Louise Erdrich

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Karen Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954. As the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes in her works, with major characters representing both sides of her heritage. In an award-winning series of related novels and short stories, Erdrich has visited and re-visited the North Dakota lands where her ancestors met and mingled, representing Chippewa experience in the Anglo-American literary tradition.

• She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Many critics claim Erdrich has remained true to her Native ancestors’ mythic and artistic visions while writing fiction that candidly explores the cultural issues facing modern-day Native Americans and mixed heritage Americans.

• An essayist for Contemporary Novelists observed that “Erdrich’s accomplishment is that she is weaving a body of work that goes beyond portraying contemporary Native American life as descendants of a politically dominated people to explore the great universal questions—questions of identity, pattern versus randomness, and the meaning of life itself.”

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Erdrich grew up in Wapeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich attended Dartmouth College, part of the first class of women admitted to the college; her freshman year also coincided with the establishment of the Native-American studies department. The author’s future husband and collaborator, anthropologist Michael Dorris, was hired to chair the department.

• In his class, Erdrich began the exploration of her own ancestry that would eventually inspire her poems, short stories and novels. Intent on balancing her academic training with a broad range of practical knowledge, Erdrich told Miriam Berkley in an interview with Publishers Weekly, “I ended up taking some really crazy jobs, and I’m glad I did. They turned out to have been very useful experiences, although I never would have believed it at the time.”

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Erdrich also became an editor for the Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper. She told Writers Digest interviewer Michael Schumacher:

• “Settling into that job and becoming comfortable with an urban community—which is very different from the reservation community—gave me another reference point. There were lots of people with mixed blood, lots of people who had their own confusions. I realized that this was part of my life—it wasn’t something that I was making up—and that it was something I wanted to write about.”

• In 1978, the author enrolled in an M.A. program at Johns Hopkins University, where she wrote poems and stories incorporating her heritage, many of which would later become part of her books.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• After receiving her master’s degree, Erdrich returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence. Dorris—with whom she had remained in touch—attended a reading of Erdrich’s poetry there and was impressed. A writer himself—Dorris would later publish the best-selling novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) and receive the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for his nonfiction work The Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome—he decided then that he was interested in working with Erdrich.

• Though Dorris left for New Zealand to do field research while Erdrich moved to Boston, the two began collaborating on short stories, including one titled “The World’s Greatest Fisherman.” When this story won five thousand dollars in the Nelson Algren fiction competition, Erdrich and Dorris decided to expand it into a novel—Love Medicine (1984), which went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• At the same time, Dorris had returned from New Zealand and their literary relationship led to a romantic one; they were married in 1981. They reared 6 children, 3 biological and 3 Dorris had adopted as a single parent.

• The publication of Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, also coincided with her first collection of poems, Jacklight (1984). The poems in Jacklight center on the conflict between Native and non-Native cultures, but they also celebrate family bonds and the ties of kinship, offer autobiographical meditations, dramatic monologues and love poetry, as well as showing the influence of Ojibwa myths and legends.

• Erdrich has always claimed that her childhood, spent in a community of story-tellers, influenced her work and its concern with narrative. Much of Erdrich’s poetry is narrative poetry, told in direct language that often relies on dramatic monologue.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Undoubtedly, though, it is as a novelist that Erdrich is best known. Over the course of a dozen award-winning and best-selling novels, Erdrich has carved out an important place for herself and her work in contemporary American fiction. Erdrich’s novels Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1997), The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), and Four Souls (2004) encompass the stories of three interrelated families living in and around a reservation in the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota, from 1912 through the present.

• The novels have been compared to those of William Faulkner, mainly due to the multi-voice narration and non-chronological storytelling which he employed in works such As I Lay Dying.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Erdrich’s works, linked by recurring characters who are victims of fate and the patterns set by their elders, are structured like intricate puzzles in which bits of information about individuals and their relations to one another are slowly released in a seemingly random order, until three-dimensional characters—with a future and a past—are revealed. Through her characters’ antics, Erdrich explores universal family life cycles while also communicating a sense of the changes and loss involved in the twentieth-century Native-American experience.

• Though Erdrich’s early works were written in collaboration with Michael Dorris, and the couple published a novel together, The Crown of Columbus (1991), the pair separated in 1995 and all of Erdrich’s later work is hers alone. Dorris died by suicide in 1997.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• The Antelope Wife (1998), the first book Erdrich released following Dorris’s suicide, does include a self-destructive husband. A New York Times review described the book as “one of [Erdrich’s] most powerful and fully imagined novels yet.” It added:

• “Erdrich has returned to doing what she does best: using multiple viewpoints and strange, surreal tales within tales to conjure up a family’s legacy of love, duty and guilt, and to show us how that family’s fortunes have both shifted—and endured—as its members have abandoned ancient Indian traditions for a modern fast-food existence. . . . As for Ms. Erdrich’s own storytelling powers, they are on virtuosic display in this novel.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Though many of Erdrich’s novels involve the same revolving cast of characters, in The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003), Erdrich focused on the European half of her ancestry, telling the stories of a World War I veteran, his wife and a large cast of characters in a small North Dakota town. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award finalist.

• Erdrich’s 2008 novel A Plague of Doves was also widely praised and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.

Biography (from Poetry Foundation)

• Winner of the National Book Award, Erdrich's novel, The Round House (2012), is set in 1988 in the same North Dakota Ojibwe reservation as that in The Plague of Doves. New York Times Book Review writer Maria Russo noted of The Round House: "Law is meant to put out society's brush fires, but in Native American history it has often acted more like the wind. Louise Erdrich turns this dire reality into a powerful human story in her new novel."

• Similarly, a Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that this novel "pulses with urgency as [Erdrich] probes the moral and legal ramifications of a terrible act of violence."

Publications

• The Sentence, Nov. 2021 (literary, in which a Minneapolis bookstore is haunted by the ghost of a recently deceased customer; "wickedly funny ghost story"I

• The Night Watchman, Mar. 2020 (literary, based on her maternal grandfather, Pulitzer Prize winner)

• Future Home of the Living God, Nov. 2017 (fiction)

• The Antelope Woman, Dec. 2016 (literary, updated edition)

• Makoons, 2016 (historical)

• Larose, May 2016 (literary)

• The Round House, Oct. 2012 (fiction, National Book Award)

• Chickadee, Aug. 2012 (fiction)

• Shadow Tag, Feb. 2010 (literary)

• The Porcupine Year, Sept. 2008 (historical, Omakayas, #3 Birchbark House)

• The Plague of Doves, May 2008 (literary, Pulitzer finalist)

Publications

• The Painted Drum, Sept. 2005 (romance)

• The Game of Silence, May 2005 (historical, Omakayas, #2 Birchbark House)

• Four Souls, July 2004 (literary, Ojibwe)

• The Master Butchers Singing Club, Feb. 2003 (fiction, WWI)

• The Range Eternal, Sept. 2002 (fiction)

• The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Apr. 2001 (literary, Father Damien)

• The Birchbark House, June 1999 (historical, Omakayas, #1 in series, also the name of her bookstore)

• The Antelope Wife, March 1998 (fantasy, science fiction)

• Grandmother's Pigeon, Apr. 1996 (fiction)

• Tales of Burning Love, Apr. 1996 (bold, darkly humorous novel)

Publications

• The Bingo Palace, Jan. 1994 (literary)

• The Crown of Columbus, July 1991 (historical romance)

• Tracks, Sept. 1988 (literary)

• The Beet Queen, Sept. 1986 (literary)

• Love Medicine, Oct. 1984

• Jacklight (poetry)

Video Interviews

YouTube interview on PBS News Hour

National Book Critics Circle

North Dakota Presents; A Conversation with Louise Erdrich

Cast of characters—Joe

• Joe, a thirteen-year-old Chippewa boy living on a reservation in Minnesota, is the novel's narrator and protagonist, the son of Bazil and Geraldine Coutts. Although he tells the story as a teenager, the fictional Joe is much older, an Ojibwe lawyer, and married to Margaret.

• As Geraldine's trauma and Bazil's preoccupation with her recovery leave Joe without much parental oversight, Joe focuses on figuring out who raped his mother. When he learns Linden Lark is the perpetrator, but cannot be prosecuted because of confusion over place, Joe has a strenuous internal debate over what to do, as well as discussions with his father and others about different kinds of justice.

• Ultimately, Joe kills Linden, with Cappy’s help, to keep his family out of danger. The novel is therefore Joe’s “coming of age” story, as Joe learns about sexuality, Indian ritual, alcohol, but it is also the story of solving a mystery and avenging a crime.

Cast of characters—Bazil

• Bazil is a tribal judge on the Chippewa reservation with his wife Geraldine and son Joe. He is a caring husband who, after Geraldine's assault, does everything he can—from planting her a flower garden to tracking down her rapist—to ensure that Geraldine recovers from her trauma.

• He is one of Joe's most influential role models in the book, intelligent, well-read, particularly about the legal history of Native Americans. As a tribal judge, Bazil is the primary source for many of the legal questions and information in the book.

• Although aware of all the legal challenges that native people face, he hopes that unjust legal precedents will be overturned so the justice system can protect Native rights instead of upholding injustice.

Cast of characters—Geraldine

• Joe’s mother and Bazil’s wife, she is a Chippewa woman whose brutal rape catalyzes the events of the novel. She is a tribal record keeper, widely considered smart, beautiful, and highly competent.

• The attack, however, leaves her traumatized; she rarely leaves her room in the weeks following and refuses to provide information about her attacker, for fear of endangering herself and Mayla, the woman Linden has kidnapped, and ultimately kills.

• Her absence catapults Joe into adulthood. Although father and son attempt to help, she feels they are unable to understand her pain, which suggests the limits of men's understanding of the effects of gendered violence.

• Geraldine's rape exemplifies the real-life sexual assault patterns that plague many Native reservations.

Cast of characters—Cappy

• Joe's best friend, 13 years old, Cappy is handsome, charming, and loyal. He offers Joe support as he copes with his mother's trauma and later helps Joe kill Linden Lark in retribution, despite Joe's protests that he wants to kill Linden alone so that Cappy won’t be legally accountable. Cappy saves Joe’s life by tailing him and delivering the shot that kills Linden when Joe is unable to do so.

• Cappy falls in love with Zelia, a Mexican American girl who comes to the reservation on a mission trip. She leaves at summer’s end and returns to Montana, but corresponds with Cappy until her parents find out and send Cappy a threatening letter, instructing him to stop speaking to their daughter. It is this letter that compels Cappy, Angus, Zack, and Joe to drive to Montana, where they get in a drunk-driving car accident that kills Cappy.

Cast of characters—Linden Lark

• Son of Grace and George Lark and Linda Lark's twin brother, he’s a murderer and a bigot who enjoys verbally abusing people, including Linda, and then mockingly apologizing for it.

• He rapes Geraldine after he discovers that she is trying to help Mayla enroll her child in the Chippewa tribe. He says that he loves Mayla, is distraught that she had a child with someone else, and kills her. He also intends to steal the money that the baby’s father, Curtis Yeltow, gave her. After he kills her, he hides her body in the construction site near the reservation and leaves the baby in the Goodwill store, furniture section.

• He also suffers from drug and alcohol problems, and received a kidney from Linda several years before the novel starts.

• He qualifies as a wiindigoo (an evil human that feeds on other human flesh), which also means that Joe acts according to tribal justice when he kills Linden. (Technically, Cappy fires the fatal shot.)

Cast of characters—Linda Lark

• Linden’s biological twin sister, she works at the reservation post office and bakes banana bread.

• When her parents abandoned her because of birth defects, Betty Wishkob and her Chippewa family took in Linda and raised her. Betty fought hard to keep Linda after social workers tried to remove her from their family, and helped to reshape Linda's malformed limbs and head.

• When Linda is an adult, her mother Grace manipulates her into donating a kidney to Linden, which Linda later regrets.

• After Joe kills Linden and hides the gun under Linda’s porch, Linda takes a sick day to disassemble and hide the gun, ensuring Joe’s safety. Linda’s experience with Grace and Betty implies that families are chosen, not born into, one of the book’s themes.

Cast of characters—Whitey and Sonja

• Whitey is Joe’s uncle and the owner of the reservation’s gas station. He lives with Sonja, an ex-stripper most people think is his wife even though they are not married. Whitey gives Joe a job at the gas station during the summer.

• Sonja is Whitey’s long-time partner. Their relationship is plagued by domestic violence, which Joe sees when he stays with them for a few days while his parents are at the hospital.

• After Joe finds the doll in the lake filled with money, Sonja helps him hide the money in various savings accounts, to use for college. But Sonja soon begins to spend the money on expensive clothes and jewelry.

• When she gives Mooshum a strip dance for his birthday, Joe blackmails her into letting him stay. She’s saddened and angered by his lack of respect for her and tells him details about her disadvantaged past.

• Sonja leaves Whitey, but returns.

Cast of characters—Father Travis

• Father Travis is the priest at the reservation's Catholic church, a former Marine who likes to shoot prairie dogs in his spare time.

• He tries to strangle Cappy when he confesses to having sex with Zelia in the church.

• He was also Bazil and Joe’s primary suspect as Geraldine’s rapist, but when Joe confronts him, Father Travis makes it clear that he had nothing to do with the rape.

• His personality seems ill suited for priesthood, a point of humor in the book, as his character seems to mock the perceived righteousness of Christian clergy.

• NOTE: Louise was raised Catholic.

Cast of characters—Mayla

• Mayla Wolfskin is a beautiful young Native woman whom Linden Lark murders. She won an internship position as a high school student in the South Dakota governor’s office, but has an affair with governor Curtis Yeltow, an older white man.

• When Curtis finds out that Mayla is pregnant, he pays her to keep quiet about the baby’s paternity. Linden, who also worked for Yeltow and who is obsessed with Mayla, abducts her out of possessive jealousy and greed for her money. Linden later kills Mayla and leaves her body in the nearby construction site.

Cast of characters—Curtis Yeltow

• Curtis Yeltow is the fictional governor of South Dakota, known for giving lip service to Native causes, but in fact pairs them, hypocritically, with policies that oppress and disadvantage people living on reservations. He’s been caught on tape saying extremely bigoted things about Native people.

• Mayla works for him as a intern, an honors award, but he begins a relationship with her although he's much older. She gets pregnant with his baby, and Yeltow pays her for her silence (the money found in the doll). He then tries to adopt the child after Mayla’s murder. He's never punished.

Cast of characters—Mooshum

• Mooshum (the Anishinaabe word for “grandfather”) is Joe’s grandfather. He lives with Joe’s aunt and uncle, Clemence and Edward; he's quite elderly, described as a bunch of "sticks."

• Mooshum was brought to the Chippewa reservation with his Métis family after the Battle of Batoche in the late 1800s; he has a wealth of knowledge about Chippewa culture and religion, and younger members of the tribe often consult him for advice.

• Mooshum tells Joe the story of Nanapush, the buffalo mother, and explains to him wiindigoo justice. Mooshum shows the value of elders on the reservation. He represents a body of knowledge about Chippewa culture that, although diminishing, is being kept alive by members of the younger generation.

Cast of characters—Mirage

• In Mooshum’s story about the buffalo mother, Mirage is Akii’s husband and Nanapush’s father. Although Mirage is a good hunter, he’s not a good husband. He cheats on Akii and, when times get tough, he blames her for their bad luck.

• Mirage, thinking Akii is a wiindigoo, convinces the other men in the village to help him kill her.

Cast of characters—Akii

• Akii, a character in the story Mooshum tells while asleep, is Nanapush’s mother and Mirage’s wife. She is smart and can read dreams, using them to help her husband hunt.

• When the hunt is scarce, Mirage convinces himself that Akii is a wiindigoo and he gathers together the rest of the village’s men to try to kill her.

• She manages to stay alive even after they try to drown her. While underwater, the fish teach her a buffalo song so she can find the buffalo again, and she teaches it to Nanapush. Later, Akii follows Nanapush’s song to save him from the buffalo carcass he is trapped in.

Cast of characters—Nanapush

• Nanapush is Akii and Mirage’s son, a hero of Chippewa mythology who reappears in many different Chippewa stories. In the story that Mooshum tells, Nanapush remains loyal to his mother even as his father tries to kill her. Akii sends Nanapush in search of buffalo, and he finds and kills one, saving his village. Nanapush then follows the instructions of the buffalo he kills to build the round house in homage to the buffalo’s body.

Symbols—the Round House

• The round house (the novel’s namesake) is a structure on the reservation used for Chippewa religious ceremonies and celebrations.

• According to Mooshum, Nanapush built the round house to resemble the body of a buffalo, which were once central to Chippewa culture. The round house is an important site for the Chippewa people on the reservation, as it continues to be used for religious practice.

• At the same time, for Joe, it is also the site of the extreme violence against his mother. When Joe thinks about the round house, he feels that it represents “a part of something larger . . . just a shadow of that way of life.”

• The round house, therefore, is both a monument to modern Chippewa culture and a memorial to the parts of Chippewa culture that have been violently destroyed.

Symbols—trees, roots

• In the book’s opening, during the afternoon of Geraldine’s rape, Joe and Bazil uproot seedlings that had begun to grow into their house’s foundation, causing the concrete to crumble. As Joe completes the task, he does it with unusual focus and attention, but he also feels guilty about uprooting the trees and shows his compassion by moving them off the sidewalk and onto the grass.

• Although Joe understands the saplings must be uprooted to protect his home, he also regrets the destruction it causes. Later, Joe thinks back on the saplings with a mix of longing and regret. As the last memory of the time before his mother’s rape, the saplings seem to represent for Joe a time of blissful innocence.

Questions for discussion

• Why does Erdrich narrate this story from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy?

Question for discussion

• What is the point of this story about Mirage, Akii, and Nanapush? Admittedly, it explains the concept of Wiindigoo, but does it also mean something else?

• Wiindigoo (different spellings) is from Algonquian mythology, a malevolent cannibalistic spirit into which humans may transform

Questions for discussion

• Like other novels we’ve read, this one is about a community of individuals rather than the solitary sheriff, the isolated hunter, the solo prairie farmer, the lone explorer off in the wilderness, or fit in another “John Wayne” type.

• So what is this book saying about the myth of the Western hero?

Questions for discussion

• Erdrich is known for sharply drawn characters who often re-appear in other novels. Which of the characters in this novel did you find most memorable?

Question for discussion

• We’ve read in many books this term about the impact of family history and ancestral heritage; in other words about the impact of the past on the present, and by extension on the future.

• As a Native American, Erdrich clearly has an ancestral past, a cultural heritage, that she so vividly portrays in her books.

• What does it mean to her?

Breakout room question

• What do you think of the ending? Do Joe’s parents know that he killed Linden Lark? What do they think about it? How do they feel?

• And what about the effect on Joe? We know from a couple of brief references in the book that he has grown up to be a lawyer, like his father, and has married, Margaret, his girlfriend as a school boy.

• And why is Cappy killed?

• What role do religious values and cultural values play?

• Note: Madwesin, the Indian sheriff, returns the pickle jar (water) Joe had left behind at the murder site but says nothing, and Linda finds the gun, disassembles it, and hides the pieces. She takes a day off from work to do so.

Next week

No class next Wednesday,

Thanksgiving break.

Wednesday, December 1,

Partner in Crime, J. A. Jance