Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich Page B

centered around casseroles heavy on wild rice. Today on Ober’s island, breakfast consists of pancakes and Ojibwe maple syrup,scrambled eggs, fresh walleye breaded and fried, a hash of potatoes and crisp turnips, and a big bowl of blueberries. There is also lots more fruit on the side, coffee, and black tea. We’ll have a big lunch just a couple hours after the breakfast dishes are cleared and washed. And then dinner, which might involve venison sausage, more walleye, boiled cabbage and potatoes, or if we are lucky enough to see Nancy Jones, whatever she has hunted might appear.

    Nancy Jones, Ogimaawigwanebiik, happens to be one of the most extraordinary women I know.
    For starters, she holds the world record as the quickest beaver skinner. I don’t know where, exactly, she earned the World’s Quickest Beaver Skinner title, but I’m assured this is the truth. She makes a few judicious cuts and turns the animal inside out. It’s like sleight of hand. Nancy does exquisite beadwork, placing each tiny cut bead just so on makazinan of smoked moosehide, trimmed with otter fur, lined with blanket. Nancy has a great laugh and deep spiritual knowledge, she is an Ojibwe language teacher, and fiercely devoted to Ojibwe culture. Her children are language teachers, too, and she has taught them her bush skills. Still, they are amazed at her fortitude and endurance. Nancy has been known to kill, skin, and cart back to her cabin a whole moose and a deer in one day. She can snare rabbits, trap anything from lynx to pine marten. She can shoot the head off a partridge sitting in a tree, and probably catch the partridge as it falls, too. Ojibwe are meat eaters, that’s just how it is. The joke goes: What isan Ojibwe vegetarian called? A poor hunter. Nevertheless, it was Nancy’s deer haunch and a fat string of bass three years ago that changed my then youngest daughter, Aza, from a supermarket carnivore to a thoughtful vegetarian.
    It was either the deer haunches, or the ribs. Anyway, on our last visit to Ober’s island, Aza made a decision from which she has never deviated. I was amazed that a ten-year-old could decide with such conviction. She won’t even eat a fish after she went to the dock to check on Nancy’s stringer. Later, she said to me that one of the fish had looked up at her. That did it. I must have been a hard-hearted little person, because as the granddaughter of a pair of butchers I helped kill chickens and watched from a corner of the slaughterhouse as my uncle knocked sheep, shot cows, scalded and gutted dead pigs. And yet it has taken my daughter Aza to make me really attempt anything like a consistently vegetarian set of habits, and it started out purely because I felt bound to support her tenderness on behalf of animals.
    At any rate, although killing and eating wild game is for the Ojibwe a spiritual as well as delectable enterprise, there is no vegetarianism this year on Ober’s island. Nancy and her son Paybomibiness are running an Ojibwe language camp this summer on her land about a forty-five-minute boat ride from Ober’s island. They come to stay for a night, but all the game is left at the language camp and so we eat the most incredible spaghetti bolognese. Maybe it’s the red pepper flakes in the sauce, or the type of onion.Maybe it’s the air. Maybe it’s the mosquitoes, and how we are free of them in the well-screened kitchen.
    Nancy remembers Ernest Oberholtzer very well—he made eggs for her family on their first visit, when they paddled over and tied their canoe to his dock. In Oberholtzer’s photo archive there are dozens of pictures of Nancy’s family, her late husband’s family, and of Nancy as a child, strong-minded looking even then, grinning, wearing a soft red woolen hat. Paybomibiness touches a picture on the wall. I recognize it as a photograph of Billy Magee, Taytahpaswaywitong—the man who guided and paddled with