ABSTRACT
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country is a travel memoir that follows Louise Erdrich’s journey from Minnesota to Ontario along the boundary-straddling lands and waters of the Ojibwe/Anishinaabeg people. Erdrich honors instead an alternative geography formed by millennia of Indigenous occupancy and migration across borders. Many of Erdrich’s works are set in borderland spaces that further work to challenge settler mappings. Home is something that Erdrich transports with her, a point that she further elaborates in a section of the memoir called “The Blue Minivan.” The islands that call Erdrich on her quest are the center of life for Tobasonakwut’s people. Water’s power is philosophical as well as physical in this text, as it is also for those who make their lives on the lake. While half of Books and Islands takes place in Canada, Erdrich is regarded as an American author of Ojibwe and German descent.
