Born July 6,1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota By: Brooke Jurgensmeyer

 Her mother Rita was a Chippewa Indian and her father Ralph a German-American.  Her parents taught at a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  Louise is the first of seven children.  She grew up in a small town of Wahpeton, North Dakota near the Minnesota border.

 Her father encouraged her to write growing up, he would pay her a nickel for each story she would write.  Her mother very much supported her writing as well and would help her daughter make the covers for the writings.  She has said that she is very proud of both parts of her heritage.

 Growing up she went to Catholic school. Her grandfather taught her about culture and religion. He was devoted to his tribe and his Catholic religion.  She thinks very highly of her grandfather and admits that her first fiction writing Love Medicine she pictures her grandfather as one of the characters.  She said she never thought about “what was Native American and what wasn’t…. There wasn’t a political climate at the time about Indian rights.”

 A lot of Erdrich’s writing ideas came from experiences with some of her other jobs she had over the years.(waitress, lifeguard, teaching poetry in prisons, editing newspapers ect.)  She also says that some of her writing was influenced by the stories that were told by her family.  Her interests were in the interaction of quirky, passionate, complex individuals— Native American, mixed blood, German American, or Anglo--- lies at the center of her fiction.

 Erdrich attended Dartmouth College, she was part of the first class that accepted women into the college (1972).  At Dartmouth she participated in a Native American studies program. Run by Michael Dorris.

 During her undergraduate career she won prizes for poetry and fiction.  Her early college writings were poems and stories about her Ojibwe tribe.

 She later received her master’s from John’s Hopkins University.  For her degree she submitted a lot of poems that later appeared in her collection Jacklight (1984).

 Love Medicine is one of her most popular and award winning work.  Winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction  The Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Fiction  The Virginia McCormick Scully Award  The Los Angeles Times Award for fiction  The American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation  A fiction award from the Great Lakes Colleges Association.

Louise met Michael while she attended Dartmouth, they later married. The two as a couple created many of Erdrich’s early writings together..

The couple had three daughters together plus three he adopted before their marriage (she adopted also.) They separated in 1995 due to allegations of sexual abuse by one of their children. Michael ended up committing suicide in 1997.

 This was wrote after the suicide of Michael.  “In a New York Times review Michiko Kakutani described The Antelope Wife as “one of [Erdrich’s] most powerful and fully imagined novels yet.” Kakutani added: “Erdrich has returned to doing what she does best: using multiple viewpoints and strange, surreal tales within tales to conjure up a family’s legacy of love, duty and guilt, and to show us how that family’s fortunes have both shifted—and endured—as its members have abandoned ancient Indian traditions for a modern fast-food existence.”

 Love Medicine (1984)  The Beet Queen (1986)  Tracks (1988)  The Bingo Palace (1994)  Tales of Burning Love (1997)  The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse(2001)  Four Souls (2004)

 Fiction Novels  Story Collections  Children’s Literature  Poetry  Non-fiction

Indian Boarding School: The Runaways Home’s the place we head for in our sleep. Boxcars stumbling north in dreams don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run. The rails, old lacerations that we love, shoot parallel across the face and break just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross. The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts to be here, cold in regulation clothes. We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun to take us back. His car is dumb and warm. The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts of ancient punishments lead back and forth. All runaways wear dresses, long green ones, the color you would think shame was. We scrub the sidewalks down because it's shameful work. Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark face before it hardened, pale, remembering delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves. Louise’s work

In 1999 Erdrich and her three youngest children moved back Minneapolis to be closer to her parents. She is very close with her family. She and her sister opened Birchbark Books, Herbs, and Native Arts. Her entire family takes part in helping with the book store. She started focusing mainly on learning the Ojibwe language and studying her tribe's culture and traditions. She also spent a lot of her time teaching her youngest daughter how to speak the Ojibwe language.

" Primarily I am just a storyteller, and I take [stories] where I find them. I love stories whether they function to reclaim old narratives or occur spontaneously. Often, to my surprise, they do both. I'll follow an inner thread of a plot and find that I am actually retelling a very old story, often in a contemporary setting. I usually can't recall whether it is something I heard, or something I dreamed, or read, or imagined on the spot. It all becomes confused and then the characters take over, anyway, and make the piece their own."

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