The Round House - By Louise Erdrich Page 0,142

with neutral concentration. I don’t remember that they even looked at me or I at them after the shock of that first moment when we all realized we were old. I do remember, though, the familiar sight of the roadside café just before we would cross the reservation line. On every one of my childhood trips that place was always a stop for ice cream, coffee and a newspaper, pie. It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.

Afterword

This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists. “Maze of Injustice,” a 2009 report by Amnesty International, 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. In 2010, then North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan sponsored the Tribal Law and Order Act. In signing the act into law, President Barack Obama called the situation “an assault on our national conscience.” The organizations highlighted in boldface below are working to restore sovereign justice and ensure safety for Native women.

Thank you to the many people who advised me as I wrote this book: Betty Laverdure, former tribal judge, Turtle Mountain Reservation; Paul Day, Gitchi Makwa, former tribal judge, Mille Lacs, and executive director of Anishinabe Legal Services; Betty Day, wisdom keeper and doulah; Peter Meyers, Psy.D., forensic psychologist; Terri Yellowhammer, former child welfare consultant for the state of Minnesota, and technical assistance specialist and associate judge for White Earth Ojibwe; N. Bruce Duthu, Dartmouth College, author of American Indians and the Law; the members of Professor Duthu’s Native American Law and Literature class; the Montgomery Fellow Program at Dartmouth College, and Richard Stammelman; Philomena Kebec, staff attorney for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians; Tore Mowatt Larssen, attorney; Lucy Rain Simpson, Indian Law Resource Center; Ralph David Erdrich, R.N., Indian Health Service, Sisseton, South Dakota; Angela Erdrich, M.D., Indian Health Board, Minneapolis; Sandeep Patel, M.D., Indian Health Service, Belcourt, North Dakota; Walter R. Echo-hawk, author of In the Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided; Suzanne Koepplinger, executive director of Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, who gave me the report she coauthored with Alexandra “Sandi” Pierce, “Shattered Hearts: The Commercial and Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls in Minnesota”; Darrell Emmel, TNG consultant; my copy editor, Trent Duffy; Terry Karten, my editor at HarperCollins; Brenda J. Child, historian and chair of the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota; Lisa Brunner, executive director of Sacred Spirits First Nation Coalition; and Carly Bad Heart Bull, attorney. Additional thanks are due to Memegwesi; chi-miigwech to Professor John Borrows, whose most recent book, Drawing Out Law: A Spirit’s Guide, helped greatly in my understanding the process of wiindigoo law, as did Hadley Louise Friedland’s 2010 thesis “The Wetiko (Windigo) Legal Principles: Responding to Harmful People in Cree, Anishinabek and Saulteaux Societies.”

My cousin Darrell Gourneau, who died in 2011, gave his eagle feather, his songs, and his hunting stories. His mother, my aunt Dolores Gourneau, gave me his quilt for my writing chair.

Finally, thank you to everyone who got me through 2010–2011: first of all, to my daughter Persia, for her many thoughtful readings of this manuscript, her honest, valuable suggestions, and her loving care for me especially during the uncertain weeks of my diagnosis. Everyone rallied wonderfully during my treatment for breast cancer: thanks to Drs. Margit M. Bretzke, Patsa Sullivan, Stuart Bloom, and Judith Walker for matter-of-factly saving my life. My daughter Pallas advocated for me, drove me to treatments, and provided her own treatment—Battlestar Galactica, music, and food with mysterious powers of restoration. She kept the family together. Aza fought her own difficult battle and won it for us all with her art. She was also a consultant on the manuscript and a close, discriminating reader. Nenaa’ikiizhikok brought laughter and courage. Dan stayed the center of gravity for us all with his patience and good heart.

The events in this book are loosely based on so many different cases, reports, and stories that the outcome is pure fiction. This book is not meant to portray anyone alive or dead and, as always, any mistakes in the Ojibwe language are mine and do not reflect on my patient teachers.

About the Author

Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and the author of thirteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, short stories, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. Most recently, The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Louise Erdrich lives in Minnesota and is the owner of Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore.

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Also by Louise Erdrich

NOVELS

Love Medicine

The Beet Queen

Tracks

The Crown of Columbus (with Michael Dorris)

The Bingo Palace

Tales of Burning Love

The Antelope Wife (1997; revised edition, 2012)

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

The Master Butchers Singing Club

Four Souls

The Painted Drum

The Plague of Doves

Shadow Tag

STORIES

The Red Convertible: New and Selected Stories, 1978–2008

POETRY

Jacklight

Baptism of Desire

Original Fire

FOR CHILDREN

Grandmother’s Pigeon

The Birchbark House

The Range Eternal

The Game of Silence

The Porcupine Year

Chickadee

NONFICTION

The Blue Jay’s Dance

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

Credits

Cover design by Oliver Munday

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE ROUND HOUSE. Copyright © 2012 by Louise Erdrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of The New Yorker, where the section “Linda’s Story” was published in slightly different form as “The Years of My Birth.”

FIRST EDITION

Epub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062065261

ISBN: 978-0-06-206524-7 (Hardcover)

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