Louise Erdrich

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Cover of a book with interviews with Erdrich (left) and Dorris who had a unique collaborative relationship. ISBN 0-87805-652-1
Cover of a book with interviews with Erdrich (left) and Dorris who had a unique collaborative relationship. ISBN 0-87805-652-1

Karen Louise Erdrich (born June 7, 1954) is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Ojibway and Chippewa). She is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.

Contents

[edit] Background and early life

Erdrich was born, the eldest of seven children, to Ralph and Rita Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota. Her father was German-American while her mother was French and Anishinabe. Her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, served as a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school. She attended Dartmouth College in 1972-1976, gaining an AB degree and meeting her future husband, the Modoc anthropologist and writer Michael Dorris, then director of the college’s Native American Studies program. Subsequently, Erdrich worked in a wide variety of jobs, including as a lifeguard, waitress, poetry teacher at prisons, and construction flag signaller. She also became an editor for The Circle, a newspaper produced by and for the urban Native population in Boston. Erdrich graduated with her Master of Arts degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.

[edit] Early literary work

In the period 1978-1982, Erdrich published many poems and short stories. It was also during this period that she began collaborating with Dorris, initially working through the mail while Dorris was working in New Zealand. The relationship progressed into a romance, and the two were married in 1981. During this time, Erdrich assembled the material that would eventually be published as the poetry collection Jacklight.

In 1982, Erdrich's story "The World’s Greatest Fisherman" was awarded the $5,000 Nelson Algren Prize for short fiction. This convinced Erdrich and Dorris, who continued to work collaboratively, that they should embark on writing a novel.

[edit] Love Medicine

In 1984, Erdrich published the novel Love Medicine. Made up of a disjointed but interconnected series of short narratives, each told from the perspective of a different character, and moving backwards and forward in time through every decade between the 1930’s and the present day, the book told the stories of several families living near each other on a North Dakota Anishinaabe reservation.

The innovative techniques of the book, which owed a great deal to the works of William Faulkner but have little precedent in Native-authored fiction, allowed Erdrich to build up a picture of a community in a way entirely suited to the reservation setting. She received immediate praise from author/critics such as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, and the book was awarded the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. It has never subsequently been out of print (as of 2006).

[edit] The Beet Queen

Erdrich followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen, which continued her technique of using multiple narrators, but surprised many critics by expanding the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus. Native characters are very much kept in the background in this novel, while Erdrich concentrates on the German-American community. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II.

The Beet Queen was subject to a bitter attack from Native novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, who accused Erdrich of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples. (The controversy and fall-out from this review, and some of its underlying themes, are reviewed in Susan Castillo, "Postmodernism, Native American Literature and the Real: the Silko-Erdrich Controversy" in Notes from the Periphery: Marginality in North American Literature and Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. 179-190).

[edit] Other novels written with Michael Dorris

Erdrich and Dorris’ collaborations continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s, always occupying the same fictional universe.

Tracks goes back to the 19th century at the very formation of the reservation and introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Nanabozho. By some way the novel of Erdrich’s most rooted in Anishinaabe culture (at least until Four Souls), it shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic church. The Bingo Palace updates but does not resolve various conflicts from Love Medicine: set in the 1980s, it shows the effects both good and bad of a casino and a factory being set up among the reservation community. Finally, Tales of Burning Love finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the former books, and introduces a new set of white people to the reservation universe.

They also produced The Crown of Columbus, the only novel to which both writers put their names, and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, credited to Dorris. Both of these are set outside the Argus reservation, and neither sold particularly well.

[edit] Accusations and divorce proceedings

The couple had six children, three of them adopted. Dorris had adopted three children when he was single; Erdrich also adopted them and the couple had three more children together. In 1991, their son Reynold Abel was hit by a car and killed. In 1995, Dorris and Erdrich unsuccessfully pursued a court case against their son Jeffrey Sava, who had accused them both of child abuse.[1] Shortly afterward, Dorris and Erdrich separated and began divorce proceedings. Erdrich claimed that Dorris had been depressed since the second year of their marriage.

In 1997, Michael Dorris committed suicide.

[edit] Career after Dorris

Erdrich’s first novel after the divorce, The Antelope Wife, was the first to be set outside the continuity of the previous books. However, she has subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby town, and has produced five novels since 1998 dealing with events there. These have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories in the way that they create multiple narratives in the same fictional area.

She owns Birchbark Books, a bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and continues to write.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Relations

Her sister, Heidi Erdrich, is a poet who also resides in Minnesota. For the past few years, the Erdrich sisters have hosted annual writers workshops on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

[edit] Works

[edit] Novels

  • Love Medicine (1984)
  • The Beet Queen (1986)
  • Tracks (1988)
  • The Crown of Columbus [with Michael Dorris] (1991)
  • The Bingo Palace (1994)
  • Tales of Burning Love (1997)
  • The Antelope Wife (1998)
  • The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
  • The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003)
  • Four Souls (2004)
  • The Painted Drum (2005)

[edit] Children's literature

  • Grandmother's Pigeon (1996)
  • The Birchbark House (1999)
  • The Range Eternal (2002)
  • The Game of Silence (2005)

[edit] Poetry

  • Jacklight (1984)
  • Baptism of Desire (1989)
  • Original Fire: Selected and New Poems (2003)

[edit] Non-fiction

  • Route Two [with Michael Dorris] (1990)
  • The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birthyear (1995)

[edit] As editor or contributor

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Erdrich, Louise
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Erdrich, Karen Louise
SHORT DESCRIPTION Novelist, poet
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Little Falls, Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
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