Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 321-32.
Abstract
With these words, Louise Erdrich sets forth her own manifesto for writing about her place. A Native of the Northern Plains, Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa nation. In a stunning production of seven novels, six with interwoven tales and characters, two poetry collections, a memoir, and two coauthored books, Erdrich has created a vision of the Great Plains that spans the horizon of time and space and ontologically defines the people of her heritage.
ERDRICH'S NORTH DAKOTA
The literary impact is remarkable. Louise Erdrich's North Dakota cycle of novels includes the award-winning Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love (1996), and most recently The Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse (2001).2 In an audacious move, Erdrich took the acclaimed Love Medicine, edited it, added to it, and reissued it in 1993, thus demonstrating that the vital, living nature of indigenous storytelling exists not only in oral traditions but in fixed print as well.3 Additionally, The Antelope Wife (1998) blends Ojibwe traditions with the challenges and humor of urban natives in Minneapolis, Erdrich's current residence. Earlier, relocated by career and family obligations, Erdrich describes her memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay's Dance (1995), as having "some desperation in the writing ... a longing for my home ground. New Hampshire depleted me-the isolation from family, from other people of Ojibwe mixed background, the absence of sky and horizon."4 Karen Louise Erdrich was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, "on land that once belonged to the Wahpeton-Sisseton" Dakota and was home to a Bureau of Indians Affairs boarding school, where her parents taught and her Ojibwe grandfather attended.5 She describes Wahpeton as "really half a town, the other half being Breckenridge, Minnesota" and "desperate to be something."6 Although the Red River is a natural geological divider, the political boundaries between the states of North Dakota and Minnesota, of course, meant nothing to Erdrich's Ojibwe ancestors. The Ojibwe people, historically referring to themselves as Anishinabe, ranged through the Great Lakes region and the Northern Plains. The English speakers of the United States mangled their name into "Chippewa," and that is the legal designation of the federal government. The Ojibwe trace their origin to Mantoulin Island, Ontario, "the largest island anywhere in fresh water, an expanse of rolling hills and deep azure lakes, suffused with highly differentiated vegetation, animal life, and geological oddities."7 Here the mystical manitous coordinated the world into existence. Here on the island, Moses Pillager and Lulu Nanapush in Love Medicine, heirs of the Bear clan and the Nanabozho trickster legacy,8 give life to a new generation of contemporary Ojibwe survivors, starting with their son, Gerry Nanapush.
Although the Ojibwe consist of about a hundred bands and reservation communities in what is now Canada and the United States, there are commonalities among traditions, histories, and, most importantly, geographical place. Imposition of political divisions after European contact and conflicts with traditional enemies, the Dakotas and the Sac and Fox, forced the Ojibwe into discrete communities and diminished their collective power but did not reduce a general communal sense of identity. Western bands of the Ojibwe settled in the Pembina area and the "Turtle Mountains of present day North Dakota's border region."9 Consequently, these bands, including Erdrich's home tribe, adopted Northern Plains traditions into their Woodland cultural way of life.
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln