If so, we are most distressed, beg your apology, and have certain plans to take up the matter with the writer, Louise Erdrich.
The source of these early narratives is mysterious to me also. Voices spoke to me in dreams, while I drove long distances, nursed my babies, and so on. Sometimes in sleepwalking I would find I’d written book sections. There they would be the next morning, on my desk. I feel sure they originated in my own mind, those stories, however they appeared. Yet sometimes, as I scrutinize the handwriting in those early drafts, I wonder. Who is the writer? Who is the voice? Sometimes the script is unfamiliar — the careful spidery flourish of a hand trained early in the last century. At other times — I am sure, I am positive — it is my own.
*
I also include in these end notes a possible explanation for the name given to the reservation where so many of the events in my books have taken place.
THE STORY OF LITTLE NO HORSE
(TOLD BY NANAPUSH TO FATHER DAMIEN)
White people usually name places for men — presidents and generals and entrepreneurs. Ojibwe name places for what grows there or what is found. There was no person named Little No Horse, no battle on that ground, no memory of just what happened, and yet the name goes back in time. It goes back to strange bones that were found there. People put these bones into their medicine bags during the beginning days, before the people had seen a living horse. There were rumors before a sighting ever occurred. From the south came a Shawnee who claimed that he witnessed a man leading on a vine a great dog whose paws, at the end of each leg, were gathered in one glistening nail.
Bebezhigongazhii, it was called, the one-nailed being.
That doesn’t sound possible, the people said, but the Shawnee put down his life on the truth of it. When those strange bones were found, bigger than a dog and heavier than a deer, with long strands of silver hair and those one-nailed ends to the paws, some argued that this was the creature the Shawnee saw. Others deducted from the remains an old, old, four-legged woman with a deer’s face and long, tossing ancient hair.
Not long, and that mystery was solved.
From afar, there was reported something else very new. It was seen in shadow, glimpsed by a girl and then her family. A spirit with the torso of a human and a strange wild head beneath, running, running, four legs pounding in a terror of swift music. The family hid themselves and waited quietly as it approached. The noise it made, stopping by the river, was strange as a ghost whistle in the mashkiig, or when people died very suddenly and mysteriously, felled by bad medicine. They stayed very still, and next their eyes nearly fell out of their heads. For the top of the being had detached from the bottom. They felt a little foolish, then, for soon it was obvious that the thing was two creatures, two manidoog, a man and a great dog with the paws gathered into one horned nail. The family finally understood and felt a little cheated by the truth: what they saw was human, just a Bwaaninini, hateful.
How their enemy had come to possess this spirit creature was now the whispered question among them. The natural progression of thought was this: how to kill the Bwaan and take the bebezhigongazhii. For all day, as they secretly observed, they could see how it loved him, how it cleared its throat when it saw the Bwaan, and nodded wisely in agreement with the Bwaan’s thoughts, and flicked its rabbit ears to catch his words. They did not pity the Bwaan. Drying on his hoops were two scalps, most surely Anishinaabeg. Those scalps determined them to kill the Bwaan immediately once they captured him, in order to quiet the spirits of their relatives. They never got around to it. A strange thing happened. Right before their eyes, the Bwaan clutched his groin, howled, and fell. He began to writhe upon the ground in the throes of some disgusting sickness.
“Leave him,” said the mother, when they saw by morning light what afflicted him. From knees to stomach he was bolting with black sores. They touched nothing, but grabbed the vine, which turned out to be cunningly woven. They led the spirit animal away and it quickly began to love them, too, the same way it loved the Bwaan. With the horse, though, came the sickness, selective but deadly, and it raged among them for two winters before it finally disappeared.
The horse and the illness it brought were the source of the name, which was translated by a Jesuit mapmaker and laid into a thick vellum that went under the rapids during his return to Montreal. Little Lost and No Name Lakes were partially erased and the word Horse was tagged onto them to describe the whole region.
We never had a name for the whole place, said Nanapush, except the word ishkonigan. The leftovers. Our words for the place are many and describe every corner and hole. We are called Little No Horse now because of a dead Bwaan and a drenched map. Think of it, nindinawemagonidok, my relatives.
If we call ourselves and all we see around us by the original names, will we not continue to be Anishinaabeg? Instead of reconstituted white men, instead of Indian ghosts? Do the rocks here know us, do the trees, do the waters of the lakes? Not unless they are addressed by the names they themselves told us to call them in our dreams. Every feature of the land around us spoke its name to an ancestor. Perhaps, in the end, that is all that we are. We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won’t it cease to love us? And isn’t it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi’sago’i.
* * *
And at last:
Nimiigwetchiweyndan gikinoamadayininiwag gaye ikwewag, Tobassonakwut (Peter Kinew), Nawigiizis (Jim Clark), Pagawetakamigok (Lorraine Jones), and Paybomibiness (Dennis Jones). All mistakes are mine.
READING GROUP GUIDE
About Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich was born in 1954, the oldest of seven children, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her Ojibwa-French mother and German-American father taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs School. She did not leave the region until 1972, when she entered Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
During and after college, Erdrich held a variety of jobs: She hoed sugar beets in Wahpeton; waitressed in Boston, Syracuse and elsewhere; worked in a state mental hospital in Vermont; taught poetry in prisons and schools in North Dakota; worked on a construction site; and edited The Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper.
Jacklight, Erdrich’s first book of poems, was published in 1983, followed a year later by Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Award, the Janet Kaufman Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and other prizes. Love Medicine eventually became the first novel in a remarkable series that would include The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love (1996) and The Antelope Wife (1998).
In addition to these novels, Erdrich’s publications include a collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991, written with Michael Dorris), and another book of poetry Baptism of Desire (1989). She has written of art, infancy, and the natural world in her first work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995).