I don’t know how I missed reading this book. I’ve been a huge fan of Louise Erdrich’s work since the 1980s. Love Medicine, one of my other all time favorite books won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. I also loved Tracks (1988). Erdrich writes of a fictional reservation in Minnesota/North Dakota and her characters often dance between stories.
I picked up The Round House (2012) from Libby, which is where I head for audio books. Narrated by the iconic comic actor Gary Farmer, I found myself either laughing out loud or next to tears as I walked around my local lake. The story brims with emotion. In her brilliance, Erdrich chose to tell the tale through the eyes of a 13-year-old Anishinaabe boy named Joe. It’s a coming of age story set in 1988 on a reservation in North Dakota as he reminisces of a distant tragedy that touched the lives of his family and friends.
Joe’s mother goes to the band office one Sunday to pick up a file after she gets a phone call, and when she doesn’t return, he and his father, a tribal judge, go looking for her in a borrowed car. They pass her. “She whizzed by us in the other lane, riveted, driving over the speed limit, anxious to get back home to us.”
They’re not alarmed until they find her still sitting in the car in front of their house, stinking of the gasoline and vomit that covers her dress. After prying her hands off the steering wheel, they take her to the local hospital where doctors confirm that Joe’s mother was raped.
In the afterword, Erdrich offers old stats from 2009, Amnesty International, “Maze of Injustice” that reveals how “1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime” and “86% are perpetrated by non-Native men.” This is no surprise, and I’m sure the figures are similar or higher today, as many women don’t report rape. Like them, Joe’s mother is too traumatized to talk, eat, or leave her bed.
Let’s face it. Rape is the oldest and most horrific crime, though its regularity has desensitized us to its devastating effects. Something that books like this seek to remedy.
But Joe will not let it go, and sets out with his buddies, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to find out what happened, why it happened, and who is responsible. We follow the boys as they race through the reservation on their bikes, sifting through clues which lead them to The Round House, a sacred place of worship for their people and the scene of the crime.
The text is laced with humor characteristic of Indigenous literature. One of the funniest scenes occurs as the boys head to Grandma Thunder’s home for Indian tacos. They’re always starving and know she’ll cook for them. As they race along, they run through a list of all the sex words and close facsimiles they should never say in front of Grandma, a conversation that causes each boy to jump off his bike and race into a private spot in the woods for “four minutes.”
Coming from a distant WASP family, I envy these quirky characters the deep love and closeness of community that surrounds life on this fictional reservation.
The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction (2012) and is part of Louise Erdrich’s “justice trilogy” which includes The Plague of Doves (2008) and LaRose (2016).
Birchbark Books is her Indigenous book store in Minneapolis.
