Louise Erdrich

American novelist and poet

• Born: June 7, 1954
• Place of Birth: Little Falls, Minnesota

A writer of Ojibwe and German descent, Erdrich’s stories not only show the trauma of Native American experience but also celebrate strong communities deeply connected to ancient and sacred lands. She presents Native Americans not as defeated but as determined and vital. Her work, although criticized for disjointedness and for radical shifts in time, evokes a literary artistry that is both challenging and refreshingly original.

Early Life

Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, across the Red River from Wahpeton, North Dakota, the small town that later served as a model for Erdrich’s fictional town of Argus. Her father, Ralph Erdrich, was a German immigrant; her mother, Rita Gourneau Erdrich, was three-quarters Ojibwe (also known as Ojibwa or Chippewa). Both her parents were employed by the Wahpeton Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton as the oldest of seven children and was exposed to the cultures of both her parents. Maintaining a close bond with her German Catholic grandmother, she also was on familiar ground with her extended Ojibwe family on the Turtle Mountain reservation. Her maternal grandfather was a tribal chair there, and the North Dakota Plains reservation eventually became the setting for much of Erdrich’s fiction.

Erdrich later claimed that she had never given serious attention to her Native American background while growing up, that she had never thought about “what was Native American and what wasn’t.” In 1972, she entered Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and majored in creative writing. Her parents had encouraged her interest in writing since her childhood, binding her stories into homemade books. At Dartmouth, she began to garner awards for her poetry and stories. After her graduation from college in 1976, she worked a variety of odd jobs, compiling a personal archive of experiences for use in her writing.

While pursuing her master's degree at Johns Hopkins University, which she earned in 1979, Erdrich composed many of the poems that were collected in her first published book. Jacklight (1984) received critical praise, but it was her short stories, appearing in literary magazines, that produced a sense of anticipation among literary critics. “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” set on the reservation and centering on the death of June Kashpaw, won first prize in the Nelson Algren fiction competition in 1982. Introducing the various members of the Kashpaw, Lamartine, and Nanapush families, this story became the starting place for a number of related novels that start their stories in 1912.

Erdrich’s marriage to Michael Dorris in 1981 coincided with her growing interest in her Ojibwe heritage. Dorris, who had been head of the Native American Studies Department at Dartmouth, shared Erdrich’s writing ambitions and had a similarly mixed background. He had previously adopted a son, Reynold Abel, whose struggle with fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) led Dorris to write The Broken Cord (1989). Dorris adopted two more children, Jeffrey and Madeline, who also likely suffered from FAS, and Erdrich adopted all three of Dorris’s children when they married. Together, the couple had three more children. Dorris and Erdrich collaborated closely both on their writing and in campaigning against the increasing incidence of FAS.

Life’s Work

When Erdrich’s Love Medicine first appeared in 1984, two of its stories had already been honored: “Scales,” which was anthologized in Best American Short Stories (1983), and the 1982 Nelson Algren competition winner, “The World’s Greatest Fisherman.” “Saint Marie” was later selected for Prize Stories 1985: The O. Henry Awards (1985). Among the awards Erdrich received for Love Medicine were the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Award for Fiction. Erdrich immediately was hailed as an original and powerful talent, and her second novel, The Beet Queen (1986), confirmed her place among important contemporary authors.

Native American fiction became a component of twentieth-century American literature beginning with the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s A House Made of Dawn (1969). Readers, primed perhaps by the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the writers of the Latin American boom period, appeared ready for the transcendent storytelling of such writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Sherman Alexie. Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990; originally published as Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, 1978) not only appeared on best-seller lists but also demanded the attention of critics and scholars.

A distinctive yet difficult element of Erdrich’s fiction is the apparent disjointedness of her narratives: cross-cutting points of view, circular plotting, jarring shifts in time. Casual, linear reading produces an impression of a beautifully written but incoherent patchwork of short stories. A more careful approach reveals a deliberate and artful weaving of tales, all related, some more distantly than others but all essential to the whole.

While Love Medicine deals with the extended family of the Kashpaws on the reservation, The Beet Queen tells the somewhat more tightly plotted story of the Adares: siblings Mary and Karl (who, in one of the most memorable scenes in American literature, are abandoned amid an expectant crowd as their mother unexpectedly flies away with a pilot at an air show) and Karl’s daughter Dot. Dot is the intersection at which the worlds of the White Adares and Erdrich’s Ojibwes overlap. Celestine, Karl’s lover and Dot’s mother, is half sister to Russell Kashpaw; Gerry Nanapush is the adult Dot’s lover.

Tracks appeared in 1988, continuing the histories of characters begun in the two previous works. The action in this novel is concentrated in the years 1912 through 1924, though its repercussions travel backward through Love Medicine and The Beet Queen (and forward through time), filling in crucial details and enriching the entire saga. What emerges is a full, vibrant, and complex picture of the Little No Horse reservation, the adjoining Lake Matchimanito, and its inhabitants and neighbors; Erdrich brings into flower a mature and many-branched family tree. Nanapush and Pauline Puyat alternate their narratives, each revealing from strikingly different perspectives the life of Fleur Pillager, an alluring and mystical figure who calls Nanapush “uncle” and loves Eli Kashpaw. It is the descendants of Pillager, Nanapush, and Eli that people Erdrich’s Little No Horse. In 1993, publishing company Henry Holt issued an expanded edition of Love Medicine that included several new sections. Erdrich believed that the new stories belonged with the earlier work. Then, in 1994, she released The Bingo Palace, bringing another generation of her characters to adulthood.

The web of characters Erdrich spins is dizzying in its complexity. An enthusiastic reader would be well advised to map out the relationships to appreciate fully the varying perspectives that characters have of one another. Lulu Nanapush Lamartine, for example, is the daughter of Fleur and Eli. She has eight children, each with a different father. She also is the love interest of her uncle Nector, rival to Marie Lazarre, and grandmother to Lipsha Morrissey. She appears as an infant in Tracks and as a middle-aged woman in The Bingo Palace. Her son Gerry is the lover of both June Kashpaw (Lulu’s half sister) and Dot Adare. Gerry’s son, Lipshaw, becomes the rival of his uncle Lyman (another of Lulu’s sons).

It is easy to draw comparisons between Erdrich’s fictional community and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Indeed, Erdrich named Faulkner as an influence. Little No Horse is based on Turtle Mountain reservation, where Erdrich spent much of her youth; the off-reservation town of Argus is a re-creation of her hometown of Wahpeton. The complicated family network that binds her fiction into a comprehensive whole is certainly inspired by the author’s own Ojibwe relatives. Her familiarity with the more sinister aspects of Roman Catholic mysticism and the dangers posed by its mingling with Native American mythology appears especially in the dark, twisted reasoning of Pauline, the mixed-race fanatic nun known as Sister Leopolda.

Pauline’s death is the occasion for the papal investigation that results in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Father Damien, the priest who has spent nearly a lifetime at Little No Horse, fully recognizes the bitter irony of the nun’s malevolence being confused with the touchstones of sainthood, yet Damien himself is possessed of strange ecstasies that are at the core of his carefully guarded identity. Not willing to gloss over Sister Leopolda’s cruelties, Damien nevertheless anxiously champions her, arguing that the good that God worked through her outweighed the evil in her own very human nature and was perhaps even a product of it. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was written after Dorris's suicide, but while themes of grief and moral ambiguity run through the work, Erdrich maintained that it was a story about surviving oneself and discovering purpose.

The last two years of Dorris’s life were difficult for Erdrich. Depression had plagued Dorris throughout their marriage, and the accidental death of Reynold Abel in 1992 placed further stress on their relationship. Their other adopted son accused Dorris of abuse, provoking a lawsuit in which Dorris and Erdrich charged him with extortion. Both the allegations and the couple’s divorce proceedings were left unresolved at Dorris’s suicide in 1997, and Erdrich became estranged from their adopted daughter. In light of the painful publicity that resulted, Erdrich became even more protective of her family’s privacy. Living quietly in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she opened a bookstore called Birchbark Books in 2000 and gave birth for the fourth time to a daughter. While her collaborative relationship with Dorris had been widely credited with the success of her novels, her subsequent output did not seem to suffer in either creative energy or polish.

Four Souls (2004) returned to the story of Fleur with a revenge plot that becomes complicated by the intrusion of human sympathy, the seduction of wealth, and the bargaining of souls. In her quest for vengeance, Fleur loses herself and must return home to find healing. Erdrich had earlier explored issues of identity and self-deception, as opposed to the self-realization of Father Damien, in The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003). In this novel, a literal balancing act is the metaphor Erdrich uses to describe lives teetering on the improvised order of men and women. In The Painted Drum (2005), Erdrich celebrates the redemption of mothers by their daughters and plumbs the depths of grief caused by the loss of a child.

Her later works have prominently explored violent subject matter. Erdrich's Plague of Doves (2008), which was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009, centers on the historical lynching deaths of three Native American men for a mass murder they did not commit. Shadow Tag (2010) tells of the psychological unraveling and physical destruction of a mixed-blood family, particularly highlighting the twisted relationship between the wife and husband. A mother's rape, her son's coming-of-age, and a futile quest for justice in Indian Country form the core of the novel The Round House (2012), which was a 2012 National Book Award winner and a 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction nominee. Erdrich won a Pulitizer Prize for her 2020 novel The Night Watchman. Erdrich was inspired to write the novel by her grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and fought the forced removal of Native Americans from their land in rural North Dakota. Her 2021 novel, The Sentence, centers on a mystery at a haunted bookstore. The Mighty Red, published in 2024, explores the impact of tragedy on ordinary people's lives. In 2015, Erdrich received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

The themes raised in Erdrich’s fiction are universal: the value and potency of hope and love, the role of humor in survival, and the importance of home and family. The issues that illustrate these themes stem from the experiences of Native Americans in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. The reservation is a blighted residue left over from previous decades of decline, a place of concentrated despair, yet it is also a community where ties among members are strong and the connection of its people to the land is ancient and sacred. Poverty, alcoholism, and abandoned or distorted faith are balanced against self-worth, endurance, and love. Identity, discovered and disguised, have emerged as a major theme in her later writings, and the earlier explorations of cultural and generational connection have deepened as Erdrich has applied them particularly to her characters, endeavoring to survive themselves.

Erdrich’s plots also address a variety of contemporary issues, including the erosion of land rights, the education of children in both locally run and government schools (in which Native American children endured forced assimilation and the attempted erasure of their language and culture), tribal politics, religious conflict, generational conflict, and intermarriage.

Significance

Erdrich’s contribution to the canon of American literature, specifically Native American literature, is a critical one. In addition to giving expression to the trauma of the Ojibwe experience, she presents the lives of Native Americans not as defeated but as determined and vital peoples. She also brings to the storytelling tradition a literary artistry that is both challenging and refreshingly original. Critical opinion, however, does not confine Erdrich to the narrow category of Native American writer. She is unquestionably among the most important novelists of the twentieth century, and her influence can be seen in the works of writers such as Amy Tan, whose The Joy Luck Club (1989) tells the multiple-viewpoint, multigenerational story of a dead mother.

In addition to her fiction, Erdrich has also published works of poetry and folktales, including Baptism of Desire (1989) and Original Fire (2003). A rewarding collaborative relationship with Dorris resulted in other works of fiction, including The Crown of Columbus (1991), as well as Dorris’s autobiographical work The Broken Cord. The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year (1995) was praised for its detailed expression of a mother’s connection with her infant. Erdrich also wrote a number of children’s books, including The Birchbark House (1999), The Game of Silence (2005), and The Porcupine Year (2008), which have been described by reviewers as an answer to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s popular Little House on the Prairie series from the point of view of those displaced by such pioneer families as the Ingalls and the Wilders. Her nonfiction works include the travelogue Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003).

Erdrich and Dorris’s campaign against fetal alcohol syndrome has helped to draw the nation’s attention to the dangerous effects of alcohol in utero. Legislation was eventually passed requiring the posting of warnings to pregnant women anywhere liquor is sold.

Erdrich’s commitment to improving and celebrating the lives of Native Americans, along with her position as a prominent American author, prompted her to open Birchbark Books. This enterprise provides the sizable Native American population of Minnesota with a clearinghouse of art and information by and about Native Americans. Wiigwaas Press, launched by Erdrich and one of her sisters in an effort to preserve the Ojibwe language and culture, publishes works written in Ojibwe.

Bibliography

Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. 1999. Rev. ed. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. Print.

Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999. Print.

Erdrich, Louise. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Ed. Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. Print. T

Erdrich, Louise. "The Art of Fiction No. 208: Louise Erdrich." Interview by Lisa Halliday. Paris Review 195 (2010): 132–66. Poetry & Short Story Reference Center. Web. 19 Dec. 2013.

Hafen, P. Jane, ed. Critical Insights: Louise Erdrich. Ipswich: Salem, 2012. Print.

Heing, Bridey. "Louise Erdrich on Her Fiction: 'I'm Writing out of the Mixture of Cultures.'" Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 5 Sept. 2015. Web. 29 Sept. 2015.

Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. New York: Lang, 2001. Print. American Indian Studies ser. 11.

HolyWhiteMountain, Sterling. "A Conversation with Louise Erdrich." The Paris Review, 25 Mar. 2024, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/03/25/a-conversation-with-louise-erdrich/. Accessed 27 Sept. 2024.

Madsen, Deborah L., ed. Louise Erdrich: Tracks,The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,The Plague of Doves. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print.

Mankiller, Wilma. Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women. New York: Fulcrum, 2004. Print.

Sarris, Greg, Connie A. Jacobs, and James R. Giles. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich. New York: Mod. Lang. Assn., 2004. Print.

Stookey, Lorena. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. Print.

Washburn, Frances. Tracks on a Page: Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2013. Print.

Wong, Hertha Dawn, ed. Louise Erdrich’sLove Medicine: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.