A World of Ideas; 218; Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

BILL MOYERS' WORLD OF IDEAS May 27, 1990 #217 Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over} When I first met Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris at their home in New Hampshire, anticipation reigned over both the private life they share as husband and wife and the public life they share as writers who say their best work is the work they do together.

Since our meeting, Louise Erdrich's new book of poems, Baptism of Desire, has been published, and she's given birth to their newest daughter, Aza. Michael Dorris has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book on the impact of fetal alcohol syndrome on their adopted son.

Both are half-Indian. His tribe was Modock, hers, Chippewa. We talked about how traditions of spirit and memory weave through the lives of many Native Americans, and how alcoholism and despair have shattered others.

[interviewing] What about this negative side of the Indian experience that so many lives wasted by the alcoholism, the fetal alcohol syndrome, what does that hold out for the future?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Well, alcohol has been defined repeatedly in recent years as the number one health hazard for Indians. Why? There's a lot of explanations for that. I think the most persuasive is that there was no tradition north of the Rio Grande of mind-altering drugs of any kind. And the people who introduced the drugs also introduced the way to use them.

BILL MOYERS: People from-

MICHAEL DORRIS: Europe. They were trappers and traders who were social deviants in their own society. They drank to get drunk. They drank in trading situations to get their trading partners drunk to make them more pliable trading partners. And that is the way the whole use got introduced within the society. So there was a way of drinking that later became at least identified in a metaphorical way with what it was to be an Indian.

Unfortunately, alcohol is also addictive, I mean, it's not a game. And the new book is about fetal alcohol syndrome. And fetal alcohol syndrome is what happens to a fetus when his or her mother drinks during her pregnancy. She doesn't have to be an alcoholic, she doesn't have to drink all the way during the pregnancy. For some metabolisms, one night of drinking can cause serious damage. For almost everybody, repeated drinking, even at low levels, can do serious damage. It's something that wasn't even known about by scientists until the mid-'70s, and in fact, pharmacological textbooks up until the middle '70s said, yes, alcohol passes the placental barrier, but it doesn't do any harm. Absolutely wrong. The surgeon general says that the only safe thing for pregnancy is no drinking. And if somebody has been drinking during their pregnancy, to stop, because the fetus cannot metabolize alcohol, and consequently, if a mother drinks just a little bit, the baby might pass out.

BILL MOYERS: Why did you get so interested in this?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Two reasons. Personal and professional, you might say. The personal level, our eldest son, who is adopted, is clearly a victim of this, although when he was adopted and when he was born, this wasn't even known about. But since then, it's obvious that that is part of his problem. He has a whole series of health problems and learning problems. And so we've been living with it for 18 years, and looking for a name to put on the constellation of symptoms that he has.

BILL MOYERS: What does it do to a child? What does it do as he grows

up?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Well, it depends on the trimester in which drinking takes place. First or second trimester drinking oftentimes will be a physical disability, scoliosis, cleft palate, any number of kinds of things like that, hearing problems, visual problems. Third trimester drinking, that is, in the last three months of the pregnancy, maybe affects only the brain, and maybe it is not manifested until the child is older, but the way one researcher at the University of Washington puts it, bad judgment. The inability to think abstractly, to relate an event and its consequences, to deal with money, to deal with time, to deal with moral issues. Everything is immediate, what's happening right now. That's the personal.

The professional is because it's a problem that is a huge crisis on a number of reservations. There are communities in this country and in the Soviet Union and in Japan and in Sweden and in Germany and France in which half of the kids born by the year 2000 will be impaired to a degree by maternal drinking. Because the woman who is a victim herself is almost impossible to counsel about not drinking during her pregnancy, so that woman doesn't hear the warnings, continues to drink. She has more children, she starts earlier, she has them longer in her life, raises the kids in an alcoholic environment, drinks during her pregnancies, and it's a problem that grows geometrically.

BILL MOYERS: And is that happening on the reservations here?

MICHAEL DORRIS: In many reservations it is happening.

BILL MOYERS: You've been doing your field work out there with them.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: What form does it take? What do you see happening because of fetal alcohol syndrome?

MICHAEL DORRIS: A whole generation of people are growing up who are impaired in their ability to look out on the world and see the same thing that other people see. These are people for whom, if you said, "I will give you $500 for this land right forever, and I'll give you the $500 right now," they'd take it. Our son is a sweet and generous boy. If he had $10, and somebody said, "Give me your $10," he'd do it, because money means nothing to him. If they said, "We'll give you a doughnut, give us $10," he'd give it, because it means nothing to them. You translate that to a group of constituents voting who can't make that long-term judgment; it translates into a real political crisis as well as a series of human crises. In addition to which, fetal alcohol costs this country billions of dollars a year.

BILL MOYERS: Is your son under a life sentence?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Absolutely. He will never be able to live independently. He will never be able to look at a work of art, listen to a piece of music, read a poem, and get from those abstract experiences what he would have gotten from them if his mother had abstained during her pregnancy.

BILL MOYERS: So what's the outlook, then, for those-your people, not just your son?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Well, the first outlook is prevention of that by dissemination of information for those people who can understand it, who are not themselves severe victims of the problem. For those people who are victims, like our son, I think the challenge is to find a means of instruction and education that will maximize the qualities they possess.

BILL MOYERS: Do you live a certain kind of life because of that reality? Are there things you can't do, don't do?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Yeah. I mean, when you see somebody that you love incapable of loving what you love, there is this-there's an ongoing sadness about that, and an anger, you know. I mean, it's also coping with the anger. What do you do when you're in a social situation and you see someone who is obviously pregnant drinking? Do you say something?

BILL MOYERS: Do you?

MICHAEL DORRIS: We do. We're not popular in such a situation, but on the other hand, if those people walked into a room full of fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol-affected kids, they wouldn't drink. I mean, we've had that experience of doing it, that they haven't had, and it would be immoral not to be a naysayer.

BILL MOYERS: Given what you've been told and what you understand about what's happened since Columbus came, the treaties, the broken promises, the alcohol, the perfidy, the betrayal, how do you trust people anymore? How do you trust human nature?

LOUISE ERDRICH: Who said that we do? [laughing]

BILL MOYERS: All right. Okay. Wipe that assumption.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Maybe-maybe we don't. Maybe we are somewhat cynical.

BILL MOYERS: I don't get that in your books. I don't get that from talking with you.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Many Indians today have a sense of identification with the American government against the example of this past history, and I think the answer is, because what choice do you have? I mean, what choice do we have as writers? What choice do we have as people who have children and look forward to a future? And want a future for them? You get angry? You become an activist? You get frustrated with what you perceive as being bad decisions on the part of people politically, but you don't just stop, you know, you have to believe that somewhere there is something that can be appealed to that is of common human experience.

BILL MOYERS: What do you think that is?

MICHAEL DORRIS: I think it's empathy, because we all share certain experiences like parenthood, and being a child, and so forth. And I think there is a truism that you can say about cultures the world over, and that is, the prime directive is to survive. And when you look at the greenhouse effect and you look at overpopulation and environment and perfidy and war and nuclear disaster possibilities, unless we've lost our minds collectively, we still have somewhere inherent that determination to survive. And it's a matter of making it clear that this is the time to ask that question, that there's no luxury.

LOUISE ERDRICH: You're probably right in that if we truly were cynical we wouldn't be writers. There was a-there's a great French writer who said that the purpose of a writer is to try to increase the sum total of freedom and responsibility in the world. And this was just after World War II. And you know, I think we think of ourselves as citizens of two nations, as writers, as parents, and you know, we just keep going and trying to do the best, but that doesn't mean that we think everything is going to turn out for the best.

We'd like to believe that things from day to day won't change for us, living in the United States, and it doesn't appear to be true, to me. It appears that we're on a course that will cause us to have to reevaluate ourselves in the very near future. We have to start thinking, more than anything else, and trying to learn from whoever, whomever we can find what our solutions are going to be. I mean, they're going to be technological, they're going to be solutions of the spirit. And we've grown technologically, we haven't progressed as far spiritually.

We're talking about knowledge coming from Europe. There was wisdom here about how to deal with so many of the problems we're going to face. And not having a happy ending mentality may be something that we need.

BILL MOYERS: You both have said you experienced a gothic Catholic childhood. What kind of childhood was that, a gothic Catholic childhood?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Oh, I guess it means, basically, that if there was ever Trivial Pursuit for how saints died, we would do very well. I mean, there was a big emphasis on martyrs, lots of-if there had been calculators in the days that I was a kid, people would have totaled up how many days they got off of purgatory by various indulgences. A lot of things that have really changed in the church but made for great material.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Well-you know, although we're not practicing Catholics now because of enormous disagreements with the canon, the dogma of the church, and our pope, there is something to being raised a Catholic. I mean, you were told that you have to wrestle with your soul. Well, how many children have to wrestle with their souls anymore? Or have them? And-

MICHAEL DORRIS: And you're responsible for your actions, and you know, guilt is the thing that probably is-everybody who is raised in it has to fight against for the rest of their lives, but that is-the other side of guilt is responsibility, which is not a bad thing.

BILL MOYERS: But at the same time, given your heritage, your Native American heritage, that line that shaped the two of you, that you were wrestling with your Catholic soul, were you also wrestling with your Indian soul?

LOUISE ERDRICH: My grandfather was the last person-and is the last person in our family who spoke Ojibwa and who really had a sense of what it was like to grow up before so many of the changes occurred in the reservation that destroyed a lot of the belief system. He somehow managed to believe both ways. He was very Catholic, believed in the saints, went to Mass, but he prayed in Chippewa or Ojibwa, and used a lot of the very particular ritualized instruments that he'd been taught to use. So when I'd be with him, I'd question everything, and I'd feel an entirely way about religion, because he didn't go to church to pray in certain ways, he went into the woods to pray. And one time when he came back out of the woods, he told me he'd been praying for a safe landing on the moon. This was during the first moon shot. So he was completely of his time, of his world, outside of the reservation, but he was using the very old system, the very old beliefs that he had, to make sense of things. And I think he's pretty sure that that's why they came back safely, you know.

BILL MOYERS: Does any of that still have a hold on you?

LOUISE ERDRICH: It does, but I think it's so subterranean that it probably comes out mainly in the writing. I'm always questioning back and forth. I don't know. I don't know yet, I'm not-I'm not sure.

MICHAEL DORRIS: In the books, we're very careful to try and, whenever something happens, a miracle or something that has no clear explanation, to give the readers a choice. Either they can believe with the characters that things happen for a mystical reason, or they can believe the characters are crazy, you know [laughing], and have a more psychological explanation. And I think that reflects our own predispositions.

LOUISE ERDRICH: There's been a lot of interest among younger people on reservations in traditional religion. It's a very positive thing, and there's revivals of sun dances, there's revivals of communal celebrations, and sometimes these things change with time, I mean, Native American people are adaptable within their own culture, too.

MICHAEL DORRIS: And religion is not something that's segmented away from other aspects of the society. In the northwest cultures, in Vancouver Island, British Columbia and Washington state, there's a revival in the economic system of pot latching, which is-

BILL MOYERS: Pot latching?

MICHAEL DORRIS: -pot latching, in which-it's a system of exchange in which-around ceremonial occasions you have, in a sense, an enormous party. And the hosts of the party, at the end of it, put, in ideal ways, all of their worldly possessions down, and call the guests up, and they carry them away. And you've been-you've given a successful party if you're impoverished, if you have absolutely nothing left. Then you go all the way up on the status hierarchy, and all the way down on the wealth hierarchy. But you know that eventually they're going to have a birth or a death or a marriage or something like that and invite you, and then you go and the expectation is that you have

to take away more than you gave. So it's a spur to production. And this is a system that worked for a thousand years among northwest people, and so--I mean, that isn't a religion per se, but it's all wrapped up in a world view, in a [crosstalk].

BILL MOYERS: It is religion if you take religion as the whole of the being, not just something that happens over here when you walk into the cathedral and open the book.

LOUISE ERDRICH: Right, yes.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Right, exactly.

BILL MOYERS: Is it possible that what you're trying to protect and celebrate, as I read your works and listen to what you're trying to hold on to, is memory? Perhaps it's the memory that makes one whatever one is.

MICHAEL DORRIS: We're talking about cultures that were primarily oral, that is, they didn't have a written language. And history was what was passed from one generation to the next. It is the words that-the entire lexicon had to be passed from one generation to the next. Oral languages are huge compared to written languages, because you have to have very specific words that identify things in a particular kind of way. So it isn't so much-when you say preserve memory, I would say yes, as long as you don't mean memory as something' of looking back to the past always as reference. Most Native American philosophical systems, I think, you might say are cyclical rather than linear, that is-

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

MICHAEL DORRIS: -well, that there is a sense not of continual progress and never repeating what has happened before, but rather that everything is repeated, that everything has happened before, that there is a continual cycle that sort of rolls forward but always returning to certain basics, even as the day and the night and the years and all this kind of stuff, so that you don't discard the past, you know. It isn't just prologue to what's going to come next, but it also comes next. I mean, there is a sense of continuity. And then people have noticed in our books that we have weird time frames, that in Love Medicine that the time skips around, and in Yellow Raft it moves from the present back to the past. And in a sense, maybe that reflects the cyclical view, that to pick and choose within the spectrum of time is an option that exists for cultures that have this cyclical view.

BILL MOYERS: I'm struck by the fact that so many of the characters who run through your work are bonded across time and space by ties of kinship and community. What does kinship mean? What spins the web of kinship?

LOUISE ERDRICH: Accident, sometimes. Even when you plan to have a family, everybody's an accident. You never know who the person is going to be that you decide to become a parent to. We're accidentally born to our own parents.

MICHAEL DORRIS: It's one of those things that's larger than the sum of its parts. It is-it's-for us as writers, it's a kind of interesting thing, because we are discovering stuff about our characters as we go along, and when one or the other of us is writing, the best experience is to go to the other office and say, "You'll never guess what so-and-so just did," or "who so-and-so really is." And we have the illusion that we know more about these people than they know about themselves, but we're discovering it all the time, too.

BILL MOYERS: That's fascinating, because you've just said something different but related to what Louise was saying. You are willing these characters' lives. You said kinship is an accident, in the sense that you don't even choose the children you have. You are willing your love for them after they come as accidents, after they come serendipitously. ERQRICH: It's not will, it's helplessness. I mean, you're in love.

BILL MOYERS: But isn't that the point, that you willed this kinship, you set out to create an extended family? Something's come into being not by accident, but by moral choice.

LOUISE ERDRICH: That's kinship.

MICHAEL DORRIS: Well, it's security, it's a link into the future, it's constant surprise. I mean, it's the antithesis of being static, when you have children. You may will the experience, but the particular is never predictable.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

MICHAEL DORRIS: Well, each individual child, a constellation of personalities, the things they need from you, the things they don't need from you, you can't will that. You have to simply respond to it. You may make something happen, but it's like setting into motion something that you'd lose control of once it exists.

BILL MOYERS: What have you learned about yourself as a father that you might not have learned otherwise?

MICHAEL DORRIS: When I started being a father, when I first became a father, I came out of the tradition that was entirely nurture-centered, that is, I thought that nurture was everything and that you have a child and they're a blank slate, and you put certain things around them and they will become the person that you expect them to become. And as a father, I guess I've learned that that's baloney, you know, that doesn't happen at all. And it is learning to respond to the person that is, rather than the hypothetical person.

BILL MOYERS: I think that's what I've learned as a father, that while I might have had certain expectations, they don't matter as long as I learn to love the child that grows up to the person that he or she is.

MICHAEL DORRIS: And that's the struggle. It's a struggle for our characters as well.

BILL MOYERS: Well, I take heart from the fact that your novels keep like expanding circles, getting larger and larger and incorporating and bringing forth more people, and I get a sense of life going on.

LOUISE ERDRICH: I think so. I think-people have been surviving-these characters have been surviving us. What else could they do?

BILL MOYERS: And they will survive you. Does that thought occur to you often, that 100 years from now, your characters will be living?

MICHAEL DORRIS: What you want for your characters-

LOUISE ERDRICH: I hope so. I hope that's so.

MICHAEL DORRIS: -more than anything else is to be true. I mean, it's a way to grab a little part of truth, and get it down and put a boundary around it, and sort of preserve it, like a time capsule going out there.

BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] From their home in New Hampshire, this has been a conversation with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. I'm Bill Moyers.