Tribal Threads

~ The Round House, by Louise Erdrich ~

Joe Coutts is an only child in an unusually (by his description) stable and happy Indian (Native American) family on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. His mother parses the bloodlines and secrets of people who want to enroll in the tribe, and his father is a judge who takes the law very seriously.

In a horrific incident at the beginning of the novel, Joe’s mother is brutally beaten and raped. But where, exactly, did it happen? And why does that matter so much?

Three men came through the emergency ward doors [..] There was a state trooper, an officer local to the town of Hoopdance, and Vince Madwesin, from the tribal police. My father had insisted that they each take a statement from my mother because it wasn’t clear where the crime had been committed — on state or tribal land — or who had committed it — an Indian or a non-Indian. I already knew, in a rudimentary way, that these questions would swirl around the facts. I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice.

Joe’s mother returns home, withdrawn, badly bruised, jumpy, and eventually retires into her bedroom, inanimate, unable to eat. Distraught though he is, the loving, thoughtful patience with which Joe’s father cares for her is beautifully developed.

My mother and I probably realized at the same time that my father, who had taken care of his grandmother for many years and certainly knew how to cook, had faked his ineptitude. But the stew with its gagging undertone of rotted onion was so successfully infernal that it cheered us up.

The Round House of the title is a tribal meeting place with deep spiritual significance, but it is also, now, the place where Joe’s mother was violated. Although much of the book involves the identification of the attacker, and the investigations (in files by Joe’s father, and in the lake and surrounding areas by Joe), the heart of the novel is really the picture it paints of the tribal community.

From the government’s point of view, the only way you can tell an Indian is an Indian is to look at that person’s history. […]

On the other hand, Indians know other Indians without the need for a federal pedigree, and this knowledge — like love, sex, or having or not having a baby — has nothing to do with government.

Despite centuries of genocide, relocation, one-sided government policies implemented by heartless agents, they are resilient, with cultural traditions that persist despite consistent attempts to wipe them out since the 1600s.

Joe is thirteen, and with his three friends Cappy, Zack and Angus, is beginning to feel the beat of sexuality. The raunchy conversations of the grandfathers and grandmothers have left little to the imagination, and he sneaks glances at his aunt’s bounteous bosom when he can. In 1988 on the reservation, the boys are hooked on Star Trek the Next Generation.

The open-hearted culture of the tribe is made evident in many ways. Most remarkably, and central to the story, is Linda, born deformed, whose white parents asked the doctor not to resuscitate her and took only her healthy twin home. But Linda survived, was adopted and brought up in an Ojibwe family, and now works in the post office on the reservation. As Joe says when asking about her history:

I have friends, you know, whose parents or cousins were adopted out. Adopted out of the tribe, and that is hard, well, I’ve heard that. But I guess nobody ever talks about getting …

Adopted in?

Linda’s birth family gets in touch with her twice: when they want to control the Ojibwe land she inherits, and when her twin brother needs a kidney transplant.

Many of the people on the reservation are related in some complex way, but regardless of blood links, Joe and his friends are generally treated as family wherever they go. Aunts cook for them whenever they turn up, families absorb them when they visit, there is always a couch available for the night.

So there is love and a welcoming generosity, but the boys are in no way protected from reality. Tales of domestic violence, alcoholism and poverty abound, and Joe’s father does not play down what happened to his mother.

Joe, he said. Your mother was attacked. [..] She doesn’t know who the man was, Joe.

But will we find him? I asked in that same hushed voice.

We will find him, my father said.

The attacker is drawn rather flat and one-sided, with no personality other than being thoroughly, hideously, evil. There are occasional digressions into tribal myth which left me unmoved.

That said, there are multiple reasons to read this novel, and discovering what happened and why is just one of them. It is a coming-of-age story: Joe’s loss of innocence, his changing relationship with his parents, his anguish, anger and resentment, his slow realization that even those you love can betray you, and his growing acceptance of adult responsibility. It is a story about community, and the synergistic relationship between Catholicism and tribal spirituality on the reservation. It introduces you to some very vivid characters: the athletic Catholic priest, the hardworking women who cook all morning and dance all evening at the pow-wow, the alcoholics and deadbeats, the voluptuous aunt who had made a living the only way she could, using her body. It is an exploration of the murky legal situation on tribal lands — often a reason why crimes on the reservation are not prosecuted.

Erdrich’s novels draw on her personal experience growing up as Ojibwe, with a grandfather who served as tribal chairman. The Round House is part of her Justice trilogy.