Louise Erdrich (Chippewa)
(b. 1954)
Karen Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls,
Minnesota. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe of
North Dakota. The daughter of Bureau of Indian Affairs educators, she received
degrees from Dartmouth College and Johns Hopkins, and later served for a time
as editor of The Circle, a newspaper published by the Boston Indian Council,
before earning residential fellowships to the distinguished writers’ colonies.
Her initial reputation was founded on a series of successful short stories, for
which she received the Nelson Algren Award in 1982 and a Pushcart Prize in
1983.
In
1984 Erdrich published her first book of poetry, Jacklight, which focuses upon
both her own personal experiences and her observations of small town,
upper-midwestern life. The classic themes of this poetry—the fragility and
power of a life in the flesh, the desperation of longing, the need for
transcendence—return in her second book of poetry, Baptism of Desire (1989),
rendered almost surrealistically by combining an urgent and vivid organicism
with a crackling, electrical imagery. Indeed, the virtuosity of Erdrich’s
acclaimed prose style is founded in the disciplined craft of her poetry, most
of it written before her more widely known fiction.
Erdrich’s
first novel, Love Medicine (1984), was generously praised in the United States,
where it won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for the Best Work of
Fiction for 1984. The novel is structured as a series of separate
narratives—several of which were first published as short stories—spanning a
period of fifty years, from 1934 to 1984. Set on a North Dakota reservation,
the stories focus on relations between three Chippewa families: the Kashpaws
and their relations, the Lamartine/Nanapush, and the Morrisey families. The
novel opens in 1981 with a young college student’s return to the reservation on
the occasion of the death of June Kashpaw. Coming home she sees clearly the
pain and personal devastation the years have wrought on her family, and she
struggles in her first-person narrative to comprehend what force or attraction
in that situation would compel her Aunt June to set out for her home across an
empty, snow-covered field on the night she froze to death. The stories that
follow probe the relations between these families and in so doing focus on
three major characters: Marie Lazarre, a strong-willed woman of great spirit
and beauty whose sense of principle is founded on feelings of inadequacy that
have bedeviled her all her life; Lulu Lamartine, a woman of passionate
intensity, who learned early in her life of the frailty of the flesh and its
enormous capacity to heal life’s pain and redeem its guilt; and Nector Kashpaw,
a man of good looks and popular appeal, who is irresistibly drawn to Lulu but
marries Marie (June is their daughter). The selection in the anthology is the
second chapter of the book, the first in which we meet Marie Lazarre and come
to understand her need for a “love medicine,” a medicine which would create
love, a love that would be a medicine.
Erdrich’s
second novel, Beet Queen, returns to the upper midwest in the same time frame
as Love Medicine, but focuses on the Euro-American townspeople near the
reservation. The action of the third novel in the trilogy, Tracks, precedes
that of the other two, removing the story to the turn of the century and setting
the stage for the other novels by exploring the different fates of young Fleur
Pillager and Pauline Puyat and the traditional presence of the elder, Nanapush.
In Tracks we learn that before she went into the convent and became Sister
Leopolda, Pauline gave birth to a daughter, Marie (later Lazarre), whom she
gave up to Bernadette Morrissey. Erdrich’s work is marked by a generous,
compassionate spirit, a marvelous sense of comic invention, a sometimes acute
irony, and a finely honed sense of imagery and style.
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