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The strength and endurance of the Chippewa people inspire Louise Erdrich’s work. The notion of survival drives her storytelling no matter what genre she chooses. Whether she writes about Native Americans or people outside that community, Erdrich plays with the theme of human transcendence. In both her poetry and her fiction, she demonstrates that tribal culture endures in new forms, even as Native American life seems relegated to the margins of society. Erdrich’s characters are comic and eccentric, yet fall into a mythic category as they try to overcome feelings of alienation, abandonment, and exploitation.

Biographical and Historical Context

Growing Up On Turtle Mountain

Karen Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, but spent her childhood near or on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. Her maternal grandparents lived on the reservation, and her parents—her German-born father and Chippewa mother—worked as teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. Family members inspired much of her writing. For example, her paternal grandmother, Mary Erdrich Korll, became a character in the novel The Beet Queen (1986) as well as in the poetry sequence called ”The Butcher’s Wife,” included in the books Jacklight (1984) and Baptism of Desire (1989). Erdrich, in an interview for Reader’s Digest points to her family as the source of her narrative creativity:

The people in our families made everything into a story. They love to tell a good story. People just sit and the stories start coming, one after another. You just sort of grab the tail of the last person’s story: it reminds you of something and you keep going on. I suppose that when you grow up constantly hearing the stories rise, break and fall, it gets into you somehow.

Turning Reality Into Fiction

Erdrich was educated, for the most part, in public school, but did attend a parochial school for a few years. Her stint in private school inspired at least one small detail in The Beet Queen, in which character Wallace Pfefis described as a supporter of the B# piano club. When Erdrich took piano lessons with sister Anita at parochial school, she was elected to her own B# piano club. These and other details from her early education informed her experiences and her later writing.

In 1972, Erdrich received scholarships to Dartmouth College as part of its first coeducational class. That same year Michael Dorris, her future husband, was appointed head of the Native American studies department. over a decade later, they would begin their successful collaboration on ”The Broken Cord” (1989), a children’s story, which Dorris wrote and Erdrich illustrated. At Dart mouth, Erdrich also published work in university literary magazines, but did not realize her talent until the magazine Ms. accepted one of her poems. Shortly thereafter, in 1975, the American Academy of Poets prized her work.

After graduating from Dartmouth with a Bachelor’s degree in 1976, Erdrich worked at various minimum-wage jobs, many of which added texture to her fiction. In 1979, Erdrich accepted a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, where she was able to focus solely on her writing. With her master’s degree in hand, she became editor of the Boston Indian Council newspaper, The Circle. Erdrich also received writing fellowships in 1980 to the MacDowell Colony and in 1981 to the Yaddo Colony.

Literary Success Across Genres

Erdrich’s literary career officially began in 1984 with a collection of poems, Jacklight. The jacklight of the title poem refers to the bright light that hunters use illegally to draw deer from the forest. Throughout the course of her career, Erdrich also collaborated on several works with Michael Dorris. They married in 1981 and had six children together. Their critically-acclaimed, award-winning projects include short stories and Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine (1984), a very popular book which Erdrich revised in 1993. Love Medicine was made into a television serial, and movie rights were also optioned. The work was also translated into more than eighteen languages. Dorris and Erdrich also worked together on the novel The Crown of Columbus (1991).

After the success of Love Medicine, her second novel, The Beet Queen (1986), received mixed reviews for not completely focusing on Native American themes. It also incited what some call ”the Silko-Erdrich controversy,” in which writer Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko criticized the novel for not exposing enough of the racism running through North Dakota society. Erdrich returned to her Native American roots in her third novel, Tracks (1988), a favorite among her readers. A year later, her second book of poetry, Baptism of Desire (1989), revisited the themes and personages of Jacklight.

In addition to publishing several more novels and poetry collections, Erdrich contributed numerous short stories, essays, and book reviews to periodicals such as the New Yorker and Kenyon Review. Sadly, the collaborative projects she enjoyed producing with her husband ceased upon his death in 1997. Her most recent book, The Porcupine Year (2008), takes place in the nineteenth century and tells the story of an eleven year old girl named Omakayas. The novel follows Omakayas as she and her family journey by canoe from the shores of Lake Superior along the rivers of northern Minnesota in search of a new home.

Teaching and Honors

Erdrich has taught poetry with the North Dakota State Arts Council and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. She also returned to Dartmouth College as a visiting fellow. Her work has earned a Pushcart Prize, an American Book Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Los Angeles Times Book Award, among other honors. Erdrich has also garnered a Guggenheim fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Erdrich now lives with her family in Minnesota.

Works in Literary Context

Ethnicity and Humanity: Love Medicine

Much of Erdrich’s work revolves around similar themes, motifs, and conflicts. A recurring theme in Erdrich’s work is the conflict between American Indian culture and white culture. For example, in Love Medicine, most of her characters are greatly affected by their position as Indians trapped inside white culture. Their narratives show the realities of contemporary reservation life: alcoholism, suicide, abandoned children, as well as the community of extended families, hope for better lives, and a reliance on humor. Though issues of race and ethnicity reside at the core of the book, the novel promotes the idea of being primarily human, rather than being primarily Indian. Racial prejudice in the story goes both ways, and in this novel, blood ultimately means less than love.

The Voices of Multiple Narrators

Erdrich often uses multiple narrators to build her stories. She experiments with multiple narrators to give the reader a comprehensive understanding of the world created inside her work, and to foster a sense of community. This collective of voices allows for different perspectives and different realities, as well as presents the opportunity for certain details and events to be better clarified for the reader. The narrators also deepen the complex relationships Erdrich draws in her novels. In Love Medicine, for instance, multiple narrators act as storytellers, yet each voice remains distinct. In this way, the solo voices combine to mimic a chorus of tribal storytelling. In The Beet Queen, Erdrich also employs several first-person narrators, in addition to a third-person omniscient narrator who summarizes and explains things more thoroughly. Readers have appreciated this aspect of her work. An essayist for Contemporary Novelists noted:

Erdrich’s accomplishment is that she is weaving a body of work that goes beyond portraying contem porary 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.

Works in Critical Context

Erdrich has been recognized throughout her career for illuminating the many facets of Native American culture. As critic and scholar Elizabeth Blair wrote: ”The painful history of Indian-white relations resonates throughout her work. In her hands we laugh and cry while listening to and absorbing home truths that, taken to heart, have the power to change our world.”

Critical Praise for Love Medicine

Critics of Love Medicine confront the book’s thematic elements, narrative strategies, and structural readings of Chippewa culture. The novel received mostly praise from the press, academics, and fellow writers. For example, Native American novelist Louis Owens complimented Erdrich’s portrayal of contemporary Native American life in the following way: ”The seemingly doomed Indian[s] … hang on in spite of it all, confront with humor the pain and confusion of identity and, like a storyteller, weave a fabric of meaning and significance out of the remnants.” Critic Thomas Matchie called the novel ”A Female Moby Dick” in an article which referenced the nickname. He also wrote:

Love Medicine is different from so much of Native American literature in that it is not polemic—there is no ax to grind, no major indictment of white society. It is simply a story about Indian life; its politics, humor, emptiness, and occasional triumphs. If Erdrich has a gift, it is the ability to capture the inner life and language of her people.

Silence and Energy in The Beet Queen

Although The Beet Queen was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Erdrich was harshly criticized for her work on that book. To many readers, reviewers, and critics, the novel, as suggested by Susan Meisenhelder, ”is unusual in Native American literature because of its apparent silence on the issue of race. Leslie Marmon Silko accused the novel of not being Indian enough, but other critics like Meisenhelder and Gerald Vizenor, a Chippewa critic and author, ultimately defended Erdrich s approach. As Dorothy Wickenden observed: ”[Erdrich] has conveyed unforgettably the mixture of the prosaic and the uncanny that informs the lives of dreamers and plodders alike. And she has endowed all of her characters with an idiosyncratic trait that both isolates them and allows them to survive: the energy and ingenuity to grapple with the terrors of intimacy.

References

Beidler, Peter. ”Louise Erdrich” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 175: Native American Writers of the United States.. Ed. Kenneth Roemer. Detroit: The Gale Group, 1997.
Rosenberg, Ruth. ”Louise Erdrich” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 152: American Novelists Since World War II. Ed. James and Wanda Giles. Detroit: The Gale Group, 1995.
Silberman, Robert. ”Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman.” Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
Woodward, Pauline Groetz. ”Louise Erdrich” American Writers Supp. 4. Woodbridge, Conn.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1996.
Matchie, Thomas. “Love Medicine: A Female Moby Dick’ The Midwest Quarterly. 30:4 (Summer 1989).
Meisenhelder, Susan. ”Race and Gender in Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen” Ariel. 25:1 (January 1994).
Smith, Jean. ”Transpersonal Selfhood: The Boundaries of Identity in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Studies in American Indian Literatures. 3 (Winter 1991).
Towery, Margery. ”Continuity and Connection: Characters in Louise Erdrich s Fiction. American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 16:4(1992).
Van Dyke, Annette. ”Questions of the Spirit: Bloodlines in Louise Erdrich s Chippewa Landscape. Studies in American Indian Literatures. 4 (Spring 1992).