Biographical Essay

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.

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