Louise Erdrich
on Lake of the Woods

There is a small but select group of literary productions which take the personal essay to such heights of discursiveness as to enter an entirely new domain of expression. Unlike the relatively brief productions of, say, Hazlitt or Lamb, or even Montaigne, which tend to focus on a single theme—flip-flops, mad dogs, the demise of the supermarket carry-out boy—the type of work I'm thinking referring to moves from one subject to another with a nonchalance that has little to do with developing a thesis and a great deal to do with simply “thinking out loud.”

Junichiro Tanazaki's essay “In Praise of Shadows” is a prime example of the genre. It wanders from Japanese outhouses to why women used to blacken their teeth, to the significance of the shine on a copper pot, to a recipe for boiled cabbage, without ever seeming to tarry too long at any one place, or to lose the thread of connections. In recent years the German writer W. S. Sebald has revealed himself to be master of the form, especially in his collections Vertigo and the Rings of Saturn .

In her recent contribution to the National Geographic Society's Travel Series, Louise Erdrich have given us another fine example. The discursiveness begins immediately with the title: Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country. These words don't have much of a ring to them: It would have been better to say Islands and Books. In any case, the association of images produces no clear impression in the reader's mind. In fact, it sounds like a working title that no one could improve upon, and its one virtue, considered in retrospect, is that it describes more or less what the essay is about.

Specifically, Books and Islands details a trip Erdrich took to Lake of the Woods, which lies on the border between Minnesota and Ontario, to visit some painted rocks with her boyfriend, who lives in the vicinity and acts as a sort of shaman, often taking young men out the islands by boat for the four-day vision quest that remains a traditional means of initiation into manhood for the tribe. It might seem a little quaint for us to be referring to a man who's almost sixty as anyone's “boyfriend.” On the other hand, Louise informs us that he's a spry fellow and also the father of the infant daughter she bringing north with her.

A second objective of Louise's trip will be to visit the home and library of a man named Ernest Oberholtzer, now deceased, who lived for many years on an island in Rainy Lake. Oberholtzer was both a staunch environmentalist and an avid book-collector. The purpose of her two-pronged visit? She admits that islands don't really interest her. What Louise wants to expose is why books appeal to her so much? Beyond reading them incessantly, and writing more than a few herself, why did she go to the extreme of opening her own bookstore near the shores of Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis?

In the early going, this congeries of themes seems a little artificial, as if Louise were simply fulfilling an obligation for the National Geographic Society any way she could. But the individual elements involved—pictographs, old books, wilderness islands, and modern Ojibwe language and customs—are all interesting, considered in and of themselves, and before long we've been drawn into the world of this half-German Ojibwe novelist with a young daughter who obviously loves books and lots of other things, and is off to meet her shaman in the woods.

In preparing for her trip Louise purchases a large amount of loose tobacco, which among the Ojibwe, as she tells us, “begins every noteworthy enterprise and is given as a thank you note at the end of every significant event.” Sometimes people smoke it, more often they cast it into the wind or bury it at the base of a tree as an offering to the spirits. (Louise's favorite is a pipe tobacco with the brand name “Nokomis.”) Just when we're about to accuse her of “playing Indian,” she asks herself the question we would ask if we had the chance. Doe she believe all of this?

“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 of 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.”

Here, in plain prose, we have a simple description of the rise of the individual consciousness to reverence of her surroundings and situation through ritual practice. Confucius would have been pleased.

One of the great virtues of the book is that we're given a look at the Ojibwe culture from someone who knows it intimately, but is not compelled to remind us repeated of the truly great injuries and humiliations it has suffered, or to assert dogmatically the preternatural superiority of its woodland insights and customs. Louise's boyfriend Tobasonakwut may be a shaman, but one of her brothers is an environmental engineer who oversees the waste disposal systems on several Reservations in the area. Her own rudimentary command of the verb-heavy Ojibwe language, (which is considered one of the most difficult in the world,) allows her to share with us again and again the complex way words are formed from component parts. She introduces us to various bog plants that are commonly used by the Ojibwe as medicines. We learn about how stories are told, what the images on the island rocks mean. Mirage Island. Massacre Island. The bay where Tobasonakwat was born.

On their tour of the gigantic lake the trio eventually comes upon a channel in which vast quantities of a plant known as wiikenh is growing and Tobasonakwut cries out in anguish that no one has come to harvest it.

“His tone implies that this should all have been harvested, that the endless thick fringe of plants along the shore is an almost painful sight.”

Clearly the old ways are dying. Yet there are also signs of hope among the young, and Tobasonakwut hopes to gather sufficient funds to rebuild an abandoned Midewiwin (That is to say, medicine) lodge on one of the islands to serve as a teaching center for native lore.

For the time being, they stop to harvest some of the wiikenh themselves. Tobasonakwut pulls up selected plants by the roots and Louise steers the boat while holding the baby.

The incidents involved in Louise's island-hopping trip are all rather low-key, but the gentle pace of the proceedings seems appropriate to the setting. Anyone who has been spent time on the northern pine-edged lakes will be familiar with their mesmerizing, if not actually stupifying, effect on the mind, and this atmosphere can definitely be felt in the first three sections of the book.

“God is the lake and we are the waves.” Or at any rate, that is what Tobasonakwut's father once told him.

In the last two sections of Books and Islands , Louise describes her visit to the Oberholtzer estate, and here the ancient lore and world-view of the Ojibwe gives way to a form of bibliomania that's more familiar to us. Oberholtzer had a lot of books. He was also deeply interested in the welfare of the region, however. In 1912, at the age of 28, he convinced an elderly Ojibwe man to accompany him on a journey of exploration into the heart of the then-unmapped woods of northern Canada south of Reindeer Lake. They brought along 700 pounds of food, got lost, regained their bearings, starved, hallucinated, arrived at Hudson Bay only to find they'd missed their connection, then battled furiously against the encroaching winter. In the end they survived.

This same man was instrumental in preserving the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness. And somewhere along the way he also accumulated more than eleven thousand books on his island retreat in Rainy Lake.

Louise visits the island along with the Lac Court Orielles Language Society, sleeps in the man's house, peruses his books. She offers up a wonderful description of the Ojibwe woman who now manages the place, and is also a very good beaver-skinner.

Finally, back home in Minneapolis, Louise asks herself the same question. Why books? But the answer has already been provided by the recount of her travels. Why books? To experience. And to preserve. And to remember. Her own book takes us a certain way toward experiencing the Ojibwe life for ourselves, real and modern enough, and the Ojibwe's reluctance to lose touch with the wisdom, both practical and spiritual, that have allowed them to survive in that harsh and beautiful border region for centuries.