American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. . . . The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. —Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands: The New Mestiza One night, in Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, the main character, Father Damien Modeste, now more than one hundred years old, begins one of his final letters to the pope, this time to reveal the secret of his identity. In it, he recalls the flood that swept Agnes DeWitt away from her deceased lover’s farm and the idea that carried her north to the reservation at Little No Horse, confessing, “I now believe in that river I drowned in spirit, but revived. I lost an old life and gained a new.” Even before the flood, Agnes had contemplated the “absurd fantasy” of a new missionary life after meeting the other priest—the first Father Damien Modeste—who was traveling to his resented assignment to “missionize the Indians,” where, he says, “the devil works with shrewd persistence” and God must enter “the dark mind of the savage.” When she emerges from the flood to find the priest’s dead body caught in a branch, Agnes “already knew.” She puts on the priest’s clothes, cuts her hair with a pocketknife, buries the body with her shorn hair (“the keeper of her old life”), and “begins to walk north into the land of the Ojibwe.” For the next eighty years, Father Damien marks the day of his arrival on the reservation as the beginning of “the great lie that was her life, the true lie . . . the most sincere lie a person could ever tell.” That “true lie” is an identity that transgresses the boundaries of mainstream gender norms, an identity that is accepted and honored in the unrestricted territory of the Ojibwe culture.