragging the skulls on thongs fastened somewhere within her habit, she raised her arms in horror to see the Host defiled. She bounded forward just before the garlanded wagon bearing the brooding statue, the children, Quill, and Kashpaw. Her oversize habit flapped like a sail. She flung herself into the wagon's path.
"The horses panicked and reared in their traces. They pranced, hopped, twisted away from the Puyat, then exploded with a wild energy. They shot down the path until they reached the bottom and could run cross-country. They tore pounding through tangled farm-steads. Through town. Men chased as they wheeled by, shouting, "Cut the lines!" But Kashpaw carried with him only one dull hatchet, and the best he could manage in the wild tumble were awkward scrapes across the reins. Rounding a curve the statue of the Virgin shot out like a torpedo. That, in itself, was an event that caused repercussions deep into the future. For her halo sliced right through an oiled paper window and the rest of the statue followed, straight into the house of seven of the most notorious drunks in Little No Horse, who lay groaning that very moment for whiskey.
"The Seven Drunks
"Instead of a bottle, the Blessed Virgin flew through the window. Skidding across the room, she tipped upright so that, by the time the sodden ones looked blearily up, she stood tall. Her glance of disgusted sweetness shown down upon the four men and three women, including a much too young Sophie Morrissey and a couple of Lazarres. Their sore eyes pinned upon the Virgin, who stood directly in the square of light from the broken window. Of course, the drinkers all knelt, blessed themselves, wept in astonishment and converted - not to Catholicism, but at least to a much less potent form of alcohol: to wine. Henceforward, they were strict in their loyalty to the grape - even though, they claimed, no matter how much they poured down their gullets, they couldn't get satisfyingly shkwebii anymore. But, as a result of their encounter with the Virgin, some were afflicted with a mild friendliness and industry."
BL: Damien, the priest who is the central character in this book, was a minor character in your earlier work. Why did you decide to focus on him, actually her, in this book?
LE: Yes, I should have explained that before reading the passage. I had images. I had little pieces that I was knitting together and one of the pieces was a description of an elderly priest who was writing to the Pope; he had written to the Pope all his life, from this lonely outpost in North Dakota, but never received an answer from him. The priest finally goes to bed, but first takes off his cast. Then I found the priest was unwinding a wide Ace bandage from his chest. Then I wrote that this priest had breasts 'small and withered as folded flowers' and I thought "Oh God, she's a woman," and I didn't pick it up for a while after that, because I hadn't really thought about Father Damien as a woman. In fact I didn't know if this priest was Father Damien at the time. But I looked back and saw that I had described Father Damien as a very androgynous person.
BL: You have drawn a devoted following of readers over the years by exploring the lives of a rich array of characters. How has your relationship with those characters changed over time?
LE: It has deepened. I sometimes feel that I'm not really in charge of the books; it's really like having a family, I suppose. I do what I can to make the character real, but suddenly thoughts and ideas come that don't seem to have a basis in my own experience. I hesitate to say something as clichéd as, "They have a life of their own," but in a way they do. They seem to appear in dreams and I get messages from their later selves, from their earlier selves, and I see them very clearly at times when I'm not expecting to be visited. The relationship really is a very profound one for me and it's an ongoing source of comfort, especially with Nanapush, because Nanapush always does something to make me laugh.
BL: Talking about Nanapush, one of the figures in Native American mythology that has found resonance with many readers is the trickster. Do you have any favorite tricksters in contemporary society or politics not of your own invention?
LE: Bill Clinton was the ultimate. If you look at the mythos of the trickster, the sexual peccadilloes and the extreme intelligence and then doing enormous good on one hand and unable to control his appetites on the other hand - it's very much the profile of the trickster.
BL: In the endnotes to your novel you refer to Diane Middlebrook's book, Suits Me, which is about Billy Tipton, the jazz musician who was a woman who lived her life as a man. Can you talk a little about that?
LE: I didn't want someone to finish the book and say, 'That's impossible!' and to dismiss the book. I wanted to make a reference that someone could use to say "Indeed, it's very possible to live your life and I imagine it's possible never to be discovered." I really hadn't written a book about gender identity. It was part of the novel, but it wasn't the secret of the novel. The secret is told immediately. The only suspense is whether Father Damien will be able to go to the end of life without being discovered because, for him, it's a very serious question. If he's discovered, Damien feels that children will be returned to the powers of darkness, marriages will be unblessed and communions unsanctified; everything will be destroyed.
BL: But it's also about a larger issue - reinventing yourself - and there is a reference to Sister Leopolda in the book, starting out as one thing and becoming something else. Is that as pervasive a theme as the issue of sainthood and what really makes a saint?
LE: The saint in this book is a complicated human being, and when you read the hagiographies of saints, and you read this little story, it's actually a passion. I read several stories about saints and became fascinated with this idea that this woman could be a figure that drew people to her and worked some wonders. Strange things happen around her and yet she drives people crazy. She's really a pain. So is she a saint or not?
BL: And is Father Damien the true saint?
LE: and daily humility or does sainthood have to be surrounded by wonders and signs and miracles?
BL: The role of the spiritual world is very present in this novel. We have a biblical flood and a vision of Christ that you go into deeply. Was that because of the thematic nature of the novel or did it just flow with the subject matter to delve into the spiritual world to that extent?
LE: I never think of it as the spiritual world. I think of it as the real world. In fact, the biblical flood was the flood of 1997 in the Red River Valley, which practically carried away the town of Grand Forks. Many of the other things that happened in the book were based on bits of research. When Father Damien is playing the piano in a rock-floored grotto where he's built his church, snakes come out of the floor, listening and putting their heads up, soothed and interested in the music. It sounds like a piece of magical realism or something incredible, but it was based on a piece of research I did regarding earlier missions. There was a wonderful report of this exact phenomenon - these snakes coming out to listen to the organ music in a church.
BL: Great. There are a number of questions from our audience about the fact that you're the mother of six children and a writer and how in the world - I mean so many of us can't even get through the day much less turn out these extraordinary works with one or two children. So I want to turn to an earlier work of yours, The Blue Jay's Dance - which was written in 1995 and is sort of a meditation of the first year of your third daughter's life and how in fact you were dealing with motherhood and being a writer - and I'd like to ask you to read from the first part of this book about the passions a mother feels for her child. I love that section.
LE: Well, I have to dedicate this to my daughter, Persia, who accompanied me here and is helping me a lot and is quite wonderful. Again, I haven't read this.
"Other parents - among them, the first female judge appointed in New Hampshire, my own mid-wife, a perpetually overwhelmed movie researcher and television producer, and our neighbor, who baby-sits to make a difficult living- seem surprised at their own helplessness in the face of the passion that they feel for their children. We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult. To feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all-absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons and urges fall way into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces. The days flood by. Time with children runs through our fingers like water as we lift our hands, try to hold, to capture, to fix moments in a lens, a magic circle of images or words. We snap photos, videotape, memorialize while we experience a fast-forward in which there is no replay of even a single instant."
BL: You also, in this book, The Blue Jay's Dance, talk pointedly about mothers as writers and there's another section, the last section that I'd like to ask you to read that speaks to that.
"Every female writer starts out with a list of other female writers in her head. Mine includes, quite pointedly, a mother-list. I collect these women in my heart and often shuffle through the little I know of their experiences to find the toughness of spirit to deal with mine.
"Jane Austen - no children, no marriage. Mary Wollstonecraft - died in childbirth. Charlotte Bronte - died of hyperemesis gravidarum, a debilitating and uncontrollable morning sickness. Anne Bronte and Emily Bronte - no children or marriage. George Eliot, a.k.a. Mary Anne Evans - banned from society for an illicit liaison with a married man. No children. George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Gaskell, - children. Emily Dickinson - no children, no marriage. Virginia Woolf - no children. Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Isak Dinesen - none. Kay Boyle and Meridel LeSueur - many children and political lives. Sigrid Undset, children, and Anna Akhmatova. Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman. None. None. None. Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen - children. Toni Morrison - children. Anne Sexton. Adrienne Rich - children. Anne Tyler, Erica Jong, Alice Walker, Alice Munro, and Alice Hoffman. Children. Joan Didion. Mary Gordon. Rosellen Brown, Robb Forman Dew, and Josephine Humphreys and Monas Simpson. Children. Isabel Allende, JayneAnne Phillips, Linda Hogan, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Jane Smiley, and many, many others.
"Reliable birth control is one of the best things that's happened to contemporary literature - that can be seen from the list above. Surely, slowly, women have worked for rights and have worked for respect and worked for emotional self-sufficiency and worked for their own work. Still it is only now that mothers in any number have written literature. I beg a friend to send me Jane Smiley's thoughts on the subject - "Can mothers think?" In this piece, she speculates on writing and motherhood, upon what we do to write, what we will write, how it will be different.
"A mother's vision would encompass survival, she says, would encompass the cleaning up of messes.
"A mother's vision includes tough nurturance, survival love, a demanding state of grace. It is a vision slowly forming from the body of work created by women. I imagine a wide and encompassing room filled with women lost in concentration. They are absorbed in the creation of an emotional tapestry, an intellectual quilt. Here a powerful blossom forms, there a rushing city, a river so real it flows, a slow root, a leaf. And, too, pieces that do not seem to fit into the scheme at all incorporate themselves in startling ways.
"There is labor itself - birth as original a masterpiece as death. There is the delicate overlapping flower of another human personality forming before your eyes, and you blessed and frightened to be part of it. There is the strange double vision, the you and not you of a genetic half replicated in the physical body of another - your eyebrows appear, your mother's heart line, your father's crooked little finger. There is the tedious responsibility of domesticity that alternates with a hysterical sense of destined fate - the bigness and the smallness.
"Writing as a mother shortly after bearing, while nurturing, an infant, one's heart is easily pierced. To look full face at evil seems impossible, and it is difficult at first to write convincingly of the mean, the murderous, the cruelty that shadows mercy and pleasure and ardor. But as one matures into a fuller grasp of the meaning of parenthood, to understand the worst becomes a crucial means of protecting the innocent. A mother's tendency to rescue fuels a writer's careful anger."
BL: What part does the Native American oral tradition of storytelling play in your life, and can you see that tradition sustaining itself when we talk about the death of the printed word?
LE:Growing up, I incorporated what I knew into the writing without understanding where it came from. It came as a surprise to me that it could be based anywhere else than in my mind. As I've grown older and written more and become more systematic with learning the stories and the tradition and listening to the stories told, I've often relied upon the folktale to inspire a piece. There is a very old Ojibwe folktale about the lazy husband and the sharp-tongued wife who go out to hunt a moose; it was a springboard for me for a wild ride that occurs around the end of the book.
BL: Do you ever worry that you will exhaust the supply of stories and tradition you got from your parents, that you will have to move into another arena, or does it replenish itself?
LE: The Ojibwe tradition is of endless depth, I've learned, and I know I'll never get to the bottom of it. I've studied the language and I'll never become a fluent speaker. I'll just continue my attempts to say a few words properly in the proper order. So I don't think there's a time when I'm going to exhaust what I'm writing about. But I do sometimes turn to the other side of my family, because my father is German and I have a very close relationship with him. His parents lived in Little Falls, Minnesota and ran a butcher shop - a very German thing to do. I spent a lot of my childhood there as well. So I had this wonderfully grounded childhood in which I had a very rich tradition going on, on either side.
BL: Speaking of your life as a mother, you've also written two children's books, Birchbark House and Grandmother's Pidgeon. Are there others?
LE: Yes, I hope to do a ten-book series, of which Birchbark House is the first one. I started these books because my mother was researching our own families - the migration across Minnesota into North Dakota - and she found these wonderful documents that showed how the Ojibwe side of my family moved across into the plains. It occurred about the same time as the Little House on the Prairie series and I thought it would be wonderful to have something else that people could turn to when they're reading that series. I read and enjoyed them in spite of the enormous racism in the books - not only the overt racism of Ma, who really despises Native people in the book, but the underlying premise that Pa goes into an empty wilderness and they find nobody there, and it's free for the taking. I wanted to write a story about the people who hear Pa's axe ringing in the woods and think, 'There goes the neighborhood.' Those are the people who were my mother's ancestors.
BL: You've said that, ideally, your first audience is a Native American audience. What kind of reception have you had from segments of that community?
LE: I've always, in person, found an incredibly warm acceptance. Maybe it's because of the innate politeness of Native American people. A number of Native American writers have broadened the popularity of Native writing and, I think, shown the wider public that there is no actual monolithic Native writing. But tribe by tribe, the traditions are so very different; it's like French versus Chinese, you know; it's a very different tradition.
BL: Who are these writers?
LE: A lot of people read Sherman Alexie's books. There is also Linda Hogan, Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo - a wonderful poet - Mark Turcotte, my own sister, Heid Erdrich, and Susan Power, who wrote The Grass Dance.
BL: You write about cultural identity, but your work isn't as overtly political as that of other Native American writers.
LE: I think that any decision you make in writing a book is a political decision and, whether you disavow it or not, the decision remains. If I've decided to write about a priest who's really a woman; that's a political decision. There's a reason I wrote about this subject. But I don't write the book as a polemical piece or a persuasive piece. It's in the decisions that a writer makes, I believe, that we see the writer's politics.
BL: Speaking of writers who deal with Native American subjects, there was a great controversy about Ian Frazier's book, On the Rez.
LE: My reaction to the book was mixed. On one hand, I like Ian Frazier's writing a lot and I could understand why he wanted to write this book. On the other, I found that it was a pretty painful portrait of an alcoholic and was asked, I think on the Atlantic Monthly website, what I thought about Frazier's book turning up on the cover. I said I would have preferred to see, for instance, Sherman Alexie's face on the cover, because what isn't celebrated is the fact that here is a Native person, a Native man, who is writing and making movies, doing this incredible creative work. What we see on the cover instead is a portrait of a destroyed human. I don't think that human represents Native life and Native culture and I was sorry to see it.
BL: Did he have the right to write the book?
LE: Native people have the right to write about non-Indians, and I think that once you begin to limit people's right to write about other people, then you limit our depth of understanding. There should be a way that we can write about one another without it always being political. So I can't say that he had no right. But I will say that I still wish Native people were celebrated for accomplishment rather than tragedy.
BL: Will we see more poetry coming from you?
LE: I don't know. I haven't found it an easy switch. Since I started writing novels, I don't seem to have the kind of compressed energy that one needs to write a poem. and I regret that.
BL: It requires a more concentrated burst?
LE: It does for me. When I first started writing, I was a poet and so nervous that I couldn't sit still. I took a scarf and tied myself around my chair so that I would sit down and write a longer piece of narrative and it worked. Now I can't get out of my chair; I keep writing. I don't seem to write the poems.
BL: I hear that you are a bookseller now with your own store.
LE: I started a bookstore with my sister, Heid, some friends and my daughters, and it really was a family project. Birch Bark Books has become a wonderful place for people to visit in Minneapolis. We focus on Native fiction, law and politics, and also sell jewelry and art. The bookselling itself has led me to read more deeply. I love putting books in other people's hands.
BL: Which books are you pushing into people's hands at the moment?
LE: Being Dead is a hauntingly, strange, beautiful love story that's well worth picking up. I'd also pick up Quarantine by Jim Crace. It's about forty days and forty nights in the desert. It's about Christ in the desert, and it's hilarious. Anything by Linda Hogan is good, and Joy Harjo just has a new book of poetry out. I also love the Tracy Chevalier book, Girl with the Pearl Earring, about the Vermeer paintings. That was lovely.
