The Sentence

“Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.”

This quote is ironic because Erdrich’s novel is a testament to the power and importance of books. However, the quote is also notable because Erdrich demonstrates, through plot and character development, that although books are important, so is life experience and dealing with inner conflict. Books provide one form of knowledge, but figuring out what matters in life is an entirely different journey, a separate kind of knowledge.

“I love statistics because they place what happens to a scrap of humanity, like me, on a worldwide scale. For instance, Minnesota alone imprisons three times as many women as all of Canada, not to mention all of Europe. There are the other statistics. I can’t even get into those. For many years now, I have asked myself why we are at the bottom, or at the highest worst, of everything measurable. Because I know we have greatness as a people. But perhaps our greatness lies in what isn’t measurable. Maybe we were colonized, but not enough. Never mind casinos, or my own behavior, most of us do not make money our one fixed star. Not enough to wipe clean the love of our ancestors. We’re still not colonized enough to put us in a dominant-language mind-set.”

This passage emphasizes the dilemma of being human yet being dehumanized by statistics. Statistics help reveal inequity in US society, but they highlight the oppression of the Indigenous American community. The passage celebrates Indigenous resiliency by placing importance on the shared heritage and cultural values that keep Indigenous Americans in touch with their culture despite the systematic destruction of their people and customs. Here, Erdrich challenges the American prison system that helps propagate negative stereotypes of Indigenous Americans when she reveals that Tookie, as a representative of her people, will not be destroyed by becoming a statistic.

“Ever since I understood this life was to be mine, I have wanted only for it to continue in its precious routine. And so it has. However. Order tends toward disorder. Chaos stalks our feeble efforts. One has ever to be on guard.”

Tookie’s newfound security is broken by Flora’s ghost. This quote foreshadows that conflict and expresses Erdrich’s message that life is unpredictable and full of challenges.

“Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism. A lot of people fall in love here. We’ve even had a few proposals.”

Here, Erdrich celebrates independent bookstores as communal spaces of love. Notably, she also calls these spaces “doomed,” as though the very intimacy of the independent bookstore contributes to its doom. Erdrich highlights that as important as independent bookstores are, they’re easily fallible in the face of capitalism. Here, Erdrich advocates for the bookstores and notes the fragility of loving spaces.

“Many books and movies had in their plots some echoes of my secret experiences with Flora. Places haunted by unquiet Indians were standard. Hotels were disturbed by Indians whose bones lay underneath the basements and floors—a neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history. Plenty of what was happening to me happened in fiction. Unquiet Indians. What about unquiet settlers? Unquiet wannabes?”

Flora’s relationship with Tookie challenged her patience because although Flora was a loyal customer, she appropriated Indigenous American culture and heritage. Ghosts are used in American popular cultural portrayals of Indigenous American experiences, whether those experiences are authentic or not. Here, Erdrich subverts the stereotype of spiritual Indigenous Americans haunting the lands stolen from them by using the ghost of a white woman. With Flora’s death, Tookie isn’t free from cultural appropriation and is instead forced to confront it head-on.

“Asema and I were both paralyzed. There was a sliding sensation. Like when you see the car driving along in front of you slip on ice and proceed across the roadway sideways. It is something that an Indigenous person often feels as they listen to non-Indians appreciate an unbelievably dense dealing with Indians.”

This quote is important because it captures the dehumanization of Indigenous Americans in contemporary US society and highlights how it feels to be continuously robbed of one’s history, people, and culture. This quote connects to the character—and the attempts to reclaim Indigenous narratives from white Americans who can’t appreciate the depth of destruction of Indigenous American communities.

“It was starting to snow. At last, the pure and fragile snow was falling upon us, separating off the air from the dirt, the living from the dead, the reader from the book.”

In literature, snow often symbolizes a new quiet. Nature takes a break from living, and people are forced indoors with their internal voices and conflicts. Snow can represent a sense of cold loneliness, but it also offers the opportunity for future rebirth. In this context, the snow is a relief to Tookie because it provides the opportunity to separate herself as a reader from the book she buried in her backyard. However, snow eventually thaws, so in this quote Erdrich also foreshadows a future reckoning with the book.

“He stared holes through me. He saw straight into my heart and didn’t seem to care that it was riddled with cowardice, hubris, stupidity, regret. Those things meant nothing to him. He saw that what was left of my heart was good and loving.”

The novel presents a plot twist when Hetta arrives with a surprise baby, Jarvis. Tookie instantly falls in love with Jarvis, a sentiment that gives her the opportunity for character development. Because Jarvis is characterized through his innocence, he can see Tookie for her core persona—her enormous love and empathy. Jarvis’s inclusion in the novel is a welcome respite to Tookie’s internal conflicts and offers her a chance for redemption.

“‘Every world-destroying project disrupts something intimate, tangible, and Indigenous,’ said Asema. ‘Wild rice isn’t just a cultural issue, or a delicious niche food, it is a way of talking about human survival.’”

Asema’s quote emphasizes Erdrich’s message about reclaiming Indigenous American culture and history. Here, Asema connects wild rice (something many people wouldn’t think twice about) to cultural issues and human survival. In this quote, Erdrich points out that Indigenous people are affected by every American institutional and cultural development that solidifies their place in the American consciousness while simultaneously ostracizing them.

“Of what I should do, there was no hint. It reminded me of what Pollux said once about owls. That when you are approached by an owl, when you don’t seek it out but it flies to you or perches on your fence, say, the owl is telling you to prepare yourself. Prepare yourself for what? That sort of warning can drive you crazy. Impossible to know how to avoid something when you don’t know what it is.”

This passage reveals the paranoia that grows when an unidentified and unknowable threat hovers above a person. Erdrich presents a tone of foreboding here, a tone that she develops through the continued and escalating mystery of Flora’s ghost. Here, Erdrich alludes to suspicions of the natural world as a parallel to Tookie’s internal and external conflict. The incomprehensibility of Flora’s ghost echoes Erdrich’s message about the unpredictability of life. In Chapter 7, this tone of foreboding foreshadows the approaching COVID-19 pandemic, a worldwide event that forced every person to reckon with all that they couldn’t predict or understand.

“Louise had been excited by the word ‘essential.’ As it turned out, books were important, like food, fuel, heat, garbage collection, snow shoveling, and booze. Phones ringing meant our readers had not deserted us and some far-off day they would walk into the bookstore again. Sometimes it was exhilarating to be needed. Sometimes I felt important.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the economic security of Birchbark Books and its employees, they receive a lifeline because bookstores are deemed essential businesses. Through this plot point, Erdrich celebrates the value of books to the human soul and community. The bookstore’s survival foreshadows a brighter future and retains a message of hope through a dark time.

“When Jackie had talked about not wearing red, I’d remembered that old-timers gave away the dead person’s things or burned them. Maybe the burning came about after all the plagues that hit us. But I was covering all the bases I could think of.”

This quote highlights two symbols. The first is the color red, which in this novel is said to attract spirits. The second is the symbolic burning of objects to rid the world of a spirit. Although Indigenous American traditions and culture are pervasive throughout the novel, these two symbols are nearly universal. Burning is a literary symbol for total destruction that presents the opportunity for rebuilding and is an important symbol for Tookie, who needs to rebuild her emotional psyche, her relationships with others, and her past.

“What had she admired about me? What could I have done? Her standards were impossibly low. I set the medallion on the pile and patted it. Back then, she’d meant well. It wasn’t as though she’d waited her whole life to become a slinking, needy, invasive spirit. Maybe she hated herself for what she was doing.”

These questions are part of Tookie’s haunting. The question of why Flora chose Tookie is important because it chips away at Tookie’s self-esteem and makes her wonder if she deserves the ghost’s fearful subliminal violence. In life, Flora’s attention to Tookie was equally confusing to her. Although Tookie wasn’t particularly warm to Flora, Flora treated her like a friend. This quote emphasizes the mystery of Flora’s ghost, Tookie’s low self-esteem, and Tookie’s judgment toward Flora, even in death.

“Sometimes as I am waking, between sleep and consciousness, I am afflicted with a wave of crashing sorrow. Where this wave comes from, or why this moment is so bitter and deep, I don’t know. It just happens to me. I stay still as though I have a knife in me, afraid to jostle this feeling and make it worse. But I know that it won’t go away unless I submit to it. And so I feel it.”

In this quote, Erdrich demonstrates the depths of Tookie’s internal pain. Even in her most peaceful moments, Tookie feels a sorrow she can’t explain, emphasizing the unknowability of Tookie’s feelings and the tragedy that surrounds her. In addition, it reveals a mental health condition in her history. Tookie knows what to do in this situation—mainly, nothing. In submitting to her sorrow and embracing her feeling, Tookie works toward not repressing her emotions and thereby damaging herself and others further.

“The two mock-saluted and ducked into the car. I had a terrible feeling as they drove off. I always have terrible feelings when anyone drives off. Throughout my life people have tended to disappear forever. My aunt—diabetic coma. My mother—overdose. My cousins—various accidents, various substances. My lovers—other people. Hetta and Asema will be okay, I thought. It is supposed to be safe to exercise your First Amendment rights in peaceful assembly, but then again there was Standing Rock.”

Erdrich reveals the depth of Tookie’s loss and her insecurities about receiving love from others. Her past experiences have taught her not to trust happiness or love because the people she has tried to love all died or left her. This loss and lack of security in her life heightens Tookie’s internal conflict.

“I put my hand on my chest and closed my eyes. I have a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. And I have a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered. The glass heart belongs to Pollux. There was a ping. To my surprise, it had developed a minute crack, nearly invisible. But it was there, and it hurt.”

Here, Erdrich characterizes Tookie as having one vulnerability within her tough exterior: her sensitive love for Pollux. The “crack” in this passage is an important symbol of how unusual their relationship is. Pollux was personally responsible for Tookie’s arrest, and their subsequent true love is unique and true but also built on forgetting the memories of that arrest. Tookie is surprised to feel the presence of this crack, emphasizing that she hasn’t confronted the traumas of her past.

“Pollux had known good people, seen lives saved by his fellow patrol officers. So who was doing the beating? The uniforms or those inside them? How was it that protests against police violence showed how violent police really were?”

The protests over police brutality in the George Floyd murder put Pollux in a difficult ethical dilemma. He intimately knows both sides: He knows how it feels to be oppressed and how to be part of a force serving the community. For Pollux, the feelings about the police in Minneapolis aren’t straightforward and are complicated by his past involvement in the police force. Here, Pollux (and Erdrich) pose an important question: whether society influences individuals or individuals influence society.

“Why, after all that, be bothered by a ghost? Why indeed? I have proved that I’m too much! I shall accept her. As I was able to accept the mashed rutabagas. And Pollux? Will you accept that when he did his job he also failed you? Can you forgive him for that?”

The shifting tone in Tookie’s attitude towards Flora’s ghost—and, by extension, her own internal conflicts—is evident in this quote. Tookie realizes that she has faced scarier threats than the ghost and decides that she can accept the ghost as myth or fact—whatever it takes to alleviate her stress. Here, Erdrich directly connects the supernatural and the real. This quote confirms that Tookie’s journey with Flora’s ghost parallels her journey through resentments and internal conflicts.

“I had witnessed Flora’s tension, her zeal to correct mistakes in other people. I remembered how once she had told me I couldn’t. I talk about being ‘Indian’ or ‘Aboriginal,’ but should always say ‘Indigenous.’ I’d told her that I’d call myself whatever I wanted and to get the hell out of my face. Now I saw Flora’s pedantry as a form of desperation. It was true that she was constantly on high alert. Always offering her latest proof. Always scared she’d be laughed at. She studied us out.”

Flora’s redemption lies in Tookie’s forgiveness of Flora’s “pedantry” and appropriation. Enough time has passed for Tookie to look back on Flora with empathy. Tookie has some holes in her understanding of self, but her identity is firmly rooted in her culture. Flora, on the other hand, is desperate for acceptance and anxious about being rejected. Tookie notes that Flora “studied us out,” implying that Flora chose Birchbark Books and its employees as friends so that she could study how to be Indigenous American, highlighting her identity crisis and desire for community.

“Or maybe there was a god. Mine is the god of isolation, the god of the small voice, the god of the little spirit, of the earthworm and the friendly mouse, the hummingbird, the greenbottle fly and all things iridescent. In that quiet perhaps one of my tiny gods told me that I should drive back to the hospital parking lot.”

Tookie has some spiritual yearnings but no God. Here, she continues her journey toward healing her internal conflicts by reexamining her spirituality. In acknowledging the presence of spirituality in small things, such as the hummingbird and the greenbottle fly, Tookie honors her life and lives in the moment. Additionally, acknowledging her isolation as a god reveals Tookie’s self-awareness and her appreciation of time.

“Ah, my chubby traveler. You entered this world at the crossroads. Together, we straggled through a year that sometimes seemed like the beginning of the end. A slow tornado. I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year. I want this now to be the now where we save our place, your place, on earth.”

Throughout all the trials and tribulations of the year 2020, only Jarvis provides Tookie with a stable source of joy. In this passage, Tookie reflects on her difficult year as beautiful because of Jarvis’s presence. Rather than remembering the past as painful, Tookie actively celebrates the joy that experience and life provide. This highlights Erdrich’s message about the importance of living in the moment and appreciating the small, beautiful things in life.

“Ghosts bring elegies and epitaphs, but also signs and wonders. What comes next? I want to know, so I manage to drag the dictionary to my side. I need a word, a sentence.”

As the novel concludes, Tookie has overcome her fear of ghosts and has even come to appreciate them. In this quote, “ghosts” means both literal ghosts (like Flora’s) and the internal conflicts and past resentments that haunt one throughout one’s life. The novel’s end celebrates the “wonders” that ghosts can bring. Now that Tookie has learned that life’s challenges bring beautiful discoveries, she’s ready for the next challenge. She needs another word, another sentence to inspire her into the next chapter of her life.

“The door is open. Go.”

This quote is the last word from Tookie or Erdrich in the novel’s narrative section. It’s a response to Tookie’s desire for another word or sentence of inspiration. It’s also a message about the importance of acknowledging and embracing open doors—the unknowability of life. Doors are physical passageways and metaphors for entering new spaces and making new discoveries. The open door symbolizes how Flora finally leaves the bookstore in her ghost form.