The Birchbark House
The Birchbark House
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Louise Erdrich on The Birchbark House
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A family map drawn in reverseThe book’s origin is inseparable from a specific place: Madeline Island, in Lake Superior, where her mother’s Ojibwe family came from. She had visited the island as a child, and when it came time to write the series, she returned to write it there. The pull was genealogical before it was literary.
I wanted to tell the story of where my mother’s people had come from. We used to visit Madeline Island frequently — that’s where my ancestors lived. I loved being there; it had such resonance for me.
The genealogical work that made the project possible was not hers alone. Her mother and her sister Lise had spent years tracing the family’s origins before she put a word on the page.
I have to attribute that book’s genesis to my mother who, and my sister Lise, who did this incredible research into the origins of our family and uh, found out about the origins on Madeline Island where this book is set. [paraphrased from audio]
The Birchbark series is not just set in the Ojibwe past; it traces the exact route her own ancestors were forced to travel. In the 2009 TeachingBooks interview, she described a displacement that ran across generations and thousands of miles, one that her family lived and that she felt compelled to put into narrative.
My ancestors were driven by the westward expansion of European settlers who wanted more and more and more land. The Ojibwa were driven out onto the plains. Eventually, my great grandparents ended up all the way over in Montana. Then they doubled back and got land in the Turtle Mountains.
Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder as a child left her with something unresolved. The Little House books depict the same historical period as The Birchbark House, but Native people appear in them only to disappear, and the taking of their land registers as natural. That discomfort, held for years before she sat down to write, became part of the engine behind the series.
One of the things about the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that always distresses me is Ma’s racism. She’s a terrible racist about native people.
Where the Wilder books treat Native presence as something already fading, Erdrich built a counter-record: a family in the same era, on the same land, with full interior lives and a domestic world rendered in close detail.
How she wrote it
Objects from the island, drawn from lifeShe wrote the first pages on Madeline Island itself, working from the physical things she found there. The illustrations that accompany the text grew out of the same material practice, not from an archive but from objects she picked up and held.
I started writing these books when I was on Madeline Island, Wisconsin, drawing illustrations of stones and crayfish. There are all sorts of little things in the books that are drawn from things that I picked up on the island.
She had planned to hand the illustrations to a professional. The reason she ended up drawing them herself had nothing to do with artistic ambition and everything to do with how specifically Ojibwe the objects in the book were: any collaboration would have collapsed into her sending photographs anyway.
She said she had no confidence in her own drawings but that working with a professional illustrator would have meant just sending photographs of household objects; the things in the book were so specifically Ojibwa that she had to draw them herself. [paraphrased from audio]
One illustration came from an animal the family actually raised. The crow named Andeg, the Ojibwa word for crow, appears throughout the book, and Erdrich drew the character from a pet crow her family had kept after it fell from its nest. The author photo on the hardcover edition records the same bird.
I became very fond of the crow. It was one of the dearest pets that we ever had. On the hardcover version of The Birchbark House, my author photo shows me with our crow on my head.
Old Tallow, the hunter and elder who shapes the plot’s emotional spine, is not invented. Erdrich grounded the character in a documented historical record of women who lived outside the roles assigned to them in their era.
I have read accounts of women who lived out roles more traditionally male, and in fact my character in the Birchbark House series, Old Tallow, is based on research into traders’ journals.
Embedding traditional stories inside the novel’s narrative was a structural decision, not an ornamental one. She wanted readers to understand storytelling as the actual medium through which Ojibwe families passed time together, not as a cultural artifact set apart from daily life.
I wanted to include traditional stories and storytelling in the book. I wanted to tell a narrative of the people’s lives but also make the storytelling part of the narrative so that the readers would know that this is how people entertained themselves.
The personal thread
A language she was still learning to speakHer connection to Ojibwe culture was real and present, but she did not approach the project from a position of mastery. She has said openly that her own knowledge of Ojibwe language and traditions is still that of a beginner. Writing the series was, in part, her own attempt to recover what her family’s forced migration had cost.
It’s not research. It’s just life.
The name of the book’s protagonist, Omakayas, came from an old tribal roll. But the spelling on that roll doesn’t match the standard Ojibwa word for ‘little frog,’ which is ‘Omakakeens.’ Rather than correct it to the accepted form, she kept the anomalous spelling, treating the gap in the record as evidence of something real: either a lost dialect or a transcription error by a non-speaker. The choice says something about how she held historical documents, with fidelity to their imperfection.
Either there was a dialect that had been lost where Omakayas would be the way to say little frog, or the person who was non-Ojibwa speaking who wrote the name down wrong. I don’t know which. But I still wanted to use that old spelling in the book.
What she wants us to sit with
A fuller count of who was hereThe book was built to close a distance: between a child reader and a Native American family with a full, specific, recognizable domestic life. The Library of Congress reading where she described this goal made the comparison to Wilder explicit, placing Ojibwe household life in the same era, with the same texture, as the settler family that American children had been given for decades.
I want to give a sense to young people of how Ojibwes did household chores and also had close family structures like the ones portrayed in The Little House on the Prairie during that same time period. Ojibwe families lived on very little, and we wasted nothing and left no ecological disasters.
The argument she makes for the book is not that it should replace Wilder but that reading both together corrects a silence in how westward settlement gets taught. By 2012, she could see that correction already happening in classrooms.
I am happy that they are being read together, as the Native experience of early western settlement is so often missing in middle-grade history classes.
The deepest thing she wants readers to carry out of the series is not sympathy for the past but a revised picture of the present. The public image of Native Americans she was writing against fixes Indigenous people in a vanishing historical moment, without humor or warmth, as though survival itself were the exception.
I want readers to have a more complicated grasp of Native American people and realize that people have survived. People to this very day are speaking their language and living in their own culture and have a tremendous variety in their cultures.
What she is asking for, finally, is not that readers feel the weight of history but that they update their understanding of who is still here.