Susan Feathers

For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. ~ The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Goodreads.

John Steinbeck’s conviction that latent capacities lie in wait of the challenges we may face is the power of his stories. Steinbeck was a man with his boots set firmly in his homeland: the San Joaquin Valley. He wrote about migrant labor, loss of natural landscapes to industrial scale farming, and poverty created by the concentration of wealth by a few. He sought to understand ecology when he sailed with his biologist friend, Ed Ricketts, to study the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). In The Log of the Sea of Cortez, he and Ricketts articulate how life works in linked communities which predated more contemporary scientific understanding of ecology by decades. I highly recommend this book to Steinbeck readers to understand his curiosity and breadth of knowledge.

In recalling The Log’s philosophy, I am struck with how Louise Erdrich not only comprehends the interrelatedness of all life, but she also found her understanding in the places she grew up: the Red River Valley where the Red River flows north toward Winnipeg from Fargo, North Dakota. Today it is a highly engineered river to meet human and industry needs, but once it ran free, annually flooding its banks in the spring runoff to nourish the valley’s soil into rich black loam yards deep. The story that Louise tells in her recent acclaimed novel, The Mighty Red, is centered in this valley among families beginning in 2008 when an economic collapse stressed working families many of whom lost property and/or became homeless overnight.. Some work in the industrial beet operations, others are rich landowners who have bought out small family farms. Another family is working to improve their land in the old way, come what way may. They preserve native “weeds” and regenerate soil.

Something Louise Erdrich has mastered is THE WEAVE – my concept for threading people’s stories in the geography of place. Louise’s mother is an Ojibwe elder in the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Tribe. Her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, saved their reservation from the U.S. government’s veiled attempt to take land designated to their tribe by treaties to allow wholesale taking of forests and minerals (Termination under the guise of Emancipation). She told this story in her novel The Night Watchman which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Storytelling is in her blood as this was a primary method of recording history and imparting values, and cultural and spiritual practices among her people.

Louise Erdrich inhabits a pantheon of great writers who possess piercing insight into contemporary American culture and politics. For Louise, her ready access to indigenous ways of knowing lends the power of truth unadorned but artful. It’s a combination that has drawn a worldwide readership.

Like Steinbeck, she builds stories from decades of lived experience in a particular geography – what Gary Nabhan termed the geography of childhood.

Erdrich is imbued with a wicked humor, gift of elders in her tribe voiced through her unforgettable characters with names like Happy Freshette and Father Flirty. But don’t be fooled that her writing is entertaining in the normal way we might think of a western cowboy genre. Erdrich’s gift is alchemy. The impact is more than its elements. At the end of every book I am better than I began. She has gently led me to reconsider the human condition through her characters, to see it in fine definition, beautiful and tragic, heroic and funny.

I’ve laughed and cried my way through the lives of her characters and come to love the places where their destinies unfold. In The Mighty Red, Crystal and Kismet, Hugo and Gary, are caught up in a teenage love triangle and a mother’s quest to protect her daughter. The geography of place includes the beet farms producing sugar (a poison) while “weeds” are eradicated by an unrelenting war on native plants some of which are highly nutritious, she shows readers the profound irony of modern culture’s misunderstanding of the land under its feet. She brilliantly shows readers the interconnectedness of life, artfully described as the “joinery of nature.”

As she approaches 70, Erdrich is more powerful a writer than a decade ago. Winner of the Pulitzer, the National Book Award (twice) and hundreds of other awards and nominations, she has left America and the world a treasure of stories that speak the truth while encouraging us all about our frailty in the face of uncontrollable forces. Yet, even then, like her grandfather, we ‘grow beyond our work, walk up the stairs of our concepts, and come out ahead of our accomplishments.’

I await her nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature.