The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) is a work of historical literary fiction by Louise Erdrich, an author of Ojibwe, French, and German descent. Erdrich created an interconnected fictional universe set on a North Dakota reservation, a saga that includes her National Book Award-winning novel The Round House and her Pulitzer Prize finalist The Plague of Doves.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, itself a finalist for the National Book Award, deepens this universe by telling the story of Father Damien Modeste, an elderly Catholic priest who reveals that he is actually a woman named Agnes DeWitt. His final confession recounts the complex spiritual history of the Little No Horse community throughout the 20th century. The novel explores themes of The Fluidity of Gender and Identity, The Ambiguous Nature of Faith and Sainthood, and The Intertwining of Love, Sacrifice, and Suffering.

This guide refers to the 2016 Harper Perennial edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness, death, animal death, sexual violence, rape, physical abuse, child abuse, bullying, racism, suicidal ideation, mental illness, addiction, and substance use.

Plot Summary

In 1996, the elderly and ailing Father Damien Modeste, a Catholic priest living in retirement on the Little No Horse Ojibwe reservation, begins writing a final report to the Pope. He reflects on his long life of service and the controversial miracles attributed to the recently deceased Sister Leopolda. Damien confesses that he is an impostor and a woman and that he has kept many secrets. He resolves to tell the true story of his life before he dies.

The narrative flashes back to 1910. Agnes DeWitt is a musically gifted nun known as Sister Cecilia. Upon playing Chopin, she has a passionate, almost orgasmic experience, and her playing awakens intense emotions in the other nuns and scandalizes the convent. When the Mother Superior tries to make her quit playing, she gives up her vocation as a nun and leaves. Shedding her habit, she finds work as a housekeeper for Berndt Vogel, a kind German farmer. Though she refuses his proposals of marriage, they become lovers. Their unique erotic life centers on Agnes playing the piano for him while naked. Their happiness is cut short when Agnes is taken hostage during a bank robbery carried out by a gang. In the midst of the kidnapping, Agnes stuffs some of the stolen money into the lining of her jacket. Berndt pursues the gang, and in the ensuing struggle, the leader attempts to shoot Agnes in the head and grazes her skull. Berndt suffers a fatal gunshot wound but manages to kill the gang leader. Agnes survives with some memory issues, inherits Berndt’s farm, and is surprised to discover the stolen money that she stuffed into her jacket.

Overwhelmed by grief and trauma, Agnes becomes increasingly eccentric. She is visited by a missionary priest, Father Damien Modeste, who is on his way to the Little No Horse reservation. Shortly afterward, a great flood destroys her farm and her beloved piano. Agnes is swept into the river, clinging to the piano lid, and the trauma erases her memory of music.

After being carried away by the flood, Agnes has a mystical experience in which she is rescued and fed by a divine male figure. She then wakes up to find herself alone in an abandoned shack. Continuing her journey, she discovers the drowned body of Father Damien. In a moment of desperate inspiration, she buries him, takes his cassock and papers, and assumes his identity. Now masquerading as Damien, she travels north to the Ojibwe reservation at Little No Horse.

She arrives in 1912 to find the community ravaged by starvation and disease. She meets the formidable convent superior, Sister Hildegarde Anne, and a devout young girl named Pauline Puyat, whose mannerisms unsettle her. During Agnes’s first time saying Mass as Father Damien, the starving nuns experience the Eucharist as real, nourishing flesh and blood, a miracle that sustains them. “Damien” begins to learn about reservation life, befriending the wise but mischievous elder, Nanapush, and his daughter, the powerful Fleur Pillager. He is soon drawn into a conflict involving a man named Kashpaw and his multiple wives. When Damien finds himself manipulated by Nanapush, who hopes to gain one of the wives for his own household, the priest’s intervention contributes to the unraveling of the Kashpaw family.

Over the next several years, Father Damien witnesses the community’s struggles with land theft orchestrated by businessman John James Mauser. During a religious procession, Pauline intentionally spooks the horses pulling a wagon, causing a fatal accident that kills Kashpaw and his wife Quill. Their daughter, Mary Kashpaw, survives and is taken in by Bernadette and Napoleon Morissey, but Mary is so deeply traumatized by her parents’ deaths that she becomes obsessed with digging holes. She also violently attacks Napoleon whenever he comes near, although the reason for this is not yet explained.

When the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 strikes, Father Damien and Mary work tirelessly to care for the sick. Pauline also proves to be a heroic and compassionate nurse. Following the epidemic, Pauline undertakes extreme acts of penance, developing what appear to be stigmata and gaining a reputation for holiness. She is eventually accepted into the order as Sister Leopolda.

Years later, in the 1996 timeline, a young woman named Marie Lazarre confesses to Father Damien that she was physically abused by Sister Leopolda, who scalded her and stabbed her hand with a fork. (Marie is eventually revealed to be Leopolda’s abandoned daughter, a fact that Marie herself discovers later from another source. Marie’s testament to the fact that Leopolda abandoned her own child helps to disqualify Leopolda as a candidate for sainthood.) In the meantime, Marie’s confession of Sister Leopolda’s cruelty and violence prompts Father Damien to investigate Leopolda, and he eventually receives her confession for the murder of Napoleon, whom she strangled with a barbed-wire rosary.

Back in the earlier timeline, a young assistant priest, Father Gregory Wekkle, is assigned to Little No Horse. He and Agnes, in her identity as Father Damien, begin to feel deep attraction for one another. When Gregory discovers that Damien is a woman, the two fall deeply in love and begin a secret sexual relationship. Gregory begs Agnes to leave the priesthood and start a new life with him, but Agnes ultimately chooses to remain as Damien. Gregory leaves, heartbroken.

A donated piano arrives at the mission, and when Agnes sits down to play, her musical memory and talent return in a flood of emotion. Her playing attracts a congregation of snakes to the church, an event that the Ojibwe interpret as a sign of great spiritual power. Meanwhile, Fleur Pillager sends her daughter, Lulu, to a government boarding school and then goes away on her own to enact a complex plan of revenge against Mauser, the rich white businessman who stole her land. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, Lulu develops a long-lasting hatred of Fleur and becomes a fiercely independent spirit.

Fleur eventually marries Mauser, bears him a son, and then abandons her husband and returns to the reservation. Although she does not give her son a name, the Ojibwe community eventually dubs the strange, largely silent boy “Awun,” or “the Mist.” Fleur’s attempts to reconcile with Lulu fail. Later, Awun and Mary Kashpaw form an unlikely bond and leave the reservation together, although Mary eventually returns and continues to serve Father Damien.

After Nanapush spends a long and eventful life with his wife, Margaret, he dies and is inexplicably resurrected twice at his own wake, after which he dies for good.

Decades later, a terminally ill Father Gregory returns to spend his final days with Agnes, who cares for him faithfully despite her inner turmoil at his presence and her realization that he “condescends” to her because of his awareness that she is a woman.

Throughout the retrospective descriptions of these events that stretch over the course of Agnes’s life, the novel inserts passages detailing the present-day narrative (in 1996), when the centenarian Father Damien must contend with the young Father Jude Miller’s investigations into Sister Leopolda’s potential sainthood. Damien finally reveals that Leopolda murdered Napoleon and that Leopolda’s so-called “stigmata” were really the wounds that she sustained while strangling the sexually abusive Napoleon with the rusty, barbed-wire rosary. Likewise, Leopolda’s subsequent “visionary” behavior (her rigid posture and the trappings of “possession”) were actually symptoms of tetanus.

While pursuing further research into Father Damien’s life and career at Little No Horse, Father Jude finds Lulu’s birth certificate, on which Damien is mistakenly listed as the father alongside Nanapush. Jude misinterprets this clerical error as proof that Damien is Lulu’s biological father. Having fallen in love with Lulu himself, Jude now feels a kinship with Damien and decides to keep what he perceives to be Damien’s secret.

As Agnes feels her life drawing to a close, she fears that her identity as a woman will be discovered after her death, thereby undoing all her hard work in her life as Father Damien. She therefore plans her own disappearance. She rows out to a remote island on Matchimanito Lake, intending to drown herself; only Mary Kashpaw understands where she has gone and why. After Agnes dies of a stroke, Mary finds her body and a written note specifying how Agnes is to be buried. Honoring the note, Mary buries Agnes’s body in the deep waters of the lake.

In the Epilogue, the convent receives a fax from the Pope, who is unaware of Father Damien’s death and is requesting copies of Damien’s reports for the Vatican archives. Father Jude has returned to Little No Horse on a permanent basis; rather than investigating Sister Leopolda’s supposed miracles, he now pursues the question of Damien’s potential sainthood, researching and verifying the many miracles that surround Damien’s legacy. He and the sisters preserve Damien’s cabin as a shrine, which Mary lovingly maintains, cherishing the memory of the priest she served all her life.