Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country (12 page)
Read Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country Online
Authors: Louise Erdrich
Birchbark Books is just off Lake of the Isles. I didn't even think about this before I left, but that's itâthe whole thing about islands and books. There really are two islands on Lake of the Isles and they are both wild
islands, little places in the city where, from a canoe, I've seen great horned owls, black-crowned night-herons, arctic tern, dozens of black or painted turtles swirling off logs, and once a bald eagle. Maybe I live among the books and islands, and also must visit them in more remote places, because I've decided, in some deeply interior way unavailable to my conscious mind until I've started writing
this
book, that I will order my life to deal with a hoary old cliché.
This cliché has truly nagged at me. It is a question that I've asked myself periodically ever since I was nine years old. The question is: What book would you take to a desert island? I even have the question taped to the top of a cigar box on the bookstore counter, a request to customers to write their favorites on slips of paper, a way to find out about their tastes and discover titles that we've overlooked. What book would you take to a desert islandâwhat a dismal thought! To have only one book to read over and over for years and years. Think of that miserable moment in the movie
Cast Away
when poor Tom Hanks opens a FedEx box and finds a
videocassette
. If only it had been a book! But which book should it have been? My solution is a dictionary. A dictionary would last and last. A dictionary would be a good thing to have arrived in that FedEx box. But even better to be like Oberholtzer and to store up 11,000. Or to be an Ojibwe raised on stories and to contain many books in mind. Or me, with a bookstore.
Books. Why?
So I can talk to other humans without having to meet them.
Fear of boredom.
So that I will never be alone.
Tobasonakwut, miigwech, kiizhawenimin. I would also like to thank everyone mentioned in these pages.
Â
To Ojibwe speakers and other expertsâI tried my best to get it right and went over it all with Tobasonakwut, but there are probably mistakes that should be corrected. If so, they are mine.
Louise Erdrich is a native of North Dakota, where she was raised by her Ojibwe-French mother and German-American father. She is the author of nine novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning
Love Medicine
and the National Book Award Finalist
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,
as well as poetry and children's books. Her most recent novel, the highly acclaimed
Master Butchers Singing Club,
is a national bestseller. She lives in Minnesota with her four daughters.
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