Louise Erdrich. (The Progressive Interview).

Louise Erdrich once mused that Native American literature is often about coming home, returning to the land, the language and love of ancient traditions--a theme opposite of Western literature, which is about embarking on a journey, finding adventures beyond one's beginnings. Now, the critically acclaimed Erdrich has come home to the land of her American Indian heritage.

Though she was raised on the rich plains of North Dakota, Erdrich, the eldest of seven children born to parents of German and Ojibwe Indian descent, spent. much of her adult life on the East Coast. Far from her mother's birthplace on the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe reservation, far from the Catholic school she attended in Wahpeton, North Dakota, she found a place at Johns Hopkins University and Dartmouth College, where her writing brought her immense success.

Her first novel, Love Medicine (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1984), became a literary headline. This story about generations of Ojibwe families had a very modest press run when first published. But it won the National Book Critics Circle Award and found a worldwide audience. In the decade that followed, titles such as The Beet Queen (Henry Holt, 1986), The Bingo Palace (Harper Flamingo, 1998), and Tracks (Perennial Library, 1989), her personal favorite, would earn Erdrich devoted fans and the admiration of critics, who laud her poetic prose and gift for weaving time and place.

Her latest novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (HarperCollins, 2001), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Erdrich says that for her, this story about a woman posing as a priest in an Indian community fell short of her expectations.

Today, her home is a quiet Minneapolis neighborhood. Living close to her family and to a vibrant urban American Indian community is where she has longed to be for years. These days she finds herself reflecting on the journey that brought her here. She has survived those early days of intense public appeal, including being named one of People magazine's most beautiful people. But she was never comfortable with the media's zeal to transform her into something more than a woman from a modest midwestern small town who loved words. A walk through the woods, she says, has always given her more pleasure than a cross-country book tour.

Erdrich has also survived some much-publicized personal strife. In 1997 her husband, writer Michael Dorris, committed suicide in the midst of messy divorce proceedings. Erdrich has found peace and a new path that includes overseeing a little bookstore, Birchbark Books, and being a mother again.

It is a balmy, unseasonably warm February afternoon in Minneapolis. Erdrich is in her bookstore purchasing jewelry from an Indian artisan. Afterward, Erdrich pushes a stroller as we walk through the snowless streets to her home. We visit in her dining room, which has been turned into a nursery of toddler toys and picture books. "As you can see, we have a lot of dinner parties," Erdrich teases while watching her daughter scamper around the room.

She is gracious and accommodating during the interview--not as uncomfortable and guarded as she has been with reporters in the past. Her voice is filled with laughter throughout our conversation, much of it carrying a hint of self-deprecation, which is the cultural cornerstone of Indian humor.

Erdrich is most engaged when the subject turns to the Ojibwe language. She is deeply involved in learning the language and finding out more about her Ojibwe roots. American Indian languages are in danger of becoming extinct. Reclaiming the Ojibwe language for herself and her daughter (she has replaced words in her child's picture books with Ojibwe words) is a paramount mission for Erdrich.

Q: Talk about your process of writing.

Louise Erdrich: I take little notebooks with me when I walk. I keep notebooks of odd events I hear about. My dad tells me he used to collect weird bank robbery stories. I get a lot from little bits of historical research, too. Some of it is from family history; a lot is from local history. I love local history museums, and I love driving to North Dakota. A lot of it is plain made up. But I just have to sit down and be there every day. I really do believe in being there for the work that has to come. I go to my little room and sit. To have the freedom to sit down in your chair and to not know where anything's going to come from. I suppose that is the one big adventure in my life right now, not knowing where the story is going to come from.

Q: Besides fiction and poetry, have you ever engaged in other forms of writing?

Erdrich: Not really. I don't think I'll write in any other form, such as playwriting. I'm completely nondramatic that way. I never grew up with any sense of theater, drama. I just could never do it. I have no interest in a screenplay, either. My stories are tucked far away in my thoughts. I never am actively seeing them worked out. I grew up without television. My parents were very careful about it. I think that is a lot of the reason I love language. I really liked Shakespeare in high school. King Lear is very powerful to me. It has always been my ground text. Flannery O'Connor. J. E Powers, I've always loved. I love Toni Morrison and Philip Roth.

Q: How do you react to critical reviews?

Erdrich: Sometimes I get vicious things slung my way. I think you have to have a few of those. But I don't have a terribly fragile ego. I can't. I just have been through too much. I have occasionally been really hurt, but then I step back and say, "Why am I even concerned about this?" I suppose if I were to be pure-minded about it I would not even read them. But I care. I do want to know. There have been times when I felt someone has taken such care about the book that even when something is negative I do think about it. Being a book critic is not like some sort of huge highly paid job that everyone wants to have. People who are writing criticism are devoted to literature. It's the only reason they do it. Most people don't have some particular ax to grind.

Q: You have never struck me as someone who has been caught up in the media attention of being a well-known author.

Erdrich: My family would never accept me like that. They would kill me. I would be a perfect jackass if I really got caught up in that. My family is very realistic, and everyone has worked very hard to keep everyone humble, let's put it that way. My mother would certainly not let me get caught up.

Q: The book you are now writing focuses on a German immigrant man. Given that you have both Ojibwe and German ancestry, are you finding parallels to your Native-themed work?

Erdrich: I am finding it harder to have an ironic view. And I think it's because, for whatever reason, I do not feel that much part of a German community, although I am really close to my dad. I feel I haven't gotten all the humor yet in this book, even though it is set in the same area as the others I've done. The main character leaves Germany and comes over here. I have been reading stacks of stories about German prisoners of war. I find it fascinating reading. I had a German prisoner of war in The Antelope Wife. But he was captured by the Ojibwe. But there is also no salvation in this new one. There is not as much redemption. God does not make an appearance.

Q: I would have imagined you would have found a number of connections between Germans and Ojibwe in this new book.

Erdrich: You would think so. But there is a difference. I think the difference is in the humor and the desperation to be well regarded. In this book, my characters are always trying to make certain that they are well regarded in their town. I don't know if that's a German thing or a North Dakota thing. Or if I grew up with some of that, this whole obsession with appearances in a small town. You are just in such a narrow range of what's acceptable. It's not so much part of reservation life; there is not a broad sweep of what can be accepted in a small town. My characters in this book have a desperation to belong. It's different for me to write this kind of person.

Q: You didn't grow up that way yourself in your small North Dakota town?

Erdrich: We did. We were regarded as the town eccentrics. Town oddballs. And now we can be very proud of it, but at the time it was not easy. Now we have our pride, hard-won pride about our oddities. We were seen as being "unique." "They are so unique." "Well, they're really different."

It's not easy in a small town. I think what happens is that when small towns finally realize they can't break you, they become proud of you or embrace your eccentricities. I think it's a fascinating stroll when you look at how you start. Thinking, "I've broken with my small town roots, and I'm going to be a writer." And then you get this desperation to be conventionally approved, and it comes back and it's haunting. It rides you for a long time. I feel now, finally, that I don't have to worry about that personally. Part of that is just because I've been through the worst of it. I don't care anymore.

Q: Did that longing intensify after you became acclaimed with people suddenly recognizing you, and you not recognizing them?

Erdrich: I never felt that recognition. I didn't take it very personally. I did feel enormous pressure to keep up with whatever it was I was supposed to be. It's funny, I have never really talked about this. The topic has been on my mind a lot because of these characters and because I realize I'm writing a lot about a certain point in this character's life that is very similar to my life where now I really don't want any big adventures. I just want a tranquil pattern to envelop my family. It's as though I'm trying to keep out of God's way. I really do not want God to notice me. I just want to be able to go about my daily business and try to keep this very quiet routine.

I just want to deepen my understanding of things I've only understood the surface of. Ojibwe mysticism. I've only understood politics in a very limited way. I've only understood anything I've ever written about on this surface level. I've always enjoyed the mundane. But I haven't really studied very hard. I have not been a good student of everything around me. I think I've been living so fast, but you do that when you have so many kids. I am looking forward to being more reflective. I need to look back and see everything that's happened.

Q: In Last Report, we learn Father Damien is actually a woman. There seem to be more issues of identity in your newer work.

Erdrich: I think there is a more pointed, political, Native identity in Love Medicine and Tracks. But now it's more about identity in a sense that includes family, gender, sexual identity--every kind of way that we label ourselves or attempt to root ourselves. It's the "Who am I?" question. It's much more than who we are in a social sense. It's a religious question in the end. We all know how we label ourselves. The real question comes down to whether we are godly creatures or a mass of differentiated cells. That's the ultimate identity question. It's impossible not to attempt to ask. You need a personal answer. You need some kind of assurance. At least I keep striving to give myself some sort of assurance, even if it's a negative assurance.

Q: This recent novel embraced many themes in Catholicism and Ojibwe spirituality. A lot of people describe your work, and that of other Native writers, as having a surreal aesthetic. But surrealism is not usually a mere literary device in Native literature.

Erdrich: It's not. I find this very interesting. This whole question of surrealism, magic realism. I think there are certain Native people who are able to communicate with something I don't understand. That is the mystery, the enigma. I think the humility of people who make that connection is what really impresses me.

Q: You have a strong connection to Ojibwe spirituality, more so than your Catholic self. Do you take any comfort or solace from the Church?

Erdrich: The language in the Bible is very inspiring. I think the pure message of Christ on love is very similar to very basic Ojibwe teachings. Nothing in the Church dogma is that pure, after all. It's so bound up in right living. I don't get much comfort out of that.

When I go to Turtle Mountain I stay with the Sisters up there. I really like them. I like being in a church building. I will go into churches and just sit there.

Q: Learning Ojibwe is very important to you, and the language informs your work. What are your concerns about this language being taught out of context, away from a tribal-centered world?

Erdrich: I think it's a great problem. The real life, blood, and guts of a language is in the everyday interactions between people; it's in everything you say to your kids and they say back to you. So how are we going to reclaim Ojibwe if it's only taught in a classroom? If it's not taught in the home from the very beginning, is that a real language, or is that an academic exercise? Is it giving us some gloss of what it is to be Ojibwe but has no real meaning?

It might allow people to pray in Ojibwe. So does it then become like Latin in the Church or like Gaelic in Ireland? People don't speak Irish or Gaelic very often in the streets, and yet it's taught in the schools. It's a very strong part of their national identity, but it's not alive the way we want Ojibwe to be alive. Will our ceremonials all be in Ojibwe? Is that the Latin we're going to learn?

It's a great problem. My baby's father is a fantastic Ojibwe speaker, and I can't understand him. I can understand just the bits and pieces, and it gives me this immense, poignant sense of what we are losing. The way I think to do it, if we all had the discipline, would be to create language nests of people who said from the very beginning, "I will speak and teach Ojibwe to my baby." Then we would have a generation of children who speak Ojibwe. But is that going to happen? Can it happen?

I think there's some hope. A lot of the older people are aware that there are no children coming up to them speaking Ojibwe. It's an immense loss. You can't teach the worldview. But I do think if you have language immersion schools that bring together elders and families who are devoted to the language, that helps.

Around the turn of the century everyone who was a mixed blood spoke Ojibwe and not English because their mothers grew up speaking Ojibwe. Everyone was speaking Ojibwe. Letters written back then drove the missionaries crazy because they could not get a word in edgewise. They had to learn to speak Ojibwe. They were not going to get anywhere speaking a different language.

But two generations later it changed. It's amazing that we even have Ojibwe speakers in this century. I get very troubled when I talk about the language. I really do have such regard for it. It's a very deep, earthy, descriptive, gnarled language. It's a great language. It's not simple. It's intellectually complex, and it's so far beyond what I could ever hope to achieve in understanding. It's so tied to the landscape.

One of the things that pains me most is losing the names and descriptions in Ojibwe, especially if you go farther into Ojibwe country, that originated with some one individual who was given some human interaction with a part of the landscape--who had that original apprehension of the world. What does it mean to lose that? It means you lose a relationship with the world that humans really need.

I find it so interesting that just as you see the language about to gasp out, there's this huge desperation about it, and a renaissance, people holding on so tightly to it.

Q: Ojibwe is an oral religion. It was not created as a written text.

Erdrich: Now it is. But something is so lost. It's also the death of the language. Every time I look at the Ojibwe dictionary I realize that is what killed it. But it is also preserving what's left of it.

Q: How do you feel about the English language?

Erdrich: English, in particular, is the ultimate colonial language. It has gobbled up so many cultures. It's this conglomerate language. It is such a gift to a writer. It's sad in a way, but it's this huge gift. Its origins, its reach, have to do with the death of other languages and cultures. But it's just the language you have. One wouldn't wish it on an Ojibwe person.

Q: It seems you are very content with your world. Do you think you will be able to stay in this place?

Erdrich: Nobody can. I dread not being in the balance. Pain is inevitable. Only if you're lucky do you get some periods in which you are not in a period of loss, feeling overwhelmed. I would like to stay. I try very hard. I try to keep it. Since it's inevitable to deal with pain in life, you need to store up a lot of daily routines. I've been trying to be very quiet in going about my work. I really like what is happening at this bookstore. It uses up, perhaps, too much of my time, energy, and money. It's not breaking even. I worry about it a lot. We struggle along, but the pleasure of just being able to have a place where people go to talk books gives me this huge satisfaction.

Mark Anthony Rolo is a member of the Bad River Band of Ojibwe in Wisconsin. He is the executive director of the Native American Journalists Association based in Minneapolis.