Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country Read Free Page A

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 toldthat 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.

CHAPTER TWO
Islands
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    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 otherbrother, 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