Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (National Geographic Directions Series) Book

In my pre-GR days when I was first making reading a serious pursuit, my strategy was rarely more complicated than picking out intriguing looking covers and bleeding previously successfully indulged authors dry. Over the years, as my vistas grew more broad and my tastes more discerning, my ability to stick with a chosen name for any length of time has progressively shortened, and I have little issue with striking off prospective reads if a second, or even first, book goes awry, especially if I have not yet acquired any physical copies. However, as these misadventures are almost always on the fiction side of things, lately I've made a habit in such instances, if an author's bibliography allows for such, of switching over to nonfiction, hoping to rediscover the appeal without running to as many of the tropes. Erdrich is a name who persistently tantalizes me with more than a dozen well received and appreciably diversely themed works, so when the rare instance occurred and, instead of another shiny-stickered narrative, a slim memoir with her name on the cover crossed my path, I didn't think twice about snatching it. Now that I'm finished, I am glad to say that I am keen on continuing my trajectory through the author's fiction side (with one particular work concerned with gender-bending in my sights): this was a reprieve that I not only needed with regards to my views on the author, but also humanity, the ecosystem, my home country, and even the broader, sprawling profundity of future timelines. Pretty good for a short work that turned out to be a further 30 pages shorter than its log on this site currently proclaims. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. Now, I knew I was going to be extraordinarily biased towards this work, what with my own heart and soul being overtly displayed in the book's title and generously explored in the limited content through sentences such as the one above. What I didn't expect was a rather philosophical turnaround regarding a particular slogan that has plagued the modern timeline for at least the past four years. MAGA: Make America great again. You see, Erdrich has a sense that follows a similar trajectory, but her perspective is far more one of MOGA: Make Ojibwe great again, a concept that, thanks to the entrenched, complicated, and often sordid interweaving that winds through this country of mine, necessarily implies MpAGA: Make pre-America great again, or perhaps that should be Make post-American great again. Ideally, there wouldn't even be an America, and sense of restoration would be devoted to smaller concerns of sturgeon populations, fluent Ojibwe-speaker populations, thunderbirds (actual ones, mind you), Manoominikeshii, elm trees surviving the ever warmer winters of encroaching climate change, humans once again giving birth on the islands of their ancestors.

In the wake of a controversy regarding a not so native author, I've superficially delved into conversations regarding community, culture, and blood quantum; to my untrained, purebred WASC mind, Erdrich is so deeply concerned with yet instinctively enmeshed in the habitus of a lifeline that spans a good ten thousand years, at least, that I trust her fiction more than I had even before that aforementioned event painfully shook my confidence in my own critical faculties. I was also pleasantly surprised by her tastes in fiction, and her mention of more than one book on my TBR has me contemplating the far off venues of both post 2020 reading challenge goals and pre 2021 reading challenges, depending on the publication year. All in all, a lovely, lovely meditation on themes that veer so much from customary modern concerns in such a humane manner that the fact that I don't get more of it in my media (although 'Avatar the Last Airbender' and Pose, both on Netflix, are really helping me out visual-media-wise) is really quite a shame. Another reason to give Erdrich another chance, and fortunately, she has plenty for me to choose from.

My reading choices of these are half the remains of my challenge reads, half a twenty-first century focus, and I am still adjusting to the change of having my reading line up with modern day technologies and social media. This meditation on the personal that manages to extend vast distances through both the national landscape and the future unknown is a rare piece, and while I don't love it or consider it a favorite, I recognize that one of its roots is the same that forms the crux of many a work that is. Tracks (another entry riddled with GRAmazon's puking obstinacy) introduced me to one of the most powerful evocations of mass death and destruction that I have ever encountered, and during these days of quarantine, I watch the United States tear itself apart for the sake of pride, power, money, and a certain smugness that those who matter will be able to wait this out on high as they always have been. While speaking with others, I've said that this will all probably boil down to the deaths of either the whos or the how manys, and the mass protests are only the beginning of what could happen. Erdrich is one who contemplated historical instances of situations such as this, albeit typically far more light-a-living-thing-with-a-magnifying-glass focused in nature, long before people started believing Coronavirus was a giant hoax, and I have to wonder what compositions of hers will come out of all of this, if any do at all. When "out" is, I have no idea, but I do hope the books and the islands are doing alright. I draw more strength from the thought of them than I do from that of most humans.