For many years, her grandfather Patrick Gourneau was the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal chair.Įrdrich was in the first coed class to attend Dartmouth, where she studied English and met her eventual husband, Michael Dorris, another writer and the founder of the college’s new Native American Studies program. Both of Erdrich’s parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school.
Karen Louise Erdrich, born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, was the first of seven children raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, by a German American father and a mother who is half French, half Ojibwe-Ojibwe, also known as Chippewa, being one of six Native American tribes comprised by the Anishinaabe (“Original People”). In tidy fulfillment of an assignment entitled “very short fiction,” she wrote, “You went out for the afternoon and came back with your dress on inside out.” It helps that Erdrich does the exercises, too-reading out the results in her mellifluous, often mischievous voice. In class, the writing is personal, the criticism charitable.
Another day, they ate homemade enchiladas and sang “Desperado” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” accompanied by a fellow workshopper on the guitar. One afternoon, participants took turns reciting poetry under a basswood tree beside the single-room house where Erdrich’s mother grew up. Every August, when tick season has subsided, Erdrich and her sister Heid spend a week in a former monastery here to attend the Little Shell Powwow and to conduct a writing workshop at the Turtle Mountain Community College. From there, with Erdrich’s eight-year-old daughter, Kiizh, we drove five hours up to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, on the Manitoba border. Only one passenger train per day makes the Empire Builder journey from Chicago to Seattle, and when it stops in Fargo, North Dakota, at 3:35 in the morning, one senses how, as Louise Erdrich has written, the “earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers.” Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, but we met in the Fargo Econo Lodge parking lot. Interviewed by Lisa Halliday Issue 195, Winter 2010
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