A mother travelling through motherland: Louise Erdrich’s family trip in Ojibwe Country

Abstract

ABSTRACT American novelist Louise Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa Indians. In 2003, she published Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, a travel narrative in which she evokes her trip North with her youngest daughter into original Ojibwe land, an area on both sides of the Canadian–US border. This article examines how her journey becomes a quest for origins involving a remapping of North America as Native land. As her life-narrative moves from the intimate to the collective, from the family to the tribe, it becomes an exploration of the exceptional sense of space and history of Native people in North America and a forceful questioning of hegemonic rules and standards. The road and boat trips at stake also turn into a semiological voyage leading to the telling of another story of North America, thus flouting normative, national discourse.