BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY Of mixed Chippewa and German-American ancestry, Louise Erdrich addresses the concerns of modern Native Americans in a way that appeals equally, if somewhat differently, to Native American and mainstream readers alike. "Indianness" matters in her work, but Erdrich is far more interested in affirming important aspects of Native American experience--attitudes toward sexuality and nature, women's power, and communal ethics and aesthetics in particular--than in accusing Euro-American culture (and readers) of past wrongs. Her Faulknerian preoccupation with place has led her to create a sprawling, loosely connected multi-novel saga that deals mainly, but not exclusively, with Native American life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Her fiction (she also writes poetry and essays) weaves together realism and fantasy, sensuality and lyricism, short story and novel, oral and written traditions, comic sensibility and tragic awareness. The popular and critical success of her National Book Award-winning first novel, Love Medicine (1984), and the physical attractiveness that led People Magazine to include her in its list of "most beautiful" people have helped make her one of the most recognizable and influential Native American writers of her generation. Erdrich has won numerous awards for her work, including the Nelson Algren award (1982); National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1982); Pushcart Prize (1993); National Magazine Fiction awards (1983 and 1987); Virginia McCormack Scully Prize (1984); National Book Critics Circle Award (1984), Los Angeles Times Award for best novel, Sue Kaufman Prize, Institute of Arts and Letters for best first fiction, and American Book Award (1985); Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-1986); O. Henry Award (1987); Minnesota Book Award (1996); World Fantasy Award (1999); and the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction (2006).
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY Portrayed Chippewa Life. Louise Erdrich is known for her moving and often humorous portrayals of Chippewa life in North Dakota in poetry and prose. In her verse and in novels such as Tracks, Bingo Palace, The Beet Queen, and The Painted Drum, she draws on her years in North Dakota and on her German and Chippewa heritage to portray the great endurance of women and Native Americans in 20th century America. Erdrich's first collection of stories, published as Love Medicine, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Personal Life. Karen Louise Erdrich was born 6 July 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, a town on the border of Minnesota. Her father, Ralph Louis, was a teacher with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at Wahpeton, and her mother, Rita Joanne Gourneau, was an employee of the BIA at the Wahpeton Indian school. The family lived in employee housing at the school, and Erdrich attended public schools and spent a few years at St. Johns, a Catholic school. In an interview with Jan George in the North Dakota Quarterly, Erdrich noted that her experience with the Catholic Church affected her profoundly: "Catholicism has always been important to me even though I am not a practicing Catholic now. The ritual is full of symbols, mysteries, and the unsaid. That affects a person always, once you know it as a child." Idolized Grandfather. Erdrich's German heritage comes from her father, and her three-eighths Chippewa heritage comes from her mother. She often visited her mother's people at Turtle Mountain Reservation, situated near Belcourt, North Dakota, when she was growing up. Her grandfather, Pat Gourneau, served as tribal chairman at Turtle Mountain for many years. In an interview with Joseph Bruchac in Survival This Way, Erdrich described her grandfather as having "a real mixture of old time and church religion. . . . He would do pipe ceremonies for ordinations and things like that. He just had a grasp on both realities, in both religions. . . . He's kind of a legend in our family. He is funny, he's charming, he's interesting. He, for many years, was a very strong figure in my life. I guess I idolized him. A very intelligent man. He was a Wobbly and worked up and down the wheat fields in North Dakota and Kansas. . . . He did a lot of things in his life and was always very outspoken. . . . I always loved him and when you love someone you try to listen to them. Their voice then comes through." Erdrich's admiration for her grandfather can be seen in several of her complex male characters. Parents Encouraged Her to Become a Writer. As a child, Erdrich's parents encouraged her to write. Her father paid her a nickel per story, and her mother made little books with construction paper covers for Erdrich's stories. Her mother found out about the Native American program at Dartmouth and helped Erdrich apply in 1972; Erdrich was in the first class of women accepted at Dartmouth, which had been previously all male. Several grants and scholarships allowed her to attend Dartmouth, and Erdrich majored in English and creative writing, winning several writing awards. While in college, she discovered that poetry came easily to her. She decided to be a writer. Worked Odd Jobs. After her graduation in 1976, Erdrich went back to North Dakota, telling herself, as she related to Bruchac, that she "would sacrifice all to be a writer. . . . I took a lot of weird jobs which were good for the writing. I worked at anything I could get and just tried to keep going until I could support myself through writing or get some kind of grant. Just live off this or that as you go along. I think I turned out to be tremendously lucky." Back in North Dakota, she worked as a publications director of a small press distributor, and as a poet for the Poets in the Schools Program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. She also worked on a film depicting the culture clash between the Sioux and Europeans in the 1800s for Mid-America Television. Married Michael Dorris. Returning to the East, Erdrich received an M.F.A. in 1977 from Johns Hopkins University. While at Johns Hopkins, she began writing fiction. She then served as editor of the Circle, the Boston Indian Council newspaper. After a poetry reading she gave in 1980, Erdrich began a relationship with Michael Dorris, who had attended the reading and been interested in her and her work. Dorris, who was three-eighths Modoc, had come to Dartmouth to found and direct the Native American Studies Program. Soon afterward, Dorris left for New Zealand on an anthropology fellowship, and their relationship was put on hold until January 1981, when both returned to Dartmouth--he to resume his position in the Native American Studies Program and she as writer-in-residence. They were married in 1981, and Erdrich subsequently adopted Dorris' three Native American children, whom he had adopted and was raising by himself. They also had three children together. They lived in Cornish, New Hampshire, where both Erdrich and Dorris devoted themselves full time to their writing and their family. In April 1997, during divorce proceedings between the couple, Dorris checked into a Concord, New Hampshire motel room and committed suicide. Wrote First Novel. In collaboration with Dorris, Erdrich gathered the stories she had published between 1982 and 1984 and made them into a novel called Love Medicine in 1984. The story is told through the voices of half-a-dozen characters, as though to someone listening to community gossip; Erdrich used this technique in several of her novels to portray the complicated relationships of the characters, many of whom appear from novel to novel and whose genealogies have become the subjects of entire scholarly essays. Won Literary Award.Love Medicine is set in on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. Taking place between 1934 to 1983, the novel presents the story of Lulu Lamartine and Marie Kashpaw. Marie is married to Nector Kashpaw, but Nector desperately loves Lulu, who has had numerous husbands and romances resulting in many children. After Nector's death by some ill- fated "love medicine," Lulu and Marie unite and become tribal elders. Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of fiction of 1984. The opening story, "The World's Greatest Fisherman," won the $5,000 Nelson Algren Award in 1982. Erdrich later added some other stories to Love Medicine and published the new and expanded version in 1993. Wrote Second Novel. In Tracks, Erdrich's second novel, set in the early 1900s, the story is told through Nanapush, an elderly trickster who is the last of his family and also the last to remember when his Indian nation was free to roam and hunt before allotment, and Pauline Puyat, a mixed- breed character whose Chippewa antecedents have been forgotten. She is so desperate to fit in that she renounces her Native American heritage to become an obsessed Catholic nun. Their stories revolve around a third character, Fleur Pillager, whose spiritual powers are seen by Nanapush as necessary to save the disintegrating Chippewa nation and by Pauline as evil and destructive. Erdrich's Catholic background is perhaps most strongly reflected in Tracks, which portrays the interaction of Native American spirituality and the views of the church. The Beet Queen. The Beet Queen, published in 1986, is set in Argus, a town near the reservation. It takes place from 1932 to 1972 and explores Erdrich's German roots. Abandoned by her mother, Mary Adare comes to live with her cousin, Sita Koska, whose parents own the butcher shop. Mary becomes best friends with Sita's good friend, a mixed-blood girl, Celestine James. Celestine has a child by Mary Adare's brother, Karl Adare, and the spoiled child, the Beet Queen, becomes the center of attention. Fleur Pillager makes a brief appearance as an eccentric woman who heals Karl Adare after an accident. Bingo Palace. Bingo Palace, the story of Lipsha Morrissey (the unacknowledged son of Lulu's son Gerry Nanapush and raised by Marie), not only brings together the families from the previous books but also looks toward the future. Lipsha's great-grandmother, Fleur Pillager, appears in the novel and causes him to think about how to balance his Chippewa heritage with the business interests of his Uncle Lyman Lamartine's plan to build a bingo palace on Fleur's property. Collaborated with Dorris. Erdrich and Dorris collaborated on nearly all of Erdrich's early works. Each wrote their own drafts after they discussed various aspects of the work, such as plot and character. They then carefully reviewed the manuscript, publishing it only after they had agreed on every word. Most of Erdrich's novels were written in this way, as well as Dorris' A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, in 1987, and his nonfiction piece, The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Erdrich and Dorris co-authored the novel The Crown of Columbus, 1991, in which the Native-American academic, Vivian Twostar, and her Euro-American academic lover, Roger Williams, search for a fabulous relic supposedly left by Christopher Columbus on his first landing in North America. Erlich and Dorris' collaboration ended with Dorris' suicide in 1997. Later Novels. Tales of Burning Love (1996) tells the story of Jack Mauser and his five ex-wives. Jack meets his fifth wife while they are both inebriated and marries her that night. When he is unable to consummate their marriage, his new wife walks off into a blizzard and freezes to death. The Antelope Wife (1998) was the first novel published after Dorris' death in 1997. In this work, Erdrich departs from her usual cast of North Dakota characters to create a new community of urban Ojibwe in Minneapolis. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) is the story of a Catholic priest who has served the Ojibwe on a remote reservation for more than 50 years. Now, nearing the end of his life, the priest dreads the eventual discovery that he is a woman who has been living as a man. Four Souls (2004) continued the story of Fleur Pillager, who appeared in Tracks. Fleur takes her mother's name, Four Souls, and walks from the Ojibwe reservation to Minneapolis and St. Paul, seeking murderous revenge on the lumber baron who stripped the reservation of its land. The Painted Drum, tells the story of an antique dealer in a small New Hampshire town who finds an old Ojibwe drum in her neighbor's estate. Published Poetry Books. Erdrich has also published two books of poetry, Jacklight, in 1984, and Baptism of Desire, in 1989. Jacklight begins the strong theme about the relationships of men and women that runs through all of Erdrich's work. In sections such as "The Butcher's Wife" and "Old Man Potchiko," the collection explores her German and Native American heritages. The first section of Baptism of Desire relies heavily upon Erdrich's Catholic background, but is mediated by Native American views and focused on women's religious experience. Through all her work, Erdrich has continued to provide a unique and loving perspective on what it is to be a person of mixed heritage facing the problems of Native American life.
UPDATES April 29, 2008: Erdrich's novel A Plague of Doven was published by HarperCollins. Source: New York Times,
FURTHER READINGS • Bruchac, Joseph, "Whatever Is Really Yours: An Interview with Louise Erdrich," in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, (Tucson, Sun Tracks and University of Arizona Press, 1987): 73-86. • Coltelli, Laura, "Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris," in Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1990): 40-52. • Ruoff, A. LaVonne, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review and Selected Bibliography, (New York, Modern Language Association, 1990): 84-88. • Ruoff, A. LaVonne, Literatures of the American Indian, (New York, Chelsea, 1991).
SOURCE CITATION "Louise Erdrich." American Decades. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2010. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
Document Number: K1602000432
(Karen) Louise Erdrich Also known as: Louise Erdrich, Karen Louise Erdrich, Milou North, Heidi Louise
Birth: June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota, United States Nationality: American Ethnicity: Native American Occupation: Writer, Poet Source: Contemporary Poets, 7th ed. St. James Press, 2001. Updated: 01/27/2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Essay Further Readings Personal Information Source Citation Updates Works
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY Louise Erdrich's standing as a poet rests with the two volumes of poetry that she published in the 1980s,Jacklight(1984) andBaptism of Desire(1989). Even if she were to continue to concentrate on writing prose fiction, as she has done since then, and never publish another collection of her poems, her reputation as a poet would be solid. She has already established herself with the truthful intensity of her poetic expression, her fearlessness in the use of myth to express the realities of the human heart, and the imaginative exactness of her language. Of Ojibwa (Chippewa) and German heritage (she is a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Ojibwa), Erdrich was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and she uses all of these elements of ancestry and place in her poetry. TheJacklightpoems tend to fall into five overlapping thematic categories: poems of Indian heritage in conflict with the dominant white culture; poems of sisterhood and family; love poems; poems peopled with the shadows of figures from her past; and mythic poems that draw upon Native American myths and the habit of mythmaking. Among the poems of tension between the Indian and white worlds are some of Erdrich's best and most frequently anthologized poems, including "Indian Boarding School: The Runaways," which recounts the habitual running away of children from an Indian boarding school to the Indian place of their dreams "just under Turtle Mountains." They know that the sheriff will be "waiting at midrun / to take us back," but "home's the place we head for in our sleep." Like the tracks on the land of the railroad they ride, "the worn-down welts / of ancient punishments lead back and forth." "Dear John Wayne" presents the reaction of young Indians to a John Wayne western at a drive-in movie. When it is over, they continue to hear his voice speaking its real message:"Come on, boys, we got them / where we want them, drunk, running. / They'll give us what we want, what we need." "A Love Medicine" represents Erdrich's sisterhood-family poems. When "this dragonfly, my sister" feels the boot of her man planting "its grin / among the arches of her face," the speaker responds with her whole feminine being:"Sister, there is nothing / I would not do." Erdrich's love poems tend to have a poignantly sad note that is echoed in "Train": "Here is the light I was born with, love. / Here is the bleak radiance that levels the world." Mary Kröger is the most powerful figure in the character poems of "The Butcher's Wife" section ofJacklight.Futilely pursued by Rudy J.V. Jacklitch, the sheriff who crashed his truck and died cursing her, Mary hears her name destroyed by the townspeople until she "feared to have it whispered in their mouths!" Among the best poems in the fine "Myths" section ofJacklightis "Whooping Cranes," a haunting poem about a foundling boy, "strange and secret among the others, / killing crows with his bare hands / and kissing his own face in the mirror," who ends up flying into the mystical formation of whooping cranes that "sailed over / trumpeting the boy's name." Noteworthy, too, is the Potchikoo mythical prose poem cycle about a man born as a "potato boy" after "a very pretty Chippewa girl" is raped by the sun in a potato field. Archetypally, Potchikoo dies when his three lovely daughters visit him in his old age, sit on his lap, and block the sun from him: "He hardly knew it when all three daughters laid their heads dreamily against his chest. They were cold, and so heavy that his ribs snapped apart like little dry twigs." Baptism of Desireprojects very much the same range and depth as the earlier volume. Indeed, some of the same characters--Rudy J.V. Jacklitch, Mary Kröger, the mythic Potchikoo--do encore appearances, for which readers ofJacklightmust be grateful. The main change is thatBaptismis, paradoxically, even more spiritual in its earthiness. In "The Sacraments," for example, a richly portrayed rain dance merges with the Christian sacraments. In "Mary Magdalene," after she washes "your ankles / with my tears," Mary sardonically resolves to "drive boys / to smash empty bottles on their brows. / I will pull them right off of their skins." She concludes with an observation that is at once earthy and spiritually rebellious: "It is the old way that girls / get even with their fathers-- / by wrecking their bodies on other men." The poet and critic Simon Ortiz has summed up the strength of Erdrich's poetry succinctly: "... by knowing a bit of truthful fear we may know courage, love, faith, life. That is the way I experience Erdrich's poems of revelation. She is a remarkable, remarkable writer."
UPDATES April 29, 2008: Erdrich's novel A Plague of Doven was published by HarperCollins. Source: New York Times,
PERSONAL INFORMATION Nationality: American (Native American: Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwa).Born: Little Falls, Minnesota, 7 June 1954.Education: Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, B.A. 1976; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, M.A. 1977.Family: Married Michael Dorris in 1981 (died 1997); two sons and four daughters.Career: Visiting poetry teacher, North Dakota State Arts Council, 1977-78; creative writing teacher, Johns Hopkins University, 1978-79; communications director and editor ofCircle,Boston Indian Council, Massachusetts, 1979-80; text book writer, Charles-Merrill Company, 1980; visiting fellow, Dartmouth College, 1981. Also has worked as a beet weeder in Wahpeton, North Dakota; waitress in Wahpeton, Boston, and Syracuse, New York; psychiatric aide in a Vermont hospital, poetry teacher in prisons; lifeguard; and construction flag signaler.Awards: MacDowell fellowship, 1980; Yaddo fellowship, 1981; Nelson Algren award, 1982; National Book Critics Circle award, 1984; Virginia Scully prize, 1984; Sue Kaufman award, 1984; O Henry award, 1987; World Fantasy Award, 1999; Scott O' Dell award, 2006. Los Angeles TimesBook award, 1985; Guggenheim fellowship, 1985.Member: American Academy of Arts and Letters; American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Address: c/o HarperCollins, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, 10022, U.S.A.
WORKS • Publications • Poetry • Jacklight. New York, Holt, 1984. • Baptism of Desire. New York, HarperCollins, 1989. • Recordings • Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris with Paul Bailey(videotape), Roland Collection of Films on Art, 1980 • Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1994. • Novels • Love Medicine. New York, Holt, 1984; London, Deutsch, 1985. • The Beet Queen. New York, Holt, 1986; London, Hamish Hamilton, 1987. • Tracks. New York, Holt, and London, Hamish Hamilton, 1988. • Crown of Columbus, with Michael Dorris. New York and London, HarperCollins, 1991. • The Bingo Palace. London, Flamingo, 1994. • Tales of Burning Love. New York, HarperCollins, 1997. • The Antelope Wife. New York, HarperCollins, 1998. • Four Souls New York, HarperCollins, 2004. • The Painted Drum, New York, HarperCollins2005. • The Game of Silence,, written and illustrated by Erdrich, New York, HarperCollins, 2006. • Other • Route 2, with Michael Dorris. Northridge, California, Lord John Press, 1990. • The Bluejay's Dance: A Birth Year. New York, HarperCollins, 1995. • Grandmother's Pigeon (for children) . New York, Hyperion, 1996. • The Birchbark House (for children) . New York, Hyperion, 1999. • Editor, with David Solheim, Plainsong: Writings from North Dakota's Poets-in-the-Schools Program, 1975- 1977. Fargo, North Dakota, North Dakota Council on the Arts, 1978.
FURTHER READINGS Critical Studies • "Transactions in a Native Land: Mixed-Blood Identity and Indian Legacy in Louise Erdrich's Writing" by Daniela Daniele, inRSA Journal,3, 1992 • "Working (In) the In-Between: Poetry, Criticism, Interrogation, and Interruption" by Jeannie Ludlow, inStudies in American Indian Literatures(Virginia), 6(1), Spring 1994 • "The Construction of Gender and Ethnicity in the Poetry of Leslie Silko and Louise Erdrich" by Susan Perez Castillo, inICLA '91 Tokyo: The Force of Vision, II: Visions in History; Visions of the Other,edited by Earl Miner and others, Tokyo, International Comparative Literature Association, 1995 • "Sacramental Language: Ritual in the Poetry of Louise Erdrich" by P. Jane Hafen, inGreat Plains Quarterly(Lincoln, Nebraska), 16(3), Summer 1996 .
SOURCE CITATION "(Karen) Louise Erdrich." Contemporary Poets, 7th ed. St. James Press, 2001. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2010. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC
Document Number: K1660000978 Louise Erdrich is known for her moving and often humorous portrayals of Chippewa life in North Dakota in poetry and prose. In her verse and in novels such as Tracks, Bingo Palace, and The Beet Queen, she draws on her years in North Dakota and on her German and Chippewa heritage to portray the great endurance of women and Native Americans in twentieth- century America. Erdrich's first collection of stories, published as Love Medicine, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984; she has since won numerous awards for her writing.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY Karen Louise Erdrich was born July 6, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, a town on the border of Minnesota. Her father, Ralph Louis, was a teacher with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at Wahpeton, and her mother, Rita Joanne Gourneau, was an employee of the BIA at the Wahpeton Indian school. The family lived in employee housing at the school, and Erdrich attended public schools and spent a few years at St. Johns, a Catholic school. In an interview with Jan George in the North Dakota Quarterly, Erdrich noted that her experience with the Catholic church affected her profoundly: "Catholicism has always been important to me even though I am not a practicing Catholic now. The ritual is full of symbols, mysteries, and the unsaid. That affects a person always, once you know it as a child." Erdrich's German heritage comes from her father, and her three-eighths Chippewa heritage comes from her mother. She often visited her mother's people at Turtle Mountain Reservation, situated near Belcourt, North Dakota, when she was growing up. Her grandfather, Pat Gourneau, served as tribal chairman at Turtle Mountain for many years. In an interview with Joseph Bruchac in Survival This Way, Erdrich described her grandfather as having "a real mixture of old time and church religion.... He would do pipe ceremonies for ordinations and things like that. He just had a grasp on both realities, in both religions.... He's kind of a legend in our family. He is funny, he's charming, he's interesting. He, for many years, was a very strong figure in my life. I guess I idolized him. A very intelligent man. He was a Wobbly and worked up and down the wheat fields in North Dakota and Kansas.... He did a lot of things in his life and was always very outspoken.... I always loved him and when you love someone you try to listen to them. Their voice then comes through." Erdrich's admiration for her grandfather can be seen in several of her complex male characters. Parents Encourage Her to Become a Writer As a child, Erdrich's parents encouraged her to write. Her father paid her a nickel per story, and her mother made little books with construction paper covers for Erdrich's stories. Her mother found out about the Native American program at Dartmouth and helped Erdrich apply in 1972; Erdrich was in the first class of women accepted at Dartmouth, which had been previously all male. Several grants and scholarships allowed her to attend Dartmouth, and Erdrich majored in English and creative writing, winning several writing awards. While in college, she discovered that poetry came easily to her. She decided to be a writer. After her graduation in 1976, Erdrich went back to North Dakota, telling herself, as she related to Bruchac, that she "would sacrifice all to be a writer.... I took a lot of weird jobs which were good for the writing. I worked at anything I could get and just tried to keep going until I could support myself through writing or get some kind of grant. Just live off this or that as you go along. I think I turned out to be tremendously lucky." Back in North Dakota, she worked as a publications director of a small press distributor, and as a poet for the Poets in the Schools Program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. She also worked on a film depicting the culture clash between the Sioux and Europeans in the 1800s for Mid-America Television. Returning to the East, Erdrich received an M.F.A. in 1977 from Johns Hopkins University. While at Johns Hopkins, she began writing fiction. She then served as editor of the Circle, the Boston Indian Council newspaper. After a poetry reading she gave in 1980, Erdrich began a relationship with Michael Dorris, who had attended the reading and been interested in her and her work. Dorris, who was three-eighths Modoc, had come to Dartmouth to found and direct the Native American Studies Program. Soon afterward, Dorris left for New Zealand on an anthropology fellowship, and their relationship was put on hold until January 1981, when both returned to Dartmouth--he to resume his position in the Native American Studies Program and she as writer- in-residence. They were married in 1981, and Erdrich subsequently adopted Dorris' three Native American children, whom he had adopted and was raising by himself. They had three children together before Dorris committed suicide in 1997. First Novel Wins Major Literary Award In collaboration with Dorris, Erdrich gathered the stories she had published between 1982 and 1984 and made them into a novel called Love Medicine in 1984. The story is told through the voices of half-a-dozen characters, as though to someone listening to community gossip. Erdrich used this technique in several of her novels to portray the complicated relationships of the characters, many of whom appear from novel to novel and whose genealogies have become the subjects of entire scholarly essays. Love Medicine is set in on the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. Taking place between 1934 to 1983, the novel presents the story of Lulu Lamartine and Marie Kashpaw. Marie is married to Nector Kashpaw, but Nector desperately loves Lulu, who has had numerous husbands and romances resulting in many children. After Nector's death by some ill-fated "love medicine," Lulu and Marie unite and become tribal elders. Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of fiction of 1984. The opening story, "The World's Greatest Fisherman," won the $5,000 Nelson Algren Award in 1982. Erdrich later added some other stories to Love Medicine and published the new and expanded version in 1993. In Tracks, Erdrich's second novel, set from 1912 to 1919, the story is told through Nanapush, an elderly trickster who is the last of his family and also the last to remember when his Indian nation was free to roam and hunt before allotment, and Pauline Puyat, a mixed-breed character whose Chippewa antecedents have been forgotten. She is so desperate to fit in that she renounces her Native American heritage to become an obsessed Catholic nun. Their stories revolve around a third character, Fleur Pillager, whose spiritual powers are seen by Nanapush as necessary to save the disintegrating Chippewa nation and by Pauline as evil and destructive. Erdrich's Catholic background is perhaps most strongly reflected in Tracks, which portrays the interaction of Native American spirituality and the views of the church. The Beet Queen, published in 1986, is set in Argus, a town near the reservation. It takes place from 1932 to 1972 and explores Erdrich's German roots. Abandoned by her mother, Mary Adare comes to live with her cousin, Sita Koska, whose parents own the butcher shop. Mary becomes best friends with Sita's good friend, a mixed-blood girl, Celestine James. Celestine has a child by Mary Adare's brother, Karl Adare, and the spoiled child--the Beet Queen--becomes the center of attention. Fleur Pillager makes a brief appearance as an eccentric woman who heals Karl Adare after an accident. Bingo Palace, the story of Lipsha Morrissey (the unacknowledged son of Lulu's son Gerry Nanapush and raised by Marie), not only brings together the families from the previous books but also looks toward the future. Lipsha's great-grandmother, Fleur Pillager, appears in the novel and causes him to think about how to balance his Chippewa heritage with the business interests of his Uncle Lyman Lamartine's plan to build a bingo palace on Fleur's property. Collaborates with Dorris Erdrich and Dorris collaborated on nearly all of Erdrich's early works. Each wrote their own drafts after they discussed various aspects of the work, such as plot and character. They then carefully reviewed the manuscript, publishing it only after they had agreed on every word. Most of Erdrich's novels were written in this way, as well as Dorris' A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, in 1987, and his nonfiction piece, The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Erdrich and Dorris co-authored the novel The Crown of Columbus, 1991, in which the Native- American academic, Vivian Twostar, and her Euro-American academic lover, Roger Williams, search for a fabulous relic supposedly left by Christopher Columbus on his first landing in North America. Erlich and Dorris' collaboration ended with Dorris' suicide in 1997. Erdrich has published three novels since Bingo Palace. Tales of Burning Love (1996) tells the story of Jack Mauser and his five ex-wives. Jack meets his fifth wife while they are both inebriated and marries her that night. When he is unable to consummate their marriage, his new wife walks off into a blizzard and freezes to death. The Antelope Wife (1998) was the first novel published after Dorris' death in 1997. In this work, Erdrich departs from her usual cast of North Dakota characters to create a new community of urban Ojibwe in Minneapolis. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) is the story of a Catholic priest who has served the Ojibwe on a remote reservation for more than 50 years. Now, nearing the end of his life, the priest dreads the eventual discovery by others that he is a woman who has been living as a man. In 2004, Erdrich published Four Souls. The novel continued the story told in Tracks. Fleur Pillager takes her mother's name, Four Souls, and walks from the Ojibwe reservation to Minneapolis and St. Paul, wanting revenge on the lumber baron who stripped the reservation of its land. The story is told in three strands: one, set in the 1920s, follows Fleur as she hunts for John James Mauser, intending to murder him. The other story is told by Ojibwa elder Nanapush, and describes his own desire for revenge on a man he believes killed and ate his sister during a period of famine. A third strand features Margaret Kashpaw, who loves the traditional Nanapush. In the New York Times, Karen Joy Fowler wrote that "This shifting of voices and stories, ranging back and forth in time and place, may sound dauntingly complicated; luckily, it doesn't read that way." She added, "The progression of events feels natural and unforced, full of satisfying yet unexpected twists." In the Christian Science Monitor, Ron Charles commented, "Erdrich's most striking contribution may be her articulation of a value system that's wholly contrary to the culture of accumulation and competition that we're eager to export in our great white way." Erdrich followed Four Souls with The Painted Drum, which once again tells three intertwined stories. The book's first narrator, Faye Travers, is an antique dealer in a small New Hampshire town who finds an old Ojibwe drum in her neighbor's estate; uncharacteristically, she is so taken by the drum and its power that she steals it. The drum gives her visions, which encourage her to return the drum to its origins on the reservation in North Dakota. Bernard Shaawano, a technician at the reservation hospital, continues the drum's story. The third thread of the narrative tells the story of three young children, alone in a freezing house, who try to save themselves from starvation and hypothermia. In the Washington Post, Donna Rifkind commented, "With fearlessness and humility, in a narrative that flows more artfully than ever between destruction and rebirth, Erdrich has opened herself to possibilities beyond what we merely see," and that Erdrich "inspires readers to open their hearts to these mysteries as well." Erdrich has also published two books of poetry, Jacklight, in 1984, and Baptism of Desire, in 1989. Jacklight begins the strong theme about the relationships of men and women that runs through all of Erdrich's work. In sections such as "The Butcher's Wife" and "Old Man Potchiko," the collection explores her German and Native American heritages. The first section of Baptism of Desire relies heavily upon Erdrich's Catholic background, but is mediated by Native American views and focused on women's religious experience. Through all her work, Erdrich continues to provide a unique and loving perspective on what it is to be a person of mixed heritage facing the problems of Native American life today.
UPDATES April 29, 2008: Erdrich's novel A Plague of Doven was published by HarperCollins. Source: New York Times,