Michael's Reviews > LaRose

A story of two contemporary Native American families in North Dakota dealing with a personal tragedy and the role of one boy, LaRose, in fulfilling the healing process. Erdrich has been a favorite author for me over the years, but only with this do I feel the urge to use the “M” word for description: a masterpiece. It’s that good for story-telling, character development, and resonating across time to elucidate our current challenge of how to live with the historical trauma experienced by Native Americans.

The tale begins with a man’s accidental shooting of a neighbor boy while hunting for deer. Nothing can ever be the same for all members of the two families and the community as well. To redress this act, Landreaux and his wife Emmaline come up with an old tribal solution, to offer his parents their own five-year old son, LaRose. This is a sacrifice of biblical proportions. How can it possibly work? It really doesn’t erase the tragic carelessness of the act, and LaRose can’t really substitute for the lost boy. And imagine what the impact on LaRose might be.

But somehow the act does transmute the murderous rage and devastation of the bereaved couple, Peter and Nola, into something else. They eventually allow him visitations with his own family. And as LaRose grows up, he gains meaning as a healing mediator between the two families. The miracle of how he retains his boyish innocence while taking on the burdens and life challenges of the parents and siblings of the two families is marvelously told. I love how he wins over the bitter and alienated teen girl Maggie in his new family and tries courageously to defend he against boys at school who sexually assault her. His real sisters, who are zany and tough and volleyball stars, come to his aid at school when he is subject to severe bullying.

LaRose and the kids in this story somehow solve problems that seem to defeat the adults. Both Landreth and Peter and Emmaline and Nola (who are half-sisters) have a lot of unresolved conflicts from their long history. The whole native community lives under the shadow of racial oppression dating from the European colonial invasion. Against the tide pushing them to assimilation many look for a sense of identity in the nurturing of old cultural traditions and modes of being kept alive by the tribal elders. Young LaRose slowly learns of other LaRoses in each generation of his family who assumed a special role in keeping such traditions alive and harnessing them for survival. From his grandmother (also a LaRose) he gets the story from the 18th century when the first LaRose, was given up by an Ojibwe woman named Mink as a slave to a fur trader in order to save her life. She in turn is saved by his white assistant, Wolfred, using her traditional knowledge of plant poisons, and her traditional skills keep them both alive in their escape through the wilderness. The mission LaRose imbibes makes him part of a large story:

Mirage Ombanitemagad. The original name of Mink’s daughter. That name would protect him from the unknown, from what had been let loose with the accident. Sometimes energy of this nature, chaos, ill luck, goes out into the world and begets and begets. Bad luck rarely stops with one occurrence. All Indians know that. To stop it quickly takes great effort, which is why LaRose was sent.

The novel soon splits the reader between the contemporary story in first decade of our current century and immersion in the lives of three generations of LaRoses that passed before. Past and present are shown to be perpetually entangled, as is good and evil. The goal of the residential schools to “kill the Indian, and save the man” fails when all the traditional skills, crafts, and myths are passed on by parent to child before such attempts at erasure. The spirituality of communing with ghosts and projecting the self into the sky or into animals is another tradition carried forward by the line of LaRoses. With the mixing of native and European blood that arises out of the collusion of the first LaRose and Wolfred, the saga of victim and victimizer in history becomes transformed into our common human story. Over and over in this novel, we witness the courage to make a sacrifice to reverse cruel wrongs committed in this world.

The story of the Catholic priest, Father Travis, binds well with these themes. He inspires the Indian youth with a passion for achievement in physical fitness and the adults of the community with the power of small acts of kindness. But he knows knows well about personal sacrifice and the daily doubts of faith about higher purpose. He is a survivor of the bombing of an army barracks in Beirut that killed hundreds of soldiers. He harbors a hopeless love of Emmaline, one that helps keep him living:
He was living out Newton’s Third Law—for every action there is an equal and opposite action. Time was the variable. Getting blown up in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life. Or was it the other way around? He thought of Emmaline.

At one point when LaRose is about ten, he is soaking up wisdom and tribal history from the elders at the nursing home where his grandmother resides. The ancient and dying Ignatia recounts an Ojibwe creation myth that involves the godlike Adam and Eve figures running from the rolling head of an evil woman they were forced to slay. Ignatia’s summary holds much hope for taking action in the moment to reverse evil (kind of Zen-like you might say):
”It is about getting chased”, with a long suck on the oxygen. We are chased into this life. The Catholics think we are chased by devils, original sin. We are chased by things done to us in this life. .
We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn by what they do to us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried by what comes next. We only have this teeny moment. Oops, it’s gone!”
“What’s gone?”
“Now. Oops, gone again”.
Ignatia and Malvern laughed until Ignatia gasped for breath. “Oops, oops! Slippery!”
“What’s gone?”
“Now.”
“Oops”, laughed LaRose. “Slipped past!”

This book was a treasure for me.