Writer Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich, like many of the charact
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Louise Erdrich, like many of the characters in her novels and short stories, is part Native American, part something else - in her case, her family is a mixture of a German-American father and a Chippewa mother. Erdrich's parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as teachers on a nearby North Dakota reservation and she recalls that her father regularly recited memorized poetry - Frost and Byron - to her and her six siblings. Erdrich started her literary career as a poet, supporting herself by working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken and on road construction crews. At 28, Erdrich published her first novel Love Medicine - which had been rejected by numerous publishing houses - when her husband, the author Michael Dorris, resubmitted it, posing as her literary agent. Despite a modest first print run, "Love Medicine" was a phenomenal word-of-mouth success, selling 400,000 copies in hardback and winning the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. She followed with three bestsellers: The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace. After corresponding with Michael Dorris, her former anthropology professor, who was also of Native American descent, she began to collaborate with him on short fiction and they were married in 1981 until his recent suicide. Erdrich's works focus on Native American characters. Magic is an important theme in her works, which are marked by a lyrical prose. In an article for Salon with Robert Spillman, Erdrich talked about some of the influe
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cters in the story, although in ways that are not entirely typical in Erdrich's stories. A neighbor has sold his farm to the developer of a subdivision - a person whom we assume to be white. Gerry is arrested by an officer whom we also assume to be white, appearing as so many whites have appeared in the lives of Indians, to imprison and constrain for an action that the Indian thought it was right to do (Gleick and Fedarko, 1997, p. 29). There is the owner of the convenience store where the narrator goes to buy ice, an emblem (both the ice and the convenience store) of the world beyond the structures of the Indians' life. And then there are the protests that Gerry is involved in, protests that must be against some policy of the white government, but what exactly we do not know.
Erdrich is obviously being intentionally vague about what Gerry is protesting.
'What's he do?ö she asks again.
ôHe - well, he agitates,ö I tell her.
ôIs that some kind of factory work?ö
ôNot exactly, no. It's not a nine-to-five job or anything. (p. 421)
Erdrich's narrator's reluctance to fill in the details of Gerry's agitating come in some measure from her reluctance to lay open her life for judgement by her aunt and mother. But it also serves as a cl
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Approximate Word count = 1946
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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