When you come to the end of a section of your life, you do not consciously start the rest of your life with a new plan, a change of direction, or a goal in mind. You live day by day, doing the little things that are necessary—making the bed, brushing your teeth, getting the children off to school, buying a loaf of bread at the grocery store. Eventually out of those mundane events, something comes along. For most of us, it is something simple such as a job where we exercise a long-disused skill or going back to school to learn a new skill. We meet new people or renew old acquaintances so that day by day, the monochromatic grays of depression and loss take on the colors of life. At first, those colors are pastels—pale greens and yellows and pinks—as if we lived in a dimly lit room circumscribed by circumstances. For those of us who are lucky, someone or something turns up the light until now and then a vibrant red or green or blue catches our eye. We turn toward it, greedily, clutching it and nurturing it and hoping that it will bear fruit.
At the age of 44, when The Antelope Wife was published, Erdrich already had a considerable body of work behind her, and the riches of family and culture as well, but there were many years left for her to live and work and thrive. The color may have begun to return to her life in 1999, when she published her second children’s book, The Birchbark House. Her first children’s book, Grandmother’s Pigeon, was published in 1996, when her three oldest daughters, except for Madeline, were all 12 years old or less, and that first children’s book earned ecstatic reviews. The second children’s book was dedicated to daughter Persia, and she thanks this daughter on the Acknowledgments page and says that this book and others to follow are an attempt to retrace her family history.
School children are often introduced to early pioneer life in America through the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Erdrich’s books recall that same time period, but from the perspective of an American Indian (Ojibwe) child, Omakayas. Erdrich herself created little drawings, vignettes that illustrate the story. Well-received by the reading public as well as the critics, the book earned a finalist position for the National Book Award.
Another event that cheered Erdrich during the difficult years following the sexual abuse scandal and suicide of her husband began when she noticed a boarded-up storefront in Minneapolis on West 21st Street. It had once been a butcher shop, had last been a dentist’s office but had been closed for years. Erdrich and her sister, Heid, decided to buy it together and start a business selling books and native arts. They named the business Birchbark Books and Native Arts, maybe for the successful children’s book, but also because birch bark plays a prominent role in the Erdrich sisters’ Ojibwe culture. This tree bark was traditionally used to make houses and lightweight canoes, but also serving platters, plates, and trays for winnowing wild rice, a staple of the Ojiba diet, and even decorative items with designs bitten (yes, bitten by the artist’s teeth) into the wood. The work to get the old building in shape was daunting. The website for Birchbark Books and Native Arts states,
We are proud of our original wooden floor, which belonged to the meat market this once was. It took an enormous amount of volunteer effort to pry up two layers of plywood, three of linoleum, and one of tarpaper and then to extract thousands of nails from the boards underneath. The result is very weathered and uneven, but the real thing.1
The centerpiece of the store is a Catholic confessional booth that Erdrich found in an architectural salvage store. Heid had suggested that they use it as a listening booth for CDs and tapes, while Erdrich’s mother thought it would be a good place to shelve books on sin. Ultimately, the confessional is decoration, but a framed copy of the 1837 treaty with the Ojibwe is housed inside, an ironic statement about who has sinned against whom. A canoe hangs from the ceiling. The store sells native arts and crafts as well as books.
Opened in July of 2000, more than 12 years later, the store is still operating next door to the Kenwood Café, which gets an advertising plug on the bookstore’s website. In a time when small, privately owned bookstores are being driven out of business by big box bookstores, online sites, and e-books, it is a miracle that Birchbark is thriving. The store’s success can be, of course, partly because one of the owners, Louise Erdrich, is a phenomenally successful writer, and the other owner, sister Heid, is a talented writer herself, if somewhat less commercially successful.
Louise does not run the store herself, but has delegated those responsibilities to Heid and to a staff of competent and hardworking people. The store is also an arts center that has hosted literary events over the years. Such native authors as Ada Deer, Joy Harjo, Thomas King, Jim Northrup, and John Trudell have all presented their work at the store and left their autographs. While the bookstore was being renovated and opened, Erdrich discovered a disconcerting fact.
At the age of 46, she was pregnant again. The father was Tobasonakwuk, an Ojibwe traditional healer. When and how and where they met and the history of their romance is something Erdrich has never divulged. The child, another girl, was born in 2000 and named Azure according to interviewer, Karen Olson.2 However, when this author asked the names of her children, Erdrich gave the child’s Anishinaabe name, Nenaa’ikiizhikok. It may be that Azure is the English translation of the Anishinaabe word. Considering the public scrutiny that Erdrich and her daughters endured over the accusations against Dorris and his subsequent suicide, Erdrich’s reluctance to give any information about this last child and the child’s father is understandable and even laudable. The two things she values most in her life are her family and her writing, in that order of priority.
While she was pregnant with her last child and busy with the bookstore renovations and opening, she was also doing what she always does—writing. One result of that work was published in 2001, The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse, which brought back characters from her earlier novels, Tracks, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace. Erdrich said that this is a book that she had begun back in 1988, so it may be the novel that she kept secret from Michael Dorris. According to Karen Olson, Erdrich,
. . . originally intended it to explain how all the earlier novels came into being. She imagined the local priest in Argus, Father Damien, who had appeared as a minor character in Love Medicine [and in Tracks], divulging all the confessions of the community to a writer who would turn out to be Erdrich herself. It wasn’t until six years and several books later that Erdrich picked up The Last Report again.3
The book resuscitates what is arguably the most fascinating character that Erdrich ever created, the woman who started out as Pauline Puyat and became the nun, Sister Leopoldo. Pauline, a native woman who denied her heritage in order to be accepted as a nun, was one of the two alternating voices in Tracks. Most readers feel sympathy for the character early in the book when she declares herself to be so plain and unnoticeable as to disappear in comparison with the striking main character of Fleur. However, readers’ patience and sympathy quickly wane when it becomes obvious that Pauline is a devious liar, jealous of others, and willing to commit almost any evil act for revenge while declaring her own piety. She takes her vows and becomes Sister Leopoldo in Tracks, but the character was too juicy, too uniquely evil to let go. The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse is also about Father Damien, a woman who has disguised her female identity and lived as a priest for 50 years, and about a church investigator sent out to document the life of Sister Leopoldo when she is being considered for sainthood, which seems a bizarre consideration for most readers who are privy to Sister Leopoldo’s dark evil secrets.
The book opens with Agnes DeWitt, a woman left distraught, confused, and directionless after her lover’s death. Agnes met a priest who was traveling to a new assignment among the Anishinaabe and had been intrigued by his missionary status and his lack of enthusiasm for his new assignment. After both Agnes and the priest are swept away in a flood, Agnes discovers the dead priest’s body and assumes his identity.
While such transgendered people are not readily accepted in dominant American society, traditional American Indian societies have not only accepted them, but honored them. Two-spirited is the term used by many American Indian tribes, which is not meant to imply a sexual binary, but rather, a range of sexual identification, expression, and gender specific social roles. Mainstream culture has suppressed two-spirited people, but many American Indian groups maintained or have more recently revived gender designations that go beyond male/female. Among American Indians, males and females each have a single spirit at their center, but transgendered, lesbian, gay, or bisexual people have two spirits, hence the origin of the two-spirit term. Trickster figures such as coyote, rabbit, raven, or spider, are magical, mystical creatures that transgress boundaries of ethics, time, and space, and even the boundaries of gender.
In Little No Horse, Erdrich constructs the character of Agnes/Father Damien as a White person rather than an American Indian, which allows the character more anguished internal, sometimes doubting thoughts than if the character had been American Indian because Father Damien/Agnes does not come from a society that readily accepts transgendered people. It takes an effort of will for Father Damien to carry on and accept her/himself as the male priest as well as an effort to seem entirely male to other characters. She must be aware of and practice those physical gestures that hint to gender, as well as learn to conceal her monthly menstrual flow. She is a two-spirited person who cannot openly declare her sexually, but is forced to conceal it within the boundaries of dominant society, a Catholic society that has declared any gender expression other than all male or all female as being anathema before the Christian God.
While Father Damien is successful in disguising his female body for most of the other characters within the story, it is not so for some others, particularly the two priests, Father Gregory and Father Jude. However, when Father Jude has a sudden insight into the true nature of Father Damien’s sexuality, he dismisses it with the notion that perhaps Damien has a twin sister that Jude may have met before, blinding himself to reality within the acceptable context of Catholicism. However, when Father Gregory discovers the female body of Damien, he falls in love with her and urges her to run away with him, but Agnes demurs saying, “I cannot leave who I am.”4 Gregory and Damien’s affair introduces the possibility that Agnes/Damien is not a person transgendered by internal sexual imperative, but is really a woman who masquerades as a man to overcome the impossible life situation in which she found herself, or yet a third possibility—that Agnes/Damien is bisexual. All of these possibilities and more are acceptable within traditional American Indian societies, but not usually—at least not at the time setting of the story—within mainstream society and certainly not within the dogma of Catholicism. Here again, readers see Erdrich working out her own complex and sometimes conflicting spiritual indoctrination within the context of fiction.
These issues of social acceptance or rejection of lesbian, gay, transgendered, or bisexual people were in the forefront of political discussions in the United States before, during, and after the time Last Report was published and continue to be hot button topics. Deirdre Keenan wrote that Erdrich’s work:
. . . cannot provide a panacea for the gender troubles in mainstream culture. It is fiction, after all. . . . In the current political struggles between those who advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and those who would amend suppressive and exclusive legislation, Native American Two Spirit traditions—whether represented in fiction or nonfiction—could mediate a vision where all individuals’ gender identities and sexualities could be honored.5
Early excerpts published in The New Yorker magazine created interest in the eventual book publication, and the publisher advertised the book in promotional ads. When the book was released, Erdrich went on a book tour, of course. Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club both made this novel one of their selections. Most of the reviews were excellent using such words as “beguiling” (New York Times Book Review), “heartfelt” (Los Angeles Times), and “spellbinding” (Elle). The Los Angeles Times reviewer wrote, “Messy, ribald, deeply tragic, preposterous and heartfelt,” adding, “The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse is a love story, and what shines most brilliantly through its pages are Erdrich’s intelligence and compassion.”6 If anyone thought that The Antelope Wife might have been a fluke, that Erdrich’s writing without Dorris might not be of the same quality as her earlier collaborative work with him, this novel certainly ended that speculation for good. Not all the reviews of Little No Horse were completely complimentary; none ever are. For example, the headline for a review by Mark Schechner printed in the New York Buffalo News reads—“Erdrichland Suffers a Surfeit of Characters, Plots.”7 The headline is, however, more than a little deceptive for the bulk of the article is complimentary. Schechner continued with, “. . . Erdrich remains a formidable talent, indeed, a force whom nothing deters.”8 The review praises with faint damnation, not entirely a bad situation for Erdrich.
Of course, Erdrich had other works in progress, including another children’s book that would be published the following year in 2002, The Range Eternal. Not about land, as one might expect, the story is about a different kind of “range,” a stove used for both heating and cooking, which is at the heart of the home where the young main character lives. Only 32 pages in length, this book aimed at a younger audience than her first two children’s books, perhaps because Erdrich now had a very young child.
Even parents who are not writers sometimes make up original stories to tell their children at bedtime when the classic stories of Dr. Seuss become too well-worn. This story may have begun as one Erdrich made up for Nenaaikiizhikok (Kiizhikok for short). Rather than black and white drawings, this one has colorful paintings as illustrations, but Erdrich left that task to others. She was busy, after all, with a baby to care for, a house, the bookstore, her extended family of parents, brothers and sisters and their families, and more novels that she continued to work on and that would see publication in the next few years. But there was a nonfiction book that would come out next, before any more novels or children’s books: Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country.9
When Kiizkikok was 18 months old, Erdrich packed the baby into her blue van and took a road trip up to Lake of the Woods in Canada where she, Kiizhikok, and the child’s father canoed to several islands and cultural sites over the course of several days. From there, Erdrich and the child traveled in the van to an island on Rainy Lake, where a long deceased former woodsman and wanderer and collector of books named Ernest Oberholtzer had lived with his Ojibwe friends and collected more than 11,000 books, which are still housed there in his main residence and other outbuildings on the property.
The confluence of these two ideas—islands and books—provides the title for this nonfiction book, in which Erdrich opens up her life to the public in a way she had never done before. She writes in small statements that allow glimpses into her life without revealing much background behind those enigmatic comments. She is like the exotic dancer Sally Rand with her feather fan, promising to reveal all, but revealing very little. The personal statements and glimpses into her real life beneath and behind her books are scattered here and there, but most of the first two-thirds of the book contains historical and cultural information about the islands that she, Kiizhikok, and Tobasonakwuk visit by boat. Erdrich lyrically describes the natural landscape—the trees, the lakes, the wild plants from which medicine can be made, and the animals that inhabit these places. The book also contains descriptions of ancient rock paintings and pictograms and more recent ruins of abandoned human habitation, including the place where Tobasonakwuk was born.
Gradually, she reveals a little of Tobasonakwuk’s life. He is a spiritual healer, a medicine man who conducts sweat lodge ceremonies and supervises petitioners who undertake a four-day retreat for a vision quest. His practice is spiritual, to be respected as much as the Christian pastor who leads and guides a church full of parishioners, but vastly different from the minister or priest. While the priest or the pastor usually has a salary paid by the church and is provided with a comfortable place to live, sometimes even a car and an expense account, a native medicine man has no such economic bulwark. Nor does the traditional medicine man own or rent a lavish lodge in a scenic location, where he conducts “authentic” ceremonies for wealthy or at least upper-middle class White people who want an alternative spiritual experience and can afford to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege.
Medicine men such as Tobasonakwuk, and sometimes medicine women, rarely take money for their spiritual guidance. Rather, they are given offerings—always tobacco, and often ordinary food items such as three-pound cans of coffee, flour, sugar, canned goods, or household goods such as blankets and sheets and towels. Money offerings are frowned upon but have become more necessary in a capitalist society, where the rent and the utility bills cannot be paid for with a blanket or a can of coffee. It is a difficult life that will never bring riches or fame, only the satisfaction of being of use to people who suffer pain, seek guidance for some important decision, or wish to offer thanks to the spirit world for some boon that they have been granted. If it is a difficult life for the medicine man practitioner, it is even more so for a woman who chooses to love and live with such a person and bear his children. (Most spiritual practitioners are men. Women who choose to become medicine persons usually do so later in life, when their children are grown.)
Mary Brave Bird has written frankly about what it is like to be the partner of a medicine man in both Lakota Woman and Ohitka Woman.10 While there are moments of spiritual wonder, there are also great difficulties because the wife of a medicine man must share her husband with whomever is in need, and those in need do not show up for appointments on a 9–5 schedule such as a doctor’s patients. They may come at 2:00 A.M.; they may come with a dozen relatives; they may come drunk; they may bring children who must be cared for, and everyone must be fed and found sleeping places out of the cold or the heat or the rain. Mary Crow Dog/Brave Bird was unable to endure this life and eventually left her medicine man/partner, Crow Dog. His spiritual practice continues mostly in the upper Midwest states of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Minnesota, although he does travel to other locations around the country and the world from time to time. He has formed domestic partnerships and marriages with other women through the years, some of whom have been able to tolerate and even thrive with him and his unusual spiritual calling.
Erdrich’s relationship with Tobasonakwuk probably survives because they live separately for most of the year; she in Minneapolis with her daughters, her writing, and her bookstore, while he continues his spiritual practice and his other work in tribal governance in Canada. An online blog states:
Tobasonakwuk Kinew is an esteemed member of the University of Winnipeg community in his multiple roles as Elder and Faculty for the Indigenous Governance department and Master’s in Developmental practice with a focus on [the] Indigenous Development program.11
The above information indicates that Tobasonakwuk probably has an income over and above what might be provided by his spiritual practice. There is no information in Erdrich’s book about how or when she met Tobasonakwuk. It is impossible to know if he visits in Minneapolis or if they only meet when Erdrich travels to Canada. It would seem from the sketchy information available, that they spend most of their lives living separately. Some people need the constant presence of another person, to live so close they almost breathe through the same straw, but that is the life Erdrich had with Dorris, which ended so badly. Tobasonakwuk is there as an anchor for her life and for Kiizhikok, but they do not need to dance attendance upon each other. He would never tell her that a character in one of her stories is inauthentic or needs further development, and she would never tell him the proper way to conduct a vision quest ceremony. They each accept and support their individual passions without interference from the other.
On her trip north to visit the islands of Lake of the Woods with Tobasonakwuk, Erdrich was not even sure where she would find him. She writes, “They [her brothers] ask about him and about my plans for this trip. I am forced to say that, as usual, I have no exact idea how I’ll actually meet up with him. Although, as always, I am sure it will happen.”12 The book details and emphasizes shared experiences between Erdrich and Tobasonakwuk that all humans need in order to build a common history of living and loving, such as the moment when they see a sturgeon leap from the lake.
All of a sudden between our boat and the fringed woods a great fish vaults up into the air. . . . The fish I just saw was not a muskie. It was even bigger. Tobasonakwuk sees it from the corner of his eye and slows the boat down.
“Asema,” he says, and puts the tobacco in the water. That fish was the nameh. The sturgeon. Tobasonakwuk is happy and moved to see it because, he says, “They rarely show themselves like that.”13
The book also offers moments of tender concern for each other, such as a point in their boat trip when Erdrich attempts a climb up a rock face to see a thunderbird rock painting and to leave a tobacco offering. She gives up because the path to the painting is broken by an open space with a steep drop. Tobasonakwuk undertakes the climb in her place, and returns after successfully leaving the tobacco offering in front of the painting. She is dismayed, and as she puts it, “just a little pissed off.” He tells her that he got there by jumping, and she responds, “You could have broken your leg!” He demurs that it isn’t the 15 feet that she insists it is, but more like six feet. She says, “Don’t ever do that again!” As they travel on, she muses about his “stubborn-headed insistence that he’s still a young man.” Finally, she says, “You’ve got to quit doing things like this,” but then acknowledges that her words “will have no effect, and besides, this is one of the reasons I love him. He’s a little crazy, in a good way, half teenager and half akiwenzii.”14
The last part of this book recounts Erdrich’s visit to the island on Rainy Lake just across the border in Canada from International Falls, Minnesota. As an Ojibwe person, a writer, and lover of books, she is, of course, fascinated with the place where Oberholtzer spent most of his life under semi-primitive conditions in the wild while collecting a wide variety of books, from Keats, and Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman to volumes on sexuality. On the island, she examines and reads parts of the books, but also interacts with some unique people who live nearby, who care for the books and the property and share her love of the place.
Back home in Minneapolis, she is faced immediately with death, not of a human but of a living being. One of the old trees in her yard—the one she named Old Stalwart—has been condemned by the city as a victim of Dutch Elm disease and must be destroyed. Erdrich grieves for the tree, and as it falls, a reader cannot help but be reminded of one of the final scenes in Tracks, where Fleur has sawed partly through the trunks of the trees around her house so that when the lumber company arrives to remove her from the property, she cast a spell to bring the trees down to kill or injure the usurpers. No one dies when Old Stalwart comes down, but the sense of sadness and loss is palpable in Erdrich’s words,
. . . I watch it go, with Kiizhikok, and feel the shock of its passage, a resounding shudder of the earth that tingles in our feet. That’s it. It is gone. This has been a warm winter and a record number of elms have succumbed, as the deep cold helps kill off the beetles that spread the sickness. As I am finishing this book, the city stump grinder arrives, and by the end of the day his rotary blade has turned the rest of Old Stalwart into a pile of chips. It will be another hundred years, if the house survives this long, before a tree grown in its place tops the roofline and teases the sky.15
This book is a travelogue that charts a circular journey from Minneapolis to Canada and back again, but also a journey though a few weeks of Erdrich’s life that may reveal more about her and in greater depth than all the interviews she ever gave, with or without Dorris. It is a gift freely given to her readers. A writer owes her readers a good story, fair value for the price of the book, but nothing more. However, most humans have an insatiable curiosity, as was demonstrated by the interest in the Erdrich–Dorris relationship after his suicide. Some readers want to know not only the story, but everything about the person who created the story. Here, Erdrich offers some biographical information, but only what she is comfortable revealing. Much is left to the imagination, like Sally Rand with her fan, and just like the fan, in this book, Erdrich misdirects the eye, so now you see it—or think you see it—and now you do not. Some entertainers—musicians, writers, artists—thrive on attention, need it to fuel their work as much as they need air, water, and food to sustain their bodies. Erdrich’s work is fueled and sustained by her family and her heritage. Given her preferences, she would never give a single interview. Asked by one interviewer, “What single thing would improve the quality of your life?” she responded, “Not doing publicity.” But, she does it, because, as she responded to the question, “What is the most important lesson life has taught you,” she said, “There is always the need for some publicity.”16
Erdrich had stretched her repertoire with Books and Islands, but she also published within her comfort zone in 2003 bringing out a book of poetry, Original Fire, and her eighth novel, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. As with her earlier novels, a portion of this one, too, had been previously published as a short story, “The Butcher’s Wife,” in The New Yorker. Interestingly, a poem with the same title was published in her first collection of poetry, Jacklight, back in 1984. This novel, too, got mostly good reviews, but The New York Times published one that praised and one that panned it. Michiko Kakutani, who had written glowingly about most of Erdrich’s other works, praised this one as well, when she wrote—“[the novel is] emotionally resonant, [Erdrich displays] sheer authority as a storyteller, her instinctive sympathy for her characters, her energetic inventiveness, her effortless ability to connect public and private concerns.” However, reviewer Brooke Allen, in the New York Sunday Times wrote that Erdrich’s “lyrical gifts cannot always keep up with her soaring ambitions,” criticized the characters as not believable, and called it “too disorganized, too unfocused, too wide-ranging to sustain much force.”17
While this book is in her usual style, her subject matter and characters are somewhat different from earlier books. Most of the attention in her earlier novels is on her Anishinaabe heritage, with some nods to the German side of the family as in The Beet Queen. The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, however, specifically honors Erdrich’s German grandfather who immigrated to the United States in 1920 after fighting for Germany in World War I. This grandfather, Ludvig Erdrich, whose photo appears on the cover of the hardback edition, was a butcher. Erdrich states,
He was an amazing human being. He worked slavishly in order to earn the money for his family to join him. My father idolized him—so although the character of Fidelis Waldvogel isn’t my grandfather, I still wanted to write about someone like him, like the people who came to America and struggled so hard to survive.18
While the main character of the novel honors Erdrich’s grandfather Ludvig, the plot of the story is an admixture of Ojibwa and German stories from both ethnicities of characters, such as Erdrich’s own heritage. At 388 pages in the Harper Perennial edition, this is one of her longest, most ambitious books, almost as long as the novel jointly written with Dorris, The Crown of Columbus. Brooke Allen’s comments that The Master Butcher’s Singing Club suffers from a surfeit of characters is not without merit, but those who love Erdrich’s work are willing to engage and grapple with the cast for the pleasure of Erdrich’s poetic language and vivid descriptions of people and landscapes.
The poetry collection that was also published in 2003, Original Fire, is a return to the genre of her earlier writing roots. This book includes works previously published in Jacklight and Baptism of Desire with some new poems as well. These are not poems with classic rhyming patterns, but free verse. This is the kind of poetry she wrote in Jacklight, but the new poems in this third book of poetry eschew even informal free verse. These are narrative poems instead, much more in the style of native poet Adrian Louis. The title of this book is taken from the final section, all new poems, about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, where she writes about the “soft and original fire” in the beginning lives of her children.
Erdrich’s writing career began with poetry, but poems were too small, too finite, to contain her epic, sweeping stories and complex characters that she elaborated upon within her novels. Once she had written the novels, she returned to those themes and ideas, here and there plucking out representative nuggets to represent in poetry. Of this third book of poetry, reviewer John Freeman wrote,
What makes Original Fire so abundantly sexy is not its description of the act itself, but the way Erdrich weaves desire into themes of memory, home and history . . . Erdrich has sublimated the ferocity of her desire into parenthood, its watchfulness now tender and nurturing. These flames will no longer burn down the house. They will heat it.19
Most authors count it as a supreme accomplishment to write and publish one book every three or four years. From 2001–2003—in three years—Erdrich published five books, and three of those—Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, and Original Fire—in one year, 2003. Further, most writers work in one genre: poetry or fiction (which can be broken into the two sub-genres of short story and novel), or creative nonfiction. Erdrich published three books in three different genres in one year, and all of them were successful, both commercially and critically. That in itself is some kind of miracle.
1. Birchbark Books and Native Arts Store website, Birchbarkbooks.com/ourstory.
2. Karen Olson, The Complicated Life of Louise Erdrich (Barnes & Noble, 2001). An excerpt from this book is currently available on research website www.highbeam.com, but this author’s searches have turned up no extant copies of the book.
3. Ibid.
4. Louise Erdrich, The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 53.
5. Dierdre Keenan, “Unrestricted Territory: Gender, Two Spirits, and Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 30:2 (2006): 11.
6. Staff writer, Book Reviews, The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse. Los Angeles Times. http://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/792/the-last-report-of-the-miracles-at-little-no-horse.
7. Mark Schechner, “Erdrichland Suffers A Surfeit of Characters, Plots,” Buffalo News, April 8, 2001.
8. Ibid.
9. Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2003).
10. Mary Crow Dog, with Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman (New York: Grove Press, 1990), and Mary Brave Bird, with Richard Erdoes, Ohitika Woman (New York: Grove Press, 1993). Lakota Woman was made into a movie in 1994, produced by TNT and Jane Fonda, starring Irene Bedard.
11. Ojibway Confessions, Rightojibway.blogspot.com/2011/10/tobasonakuk-peter-kinew-recieves.html (misspelling of “receives” original in the web reference).
12. Erdrich, Books and Islands, 23.
13. Ibid., 74–75.
14. Ibid., 69–70.
15. Ibid., 132.
16. Louise Erdrich, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 5.
17. Quoted from Deborah Caulfield Rybak and Jon Tevlin, “Bookmarks: Erdrich Praises Estrogen,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 16, 2003.
18. Erdrich, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, 6.
19. John Freeman, “POETRY: Passion still burns brightly in Erdrich’s fiery poems,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 7, 2003.