Birchbark Books, in Minneapolis, is one of those great bookstores that, spread across the United States, asks their employees to recommend this or that title. The difference is that at Birchbark one of the recommenders, who signs her slips as Louise, is more than just a reader with good taste. Because Louise is Louise Erdrich (Little Falls, Minnesota, 71 years old), the great voice of native letters and one of the most admired writers in the country.
On a recent visit to the bookstore, among those chosen by Erdrich were a story about the Standing Rock uprising against the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota in 2016—it didn’t stop it, but it marked a generational awareness—or The loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai. “What Desai does in that novel is not easy,” explains Erdrich, who belongs to the club of those who, from Saul Bellow to Colson Whitehead or John Updike, have the two big prizes in American literature: the Pulitzer (in his case, for The night watchman) and the National Book Award (The Round House).
In a corner of the bookstore, which also sells crafts and jewelry from native peoples, there is a wall with that pair of award-winning titles and the rest of his work, including Mighty Red River, his latest novel. It just came out in Spanish; as usual, with the translation by Susana de la Higuera Glynne-Jones and by Siruela, who has been faithful to the prolific author for years.
The conversation with Erdrich, a Chippewa from the Turtle Mountain of North Dakota, was not in person in Minneapolis, which those days was manned by three thousand agents from Donald Trump’s immigration police, but rather took place days later by telephone. His lack of willingness to interview is known, but in this case it was also due to a health mishap that prevented him from participating as much as he would have liked in the protests.
In them, a motto was recurring: “No one is illegal on stolen land.” He criticizes those, like Trump, who want to deport immigrants from a place that has been plundered from those who were there before: the indigenous peoples. Erdrich is not convinced by the message, which landed at the Grammy Awards from singer Billie Eilish. “It seems too ‘all or nothing’ to me,” says the writer. “Either everyone is illegal except the natives or no one is illegal. I lean toward the latter. I don’t believe in borders. We all have the same right to exist. Minneapolis is on land plundered from the Dakota, but, with some exceptions, the people who arrive come to make it a better place,” says Erdrich, who feels “proud” of the response of her neighbors. Weeks after the interview, they managed to kick out ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
“This city has proven to be strong and brave in the past, such as after the murder of George Floyd,” he continues, “but what is happening now has no comparison.” Those anti-racist riots, which raged throughout the country, were present in his previous novel, The ghost of words, So he does not rule out that the revolt at 30 degrees below zero with which the city stopped Trump after the shooting deaths of two of his neighbors, Alex Pretti and Renée Good, could serve as literary inspiration.
Erdrich’s history of activism dates back to the 1973 occupation of the Wounded Knee Reservation in South Dakota, a turning point in the struggle of the American Indian Movement. It ended with Leonard Peltier sentenced to life in prison for the murder of two FBI agents in a process plagued by irregularities. Then in her twenties, the writer attended the trial, held in Fargo (North Dakota), in a federal court “a couple of blocks” from the house where she lived. “I knew some members of the jury. They convicted him out of fear and hatred, there was no evidence,” he recalls.
A couple of months ago, he adds, he went to visit Peltier, whom Joe Biden pardoned at the end of his term. The pardon came after half a century behind bars and decades of support from American culture to achieve his release. Erdrich considers that Biden was “a good president who knew how to surround himself with competent officials.” “His big mistake,” he adds, “was that he didn’t know how to leave. I blame both him and those around him. It pisses me off, because we shouldn’t be suffering from this Administration.”
The plot of Mighty Red River It takes place near where Peltier was tried, in Argos, an invented town in the Red River Valley, on the border with Minnesota. In that literary county, in the style of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, the series with which Erdrich became known already took place. It started with his successful debut, love filter (1984), and continued with The beet queen (1986), Footprints (1988) y Bingo Palace (1994).
The experience of motherhood
Those novels, whose writing she combined with motherhood—an experience “devastating, ridiculous, earthly, deeply warm, rich and profound,” as she defined it in the essay The Blue Jay’s Dance (the dance of the blue jay, without translation into Spanish)—earned her glowing praise from Philip Roth and placed her in a central place in American literature from the beginning. Then, her life took a turn with the suicide in 1997 of Michael Dorris, her first husband and father of her three biological daughters.
They seemed like the perfect literary couple. They met at the university where she studied and he was a professor. Dorris was his first agent, as well as the co-author of one of his novels. The two also raised three native children adopted by him, one of whom died in a traffic accident. They separated in 1995 and divorced the following year. Dorris took his life in a motel after being reported for sexual abuse by two of his daughters.
The new novel by Erdrich, who became a mother again after that, tells the story of a community touched by the crisis of 2008 — “a crisis that in many ways the United States has not yet overcome,” she says. The plot revolves around the unlikely courtship and wedding preparations of Gary, a white boy from a good family, and the native Kismet, a young, wounded Gothic girl who is in love with another man, with whom she reads. Madame Bovary. Kismet lives with his mother, who works on a sugar beet farm, like Erdrich herself, and believes in guardian angels.
Structured in short chapters, the novel is written with the particular rhythm that animates the author’s prose and after a process of documentation that is typical for her (in this case, about the sugar industry). It brims with humor, often absurd, that will be familiar to viewers of those Sterlin Harjo series that have been placed at the center of interest in native culture after years of being ignored by mainstream discourse. Above all, to Reservation Dogswhich tells the life on a reservation of some boys with a tendency to get into trouble. His characters do not respond to the serious stereotype of, say, the apparently mute Indian of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“Mainstream culture has tended to portray us as stoic, noble people,” Erdrich admits. “And although there is a lot of nobility, we also like to joke and laugh at those who take themselves too seriously. There is an attitude of letting life flow as it is, and that includes the ability to see the absurd and ridiculous nature of human beings. You can’t take anything so seriously that you lose sight of the fact that you are a rarity on the face of the Earth. The most important virtue in the life of native peoples is humility. The ability to ask yourself: ‘Who am I to be cruel and ‘Mean?’ We simply walk on this Earth; we are fortunate to walk on it,” he warns.
The writer defines herself as “mixed.” Her father was German and used to give her five cents to write stories for him when she was a child. The mother was Ojibwe with French ancestors. The two taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota.
They had seven children, one of whom is Heid Erdrich, the first poet laureate of the city of Minneapolis. For many years, their grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was the tribal president of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and the protagonist of The night watchman It is inspired by his fight against a US senator who tried in the 1950s to expel his people from the last piece of land reserved for them.
Erdrich has lived in Minneapolis for 25 years. He doesn’t understand life, he says, “without the closeness of family.” He still goes to visit his 91-year-old mother and frequently drives 10 hours to see his loved ones on the reservation.
That proximity is also professional in the case of their daughters. “They are my first readers,” explains the writer. Aza, one of them, is in charge of designing the covers of their books. Another, Pallas, works in the bookstore. It was there on the day of our visit. Birchbark is “birch bark” in Spanish. Erdrich says they gave it that name because some of the first books in North America were written by the Anishinaabe on scrolls of that bark. Those written by his descendants wait on the shelves of his bookstore. Sometimes they carry a slip of recommendation from a certain Louise.