To Ojibwe country and back: Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

This paper proposes a close analysis of Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country ( 2003 ), considered as a piece of travel writing. The book is first looked at through the lenses of recent developments in travel writing critical theory. However, this theory, being developed on the theoretical tools of postcolonialism, i.e. on problematizing the intentional perception of the Western travelling subject and on questioning this subject ’s almost innate adoption of hierarchical superiority in relation to the travelling object , cannot vitally apply to another “conceptual reality” in which these relations are nonexistent. After consideration of feminist reading of contemporary travel writing, the paper concludes that its, often militant, stand does not comply with a culture that knows child bringer and language teacher as a woman. To pay due respect to the text in question, the analysis turns to some of Native American authored discussions on the difference of meaning of land in contrast to mapping territory, of understanding of circularity of time in contrast to linearity of history. The paper concludes that this Erdrich’s book of travel defies Theory and develops into a potent response to the dehumanizing semiotics of the Native subject and humanity in general.