Book: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Ah... this woman can write. Here is a story with a beginning and an ending, the kind of novel that leaves one satisfied. Not all writers know how to finish what they start, but not so Louise.

It could perhaps also be called Indian Boys. Joe is 13 years old and has three good friends, Cappy, Angus and Zack. They ride their bikes all over the reservation…the rez. Joe is an only child and lives at home with his father, a judge, and his mother who works for social services. It is 1988.

One day his mother is raped. And from this point, the novel explores the ways of living on a reservation, the homes, the way time passes day after day in families with beautifully drawn characters. There is a comfort here. There are also drugs, alcohol, religion, a Catholic priest, the elders, convoluted relationships, and the rape, the rape victims, the rapist.

An Amnesty International report "included the following statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted."

I sometimes purposefully detour while driving across country to pass through a reservation. Last June, it was Pine Ridge in South Dakota. All day the weather had been making me uneasy. The sky would turn very dark, and I drove to avoid the storms, the possible tornados. But it is impressive and delightful to drive on two-lane roads across land that undulates gently and has few trees but a sky that goes forever and little creeks and sloughs. I came up from the south through Whiteclay, Nebraska, which is off the reservation and therefore able to sell alcohol, into Pine Ridge, South Dakota, just a few miles over the border. I had intended to stop at Wounded Knee but missed the turn off and was fretting too much about the weather . There were constant reports of significant hail in the storms moving vaguely north and east. I drove through Pine Ridge. These rez towns are always busier than white people towns, with more kids and bikes and dogs…lots of wind-blown litter, modest pastel rectangular homes, old cars….teenagers, people hanging around near the convenience stores, or small grocery stores and gas stations.

Along the road east of town, there were places to fish...small ponds, with a car or truck parked in the grasses and a few kids and an adult or two at water's edge or having a picnic. One time I saw a small rowboat on the water. It struck me how unconcerned they were (as opposed to me freaking out) about the ominous skies which would shift now and then to let the late afternoon sun light up the land making it (to me) wildly beautiful, tugging at my heart.

I am curious about who would or would not love this novel. Who else writes about Native Americans like this?

And I also think about Louise Erdrich and her real kids and her real life. She is a strong force, I suspect, but not immune to the charms of men.

"The fluttering energy that had possessed my mother was burnt out and she was resting--but on the couch, not locked in her room. After I got home, my father invited me to sit alongside him on an old rusted kitchen chair next to the garden. The evening was cool and the air stirred the scrap box elder bordering the yard….The round house is on the far edge of tribal trust, where our court has jurisdiction, though of course not over a white man. So federal law applies. Down to the lake, that is also tribal trust, But just to one side a corner of that is state park, where state law applies. On the other side to that pasture, more woods, we have an extension of round house land."

"Cappy's mother had died when he was young, leaving Cappy and his older brother, Randall, and his father Doe Lafournais, to a life that had worn itself into bachelor grooves and a house of womanless chaos….Zack Peace's family was split up now for the second time…Zack was almost a decade older than his baby brother and sister, because his parents had married young, divorced, then given it a second try and found out they were right the first time they divorced. Zack was musical, like his father and always brought his guitar to the icehouse. He said he knew one thousand songs….As for Angus…his aunt Star had moved Angus, his two brothers, her boyfriend's two children, and a changing array of pregnant sisters and bingeing or detoxing cousins into a three-bedroom unit. Aunt Star managed an epic amount of craziness. It didn't help that besides no steps, the building itself was a  low-bid nightmare…Star was always bribing us with frybread to do house repairs or rig up satellite reception off a dented hubcap or some such thing."