Louise Erdrich

Erdrich was born on June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was the oldest of seven children born to Ralph Erdrich, a German-American, and Rita (née Gourneau), a Chippewa woman (of half Ojibwe and half French blood). Both parents taught at a boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich's maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, served as tribal chairman for the federally recognized tribe of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians for many years.[9] Though not raised in a reservation, she often visited relatives there.[10] She was raised "with all the accepted truths" of Catholicism.[10]

While Erdrich was a child, her father paid her a nickel for every story she wrote. Her sister Heidi became a poet and also lives in Minnesota; she publishes under the name Heid E. Erdrich.[11] Another sister, Lise Erdrich, has written children's books and collections of fiction and essays.

Erdrich attended Dartmouth College from 1972 to 1976.[12] She was a part of the first class of women admitted to the college and earned a B.A. in English. During her first year, Erdrich met Michael Dorris, an anthropologist, writer, and then-director of the new Native American Studies program. While attending Dorris' class, she began to look into her own ancestry, which inspired her to draw from it for her literary work, such as poems, short stories, and novels. During that time, she worked as a lifeguard, waitress, researcher for films,[13] and as an editor for the Boston Indian Council newspaper The Circle.[10]

In 1978, Erdrich enrolled in a Master of Arts program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She earned the Master of Arts in the Writing Seminars in 1979.[12] Erdrich later published some of the poems and stories she wrote while in the M.A. program. She returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence.[12]

After graduating from Dartmouth, Erdrich remained in contact with Michael Dorris. He attended one of her poetry readings, became impressed with her work, and developed an interest in working with her.[10] Although Erdrich and Dorris were on two different sides of the world, Erdrich in Boston and Dorris in New Zealand for field research, the two began to collaborate on short stories.

The pair's literary partnership led them to a romantic relationship. They married in 1981, and raised three children whom Dorris had adopted as a single parent (Reynold Abel, Madeline, and Sava[10]) and three biological children together (Persia, Pallas, and Aza Marion[14]). Reynold Abel suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and in 1991, at age 23, he was killed when he was hit by a car.[15] In 1995, their son Sava accused Dorris of committing child abuse;[16] in 1997, after Dorris' death, his adopted daughter Madeline claimed that Dorris had sexually abused her and Erdrich had neglected to stop the abuse.[17]

Dorris and Erdrich separated in 1995, and Dorris died by suicide in 1997. In his will, he omitted Erdich and his adopted children Sava and Madeline.[17]

In 2001, at age 47, Erdrich gave birth to a daughter, Azure, fathered by a Native American man Erdrich declines to identify publicly.[18] She discusses her pregnancy with Azure, and Azure's father, in her 2003 non-fiction book, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country.[19] She uses the name "Tobasonakwut" to refer to him.[20][21] He is described as a traditional healer and teacher, who is eighteen years Erdrich's senior and a married man.[20][19] In a number of publications, Tobasonakwut Kinew, who died in 2012, is referred to as Erdrich's partner and the father of Azure.[22]

When asked in an interview if writing is a lonely life for her, Erdrich replied, "Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect." Erdrich lives in Minneapolis.[23]

In 1975, Erdrich won the American Academy of Poets Prize

In 1979 she wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman", a short story about June Kashpaw, a divorced Ojibwe woman whose death by hypothermia brought her relatives home to a fictional North Dakota reservation for her funeral. She wrote this while "barricaded in the kitchen."[10] At her husband's urging, she submitted it to the Nelson Algren Short Fiction prize in 1982, which it won,[10] and eventually it became the first chapter of her debut novel, Love Medicine, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1984.[23]

"When I found out about the prize I was living on a farm in New Hampshire near the college I'd attended," Erdrich told an interviewer. "I was nearly broke and driving a car with bald tires. My mother knitted my sweaters, and all else I bought at thrift stores ... The recognition dazzled me. Later, I became friends with Studs Terkel and Kay Boyle, the judges, toward whom I carry a lifelong gratitude. This prize made an immense difference in my life."[24]

Love Medicine won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.[25] It has also been featured on the National Advanced Placement Test for Literature.[26]

In the early years of their marriage, Erdrich and Michael Dorris often collaborated on their work, saying they plotted the books together, "talk about them before any writing is done, and then we share almost every day, whatever it is we've written" but "the person whose name is on the books is the one who's done most of the primary writing.[13]" They got started with "domestic, romantic stuff" published under the shared pen name of "Milou North" (Michael + Louise + where they live).[10]

In 1982, Erdrich's story, "The World's Greatest Fisherman,"[27] won $5,000 in the Nelson Algren fiction competition.[12] She expanded the story into the novel Love Medicine (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It is the only debut novel ever to receive that honor.[28] Erdrich later turned Love Medicine into a tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994).

During the publication of Love Medicine, Erdrich produced her first collection of poems, Jacklight (1984), which highlights the struggles between Native and non-Native cultures, as well as celebrating family, ties of kinship, autobiographical meditations, monologues, and love poetry. She incorporates elements of Ojibwe myths and legends.[12] Erdrich continues to write poems, which have been included in her collections.

Erdrich is best known as a novelist, and has published a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels.[12] She followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen (1986), which continued her technique of using multiple narrators[29] and expanded the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota.The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II. Leslie Marmon Silko accused Erdrich's The Beet Queen of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples.[30]

Tracks (1988) goes back to the early 20th century at the formation of the reservation. It introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Ojibwe figure Nanabozho.[31] Tracks shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic Church. The Bingo Palace (1994), set in the 1980s, describes the effects of a casino and a factory on the reservation community. Tales of Burning Love (1997) finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the previous books, and introduces a new set of European-American people into the reservation universe.

The Antelope Wife (1998), Erdrich's first novel after her divorce from Dorris, was the first of her novels to be set outside the continuity of the previous books.[32]

She subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns. She has published five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area. Among these are The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) and The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003). Both novels have geographic and character connections with The Beet Queen. In 2009, Erdrich was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Plague of Doves[33] and a National Book Award finalist for The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.[34] It focuses on the historical lynching of four Native people wrongly accused of murdering a Caucasian family, and the effect of this injustice on the current generations. Most recently, her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel The Night Watchman[35] (2020) concerns a campaign to defeat the 'termination bill' (introduced by Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins), and Erdrich acknowledged her sources and its inspiration being her maternal grandfather's life.[36]

She also writes for younger audiences; she has a children's picture book Grandmother's Pigeon, and her children's book The Birchbark House, was a National Book Award finalist.[37] She continued the series with The Game of Silence, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction;[38] and The Porcupine Year.

Her bookstore hosts literary readings and other events. Erdrich's new works are read here, and events celebrate the works and careers of other writers as well, particularly local Native writers. Erdrich and her staff consider Birchbark Books to be a "teaching bookstore".[45] In addition to books, the store sells Native art and traditional medicines, and Native American jewelry. Wiigwaas Press, a small nonprofit publisher founded by Erdrich and her sister, is affiliated with the store.[45]

• 1975 American Academy of Poets Prize[14]
• 1980 MacDowell Fellowship[46]
• 1983 Pushcart Prize in Poetry[47]
• 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, for Love Medicine[25]
• 1984 Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Novel, for Love Medicine[10]
• 1984 Virginia McCormick Scully Literary Award d for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos[10]
• 1985 Los Angeles Times book Prize[13]Joy Harjo
• 1985 Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts[48]
• 1987 O. Henry Award, for the short story "Fleur" (published in Esquire, August 1986)[49]
• 1999 World Fantasy Award, for The Antelope Wife[50]
• 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas[51]
• 2005 Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota[52]
• 2006 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, for the children's book "The Game of Silence"[53]
• 2007 Honorary Doctorate from the University of North Dakota; refused by Erdrich because of her opposition to the university's North Dakota Fighting Sioux mascot[54]
• 2009 Honorary Doctorate (Doctor of Letters) from Dartmouth College[55][56]
• 2009 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement[57]
• 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, for Plague of Doves[58]
• 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for The Round House[59][60]
• 2013 Rough Rider Award[61]
• 2013 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction for Chickadee
• 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award[62]
• 2014 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction[63]
• 2015 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction[6]
• 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, for LaRose[64]
• 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Night Watchman[65][66]

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Female Native Authors For Your Reading List
• Joy Harjo
• Terese Marie Mailhot
• Mohammad Hanif (Iranian writer)

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Louise Erdrich.

• Western American Literature Journal: Louise Erdrich
• Erdrich, Louise. "Louise Erdrich's Birchbark Blog". Birchbark Blog.
• Louise Erdrich at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• "Louise Erdrich". Library of Congress Authorities. 35 catalog records
• Works by or about Louise Erdrich in libraries (WorldCat catalog)