Louise Erdrich, member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, author of more than 20 novels, most of them revolving around an Ojibwe community in North Dakota, won the National Book Award for The Round House (2012), a crime thriller, and was a Pulitzer Finalist for The Plague of Doves (2009), a murder mystery. But when a galley of her new novel, (HarperCollins, out now), came across ELLE’s desk, it seemed to us that Erdrich had gone where she’d never quite gone before.

She’s written a novel—a wonderful, creepy, dystopian novel—in which women become prized, and quickly enslaved, for their ability to produce healthy babies. The pregnant protagonist of the novel, Cedar, an Ojibwe adoptee, is on the run, evading the white male evangelical government that wants to sever her from life as she knows it and use her body to produce healthy babies....



Future Home of the Living God is out now. HarperCollins

Yes, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it—unless you’ve been living under a rock and missed

The Handmaid’s Tale cleaning up at the Emmys, or the fact that the book by the great Margaret Atwood has been on Amazon’s list of its top-20 most-read books for months.

So who better to interview Erdrich about her new novel than Atwood? Lo and behold: They agreed! Over the summer, the two writers—one in Toronto, one in Minnesota—amid jaunts to the Arctic and Winnipeg, engaged in a cross-border digital interview about the novel, their prophetic fears, politics, climate change, and why we idealize Canada.

Margaret Atwood: Louise, you were writing away at Future Home of the Living God—starring Cedar, your pregnant heroine—but then you put it in a drawer. However, just recently you took it out of the drawer and finished it, in what must have been a blue-hot blaze of energy. Why did you stop writing it? And what made you resurrect it?

Louise Erdrich: I started Future Home of the Living God sometime after the 2000 U.S. election. I was furious and worried. I saw the results of electing George W. Bush as a disaster for reproductive rights. Sure enough, he began by reinstating the global gag rule, which cuts international funding for contraceptives if abortion is mentioned. This, when we face overpopulation. Also crucial for me was that we lost on climate change; there was a real chance to keep the lid on carbon back then. Oh, and I was pregnant! My youngest daughter was born in 2001, so my identification with Cedar was total. I wrote obsessively in Cedar’s voice.

I guess you could say it felt like things were going backward, devolving on every level.

When did I put the book away? First, I had to finish a book called The Plague of Doves. Then, in 2008, I transferred my energy to The Round House, which was a novel about crimes of sexual violence on the reservation. Well, really it was the story of a boy trying to save his mother. With Obama in Washington, we seemed to have a chance to move forward—clean energy, the restoration of women’s rights, a progressive Supreme Court. We had a thoughtful, elegant, and optimistic family in the White House. I like remembering when our leaders made us look good. But we have a tendency to regress after we move forward. I picked up Future Home of the Living God again, after the 2016 election, because I needed Cedar. Maybe I’m writing the biological equivalent of our present political mess.

And of course it feels like things are going backward again.

Steve Powers

Atwood: Your characters are faced with a very unusual situation: Evolution is moving backward. So babies that are being born are frequently more animal than human, thus making human babies a rare and desirable thing. Plant life is going backward, too, and animal life.... Did this idea come to you out of the blue, or was it suggested by earlier reading? This was a possibility that afflicted the Victorian mind right after the theory of evolution became generally accepted.

Erdrich: My interest in the subject probably started with the last scene in Planet of the Apes—Charlton Heston kneeling in the sand in front of the Statue of Liberty’s broken head. I loved that. I loved Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker and other books about social devolution. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (the loss of humanity with new developments in cloning). P. D. James’s The Children of Men (no babies at all). The Book of Joan, by Lidia Yuknavitch. Everything by Ursula Le Guin, including the world of Always Coming Home. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is about sexual shape-shifting. I love the [Frank Herbert] Dune trilogy, which is about lineage and interbreeding on a desertified, jihad-wracked, earthlike world. Also: Octavia Butler. Lilith’s Brood is a visionary work filled with sensuous tension and dark humanity. Her series of novels—Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (all part of Lilith’s Brood)—is about what happens when humanity is rescued from annihilation by a race of gene-splicing aliens who fall in love with us.

Steve Powers

Don’t you find it interesting that science fiction is so often obsessed with reproduction?

And, of course, The Handmaid’s Tale, which I profoundly admire. Your book has always resonated for me. Fundamentalist religions always include religious laws that control the female body—you got that perfectly right, and invented such a horrifyingly normal society based on literal readings of scripture. Of course, The Handmaid’s Tale draws enormous energy from biological shuttering, or refusal. No babies, no future. No human race. Men find ways to engulf women and to manipulate the female body. We keep thinking about it, because we are always close to the edge. Women’s rights are just a watery paint on the walls of history. We must not forget.

Future Home of the Living God is more about things falling apart, about the chaos in the wake of disaster, and about how little we know when we need information the most. It is about how vulnerable women’s rights are. People argue over what it means to be a feminist—I have never thought about it. Of course I’m a feminist. I have four daughters. What else could I be? Also, when I began writing Future Home, pregnant, I was all too aware how vulnerable we are as women—both in terms of controlling our reproductive lives and when carrying a baby. As I lumbered along at nine months, I could not imagine having to deal with plotting an escape, but I felt like writing one.

Atwood: In Future Home, as a repressive, woman-stealing government settles in, some head for the Canadian border, as many have in the past. From Minnesota it’s not too hard—at least you don’t have to leap across ice floes on the St. Lawrence or swim Lake Superior. But what is it about Canada? Do you really think we’d be nicer? Or does Canada just seem, well, more empty?

Erdrich: It is interesting to me, this tendency for Americans to view Canada as our better nature. Maybe it’s true. For one thing, you have health care. There doesn’t seem to be a death-throttle struggle over reproductive rights. You have sensible laws about guns.

My home reservation, the Turtle Mountain, is nearly on the Canadian border. We have Turtle Mountain relatives in Canada. Also, because I grew up in North Dakota and generally our field trips involved Winnipeg, I think of Canada as a land of culture. Ballet, museums, gorgeous art, people speaking French, and also many First Nations speakers of Ojibwemowin.

Atwood: That is very complimentary, but at the same time Canada has a pretty terrible record with First Nations—consider the Indian Act, a pre-Hitlerian piece of legislation dating from the nineteenth century, and the residential school system, which not only killed a lot of children but devastated families, with effects that remain today. More can be learned at recognition2action.ca. That being said, however, I think Canada is not the worst place to flee to if it comes to that. And considering where your characters live, it’s kind of the only choice!



Erdrich: You are being very Canadian here, refusing to take a compliment. But I respect that because I am from North Dakota. And Minnesota. You are entirely right about the Canadian residential school system for First Nations children. Because schooling was turned over to the Catholic Church, there was no oversight. Horrific sexual and physical abuse was rampant. Thanks for including the link here. And while we are speaking frankly, Canada’s Alberta tar sands are an outrage, killing local Native people far off in the bush with unprecedented cancers, and contributing in a distressing way to climate change. Honor the Earth and other Native organizations are fighting pipelines that push the worst of the worst climate-killing sludge down through Minnesota. But still, I really love Canada. I have considered fleeing, or, in my case, calmly relocating, to the Great North, but would have to take 30 to 40 beloved family members and friends along.

Atwood: Future Home’s main character, Cedar, is an indigenous woman who has been adopted by a New Age–y white family and fetishized by them as a sacred Indian princess, but who then goes to the reservation to connect with her birth mother and gets the buckskin-fringed stars knocked out of her eyes. (“I’d been a snowflake. Without my specialness, I melted,” she says.) The birth family is sometimes hilariously down-to-earth. The family’s teenage daughter, Little Mary, the Goth Princess, wins five stars in the obnoxious-teenager department; the family runs a Superpumper gas station/convenience store. I thought you made that up, given your knack for satire, but it’s a real thing.

How much sacred Indian fetishization have you yourself encountered? Do people tiptoe around you and look out the window when you make raucous, bad-taste jokes? (Laugh-or-die humor is one of your trademarks, yes? Though events can quickly turn horrific or heartbreaking, as they do in Future Home.)

Erdrich: Er, I thought it was more the Waldorf school that fetishized dear Cedar. I was hoping her parents were more realistic, even though her adoptive mom is an anti-vaxxer. I love that image, “buckskin-fringed stars,” and I’m very pleased that you liked Little Mary, Queen of the Damned. What a joy it was to write this vicious Goth-Lolita. She isn’t modeled on any of my daughters, not in any way. But I’ll tell you, plenty of wild, rude young women have crossed this threshold in the past 30 years. Friends and girlfriends of their boy pals. I loved the unbearable ones the best.

Have I been fetishized? Sometimes, maybe. I hope to God I was fetishized a few times. But I am very different from my characters. Quite featureless. We’ve met! I am a quiet person with nothing obvious to mark me as even very funny. Sadly, I make no raucous jokes in person. And worse than bad taste, I have no discernible taste. I’ve never had the knack of inventing a cool or even uncool persona. I am just a fairly nice person with an almost invisible air of menace.

Men find ways to engulf women and to manipulate the female body.

Atwood: Maybe you are Canadian! The indigenous saint, Kateri Tekakwitha—the Lily of the Mohawks—plays an important role in the story. (This isn’t her first literary appearance: She got into , back in 1966.) She’s ambiguous in your book. How do you feel about “perfect” female role models? At least in the Catholic Church, women do have some leading-lady parts; not many of those among the Protestants. But are such lilies used as sticks to thrash the rest of us, imperfect as we are?

Erdrich: Oh God, she was in Beautiful Losers? I didn’t know. I’ll go upstairs and rifle through my audiocassette tapes. Again, you rule with this “lilies used as sticks to thrash the rest of us” line. The images of female saints are fake, invented. They are male creations. They are the Ivanka Trumps of Catholic history, constructed, as you say, to thrash the rest of us. My female heroes have always been frankly imperfect. In fact, they have made virtues of their imperfections. As for me, I’ve tried so hard to be good that it’s made me bad. Perhaps you know what I mean. The real tragedy of Hillary Clinton is that she tried so hard to be liked. She couldn’t bust loose. A woman who has done everything as right as possible confronted with a man who has done everything as wrong as possible. Who’s going to win in this trash-mad era?

Atwood: Me, I was brainwashed by the Brownies. It hasn’t been good for me.

Writers from groups under threat (including women) are often criticized by members of that group for not portraying their characters as models of wonderfulness. It’s seen as giving ammunition to the enemy, or betraying the group by displaying dirty laundry in public. You have not shied away from this. Have people thrown stones at you for that reason?

Erdrich: I guess I’ve guarded my skull and let the stones hit me in the back. Where I’ve got padding. On some fundamental level, I do not care. Characters are who they are. I know what you mean about writing a press release for women or for my people, but that won’t work. Our conflicts are what make us interesting, and how we surmount or succumb to them. Neither you nor I write about perfect people because, if they exist, they are perfectly boring.

Atwood: I loved the “suicide diary” being kept by Eddy, husband of Cedar’s birth mother: He records various reasons why, although inclined to kill himself, he might not kill himself today—which are in themselves little hymns to life. But then as the larger society falls apart and the white cottage people disappear, Eddy gets a sense of purpose via a movement to reclaim ancestral indigenous territories. Do you see this happening now, albeit in a smaller way? A new sense of purpose through claims to ancestral lands?

Steve Powers

Erdrich: What would Eddy do if he were real? He would have been at Standing Rock. Although the oil is now running through that pipeline, it is not over. It will never be over. It has taken generations, but now, just as spiritual leaders from many Tribal and First Nations predicted, there is a strong sense that indigenous people are moving forward, reclaiming land, language, culture, a framework for survival. I love the fierce sense of purpose and unity between the old and the young.

I am working through the history of my own tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Over and over I see how close we came to losing everything. And yet, in spite of the most disastrous deprivations, how firmly fixed our people were on surviving and keeping our identity alive. My grandfather Patrick Gourneau, with a meager government-boarding-school education, figured out how to save our tribe from termination in the mid-1950s. That gives me hope.

Atwood: Your writing has never shirked the peopleness of people: It’s not all upside, being people. In this book, things take the darkest turn yet: Orwellian Room 101 betrayal—torture makes nobility virtually impossible—plus an even shoddier betrayal, just for the money. Is good behavior possible only given stable conditions? And is it difficult even then?

Erdrich: This is something I ask myself—how do I know what I would do, for instance, if I were a Chinese human rights lawyer? Would I even be a human rights advocate in a society where that would get me tortured or killed? Imagining morally challenging situations is one of the great gifts of literature. , by Hans Fallada, is one of those books. In the best of circumstances it is difficult to stand up for what we believe. This is not the best of times in the U.S. But I am encouraged by the determined way so many of us resist Donald Trump and all he stands for. Our democracy depends on what we do as individuals.

Atwood: Future Home of the Living God is filled with shape-shifting; identities are not only unclear, they change. Evolution is reversing itself, and animals and plants are reverting to earlier forms of themselves. Cedar herself discovers that she isn’t who she thought she was. Yet she does not cease to hope.

Are we at a moment in—specifically—American history in which “certainties” are being called into question? Is the ground crumbling? If so, what can we hang on to?

Steve Powers

Erdrich: I believe in methodical change. When a breakthrough happens like Roe v. Wade or laws protecting same-sex marriage, the groundwork has been put into place for many years. When Barack Obama was elected, that seemed sudden. But the way was prepared long before. The same thing should have happened with Hillary Clinton. My father, who is 92 years old, was excited to cast his vote for her because he believed she was the best-prepared person ever to run for president. My dad and I love Angela Merkel. We were hoping to see two wise women leading the world wearing color-block suits.

A woman will become president, sooner than we may think. But the road is still immensely difficult. Women. Having tasted our freedom, we are hungry for the power to make a better world.

My country is in a jam right now. Au revoir, dear Canada! Please keep fighting to be a liberal democracy—a country who welcomes immigrants and is attempting truth and reconciliation with Native people. We need your example and friendship.

This article originally appears in the December 2017 issue of ELLE.

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