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American Ethnic Writers Louise Erdrich Born: Little Falls, Minnesota; June 7, 1954 Native American Erdrich's poetry and novels represent some of the most creative and accessible writing by a Native American. Principal Works children's literature: Grandmother's Pigeon, 1996 (illustrated by Jim LaMarche); The Birchbark House, 1999; The Range Eternal, 2002; The Game of Silence, 2004 long fiction: Love Medicine, 1984 (revised and expanded, 1993); The Beet Queen, 1986; Tracks, 1988; The Crown of Columbus, 1991 (with Michael Dorris); The Bingo Palace, 1994; Tales of Burning Love, 1996; The Antelope Wife, 1998; The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, 2001; The Master Butchers Singing Club, 2003; Four Souls, 2004; The Painted Drum, 2005 poetry: Jacklight, 1984; Baptism of Desire, 1989; Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, 2003 short fiction: "The Red Convertible," 1981; "Scales," 1982; "The World's Greatest Fisherman," 1982; "American Horse," 1983; "Destiny," 1985; "Saint Marie," 1985; "Fleur," 1987; "Snares," 1987; "Matchimanito," 1988; The Best American Short Stories 1993, 1993 nonfiction: The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year, 1995; Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, 2003 Louise Erdrich (UR-drihch) was born to a Chippewa mother and a German American father, and her "mixed-blood" heritage is at the heart of her writing. The oldest of seven children and the granddaughter of the tribal chair of the Turtle Mountain Reservation, she has stated that her family was typical of Native American families in its telling of stories, and that those stories became a part of her and are reflected in her own work. In her poetry and novels, she explores Native American ideas, ordeals, and delights, with characters representing the European American and Native American sides of her heritage. Erdrich entered Dartmouth College in 1972, the year the Native American Studies Department was formed. The chair of that department was Michael Dorris, who later became her trusted literary collaborator and eventually her husband. Her work at Dartmouth was the beginning of a continuing exploration of her ancestry, the animating influence in her novels. Erdrich frequently weaves stories in nonchronological patterns with multiple narrators. Her characters are multidimensional and entertaining while communicating the positives and negatives of Native American life in the twentieth century. Family relationships, community relationships, issues of assimilation, and the roles of tradition and religion are primary motifs in her novels. Tracks, The Beet Queen, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace form a quartet that follows four families living in North Dakota between the early 1930's and the late 1980's, exploring the relationships among themselves and within the larger cultures. The novel The Crown of Columbus, written with coauthor Michael Dorris, explores many of the same ideas and is a literary adventure story. In these novels about the search for identity, some of her characters are hopelessly caught between worlds, but most of her characters battle the hurt caused by mixed identities with humor, tenacity, and a will to construct their own sense of identity. The result is some of the most accomplished and popular ethnic fiction available. The excellence of her work has earned for her numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, and each of her five novels has achieved The New York Times best-seller list. Love Medicine Type of Work: Novel First Published: 1984 A dazzling meld of Native American storytelling and postmodern literary craft, Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine, was an immediate success. It quickly made the best-seller lists and gathered an impressive group of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for best first novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for best book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, the American Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times award for best novel of the year. Sad and funny, realistic and lyrical, mystical and down-to-earth, the novel tells the story of three generations of four Chippewa and mixed-blood families--the Kashpaws, Morriseys, Lamartines, and Lazarres--from the 1930's to the 1980's. Seven separate narrators tell their own stories in a discontinuous time line, each a puzzle piece of its own, but by the novel's end there is one story, one jigsaw puzzle picture of lost identities and the often humorous but always meaningful efforts of a fragmented people to hold on to what is left to them. The characters in Love Medicine experience individual forms of alienation caused by physical and emotional separation from the communal root of their existence. They contend with the United States government and its policies of allotment and commodities; the Catholic Church, which makes no allowances for the Chippewas' traditional religion; and with the seductive pull of life off the reservation, a life that cuts them off from the community whose traditions keep them centered and give them a sense of their identities. These three factors place the characters under the constant threat of loss of their culture. Erdrich makes this clear, but she presents the lives of her Native American characters as human experiences that readers who have no background in Native American cultures can readily understand. The three generations of characters in Love Medicine surface as human beings who deal with an unfair world with strength, frailty, love, anger, and most of all, a sense of humor. The Beet Queen Type of Work: Novel First Published: 1986 Erdrich's second novel, The Beet Queen, is centered in the fictional little town of Argus, somewhere in North Dakota. Unlike her other novels of people living on reservations, the characters in this story are mostly European Americans, and those Native Americans who exist have very tenuous ties to their roots and to the reservation that lies just outside the town. Racism, poverty, and cultural conflict are not in the foreground in this novel, which makes it different from most novels by Native American authors. Instead, European Americans, Native Americans, and mixed-bloods are all in the same economic and cultural situation, and each of them is involved in a search for identity. The prose in The Beet Queen is lyrical and finely crafted, as is evident in the description of Mary Adare, the novel's central character. Abandoned by a mother who literally vanishes in the air, she builds her identity by developing a solid grounding. She is described as heavy and immovable, and she makes a home for herself in a butcher shop that is described as having thick walls and green, watery light coming through glass block windows. She has found an earthy den, which attaches her to the one thing that will never abandon her--the earth. Her brother, Karl, is her opposite. Thin, flighty, always moving, he is a European American who fits perfectly the archetype of the Native American trickster figure. He is the destroyer, lover of men and women, game-player, and cocreator of the character who ties the main characters of the novel together, his daughter, Dot. Dot is a strong, willful girl who is adored by her mother, a strong, mixed-blood Chippewa woman named Celestine, her Aunt Mary, and Walter Pfef, a town leader and her father's former lover. It is Dot, the Beet Queen in a contest fixed by Pfef, who brings together the web of characters who are otherwise loosely joined in fragile relationships. During the Beet Celebration in which she is to be crowned, her father returns. Pfef, Celestine, and Mary are also there, and Russell, Celestine's paralyzed war-hero brother, is the centerpiece of a float honoring veterans. Mary's vain cousin, Sita, is also there, although she is dead. When the day is over, the circle of family is complete. Poetic and graceful, The Beet Queen is widely recognized as one of Erdrich's finest accomplishments. Tracks Type of Work: Novel First Published: 1988 Tracks is the third in the cycle of novels that began with Love Medicine and continued with The Beet Queen. Tracks is set farther back in time than the first two novels--during the period 1912 to 1924--and a number of characters from the earlier novels reappear. The leading characters are Chippewa Indians, and the story is told through two narrators. First is the shrewd Nanapush, a tribal elder with a biting sense of humor, who survives epidemics of disease and despair and emerges as chief negotiator for the Chippewas in their dealings with the government over land. The second narrator is Pauline, a neurotic woman of mixed blood. She becomes a zealous convert to Catholicism, joins a convent, and shows herself eager for mortification. She still believes, however, in the traditional Indian myths. The third character of importance is the young Fleur Pillager, an alluring, mysterious, and dangerous woman who is thought to have a witch's power to be revenged on those who wrong her. Erdrich writes with poetic vigor and a deep understanding of human passions. She empathizes with the old Indian ways and folk beliefs, in which dreams and visions are pregnant with meaning, the Earth is a living organism, and there is a spontaneous inter-flow between the human and the natural world. The austere, intense, magical world which she has created is a fine achievement; its strange force makes a lasting impression. Where I Ought to Be Type of Work: Essay First Published: 1988 In the essay Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place, Erdrich explores the ways in which a sense of place changes the ways in which people think of themselves. Using examples from American authors of the last hundred and fifty years, she carefully compares and contrasts the approaches of European Americans and of Native Americans to a sense of place. She begins the essay with a description of the Tewa Pueblo people's creation story. In that narrative, Grandmother Spider shows the people the Sandia Mountains and tells them the mountains are their home. Erdrich explains that the Tewa listening to that story would be living in the place where their ancestors lived, and the story would be a personal story and a collective story, told among lifelong friends and relatives. In contrast with this view of a timeless, stable world, that of pre-invasion Native American cultures, Erdrich suggests that European American writers are invested in establishing a historical narrative for their landscapes. European American writers are interested in recording place, even predicting destruction, before their world changes again. Erdrich proposes that the threat of destruction of place, such as in the extreme case of nuclear obliteration, may be one reason that writers catalog and describe landscapes so thoroughly. She takes the reader into a world of complete destruction, where nothing is left, and then she asks the reader to consider that this unthinkable thing has actually happened to the Native American population. "Many Native American cultures were annihilated more thoroughly than even a nuclear disaster might destroy ours, and others live on with the fallout of that destruction, effects as persistent as radiation--poverty, fetal alcohol syndrome, chronic despair." She points out that because of this, Native American writers have a different task. They "must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of catastrophe." She ends her essay with a description of her own sense of place, the area of North Dakota where she lived as a child. She points out that it is truly knowing a place that provides the link between details and meaning. A sense of place is, then, at the foundation of a sense of identity. Baptism of Desire Type of Work: Poetry First Published: 1989 Erdrich peoples the fluid, shifting landscape of her poetry in this collection with Catholic saints and figures from classical myth and Native American legend: Saint Clare, the nine-headed Hydra, and the Chippewa trickster Potchikoo appear in these pages. Boundaries dissolve; the dead and the living share the same space, ghosts holy and otherwise. In her notes to the book, Erdrich comments that most of the poems in the collection were written between the hours of two and four o'clock in the morning, during insomnia brought on by pregnancy. A number of voices in the poems painfully draw breath as if for the first time. The perspective may alternate between that of mother ("The Fence," "Birth") and child ("The Return," "The Flood"). Such fluidity of identity can be both terrifying and exhilarating, can provoke experiences of doubt and illumination. In "Hydra," Erdrich draws on the ambivalent imagery of the serpent as seducer and as initiator into the sacred mysteries; in the poem, the creature acts as muse: "you are my poetry . . . Your place/ is at my ear." As created by the poet's imagination, the world is a seductive place; one is "lured" into birth. Erdrich notes that the German biochemist August Kekule von Stradonitz derived the ring structure of benzene with the help of a dream in which a snake was swallowing its tail. It is in a dreamlike, suggestible state that the metamorphosis of shapes and identities and the confounding of time and space occur, approximating the ritual of baptism. In the surreal landscape of dreams, the mundane and fantastical coexist: There are "mosquitoes/ dancing on the head of a pin." This interpenetration of the material and spiritual worlds characterizes both the sacramental and the poetic imagination. Erdrich's use of religious imagery and the meditative quality of her rhythms contribute to the spiritual force of her poems. The reader struggles with them as if with Proteus, till true shapes are revealed and questions answered. The Bingo Palace Type of Work: Novel First Published: 1994 The Bingo Palace adds to the cycle that began with Love Medicine. Unified mainly by the quest of its protagonist, Lipsha, to win Shawnee, The Bingo Palace is a rope drawing together many strands, just as, in Erdrich's central metaphor, the Kashpaw family is a rope of many strands complexly twisted together. Lipsha has been living away from the tribe in Fargo, but is called home mysteriously by his grandmother, Lulu. He feels called to change his life. Is his mission to marry Shawnee, the beautiful and ambitious unwed mother? Or to prevent his half-uncle Lyman, the reputed father of Shawnee's child, from converting sacred tribal land into a casino and resort? Or to aid his father's escape from prison? Or to take his destined place as tribal medicine man after the death of his great grandmother, Fleur Pillager? Although Lipsha moves toward all of these goals, he achieves none of them, except perhaps for aiding his father in his escape. In the ten chapters he narrates, Lipsha focuses upon persuading Shawnee to marry him. The other chapters--narrated mainly by a communal voice of the reservation--call attention to the context of history and relationships within which Lipsha acts without full awareness. Though early reviewers expressed skepticism about the novel's form, The Bingo Palace is Erdrich at her best; the book will reward rereading. Chronologically, this novel follows Love Medicine, which introduced most of the main characters. Like Love Medicine, The Bingo Palace abounds in anecdotes and legends that are at once funny and profound, revealing the rich and magical depth of the tribal life of Erdrich's Chippewas. Tales of Burning Love Type of Work: Novel First Published: 1996 Tales of Burning Love, like Love Medicine, begins with June Kashpah's death during a 1981 North Dakota blizzard. The man who married her in a questionable ceremony and then drunkenly let her walk into the blizzard was Jack Mauser. For fourteen years, this incident haunts Jack. He becomes a leading contractor in Fargo, but this success is built upon concealment of growing debt and his Chippewa heritage. When his fifth marriage and his business collapse, Jack and his four living wives are pushed to reorder their lives. The story takes place mainly off the Chippewa reservation in the materialistic white world of Fargo; but this world proves to be much like the Chippewa world of the other novels. It is filled with miracles that point to trickster powers who teach through absurdity and suffering. Most characters seem blind to such forces until pushed to extremes of suffering. Then they experience humorous visions that are healing and painful. Jack's second wife, Eleanor, visits with the recently dead Sister Leopolda while rolling across drifts in a blizzard wind. Jack finds forgiveness when a statue of Our Lady of the Wheat falls upon him. Tales of Burning Love shares with the other North Dakota novels the conviction that the universe does not reveal how to love, but still requires truthful and faithful love; the only alternative to burning love is freezing death. The stories are new, however, rich in character and situation. This novel is a worthy continuation of the series. The Antelope Wife Type of Work: Novel First Published: 1998 In The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich's seventh novel, a U.S. Cavalry private, Scranton Roy, sent to quell a Native American uprising in Minnesota, mistakenly attacks a neutral village instead. He captures an Indian dog with an infant strapped to its back and rears the baby as his own. In this way the white Roy family begins its intricate relationship with the two Ojibwa families of Showano and Whiteheart Beads. Typically, the book is peopled by many complex characters. The baby's grieving mother marries a man named Showano and bears twins. Her granddaughters Zosie and Mary Showano figure prominently as the twin mothers of Rozina Whiteheart Beads and grandmothers of Rozina's twin daughters. Meanwhile, Rozina, married to tribal businessman Richard Whiteheart Beads, falls in love with baker Frank Showano. That love triangle echoes the one formed years before by Zosie and Mary Showano and the grandson of Scranton Roy. Finally, Klaus Showano, Frank's brother, is nearly destroyed by his infatuation with a seductive antelope woman, a creature of legend whom he meets at a powwow. Welcome flashes of humor appear in the wisecracking monologues of the Indian dog Almost Soup, a four-legged standup comic who tells dirty dog stories. Black comedy also occurs at the disastrous wedding of Rozina and Frank Showano, where the bride's first husband menaces the wedding party and is felled by a blow to the head with a frozen turkey. Erdrich is at her finest when she writes through Native American culture and consciousness. Here she returns to the lyricism of her earlier work, introducing a vital new group of characters. Her poetic skill and perceptive insights remain undimmed. Four Souls Type of Work: Novel First Published: 2004 In Four Souls, the eighth installment in the series that began with Love Medicine, Fleur Pillager seeks redress from John James Mauser, the tycoon who left a trail of ruined Native American lives in his lust for wealth. Readers familiar with Fleur from the preceding novels in the cycle will delight in the story of this ferocious, taciturn woman. Erdrich's decision to allow Fleur's father and the aristocratic Polly Elizabeth Gheen to describe events rather than Fleur herself only serves to enhance the enigmatic nature of her personality. Erdrich enriches Fleur's quest for revenge by contrasting it with Nanapush's desire to punish Shesheeb, a neighbor who flirts with Nanapush's wife, Margaret. While Nanapush's hilarious failures ultimately bring him closer to his wife, Fleur almost succeeds too well. She marries the man she originally intended to kill and bears him a son. The climax of the novel--a high-stakes poker game in which Fleur tries to win back her land--is one of the best scenes in Erdrich's oeuvre. While it would be easy to find fault with the shallowness of Mauser's character, one is more than compensated by the rich inner lives of Erdrich's Native Americans. Four Souls is a fitting addition to Erdrich's continuing saga. Suggested Readings Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Erdrich, Louise. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Ferguson, Suzanne. "The Short Stories of Louise Erdrich's Novels." Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 541-555. Hafen, Jane P. "Sacramental Language: Ritual in the Poetry of Louise Erdrich." Great Plains Quarterly 16 (1996): 147-155. Ludlow, Jeannie. "Working (in) the In-Between: Poetry, Criticism, Interrogation, and Interruption." Studies in American Indian Literature 6 (Spring, 1994): 24-42. Stone, Brad. "Scenes from a Marriage: Louise Erdrich's New Novel--and Her Life." Newsweek 131, no. 12 (March 23, 1998): 69. Stookey, Lorena Laura. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Wong, Hertha Dawn. Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine": A Casebook. London: Oxford University Press, 1999. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick |
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