LaRose by Louise Erdrich (review)

BETWEEN HER GRANDFATHER'S SIGNATURE, practiced at boarding school, and her mother's story of sharing a child, Louise Erdrich found LaRose, the main character of her fifteenth novel. Erdrich writes now into a network of expectations: her characters and first readers all have descendants of their own. Her novels cross the boundaries of town and reservation, and they include Catholic and Midewewin traditions. They are old stories made new, and stories of the present stretched to connect with the past. Like some of her other tales, this one begins on the Little No Horse Reservation between the towns of Pluto and Argus, where Landreaux Iron hunts between his place and his best friend Pete Ravich's place. When he shoots and five-year-old Dusty Ravich falls, the story begins. Or is it really just continuing?

Erdrich's early novels rewrote the story of settlement in the Great Lakes on the eastern edge of the American and Canadian Great Plains. Tracks, Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace, Four Souls, and the Birchbark House series paint a picture of removal, reservations, allotment, and the impact of industrial capitalism. Her later novels explore the collision between Manifest Destiny and sovereign nations. The Plague of Doves questions constructions of race. The Painted Drum explores possession and repatriation. The Round House damns the impotent tangle of state, federal, and reservation jurisdiction over violence against women. In all her novels she inserts precolonial narratives, decolonial histories, and Indigenous forms of justice and well-being.

LaRose is about two families, two sons, one loss, and one gift with limits. To say more would spoil the story, but it is worth noting that the adults imagine they are guiding circumstances until they realize the children have been in control all along. The Ojibwe name carried by LaRose is Ombaanitemigad, Mirage, one who is able to be in the world we see but also to extend beyond it. Careful readers will notice that along with her usual taut poetic balance of omniscient narration and interior dialogue, Erdrich adds to this novel an ever-present hue that sometimes appears in the liminal space we all inhabit. Ozhawashkwaa, the Ojibwe word for "blue," includes the full spectrum of indigo to evergreen, and that allusion to life's infinite variation takes symbolic shape in the story as an alternate way to process decisions that make the difference between life and death, between pain and moving on, between feeling loved and giving up.

LaRose is also an introduction to American Indian education, which relates directly to the theme of not giving up. Boarding schools are represented as both good and bad, places where food is minimal but regular and lessons offer insight for survival. The first LaRose found the Presbyterian Boarding School of the 1800s, with its harsh cultural erasure and rampant disease, better than the homelessness and violence of her childhood. By including multiple generations of stories, Erdrich allows readers to compare the early zeal of missionaries who were intent on saving souls to the post–Civil War racist nationalism of Frank L. Baum and others whose goals were precisely the opposite, to ensure the Indians' "spirit is broken, their manhood effaced." Erdrich quotes the missionaries' venom to make clear the complexity of the situation because alongside this rhetoric, generations of Indians became educators and acquired a taste for the pure love of learning, although it was continually served with a huge dose of poison. In spite of what is often referred to as layers of historic trauma, Native people have held on to hope and continued to engage reality with a blend of wit, humor, eloquence, and innovation, producing with each generation a new set of stories still connected to the old. Emmaline Peace, mother of the present-day LaRose, lived to see the "era when we took back our education" and began a boarding school on the reservation for children of families in crisis.

Elder storyteller Ignatia Thunder tells LaRose, "We are chased into this life," implying a never-ending trajectory of rolling heads, transformational snakes, gardening tips, dangerous escapes, love...