Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris met when she was an undergraduate at Dartmouth and he was a professor of anthropology and the director of Dartmouth’s new Native Studies Program. Erdrich enrolled in a seminar taught by Dorris, and they remained acquaintances—something that might not have happened at a larger institution with a student population of 30,000 or 40,000. Dartmouth’s enrollment at that time was around 4,000. It was probably inevitable that the two would at least bump into each other on campus, but their relationship remained at the acquaintance level until after Erdrich graduated. For about a year (1977–1978), she worked as a visiting poet and teacher for the North Dakota Arts Council, and while she was working at this job, she began writing the manuscript that would become her first novel, Love Medicine. Continuing her education at Johns Hopkins University, she earned an MFA in 1979, publishing short stories and poetry at the same time. Dorris stayed at Dartmouth, earned tenure, continued as director of Dartmouth’s Native Studies Program and adopted three American Indian children. Dorris and Erdrich continued sporadic contact, but did not meet again until Erdrich returned to Dartmouth in 1979 to give a reading that was entirely poetry—no fiction. Dorris attended the reading, and the two renewed their acquaintance and developed a friendship.
The renewed and deeper friendship not only brought them together, it also marked a turning point in both their careers. In a 1987 interview with Georgia Croft,1 Dorris and Erdrich stated that in 1979, at the time of Erdrich’s visit to Dartmouth, they had both given up on writing fiction, but after they renewed their friendship, they began collaborating on some short stories. Dorris then took a sabbatical year in New Zealand with his three adopted children, while Erdrich worked as communications director and editor of a Native American newspaper, The Circle, sponsored by the Boston Indian Council. Beginning publication in 1976, this was a newspaper format publication for native people, as their subtitle from the time suggested. Erdrich’s duties at the time are unknown, but as both circulation and budget were small, she probably had multiple duties, ranging from general office work to writing some of the main stories.
While they were apart, Dorris and Erdrich exchanged personal letters and drafts of short stories. Although primarily interested in writing fiction, Dorris published some poetry in The North Dakota Quarterly and Suntracks, along with what he called some commercial short stories. Erdrich wrote her short story, “The Red Convertible,” offering it to Dorris for criticism. By the time Dorris returned to Dartmouth from New Zealand, Erdrich had become a visiting fellow there; their relationship deepened, and the two were married on October 10, 1981.
This fall wedding between two people who were beautiful to look at, ambitious, and hard-working, who enjoyed working together, took place when the New Hampshire leaves were at their most gorgeous peak of color. Perhaps the colorfulness of the autumn leaves was a reflection of the colorful characters of both Erdrich and Dorris, with their unique collaborative writing habit that they had developed before their marriage, which continued afterwards. Indeed, in interview after interview over the next 14 years, both Dorris and Erdrich constantly emphasized their collaboration on writing projects that were eventually published under either Dorris’s or Erdrich’s name. Usually, the publication credit went to Erdrich rather than Dorris, which is not surprising. Erdrich likely had more time to create new works of writing since she was not employed in a demanding academic job as Dorris was and could more easily juggle her schedule to accommodate intensive writing. However, upon her marriage, Erdrich became an instant parent to Dorris’s three adopted children.
Stepchildren, even if they are not living with the newly married couple, always require an adjustment for everyone concerned, and naturally, the more children there are involved, the more difficult the task. The oldest of seven children, Erdrich was certainly equipped to deal with multiple youngsters in the household, but Dorris’ three were not ordinary children.
Reynauld Abel, Jeffrey Sava, and Madeline Hanna, all Native American children, suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) caused by their mothers’ excessive consumption of alcohol during pregnancy. Alcohol crosses the placental barrier, disrupting brain cell development, which results in stunted or malformed cells. The symptoms of FAS vary, but can include malformed facial and other body structures and an array of behavioral and cognitive disabilities, including poor memory, attention deficits, impaired critical thinking, and impulsive behavior as well as the secondary symptoms of drug addiction and mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression. Dorris wrote about his and Erdrich’s experiences in dealing with the problems of Abel (Reynauld), Sava (Jeffrey), and Madeline in The Broken Cord (1989). The book brought attention to the issues of FAS as well as to Dorris himself, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book. It was named Outstanding Academic Book by Choice and won both the Christopher Award and the Heartland Prize. Awards and public attention were all well and good, but in the meantime, both Dorris and Erdrich had to manage the problems of their children on a day-to-day basis, and Erdrich probably more so than Dorris. He could escape into academia. Erdrich struggled to write as a stay-at-home mom. Perhaps writing was her escape, her solace, her comfort when the children’s problems became overwhelming. Three daughters—Persia, Pallas, and Aza—would be born to the couple over the years of their marriage, bringing the total number of their children together to six. Certainly, financial success from their writing helped ease the burden somewhat by allowing them to hire help when they needed it. At the beginning, though, Erdrich and Dorris struggled like any couple on a single income living with and supporting three special needs children and their growing family with the addition of each of their three biological children.
The two continued to work on fiction, writing multiple drafts and trading them back and forth for intensive editing and criticism. Dorris said, “You get back this savaged draft, and then the arguments begin. . . . The objecting person always wins.”2 Early on, they collaborated on a series of romance novels under the pen name of Milou North—the first name a combination of Michael and Louise, and the North because they lived in the north. Romance novels are not considered respectable as literature because they are formulaic and often clichéd, but there is a thriving market for the genre. Erdrich and Dorris hoped it would make them a significant amount of money, but it did not. However, they learned the discipline of writing in a specific style for a targeted reading audience.
Erdrich did continue to write and publish poetry while perfecting her fiction writing. Then, in 1982, a relative informed her of a fiction writing contest, but only four days before the deadline. Holed up in her kitchen, she worked intensively and submitted her short story, “The World’s Greatest Fisherman,” to the Nelson Algren Fiction Contest—and won! That success broke the dam. That same year, Erdrich was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the following year, published both poetry and fiction. The poem, “Indian Boarding School,” won a Pushcart prize and her short story, “Scales,” won the National Magazine Award for Fiction and was included in The Best American Short Stories, 1983. PEN Syndication Fiction Project chose her short story, “The Immaculate Conception of Carson Du Pre,” for publication. She still had not published a novel, although she had submitted both Love Medicine and another novel, Tracks, to publishers and agents. The rejection slips kept coming. In the early 1980s, then as now, almost no writer could get any book manuscript accepted for publication by sending their work directly to a publisher, who accepted work, particularly from first-time novelists, only through literary agencies. These agencies also hired a coterie of readers whose judgments on the quality, and especially the salability, of any work were final. Some of the major publishing houses received dozens, even hundreds, of manuscripts every month, so a cursory glance might be all that any reader could give to a particular writer’s work. Often, it is not the quality of writing that gets a work accepted, but simply luck. Dorris realized this difficulty and responded by creating a literary agency of his own, even to having stationary printed. As a literary agent, he could then access publishers directly. With the advent of the internet almost 30 years later, such a ploy is unlikely to succeed because publishers can easily look up any purported literary agency online to determine whether or not they are legitimate. However, in those simpler times, the access that Dorris gained by representing himself as a literary agent and probably his persuasiveness in presenting her work got Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, accepted for publication.
While Erdrich uses multiple narrators for all three of the first novels she published, Tracks utilizes dual narrators. The storytellers in that novel alternate, with one narrator per chapter. Love Medicine and The Beet Queen utilize multiple narrators, and often, more than one within the same chapter, so that rather than hearing a solo performance, the reader “hears” a chorus. For instance, the opening chapter of Love Medicine begins with the death of June Kashpaw in a late spring blizzard, but segues into a kitchen table conversation among many of June’s relatives who were important in her life. The few facts about June revealed here establish who she was, why she left, and why she is returning. This communal storytelling event posthumously establishes June as a member of the community within the web of memory while simultaneously telling the reader why June Kashpaw and her life were important. She cannot speak for herself, so others speak for her. The polyvocality of the plot here establishes the importance of communal rather than individual identity, and as these narrators speak of June, they necessarily reveal themselves and their own place within the web of family and cultural identity.
Erdrich draws not just upon her own experience and knowledge of Anishinaabe culture for this novel, but also upon her dual upbringing within both Anisinaabe spiritual practice and belief and the Catholic faith, and both are coded into this text. Hertha Wong has written about the elements of water and fishing in Love Medicine that she believes connect both Catholic Christian and Anishinaabe narratives.3 For example, one origin story for the Anishinaabe states that the world was created on the back of a turtle, which is associated with water, and a later creation story begins with a world composed of nothing but water until a muskrat repeatedly dives down and brings up mud to create land masses. Such origin stories, known as earth diver creation myths, are not uncommon among many American Indian tribes. The geographic location of the Anishinaabe people around the Great Lakes of North America is sufficient to indicate that fishing would be an important source of food, and as any fisherman would say, patience and cleverness are important requirements for catching fish, and would therefore become integral values in Anishinaabe culture. In Catholic belief and practice, water is important, too. For example, water is a purification symbol in the rites of baptism, and fishing is a metaphor that Jesus uses when he recruits two fishermen as disciples, telling them that he will make them fishers of men.
Dennis Walsh expands upon Wong’s analysis, but Walsh insists that the two worldviews wrestle for supremacy in Love Medicine when he wrote, “The Chippewa and Catholic codes are thus thrown into conflict though it becomes clear as the novel progresses that the Chippewa code has primacy.”4 In establishing identity for her characters, perhaps Erdrich was also working out her own identity, worldview, and spiritual belief, and it would seem that, for her as well as her characters, “the Chippewa code has supremacy.”
The same year that Love Medicine was published—1984—Erdrich’s first book of poems, Jacklight, was also published. Titles of poems and characters in these poems appear in later short stories and novels, as do water images. The second poem in the book is titled “Love Medicine” and contains these lines—“Still it is raining lightly,” “she belongs more than I/to this night of rising water,” “And later at the crest of the flood,” “sheets of rain sweep up down/to the river held right against the bridge,” and in the last stanza, “We see that now the moon is leavened and the water/as deep as it will go/ stops rising. Where we wait for the night to take us/ the rain ceases. Sister, there is nothing/ I would not do.”5 [Italics in the original.] Another poem is titled “The Book of Water.”6 In addition to the water images, there are also references to other specific Anishinaabe images in such poems as “Windigo,”7 which has a short definition of a windigo at the beginning. Catholic images are invoked as well, such as in the title of the poem, “New Vows.”8 While poetry is often image-driven or theme-driven, Erdrich’s poetry is mostly character-driven. The reader meets people herein and not just the generic “I” or “you,” “he” or “she,” but individuals with names and histories, even legends. John Wayne is redefined through an American Indian perspective; the reader visits Francine’s Room, meets Leonard who went each morning to the first confession, commits redeeming adulteries with all the women in town, and refuses to atone. Readers are also introduced to Step-and-a-Half Waleski, who will become a central figure in a future novel, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club. Reading Jacklight is a retrospective of Erdrich’s life to that point and a cryptic harbinger of her future work.
Both Love Medicine and Jacklight won multiple awards. Likely, she would have been proud of the novel’s publication if it had been accepted immediately, but she was probably more so because it had been so difficult for her to break into the fiction genre. She had been publishing award-winning poems for many years, so a collection of her poetry probably seemed inevitable. Her short stories had also been very successful, but novel writing was an entirely different level of work.
A poem or a short story requires a quick concentrated burst of energy and concentration, then a period of reflection and revision, but creating a novel is a sustained effort over a longer period of time. It requires building a story with characters that hold the readers’ interest through multiple pages, making certain that the words and actions of each character stay true to the persona the writer has created, building tension to a climax, and creating a satisfying ending. From the beginning and throughout the process, the novelist has to make choices—to write in first person or third person, to emphasize this character or that, to change a setting, and to make multiple other decisions that affect the overall tone and structure of the work. Further, the novelist must offer a sense of verisimilitude so that the story is believable and the reader will suspend disbelief. To achieve both those ends, the writer must ensure what filmmakers call continuity. If the novelist names a character Arthur on page one, then Arthur he must be throughout the entire novel. Mistakenly writing that character’s name as Andrew in a different place not only confuses the reader, but undermines verisimilitude.
All of this is work intensive. In addition, the author needs someone willing to read and edit the work. Dorris provided this editing service for Erdrich, and she, for him. Most writers are not this fortunate. Those who are students in creative writing programs certainly get feedback on their work, but most of this comes from fellow students who are usually no better informed or talented at discerning good writing from bad than is the writer herself. Of course, workshops at the college level are led by teachers who must be published authors in order to get the job in the first place, and offer their advice, but being a good writer does not necessarily translate into being a good teacher, and simply getting writing—fiction or poetry—published does not necessarily mean that the work is good. It may get published because it fits a particular niche, as happens with some action films. These usually do not have a very well-constructed story or characters, but as long as they appeal to the mentality of 12-year-old boys with money to spend, they will be produced and distributed. That is simply good business strategy. Further, every writer has their own unique style, so the criticism provided by fellow students and the teacher, who may be and usually is, biased towards his or her own personal style, may in fact kill the style of a new writer, which can make the new writer’s work unpublishable. Writers are usually not good critics of their own work, either. Some few are able to switch hats—to write creatively without thought for word choice or characterization or setting or continuity, and then to ignore the creativity that went into the work, while objectively editing their own work. Most people fit one category or the other. Of course, the element of luck enters into the equation as well.
The singer-songwriter Willie Nelson was once asked how much talent it takes to be successful, and he responded by saying that he did not know, but he did know that he would rather have a little luck than all the talent in the world. Erdrich certainly possesses great talent, but she was also lucky that Dorris willingly collaborated—or so it would seem—editing her work and promoting it as her agent. Alternatively, Dorris was lucky that Erdrich was willing to critically analyze and advise him in his own writing. Their marriage was seemingly a match made in heaven, as were their parallel careers.
The years passed and the publications and awards piled up. In 1985, the year after publication of Love Medicine, the novel won multiple publishing awards, but the most lucrative and prestigious award for Erdrich was the Guggenheim Fellowship (1985). These highly competitive mid-career fellowships fund a scholar, writer, scientist, or other professional for as long as a year. This would certainly have been a financial boon for Erdrich and Dorris as they struggled to provide for their growing family.
From that point on, Erdrich focused her writing energy on fiction, although she would continue to publish some poetry, as well as branching out into the children’s book and creative non-fiction genres years later. The Beet Queen, her second novel, was published in 1986, and although it earned excellent reviews, was commercially successful, and was nominated for awards, it did not win any awards. The novel displays Erdrich’s gift of describing human behavior through the actions and inner thoughts of characters, both White and Indian.
After being abandoned by their mother, the two main characters, brother and sister, Mary and Karl Adare arrive in the small town of Argus, North Dakota9 on a freight train, intending to live with their Aunt Fritzie, but a sudden fright sends Karl scurrying back to the train, while Mary runs to her Aunt Fritzie’s home. This early bifurcation in the paths of the siblings sets the theme for future events within the novel, which include the initial theme of abandonment, then separation, love, sexual obsession, and jealousy, and the aggression and self-destruction of which humans are capable.
The novel is replete with images and situations from Erdrich’s past in Wahpeton, including the agricultural production of sugar beets. In creating a Beet Queen, she is following the practice of small towns that emphasize and honor whatever is unique about their town or region by naming a young woman as queen of that product or social practice. As Erdrich writes, “There was already a Snow Queen, a Pork Queen, and a Homecoming Queen. There would be one more queen and she would be queen of the beets!”10 Here, Erdrich’s talent for creating dialogue for characters that think and speak in thought-provoking ways are evident—“We are very much like the dead,” Mary argues, “except that we have our senses.”11 The similes and metaphors that Erdrich writes to form the inner thoughts of characters are never clichéd, but always unique. For example, at one point, Dot, the Beet Queen from the title ruminates about Mary, “The Big Gal’s is where Aunt Mary likes to shop. She’s hard to fit, being built like a cement root cellar. . . .”12 For all the obvious talent of the writing in this novel, the format is odd and the narrative seems disorganized.
In regard to the format or structure of the book, it is divided into chapters, but there are further divisions within some chapters, but not in all, and these divisions are sometimes indicators of a change of narrator, and sometimes are given imaginative titles, which makes the structure messy. That the novel was derived from 12 previously published short stories, most of which were published in 1986 just prior to the book publication, may be the origin of the structural problems. The book has a rushed feeling. Erdrich would manage reworking short stories for a longer narrative much better in her third novel, Tracks.
The following year—1987—saw publication of more short stories and more awards for the couple. That same year, Dorris joined the ranks of published novelists with his first, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, which was nominated for multiple awards, but won none of them. The book, like Erdrich’s novels is considered Native American literature, but it was very unusual in that most characters in this genre are either full-blood or mixed blood people; if they are mixed blood, the combination is inevitably White and Indian, as is true in N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, House Made of Dawn, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and multiple other works by Native American writers. Dorris’ novel featured a mixed blood protagonist who was of White and African American heritage. That was an unusual move, but it did not mean the book would achieve fame because of it. Perhaps Dorris did not mind that his work did not garner the critical acclaim and financial success that Erdrich’s did, particularly since he contributed much to her work—something that she has repeatedly acknowledged and thanked him for. Perhaps there had always been difficult times in their marriage, and their eventual separation was inevitable when two such strong minded ambitious people are paired, but possibly, that slight to his published work began the breakdown in their relationship. The following year—1988—saw the publication of Erdrich’s third novel, Tracks, which made it to that special place that every author dreams of—The New York Times Best Seller list.
She had worked on this book in various iterations for several years, beginning back when she was a student at Johns Hopkins, but it grew into a bloated manuscript that she could not seem to save, no matter how much editing she and Dorris did. She began cutting pieces from Tracks to use in other works, until, by the process of elimination, she had a much more workable manuscript that she and Dorris then reworked into a publishable manuscript. A short story derived from that novel, “Snares,” was previously published in Harper’s and then included in the Best American Short Stories, 1988.
Both Tracks and Love Medicine differ from other novels in that a chapter in a regular novel is not complete in itself, but may carry a thread of narrative from one chapter to the next in a more disjointed manner than in standard novel structure. One chapter taken at random from a novel is unlikely to be a satisfactory reading experience on its own. However, within the short story cycle type of novel, as most of Erdrich’s are, each chapter can stand on its own with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but unlike a collection of short stories, the short story cycle has themes, settings, and characters in each story that contribute to a coherent whole. This style is common in Native American storytelling events, where one person may tell a story, which is followed by another storyteller with a related story, and then another and so on, like railroad coaches coupled together to make a train that begins in one place, adds cars along the way, and arrives at another place. Translating this oral tradition to written works would have seemed very natural for Erdrich. As George Bird Grinnell described:
At formal gatherings a man might tell a story and when it was finished might say: “The story is ended. Can anyone tie another to it?” Another man might then relate one, ending with the same words, and so stories might be told all about the lodge.13
Two themes couple the story/chapters together in Tracks—the loss of land and concomitant loss of culture and community; and the influence of Christianity or Catholicism upon the Anishinaabe characters.
Land loss resulted from one of those historic moments, the Dawes Act, that Owens insists readers need to know in order to understand the American Indian novel. Also called the General Allotment Act or the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, this law changed the definition and the reality of land ownership for American Indians. When the reservations were created, for each one, the entire block of land belonged to the tribe as a whole, so that no one person has a deed to a specific piece of land that could be bought or sold on the market. Neither the whole nor any part of reservation land could be sold or transferred to anyone else unless the entire tribe agreed and signed off on the deal. The concept of land ownership was alien to American Indians, who believed that land belonged to everyone, just as air and water did, and that people had the use of land, which might or might not be permanent. Any natural resources present upon the land—animals to hunt, plants to gather for food, trees for timber, water, fish within the water, and so on, were considered community property available to anyone, much like the concept of the commons in Europe and elsewhere up until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Some influential people, Sen. Henry Dawes among them, believed that the main reason American Indians were not moving into the mainstream of American society and remained mired in poverty was because they had no pride of individual ownership of land, which was entirely a Euro-American concept that bore no relationship to American Indian worldviews. Dawes and his supporters introduced legislation that would break up the community-owned parcels of land on reservations and assign acreage to individual owners. Generally, each head of the family was allotted 160 acres of land, each single person over 18 years of age was assigned 80 acres, and minor children were to receive 40 acres each. Of course, before the land could be distributed, it had to be surveyed, and it is this process to which Erdrich refers in Tracks. The Dawes Act was signed into law in 1887, but reservations are vast tracts of territory widely scattered across the United States, which meant that it took years for the land to be surveyed. According to the dates that Erdrich assigned in her book, the surveying of the reservation there took place in the early 20th century. Other reservations in the upper Midwest were not surveyed and allotted for many more years. The Pine Ridge Reservation for the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota, for instance, was not surveyed and allotted until 1937, some 50 years after the Dawes Act was passed. The so-called Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—were exempt from the provisions of the Dawes Act until the Curtis Act of 1907 brought them under allotment as well. Angie Debo has effectively and thoroughly documented the severe adverse effects of these laws on American Indian tribes.14
Pauline Puyat, one of the two narrators in Tracks, claims that Fleur used the equivalent of black magic to kill or drive the surveyors mad, some of whom were tribal members. Fleur was of the traditionalist point of view, believing that it was wrong to divide up the communally-owned land into individually-owned tracts, but whether she actually put curses on the surveyors, as Pauline claimed, is open to interpretation. As Fleur said to Nanapush when he told her some of the rumors Pauline was spreading, “Uncle, the Puyat lies,”15 which not only undermines the tales that Pauline tells to characters within the text, but is also a signal to the reader that Pauline is an unreliable narrator.
Another goal of the allotment act was to change American Indian culture from a communal social organization to individualism. It is unclear whether those advocating such change really believed that would help the economic situation of American Indians or whether that desire was borne out of fear of something they did not understand—fear that a socially communal group could unite under the guidance of charismatic tribal leaders to wreak mayhem against White citizens. The allotment act did exactly what its worst proponents hoped. Cracks appeared in the communal nature of American Indian societies as individuals, families, or small groups united to their own advantage over that of the community as a whole. Outside non-natives saw advantages in pitting tribal members against each other. Erdrich details this situation very well when she writes about the animosity between Nanapush, a traditionalist opposed to allotment, and the Morissey family, who took advantage of the new law to acquire their fellow tribal members’ land. Even Margaret Kashpaw, common law wife of Nanapush, underhandedly pays the taxes on her own land at the expense of Nanapush losing his. Outsiders, too, participated in the land grab. The timber company in Tracks that acquired tribal lands through coercion, corruption, or theft is an example of the vultures that circled after the passage of the Dawes Act. A reader unfamiliar with the Dawes Act and the destruction it wreaked upon American Indian tribes may still understand the human emotions Erdrich writes of—the sexual attraction between Eli and Fleur, and between Nanapush and Margaret, for instance, but is unlikely to grasp the finer details that drive the plot themes of land loss and cultural disintegration.
The Christian missionary effort among the Indians, particularly Catholicism and the divisions it created, is a second theme within Tracks. Christianity is an exclusive religion; that is, its practitioners are expected to adhere exclusively to the Christian dogma that there is only one god and that is the God of the Christians inherent in the holy trinity of the father, the son, and the holy ghost. The central belief is that anyone who acknowledges other gods cannot also be Christian; however, American Indians have long been polytheistic, and most see no conflict between being Christian while simultaneously believing and participating in one or more traditional American Indian religious practices. For many American Indians, religion and spiritual practice are inclusive activities where it is common to attend a sweat lodge ceremony on Saturday and attend mass on Sunday. Such American Indians see no conflict. Erdrich demonstrates this common confluence of religious belief and practice within the character of Margaret Kashpaw in Tracks.
Margaret demonstrates her adherence to traditional practice when she performs the ceremony of setting the table for guests to bring people to her table who might offer information; yet, she insists upon attendance at mass, even though it means walking a considerable distance at night in the bitter winter cold. Pauline Puyat’s heart’s desire is to become a nun, even going so far as to inflict discomfort and pain upon her own body to prove her worthiness; yet, she still believes in Mishepeshu, the monster in the lake from Anishinaabe stories, and stages a challenge against him, although she seems to conflate the Anishinaabe Mishepeshu with the devil from Christian mythology. While Erdrich does not credit Christianity and Catholicism with the same level of destructive power as allotment, at least not in Tracks, she does portray Christianity as a divisive force contributing to the undermining of Anishinaabe social and cultural cohesion.
Pauline’s eventual desire to become a nun is not so much about faith as it is about her denial of her Indian identity and her desire to become White. Early on in the novel, Pauline admits, “We were mixed bloods,” and “I wanted to be like my mother, who showed her half-white. I wanted to be like my grandfather, pure Canadian.”16 She does not seem to realize that “Canadian” is not a race or ethnicity, but rather a national citizenship, and that Canadians may be any one of multiple races and ethnicities. At that time in her life, she did not want to become a nun, but only to learn the lace-making trade from the nuns. It is only when Eli rejects Pauline as a sexual partner, and Pauline turns to the aging Napoleon, gets pregnant by him, and bears his child that she decides to become a nun.
In the early 20th century, at least according to Erdrich’s words in the novel, Indian women were not allowed to take final vows as nuns within certain orders of the Catholic Church. According to Pauline’s narration, “For one day during supper Sister Anne announced that Superior had received word that our order would admit no Indian girls.”17 Here, Erdrich indicates that although Christians wanted to save Indian souls, they were not willing to completely admit Indians into Christian practices. The section also demonstrates the unreliability of Pauline as a narrator. Whereas, earlier Pauline had declared to the reader that she came from a mixed blood family, here she denies her Indian heritage in order to become a nun. The above quote continues, “. . . and I should go to her and reveal my true background. Which I did. And Superior said she was delighted that the hindrance was removed, since it was plain to see that I abided in His mystical body.”18 Obviously, Pauline lied about her heritage, but just as obviously, the Mother Superior accepted the lie. Living and working within this small community, the Superior would certainly have known Pauline’s family history and known that Pauline was part-Indian in heritage. It can be argued that the Superior disagreed with Church rules about who could become a nun, and was therefore behaving in a humane way in knowingly circumventing the rule, but it can also be argued that this is an example of Christian Catholic hypocrisy towards the Indians that the Church supposedly served.
While Erdrich points out these hypocrisies, she does not tar all Catholic missionaries with the same brush. Father Damien, although somewhat of a bumbling character as the priest in the novel, seems of good heart and does practical things to help the people he is called to shepherd. For example, during one winter of starvation, when little game is to be found and other food supplies have run out, Father Damien “signs the paper for us” and brings them food. “In his pack he had a slab of bacon, a can of lard, a sack of flour, and a twist of baking powder.”19 When Nanapush, Fleur Pillager, and the Kashpaws are short of the money needed to pay the fees on their land or lose it, Father Damien adds the final quarter from his own pocket.
As well as being a masterpiece of storytelling, Tracks also effectively illustrates the devastating consequences of both allotment and Christianity upon American Indian communities. The complex characters, particularly Pauline Puyat and Fleur Pillager, are some of the most well drawn in American literature.
Erdrich’s overwhelming success with Love Medicine, Jacklight, and Tracks might have broken the Erdrich–Dorris partnership and marriage at that point if Dorris had not published some minimally successful work on his own, but in that same year, Dorris’ book about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, The Broken Cord, was published, and in 1989, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. To match Erdrich’s Guggenheim Fellowship from 1985, he also won his own prestigious award—A National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, probably based on his novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Now, the two of them had made enough money and had enough confidence in their financial future that Dorris could afford to reduce his academic work schedule and devote more time to his writing. He stepped down from his full-time professorship at Dartmouth to become an adjunct professor. Whether or not their marriage was stabilized by these events is not clear, but later interviews with Erdrich would indicate that they never had the ideal marriage that they encouraged the world to believe. The awards that Dorris’s work won may simply have made him feel that his work was on an even keel with Erdrich’s, temporarily calming the troubled waters of their relationship that was not obvious at the time, but became so later.
Erdrich, meantime, had gone back to her original writing genre of poetry and in the same year—1989—published another volume of poems, Baptism of Desire. Erdrich states in the notes for this book that it was written between the hours of 2:00 A.M. and 4:00 A.M., when she suffered insomnia brought on by pregnancy. The title of the collection comes from Catholic theological discussions and disagreements over whether a person baptized in ignorance of what they are undertaking is still saved from the damnation of hell.
Some of the poems in this collection, too, draw upon both Catholic Christian imagery and Native American, Anishinaabe myths and legends. The book contains five untitled sections, with the poems in the first section referencing Catholic ritual and mysticism while section four is made of up very short stories or narrative poems with Anishinaabe themes. The poems in Part Two are character poems that continue the narratives Erdrich established in “The Butcher’s Wife” section of Jacklight. Part Three is a single five-part poem entitled “Hydra,” and the concluding Part Five contains a dozen personal, reflective poems. Jacklight has a dynamic quality that invokes a sense of small town community as the poems move from one colorful character to another, from one major event in the life of a small town to another, but Baptism of Desire feels strained—a disparate collection of miscellany, with the exception of the section themed to Catholicism and the one referencing the Anishinaabe mythical character of Potchikoo, a trickster. The lack of overall coherency may be indicative of Erdrich’s physical state of pregnancy, with all the changes that it brings. P. Jane Hafen chose to address in depth the Catholic-themed section and the Potchikoo section and how the poetry is rooted in Erdrich’s dual upbringing, while ignoring the other three parts of the book. She wrote, “Much of Erdrich’s poetry is a performance of beliefs derived from her variegated heritage, primarily Catholic and Chippewa.” She continues, “Nevertheless, these poems also reveal a persona and communal voice. . . . Erdrich’s poems manifest the paradox of individuation occurring within and being defined by communal and tribal relationships.”20 Hafen here succinctly states the difficulties of an American Indian person such as Erdrich, who must negotiate two sometimes conflicting sets of ideologies and worldviews, but Erdrich’s poems do not seem to indicate conflict between Indian/Catholic worldviews, but rather, an objective acceptance of both. Baptism of Desire was not a great critical success and did not bring great financial rewards, but it was another respectable work added to Erdrich’s growing list of publications.
Confidence in their financial future was justified when the two of them were awarded a joint contract to write a novel, The Crown of Columbus, for the advance sum of $1.5 million. The book was meant to pay homage to the quincentennial, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America from the American Indian perspective. The beautiful, shy, young woman of Anishinaabe and German heritage from small town North Dakota and the tall, handsome young professor from Kentucky whose father had died when he was very young had “made it.” They were the American Dream. The two were wined and dined, speeched and honored. Everyone wanted to shake their hands, and everyone wanted to interview them—from the most prestigious literary journals to small town newspapers. A selection of some of the interviews with them conducted from 1983 to 1992 was published as the book, Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.21 If they grew tired of being asked the same questions over and over, they never indicated it. The May 1990 issue of People Magazine named Erdrich one of the 100 most beautiful people of the year. Each of the 100 people selected was given one page in the magazine with a short narrative and a photo. Erdrich was shown in three-quarter profile leaning against a birch tree with her arms crossed and an enigmatic smile. She wore a dark dress, a turquoise and silver bracelet, and a fedora with a blue feather inserted in the band. She is, indeed, beautiful, and probably felt very fulfilled at that moment, with her family of six growing children, if not always peaceful. The couple’s three adopted children were always a source of chaos and conflict in the household, but she had a handsome and successful, if sometimes difficult husband, and a career that seemed to be on a never-ending upward trajectory. The career part of the dream for Erdrich has been mostly born out in the more than 20 years since that People Magazine article, but the family situation and her marriage to Dorris did not have such fortunate outcomes.
The reviews for The Crown of Columbus were tepid at best, damning with faint praise. A long review in The Nation, states:
. . . there is a fair bit of entertainment—discounting some dreary chapters depicting the life of the dreary man who is a central character, and an interminable free-verse poem about Columbus recited by that same leaden man . . .22
This same review also points out historical inaccuracies of dates and events within the novel, continuing:
It is a mistake not merely incidental but crucial, and for me fatal to the plot. Erdrich and Dorris, who write so convincingly elsewhere from their own experience, seem here to have been a little hasty in trying to exploit Columbus’s.23
Although Erdrich’s second novel, Tracks, had made it to the New York Times Best Seller list, that publication’s review of The Crown of Columbus was not favorable. After a sketchy introduction that simply summarized parts of the plot, Michiko Karutani wrote that the book did not measure up to the works each of the authors had written individually. She is disappointed in what she terms as the lack of “strange, visionary magic,” and complains that the while the narrative moves forward quickly, it is the same sort of thing that had already been offered in dozens of movies. However, at the end of the review, Karutani seems to have second thoughts about her heavy criticism of the book, and she wrote that The Crown of Columbus is still compelling entertainment.
A reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times was a bit kinder. Reviewer Gretel Ehrlich wrote that the book is “historically provocative and outrageous,” but that it is also fun. However, she goes on to criticize the plot structure and says that The Crown of Columbus cannot possibly be compared to great literary works such as Anna Karenina and The Grapes of Wrath.24
M. Annette Jaimes, a well-respected American Indian scholar, wrote a review that echoes the breathless, hyperbolic style of soap operas and the Milou North romance novels that Erdrich and Dorris had collaborated on years earlier—“Will Vivian and Roger find competitive happiness together? . . . Will their daughter out of wedlock, Violet, grow up to be somebody special?”25 For Jaimes, the book is chock-full of every possible American Indian political and social issue, while including the social and psychological drama of American mainstream society as well. Her final words of the review are worth including in their totality here:
At any rate, the bottom line of this paradoxical tale appears to be that Columbus’ greatness is happenstance and trivialization of the conquest is acceptable, but nonetheless American Indians today have the chance to be prideful if not vindicated for their irredeemable loss. This book will no doubt be popular reading for the majority, but it is this reviewer’s final assessment that the reputations of neither author will be enhanced by their team effort since in collaboration as literary artists they have chosen to engage in a pandering of their art.26
This less than laudatory reception faulted the plot, the characters, and the writing style, but not so much the already recognized writing skill of Erdrich and Dorris. In previous works by both authors, they had created characters that were not recognizably themselves. All authors, consciously or not, incorporate elements of their own personalities and lives in their characters. In Crown, the main characters are obvious reproductions and distortions of Erdrich and Dorris themselves. The heroine of the book is Vivian Twostar, a professor of Indian Studies at Dartmouth who is pregnant with her preppie boyfriend’s child while simultaneously coping with a teenage son who is acting out. The boyfriend, given the historical name of Roger Williams, is a poet who wants to immortalize Columbus and thinks Vivian is beneath him, an amateur explorer and scholar.
Any reader who knows anything at all of the personal lives of Erdrich and Dorris would recognize the personalization of the characters. The authors chose to insert themselves directly into the narrative instead of creating entirely different characters that might have unrecognizable touches of their own personalities. The idea was a mistake, and one wonders exactly whose idea it was—Erdrich’s or Dorris’s—or if it was something mutually agreed upon. The novel seems uncomfortably formulaic, again recalling the Milou North romance novels on which they had collaborated years earlier. Certainly, they cannot be entirely blamed for a novel that, in the words of the reviewers, does not live up to works they wrote individually, which may be disingenuous to even suggest since they were open collaborators on works that were published under one or the other’s name. However, they were awarded the contract for this novel based on a five-page proposal to the publisher, so the executives or editors at HarperCollins Publishing who agreed to the concept and approved the final manuscripts must also accept some blame for the result. Given the semi-celebrity status of Erdrich and Dorris, perhaps the editors thought that translating their celebrity into the plot of this novel along with their award-winning writing skills would create a book that could not help but make money. It did sell reasonably well, but the writing reputation of Dorris and Erdrich was somewhat tarnished.
The couple may have been privately upset by the book’s less than stellar reception, but they shrugged it off in print. In an article for The Chicago Sun-Times, interviewer Wendy Smith wrote that “The authors take such comments [critical reviews of the book] philosophically.”27 Erdrich stated:
We’ve had mixed, strong reactions to every book, because every book is different. We go with it. It’s going to be the same book in ten years, so we live with the book rather than the reactions. [Bad reviews] happen to every writer.28
Dorris said, “I think that when you write a book you hope it’s provocative, produces strong opinions and stirs conversation.”29
They had reason to think philosophically and react mildly to the current criticism. Each had been through difficulties getting published in the first place, but had achieved remarkable success both individually and together in the preceding 10 years since their marriage. Further, as they indicated, they knew even the best-known, award-winning writers do not have a bestseller with every book they write. They already had the million-dollar plus advance in the bank. They could afford a bit of adversity, even mild rebuke. However, this setback was a harbinger of worse things to come.
On September 8, 1991, their eldest son, Abel, was stuck by a car. Hospitalized in serious condition, he died of his injuries on September 22. He was 23 years old. The newspaper accounts of what happened are sketchy, but they do report that the driver of the car was not charged, and that Abel had never learned to read traffic signals when crossing the street. Of course, the family was devastated, but possibly Dorris was more affected since he had adopted Abel as a three-year-old and raised him a single father until his marriage to Erdrich in 1981; Abel was the main subject of Dorris’s award-winning book, The Broken Cord. The next two years would bring more literary awards for both Dorris and Erdrich, but also the denouement of their novel-like marriage.
1. Georgia Croft, “Something Ventured,” White River Junction, VT: Valley News, April 28, 1987, 1–2.
2. Ibid.
3. Hertha Wong, “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Narrative Communities and the Short Story Sequence,” in American Short Story Sequences: Composite and Fictive Communities, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (Cambridge: University Press, 1995, 170–193).
4. Dennis Walsh, “Catholicism in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tracks,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25:2 (2001): 107–127.
5. Louise Erdrich, Jacklight (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1984. Reprint, London: Abacus by Sphere Books Ltd., 1990), 7–8.
6. Ibid., 62.
7. Ibid., 82.
8. Ibid., 65.
9. Many writers have stated that Argus is a fictional town, but there is an Argusville, North Dakota, about 40 miles north of Wahpeton, which could have been the setting for this town that appears not only in The Beet Queen, but also in Tracks.
10. Louise Erdrich, The Beet Queen (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1986), 304.
11. Ibid., 263.
12. Ibid., 333.
13. H. David Brumble III, American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 32.
14. See Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940).
15. Louise Erdrich, Tracks (New York: HarperCollins Perennial, 2001), 38.
16. Ibid., 14.
17. Ibid., 138.
18. Ibid., 172.
19. Ibid., 191.
20. P. Jane Hafen, “Sacramental Language Ritual in the Poetry of Louise Erdrich,” Great Plains Quarterly¸ Paper 11–1, 1996.
21. Alan Chavkin and Nancy Fehl, Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).
22. Kirkpatrick Sale, Book Review, “The Crown of Columbus, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich,” The Nation, Oct 21, 1991.
23. Ibid.
24. Gretel Ehrlich, Book Review, “A fun-filled, outrageous collaboration by Erdrich and Dorris,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 5, 1991.
25. M. Annette Jaimes, “The Art of Pandering: A review of the Crown of Columbus,” Wicazo Sa Review 8:2 (Autumn 1992): 58–59.
26. Ibid., 59.
27. Wendy Smith, “A Novel Collaboration//Married Authors Compose Their First Written Duet,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 12, 1991.
28. Ibid.
29. Wendy Smith, Interview.