Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

Author:Louise Erdrich
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062309976
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-02-04T17:00:00+00:00

Offering

I am almost asleep when I realize that I have seen all that is depicted in the first rock painting, the one that I marveled over, the one that glowed from the rock in all of its complexity. I saw the wild rice, which is the spirit of the wild rice, I saw the bear, I saw the deer, and I saw the name. The next morning, we go back to the painting. Tobasonakwut ties up at the base of the rock. I bring a dish of food, including asema, up to the top of the rock. I also leave my favorite ribbon shirt.

It is a leave-taking. I have to tell myself not to look back as we travel away from the rock. It is as though I’ve left behind something intangible—not the shirt, the tobacco, or the food. It is as though I’ve written a poem and burned it. Given up a piece of my own spirit. I don’t understand the feeling that closes in on me. And even now, as I am writing in my study, and as I am looking at photographs I took of the paintings, I am afflicted with a confusing nostalgia. It is a place that has gripped me. I feel a growing love. Partly, it is that I know it through my baby and through her namesake, but I also had ancestors who lived here generations ago.

The Ojibwe side of my family, who ended up with the surname Gourneau, roamed from Madeline Island in Lake Superior, along what is now the Canadian border, through Lake of the Woods and down to Red Lake, and then out onto the Great Plains and eventually the Turtle Mountains. Baupayakiingikwe, Striped Earth Woman, was one of those ancestors, as was Kwasenchiwin, Acts Like A Boy. Our family was of the Ajijauk or Crane dodem, and the Makwa or Bear dodem. I can’t help but imagine that these two women, whose names my mother and sister have searched out of old tribal histories, walked where I’ve walked, saw what I’ve seen, perhaps traced these rock paintings. Perhaps even painted them.

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