With this new beginning in Agnes’ life comes the hope and purpose that leads to lifelong service under the guise of Father Damien on Little No Horse. Interwoven with the present-day conflict is the bizarre history of Agnes Dewitt’s transformation into Father Damien and her absorption into the Ojibwe tribe, a culture to which she came in 1912 as an outsider under desperate and strange circumstances. Further complicating this situation is the presence of Father Jude Miller, sent by the Vatican to investigate the possible canonization of a local nun, Sister Leopolda, a stigmatic with dark secrets in her past, of which Father Damien is uncomfortably aware.
This latest opens with its protagonist, Father Damien Modeste, in old age, “in the thrall of the grape” and anxious that his longtime secret will be revealed upon his death – namely that he is actually Agnes Dewitt, a woman who has masqueraded for decades as a man of the cloth after stealing a dead priest’s identity. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse is the seventh in a series of works by Louise Erdrich that chronicles life on an Ojibwe reservation called Little No Horse. I soon discovered that this title was just what it proclaimed itself to be – the final report to the Vatican by a priest concerning the goings-on at the Indian reservation that is his parish. As I approached The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, I looked skeptically at the long title, wondering what Louise Erdrich’s story would entail. In other instances, it happens to be a small isolated microcosm of the novel’s larger themes. Often, a book’s title is a cryptic reference to a small event or occurrence in a novel that is key to unlocking the novel’s meaning. “Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.” – George Santayana
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