Erdrich also received the creative benefit of hearing family stories from both sides of her ancestry. The history of her paternal grandparents, Ludwig Friedrich Erdrich and Mary Kroll, a German immigrant butcher and his wife, ultimately inspired such novels as The Beet Queen (1986) and The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) and “The Butcher’s Wife” poems in her early poetry collections. Though Erdrich’s German background is the focus of these important works, her authentic voice seems to come forth more naturally from her Ojibwe roots. Arguably her maternal grandparents, Patrice and Mary Gourneau, were a more significant influence on her literary work, which has as its primary focus the Ojibwe part of her heritage. Though raised Catholic, Erdrich was exposed to a great deal of Ojibwe culture: she heard traditional stories, participated in cultural ceremonies, and learned tribal history. Pat Gourneau was a prominent tribal elder and political activist for tribal rights. In describing the position of Gourneau in the family, Erdrich explained, “He’s kind of a legend in our family. He is funny, he’s charming, he’s interesting. He, for many years, was a very strong figure in my life. I guess I idolized him. A very intelligent man.”⁶ Gourneau was not only a beloved grandfather but also an undeniable force in the community. He served as the tribal chairman for the Ojibwe tribe on the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota during the 1950s, when the U.S. government devised a solution called “termination” as a remedy to the “Indian problem.”⁷ Termination was designed to undo the relationship between the federal government and Native Americans, so individual tribes would be forced to dissolve and join mainstream American society. The policy would have transferred communal tribal land held by the reservation into privately owned parcels for sale—in essence taking away the Ojibwe’s most prized possession. Erdrich explained the motivation behind her grandfather’s tireless fight against this policy: “He recognized that this would be the end of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa as a people.”⁸ After Gourneau testified before Congress to ensure his reservation would be exempt, the tribe avoided a frenzied sell-off, which preserved the reservation and saved the tribe from possible extinction. Gourneau’s efforts impressed upon Erdrich the critical relationship between Ojibwe survival and the land. Keenly aware of her grandfather’s legacy growing up, she committed herself to telling the story of the Ojibwe people, since remembering through storytelling is a traditional and time-honored form of preserving Ojibwe heritage. Recognizing Erdrich’s compassion and respect for the Ojibwe and the sacred view of the land embraced by her Anishinaabe ancestors is essential to understanding her body of work.

Erdrich’s educational background includes a bachelor of arts in 1976 from Dartmouth College, where she was part of the first class of women to gain admission to the college. Far from her hometown of Wahpeton and attending an Ivy League school, with all of the attendant cultural and social norms of New England, Erdrich faced an authentic culture shock and intense adjustment period. She admits her success was due to the kindness of instructors, advisers, and the community of Native American scholars at Dartmouth, who took under their collective wing the “wide-eyed, chainsmoking, wild-haired, disorganized, red-booted young woman from North Dakota, and managed, with their love and examples, to bring me through.”⁹ Among those generous individuals was Michael Dorris, chairman of the newly established Native American Studies program and an instructor in the department. Erdrich extolls Dorris’s contribution to the program and to those Native American scholars, like herself, who joined the nascent program: “He gave himself utterly to the task, and used his tough humor, tenacity, and courage to make sure the program and the department would be of ongoing integrity. So it continues. Without him, there would be no voices to collect.”¹⁰ Dorris eventually became Erdrich’s husband, and together they created one of the most celebrated literary partnerships of the late twentieth century.

The Dartmouth years, then, significantly altered the course of Erdrich’s life and career, but not only because of Dorris. Dartmouth’s Native American Studies program offered a young Erdrich the opportunity to explore, cultivate, and refine her Ojibwe voice. Along with the other students in the program, Erdrich developed a “reliance on community and an appreciation of the blessings of connection.”¹¹ Decidedly these two themes, community and connection, are central to Erdrich’s literary work—the communities of the fictional Argus, Hoopdance, and Little No Horse figure in almost all of her novels, and connections of kinship and genealogical ties abound in her stories. Though Dartmouth’s Native American students were of different tribal backgrounds, both mixed-blood and full-blood, there was a common need shared among them in terms of identity: “the need to integrate, a need to make sense of a world that does not include them, a need to return to places deeply longed for and understood.”¹² The creation of a cultural identity, the struggles of tribal members and their communities to belong in the world at large, and the overwhelming pull of place, of home, take up much of the striving and conflict in Erdrich’s work. Her time at Dartmouth precipitated an enriching and liberating seismic shift in her world that would irrevocably affect her art and her life.

After graduating from Dartmouth, Erdrich remained in New England for a time before returning to North Dakota. Eventually the call to pursue her creative writing talents led her back east to graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, where she had the opportunity to study under various literary luminaries, including John Barth, Edmund White, Richard Howard, and C. Michael Curtis.¹³ Upon receiving her master of fine arts degree in 1979, Erdrich ultimately returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence, where her professional relationship with Dorris, who had remained in contact with her, evolved into a romantic one; they married in 1981. Erdrich settled in New Hampshire with Dorris and his three adopted children, Reynold Abel, Jeffrey Sava, and Madeline, whom Dorris had previously adopted while single. During the course of their nearly seventeen-year marriage, Erdrich gave birth to three daughters, Persia, Pallas, and Aza, all while embarking in earnest on a literary career. Dorris, a writer himself, published a number of works, including A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), and received the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for his critically acclaimed memoir, The Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which includes a foreword by Erdrich. The book describes the condition known as fetal alcohol syndrome, which afflicted their adopted son Reynold, who died after being struck by a car in a hit-and-run accident.

Erdrich and Dorris’s literary partnership became the subject of public admiration and fascination. They collaborated on a number of early stories and books; throughout their relationship Dorris supported Erdrich professionally as a trusted adviser, literary agent, editor, tireless promoter, and sounding board. On his suggestion a reluctant Erdrich entered the short story “The World’s Greatest Fisherman” in the competition for the Nelson Algren Literary Award, which she won. The story became the first chapter of the novel Love Medicine (1984), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Her poetry was gaining critical attention at this time, as well, with the publication of Jacklight (1984) and Baptism of Desire (1989), parts of which appear with newer poems in Original Fire: New and Selected Poems (2003). Though some of Erdrich’s early works, parts of Love Medicine (1984) and the coauthored The Crown of Columbus (1991) and Route 2 (1991), were written in collaboration with Dorris, there is some confusion about which other of her novels were the product of shared creative effort. The task to parse who authored what portions of the early novels, including The Beet Queen (1986), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994), would be impossible. Indeed early interviews with Erdrich failed to clarify the extent and depth of their joint efforts: “In the course of it [the writing of a novel], we’ll continuously plot and continuously talk about who the characters are, what they eat, what clothes they wear, what their favorite colors are and what’s going to happen to them. In that way, I think it’s a true kind of collaboration: we both really influence the course of the book. You can’t look back and say which one made it go this way or that way, because you can’t remember.”¹⁴ Of course, at that time Erdrich was a woman who loved her husband and the father of her children, admired him as a gifted educator, depended on him as her literary agent and first reader, and shared her writing with him as a trusted editor and adviser. Dorris was present at most of those early interviews, which number more than one hundred, and the pressure on Erdrich to maintain the impression that she and Dorris were engaged in a wholly collaborative literary partnership must have been compelling for a number of professional and personal reasons.

In the intervening years, particularly since Dorris’s death, Erdrich has opened up about the collaboration in more candid terms. For those curious in learning more about the extent and the nature of their creative partnership, she has set the record straight: “I would have loved for Michael to have had his own life as a writer and not covet my life as a writer. But he couldn’t help himself. So in agreeing to write The Crown of Columbus I really made a deal, at least in my thoughts, that if we wrote this one book together, then we could openly work separately—as we always did in truth, of course.”¹⁵ The early novels were published under Erdrich’s name alone, officially crediting her as the sole author. There is no question that Erdrich valued Dorris as a keen and intuitive editor of her works, but the notion that her novels should actually be considered collaborations should be called into question, particularly as evidenced by her ongoing list of publications since 1997. In a 2012 interview promoting The Round House, Terry Tazioli asked Erdrich how different it was to write on her own compared to writing collaboratively with Dorris, and Erdrich gave a straightforward answer: “It’s not any different. I wrote it all. . . . So, collaborating wasn’t like . . . he would write a page and I would write a page. It was more that I had someone who gave me very, very wonderful editorial advice.”¹⁶ The Erdrich-Dorris literary partnership effectively came to an end in 1996 when the couple separated. Dorris committed suicide in 1997. The loss of Dorris left Erdrich a single mother and the focus of unwanted attention and speculation on the part of the literary community about her personal affairs.

During this difficult period in her life, Erdrich continued publishing novels regularly: Tales of Burning Love was published earlier in the same year as Dorris’s death, followed by The Antelope Wife (1998). Erdrich continued her creative output with The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), a finalist for the National Book Award; The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003); Four Souls (2004); and The Painted Drum (2005). After a brief hiatus, Erdrich followed this stream of novels with another prolific period, publishing some of her most critically acclaimed novels—The Plague of Doves (2008), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shadow Tag (2009); and The Round House (2012), winner of the National Book Award—as well as The Red Convertible: Collected and New Stories (2009). In addition to her adult fiction and poetry, Erdrich has written an award-winning series of children’s books that includes The Birchbark House (1999), The Game of Silence (2005), The Porcupine Year (2008), and Chickadee (2012). She has also written nonfiction, including a memoir of motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995), and Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), a memoir of her travels through Ojibwe country and a catalog of various cultural aspects of Ojibwe life.

Erdrich lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she owns an independent bookstore, Birchbark Books, which specializes in Native American literature and Ojibwe-language publications. The bookstore proudly displays a handmade canoe hanging from the ceiling and an authentic confessional salvaged from an old church, in a nod to her Catholic heritage and perhaps a smirk from her Ojibwe self. In her continuing commitment to preserve Ojibwe language and culture, Erdrich established the Birchbark House Fund to support indigenous language revitalization and, with her sisters, formed the Wiigwaas Press to publish material in Ojibwe and bilingual Ojibwe/English. Paralleling her growing list of publications, Erdrich’s family has expanded as well. She had a fourth daughter, Nenaa’ikiizhikok, in 2000, who is featured in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, and married a local businessman from Minneapolis, Dan Emmel, in 2008. Erdrich remains engaged with Ojibwe life and community: she continues her studies in the language, runs regular writing workshops with her sister Heid Erdrich, also a creative writer, and travels regularly to Ojibwe retreats and sacred places. During her acceptance speech at the 2013 North Dakota Theodore Roosevelt Rough Riders Awards ceremony, an honor bestowed to exceptional North Dakotans, Erdrich remembered her Ojibwe ancestors: “I want in this context to thank the old people who really sacrificed to keep alive Anishinaabe culture, ways, and language.”¹⁷ Clearly evidenced in her thanks to those Ojibwe who have gone before is Erdrich’s unwavering commitment to preserve the fruits of their sacrifice.