That Louise Erdrich has earned and deserves a place in the canon of writers is undisputed, although scholars may argue over who else should sit at the table and whether Erdrich should sit at the head of that group, or to one side, or at a roundtable of equals. Erdrich’s work can be comfortably juxtaposed with writers of many different identities. The broadest category could be simply women writers and men writers; then, people of color in general, a category that could be subdivided into world writers and American writers. A further subdivision of the American category would include African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and American Indian. Erdrich had predecessors, both male and female writers in multiple categories, who opened a way for her to follow. She has stood upon the shoulders of giants.
Until quite recently in historical times, the word “woman” was not an adjective that could be applied to the noun “writer.” As Olwen Hufton detailed in her book, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500–1800,1 women had two main career choices—marriage or the convent. Of course, there were women who made other choices, but these brave or unfortunate souls, depending upon the point of view, were often outcasts of society—spinsters, prostitutes, witches, or only an unwanted female relative that a family might grudgingly support as a member of the household, often in a servile position. Women who married faced the distinct possibility of early death from complications of childbirth in a time when antibiotics or even casual hygiene was unknown. Women who did survive were rarely educated, but spent most of their time caring for their children and households and often helping their spouses in the fields or in small shops to produce food and income.
Entering a convent was not a possible choice for many women because, first of all, she had to have the permission of a male relative, usually her father, but possibly a brother or even an uncle. Then, many convents expected that their postulants would bring a certain sum of money with them, comparable to a dowry. A woman without a dowry could neither marry nor enter a convent. Such women became the spinsters who lived with other family members in exchange for their work, whether domestic, agricultural, or crafts. The only avenue, with rare exceptions however, for a woman who wished to become literate or even aspire to writing herself, was to enter a convent. Until at least the 15th century, religious orders, primarily monasteries, were the repositories of learning and books, which not only created books but maintained libraries of books and educated some children of the wealthy, but only male children, of course. That situation began to change in the 16th century. Hufton writes, “Between 1500 and 1800 the number of women who seized the pen and of those who went further and inched into print multiplied very considerably.”2 Not surprisingly, some of the first women writers were nuns such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Angelica Baitelli, and Arcangela Tarbotta who all wrote religious tracts and letters and lives of the saints, particularly women saints.3 By the 16th century, some women, particularly those who came from wealthy families with liberal fathers, were literate, but not necessarily writers. Women who did write expanded their repertoire from religious topics to works that offered advice on household management or child care. Their work, however, was usually edited by their religious confessor. One woman who stepped outside the boundaries of propriety and custom was the playwright Aphra Behn, “who carries the distinction of probably being the first woman to make a living from her literary oeuvre.”4 Her acquaintance with nobility and commoners alike provided her with ample material for her plays, of which 16 were published. A bold woman of dubious reputation, she defended a woman’s right to study science and philosophy, but she wrote sexually explicit material that Erdrich has probably read and appreciated for their frank and open descriptions of sexual play.
Meanwhile, in the new world of America, a few women wrote and published, but mostly on religious subjects such as the already discussed captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, although, there is now some doubt as to whether Rowlandson actually wrote her own story or whether it might have been ghost written by Cotton Mather.5 Another early American woman writer, Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) as the privileged daughter of an upper class country estate manager, Thomas Dudley, was better educated than most young women of her time. In her youth, she wrote poems to please her father, and she continued writing after her marriage. Always in ill health, she probably wrote most during the times she was bedridden. Her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, took a manuscript of her poetry to London and had it printed there in 1650. No Aphra Behn, Bradstreet’s poems reflect her concern for family and everyday life, along with some more contemplative philosophical works.6
In the early 18th century, Elizabeth Ashbridge published in the then popular genre of religious conversation. Born in England, at age 14, she ran away with a man who died shortly thereafter, and unwanted back at home, she emigrated first to Ireland, and then to America. Eventually she experienced a religious epiphany, became a Quaker, and wrote about that conversion as well as life for women in England and American during that time period.7
Nineteenth-century French writer, Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, illustrates the difficulties of getting published for a woman writer. Taking the pen name of George Sand, she wrote novels, literary criticism, and political texts in the mid-1800s. Contemporaries of Sand, the Bronte sisters of England were also successful novelists whose works are still read and respected. Charlotte, perhaps the most famous, wrote Jane Eyre, under the pen name of Currer Bell. Emily, author of Wuthering Heights, also wrote in the same romantic style as Charlotte, but the younger sister Anne used a more realistic style for her best known work, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Some 50 years before George Sand and the Bronte sisters, a very few African Americans had begun to write for publication. Olaudah Equiano did not, however, define himself as African American nor Anglo-African but rather as “the African.” Born in Nigeria, he was transported first to Barbados, and later to America, where he saw the worst of life as a slave. Purchased by a Quaker, Robert King, Equiano eventually bought his freedom and made his living as a servant and musician. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was published in London in 1789, reprinted in New York in 1791. Less than 50 years later, another man of African descent, Frederick Douglass, would publish Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a written record of his life as a slave that he had been describing for years in public lectures. Concerned not only with oppression of people of color, Douglass was an active proponent of women’s suffrage, and was an important influence on future black leaders.
Between Equiano and Douglass, another American man of color published his own autobiography. William Apess, a Native American of the Pequot tribe who in 1829 published A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Appes, A Native of the Forest, Comprising a Notice of the Pequod Tribe of Indians, Written by Himself. Written as a Christian conversion narrative, Appes used the format to comment upon injustices perpetrated upon American Indians.
The 19th and early 20th centuries saw more American women writers published—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, and a few African Americans including Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois, among others. The first Native American woman writer was not a U.S. citizen, however, but a Canadian.
Indigenous people have been in the Americans for hundreds of thousands of years without acknowledging human-created invisible lines on the land that divide counties, countries, states, or nations. Writing, too, is confined only by human-created boundaries. While many people think of American Indians as only those native people within the United States, in fact, Indigenous people have lived, worked, and yes, written throughout the entire archipelago of the western hemisphere. Native people referred to the U.S.–Canadian border as the “medicine line,” indicating that it is a magic line on the ground, something that has significance, but does not exist in the real world. E. Pauline Johnson, born in 1861 of the Mohawk Nation in Canada, was the first American Indian woman writer who achieved publication and some degree of public attention.
Beginning publication in 1886, she wrote poetry and short fiction for children, but garnered most attention for her public performances, where she wore traditional clothing for the first half of her presentation, then changed and wore mainstream Victorian attire for the second half. Some critics called her work derivative and shallow and said that her public appearances were mere showmanship, but whether her writing was “good” or her method of delivering that work was useful is not the point. She was a native woman writer, the first to boldly declare that combination of ethnicity and literary ambition, unafraid of criticism.
The first American Indian writer south of the medicine line was Zitkala Sa (Gertrude Bonnin Simmons), and like Erdrich many years later, Zitkala Sa also came from the Upper Great Plains. She was Dakota, born on the Yankton Reservation. Like Erdrich, Zitkala Sa, left home to earn an education. As an elementary school student in the late 19th century, she attended an eastern boarding school. The experience was far from what Zitkala Sa expected. The boarding school experience, as for most American Indian children, was abusive and traumatic, but Zitkala Sa was determined to prove that her scholarship and intellect were as good as that of a White person. She persevered, particularly with writing and publishing, where she was determined to demonstrate American Indian literary and intellectual ability. She wrote a mix of political pieces, autobiographical essays, and short stories that were published from 1900–1904, then again from 1916–1924. Just as Erdrich’s short stories were well received and published in The Atlantic Monthly, so were many of Zitkala Sa’s early writings. A feisty woman, she refused to be denigrated as an Indian person, as a woman, or as a writer, but spoke and wrote with skill, honesty, and superior intellectual ability.8
Other than their geographical origins and native ancestry, there is little in common between Zitkala Sa and Erdrich. Zitkala Sa was a writer, yes, but better known for her political activism and social commentary than for her literary writing. Further, Zitkala Sa was neither a novelist nor poet, but a writer of short pieces that were mostly autobiographical or political in style and theme. Without Zitkala Sa, Erdrich would certainly have still became a writer, but both E. Pauline Johnson and Zitkala Sa provided the early impetus for all American Indian women who aspired to step outside the accepted roles of women in general and American Indian women in particular.
The first Native American woman novelist from the United States was Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) from the Colville Confederated Tribes of eastern Washington state. Born in 1885, her parents were poor and uneducated but respected within their tribal society. Realizing that education was a key to achieving any success in the world, Mourning Dove sought her own education, first at the Goodwin Catholic Mission School, then at Colville Mission, Fort Spokane, Fort Shaw, and eventually at Calgary College, but her total years of education from all these institutions were only nine. Later, she would enroll in a business school to improve her typing and writing skills. She married early and often, mostly to men who were abusive or, at best, only tolerant of her ambitions to be a writer.
She began writing a novel in 1912 as a reaction to a western romance novel set among the Flathead Indians that she felt was unsympathetic towards the Indian characters. Deciding that her own work was flawed, probably in the basic writing and grammar, she hid it away. Soon afterwards, she sought more education at a Calgary business school. A chance encounter at the Walla Walla Frontier Days celebration brought her into contact with Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, a Yakima businessman and Indian rights advocate. McWhorter urged her to preserve her Salish traditions through writing, and it was this contact that led him to become her editor for her novel, Cogewea, the Half-Blood.9
The book is at its heart the romance novel that Mourning Dove intended, but McWhorter’s heavy handed, preachy additions to Mourning Dove’s text make for tedious reading. Long sections added by McWhorter, while well-intentioned, belabor the injustice of society and Federal Indian law and policies in regard to America’s Indigenous population, bogging down the plot to a point where it is almost unreadable. An expurgated version more faithful to Mourning Dove’s original work and intent would be of great service to the genre of American Indian literature and to Mourning Dove herself.
Besides the series of difficult and tempestuous marriages, Mourning Dove was often in poor health and always struggling financially. She worked for a while as a teacher, probably the highest paying and most personally satisfying job she ever held, but mostly her life was a series of temporary jobs at common labor. She worked for a while as a nanny for six children, but most often she, and sometimes her husband at the time, were migrant farm laborers. She worked long hours in the field and then labored over her typewriter late into the early morning hours. These are the bare bones of her life. According to the editor of her posthumously published autobiography, Jay Miller,
Little has been recorded about her life. What is available includes fictions she created to protect her privacy. Intent on being a novelist, Christine [Mourning Dove] wove such fictions, usually quite plausible, into her work.10
There are some minor confluences between Mourning Dove and Erdrich, but only minor ones, and many differences between this first American Indian woman novelist and Erdrich. Erdrich is of mixed White and American Indian ancestry, while both Mourning Dove’s parents were American Indian. Although not born into wealth, neither was Erdrich’s early life one of desperate poverty and deprivation. Erdrich, coming from a family where both parents were teachers, had excellent educational opportunities and encouragement to go on to higher education, while Mourning Dove had to defend her desire, against her family’s wishes, for even the most basic education. Erdrich had the two most important things that Mourning Dove lacked: education and a supportive family and that has made a great difference in their respective literary production.
Mourning Dove wrote Cogewea in 1912, but it would not see publication until 1927, nor would she receive any great economic or critical acclaim for the work. On the contrary, she continued to struggle economically, while her family and community refused to honor her work. Miller reports that,
When her only novel seemed near release, local newspapers made public her ambitions. Her neighbors, both white and Indian grew suspicious, even hostile. When she later became politically active, some white reservation officials were critical of her, striking at her most heartfelt aspiration: they denied her literary ability. An agency farmer . . . said she had not written the novel but only allowed her name to appear on the work of a white man.11
Her novel made few ripples at the time of its publication and soon disappeared until it was reprinted in 1981 when injustices against American Indian and all things relating to Indians were brought to the forefront of American consciousness as a result of the civil rights movements and American Indian political activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The women who are brave and strong enough to risk being the first at anything rarely achieve great personal success, but they make it a little easier for the next woman to step forward. Erdrich may or may not have been aware of Mourning Dove when she first felt the urge to write for publication, but Mourning Dove is widely honored by all American Indian women writers for her literary achievement and courage against all odds.
Roughly contemporary with Mourning Dove’s publication of Cogewea was the African American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). As part of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Hurston “arrived in Harlem in 1925 and came to symbolize the very heart and life of the movement . . . When she died in 1960 she had published more books than any other black American woman; yet she died in a welfare home, alone, forgotten, and penniless.”12 Born into the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, Hurston was one of eight children with a Baptist preacher father who was distant and uninvolved with his family. After her mother’s death, when Hurston was about 11 years old, the child was sent to live with one relative after another, but she still had the strength of will to enter and complete college. When one of her short stories, “Drenched in Light,” was published, she moved to Harlem to pursue a literary career. Entering Barnard College, her career took a double path. Besides being a gifted writer, she also worked with the anthropologist Franz Boas, which probably inspired her to study and record the oral traditions of her own African American community in Florida. Her most well-known work is probably Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is a loosely organized novel that defies categorizing, as it employs extensive folk humor in places while compressing the narrative in others. By the time Dust Tracks on a Road, her autobiography, was published in 1942, her audience had almost evaporated. The civil rights movements of the 1960s and women’s activist movements of the 1970s revived her work and introduced her to new readers. Now, she is appreciated as both an important black writer and an important woman of the 20th century.
A long arid period stretched between Hurston, Mourning Dove, and the next women writers of color, although there were African American men such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin who successfully published. Some American Indian men also wrote and published, including D’Arcy McNickle (Métis) who wrote and published novels such as The Surrounded (1936), Runner in the Sun (1954), and Wind From an Enemy Sky (1978). His novels were entertaining and while they were didactic, they did not rise to the level of tedious and off-putting preachiness that McWhorter had inserted into the narrative of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea. According to Dorothy Parker, while he was a writer “largely by choice, he was a Native American who sought to restore pride and self determination to all Native American people.”13
Of course, the most critically successful American Indian writer after 1969 was a man, N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, House Made of Dawn. He was followed by another man, James Welch (Black Feet/Gros Ventre), who in 1971 published Riding the Earth Boy 40, a collection of poems followed by the novel Winter in the Blood in 1974. Welch went on to publish a total of three books of poetry, five novels, and one nonfiction work about the Battle of the Little Big Horn from the Indian perspective, which was made into a documentary film. While Welch was busy with his early publications, women of color were also beginning to find entry into the literary world: Leslie Marmon Silko, of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican American, and White heritage was one of these women.
Silko’s first foray into the literary world was a short story, “The Man to Send Rain Clouds,” but like Erdrich and many other American Indian writers, her primary writing focus during those early years of 1968–1974 was poetry. Her first book publication was a collection of her early poems, Laguna Women: Poems, which was released from Greenfield Press in 1974. At only 35 pages, it was small but promising. Her first novel, and arguably her most notable achievement, was Ceremony published in 1977. This book is the one most often included as a course text for college classes in American Indian Literature. Over the course of her career, she would publish three nonfiction books, two more novels, and six more books that were either poetry or a combination of poetry, short stories, and a memoir, The Turquoise Ledge (2011). Her work began before Erdrich’s, but continued simultaneously, and while the careers of the two women are those most often compared, their writing styles are very different.
Silko’s writing is chunky and disjointed, which does not mean it is bad writing, only different in style from Erdrich’s work. Silko’s narratives rarely follow a linear time line but jumps backward and forward in time, often confusing readers who are accustomed to the Euro-western, straight forward, time sequential style. It takes some thinking or coaching to realize that Silko is using blank space on the page, italicized words, different type fonts, and center justification at times rather than right or left margins to signal these time shifts in the story. This style has often been compared to the postmodernist style of Kurt Vonnegut or Thomas Pynchon, but despite some similarities, postmodernism and Silko’s American Indian style of writing had different origins. Silko’s writing arose from the closer proximity of her heritage to oral tradition rather than literacy. Postmodernism was a reaction to the chaotic and confusion of modern society post–World War II, and some would argue, Post–World War I, when nothing seemed stable and reliable. Erdrich follows a more conventional Euro-western writing style in format, using word signals within the narrative to alert readers of time shifts, and usually, chapter breaks to indicate a change of narrator.
There were some people who thought they smelled a rivalry between Silko and Erdrich when Silko published a less than flattering review of Erdrich’s The Beet Queen. Silko labeled the work as less than authentic, which caused dismay and hand-wringing, and possibly, hand rubbings of glee among people who might enjoy a literary feud. Erdrich quickly and graciously defused the situation with a few words, and the issue was dropped.14 It is unknown if the two ever met in person.
The African American writer Alice Walker also began her literary career early in the 1970s, publishing poetry followed with short stories and then two novels: The Life of Grange Copeland (1970), followed by Meridian (1976). While working as an editor for Ms Magazine, Walker wrote an article for that publication about Zora Neale Hurston, which helped revived interest in Hurston’s writing. Walker and Hurston had similar family backgrounds. Walker, like Hurston, had seven siblings, was born very poor in the rural south, and grew up hearing oral tradition stories. In 1982, she published her third novel, The Color Purple, which won her the Pulitzer Prize, and was made into a successful film directed by Stephen Spielberg in 1985. Set in the 1930s South, the book is a graphic depiction of life for young black women enduring not only White racism but also black patriarchy. Even with all the critical acclaim that the book and movie earned, the novel was one of the most frequently challenged books from 2000–2009 on the list maintained by the American Library Association. According to their website, “The ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) receives reports from libraries, schools, and the media on attempts to ban books in communities across the country.”15 Walker has continued her writing career with more novels, but she has also been and continues to be a political activist. She has not won as many writing awards as has Erdrich, but she has won the most important one in American letters, the Pulitzer.
Toni Morrison is another African American woman who began her writing career in the decade of the 1970s. Born into a working-class family in Ohio, Morrison started her life as Chloe Ardelia Wofford. Like Erdrich, she had a storyteller in the family, but it was her father, rather than her grandfather, who told her folk stories and legends that would find their way into Morrison’s novels. A graduate of Howard University, Morrison went on to earn an M.A. from Cornell University in 1955, then to work as a text book editor for Random House. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, followed by Song of Solomon in 1975, and Beloved in 1987. This last novel earned her the Pulitzer Prize. Jazz came out in 1992, and in 1993, Morrison earned the highest literary prize possible: the Nobel. Like Erdrich, Morrison has also published children’s books and nonfiction works, but unlike Erdrich, Morrison’s novels do not start out as short stories. Indeed, that is one kind of writing that Morrison has eschewed with the exception of one short story, “Recitatif” published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women.16
Rudolfo Anaya was one of the earlier Chicano writers to break into the publishing world with his widely acclaimed first novel, Bless Me Ultima, in 1972. Born in Mexico, his family moved to New Mexico in the early 1950s where Anaya graduated from public schools, then went to business school for two years before enrolling at the University of New Mexico and earning his degree there. He taught public school while working on his first novel, and later became a professor in the English Department at the University of New Mexico. Acclaimed as the father of Chicano literature, Anaya would eventually publish 13 novels and 10 children’s books. One of the wedge authors, Anaya’s success paved the way for other Chicano/a authors such as Sandra Cisneros.
Cisneros’s first book was a tiny chapbook of only seven poems, Bad Boys (1980). Her next book, the short novel (just over 100 pages), The House on Mango Street, was published in 1984. The novel is semi-autobiographical about a young girl growing up in Chicago. Told in vignettes, the style is somewhat similar to Erdrich’s in that this is not the usual linear plot with one theme leading the reader from chapter to chapter, but a burst of stories that expand outward in multiple directions. She followed the novel with a collection of short stories, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. The stories here epitomize Latino culture, especially for Latinas with stories of love, marriage, and children among other issues. She went on to publish two more collections of poetry: My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1992) and Loose Women (1995), and another novel, Caramelo (2003), as well as a children’s book, Hairs/Pelitos (1997). Her work has become essential reading in college Chicano literature classes.
Julia Alvarez’s books have been published contemporaneously with the works of Cisneros. Alvarez, a Dominican American Latina published her first novel, How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents in 1991, followed that one with another novel, In the Time of Butterflies in 1994. During the course of her writing career, she has published five novels, three collections of poetry, nine children’s books, and three nonfiction works. The body of work by Latino/a writers and the number of these writers is destined to grow as more mainstream readers discover the richness and depth of these works and as the demographic of Latinos in the United States expands.
Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan began her literary career by publishing a chapbook of poetry, Calling Myself Home, in 1978 following up that work with five more books of poetry before publishing her first novel, Mean Spirit, in 1990. Since then, she has published three more novels: Solar Storms, Power, and People of the Whale, as well as five additional books of poetry and two works of creative nonfiction. She has won multiple awards for her work, which is narrowly focused on righting wrongs against American Indians and on environmental themes, which may be why she has not Erdrich’s appeal to a wider reading audience. Still, she has done worthy writing that is often included in American Indian Literature classes. An academic herself, she has taught in creative writing and ethnic studies programs at the University of Colorado and at the University of Oklahoma.
Other American Indian women writers around the same time as Silko and Erdrich in the late 1970s and early 1980s are poets Joy Harjo (Creek), Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), and Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O’odham), and of these, Harjo is the most prolific with 12 books of poetry to her credit. All three of these writers had and continue to have academic careers, as well. Harjo has ventured outside poetry to write several plays, and Zepeda is perhaps better known for her linguistics and language preservation work. She published a dictionary and grammar of her native language entitled A Papago Grammar (1983). Tapahonso, however, has kept strictly to her chosen poetry genre. While all three of these outstanding writers have earned their places in the literary field, none has gotten the public attention, literary awards and honors, and commercial success of either Silko or Erdrich.
Outside the continental United States, Velma Wallis (Athabaskan) from Alaska has two books to her credit, Two Old Women (1993), and Bird Girl and the Man who Followed the Sun (1996), both literary versions of oral tradition stories from her own tribe. Like many such native stories, these two books are narratives intended to foster courage and resourcefulness.
Among writers of Asian ancestry in America, the Chinese American author, Amy Tan, is perhaps the most well-known. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989) was largely autobiographical about her mother’s first marriage to a brutal man and their children in World War II China, her coming to America and second marriage, then a return to China to rediscover her first family. Five other novels followed, including The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), two children’s books, and three nonfiction works.
South Asian women have also contributed their share to the literary world, including Bapsi Sidhwa, who was born in Pakistan. Her first novel, Cracking India (1991), chronicles the story of people who had been lifelong neighbors and acquaintances turning against each other in an orgy of violence when Pakistan was partitioned from India. Sidhwa states, “Those were very tumultuous times and very cruel times, and I’m showing how man’s nature changes into something very bestial when savage things happen.”17 Sidhwa would go on to write another five novels.
Thrity Umrigar, born in Bombay, India, was a journalist for 17 years, writing for such publications as the Washington Post and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. A teacher of creative writing at Case Western Reserve University, she has written a memoir, First Darling of the Morning (2004) as well as three novels, of which her best known work is The Space Between Us (2006).
Two other American Indian women have published novels since the turn of the millennium. In 2002, Debra Magpie Earling published Perma Red, and in 2006 Frances Washburn published Elsie’s Business. Both of these novels address questions of violence, particularly violence against women. Washburn has published one more novel, The Sacred White Turkey (2010) and a third novel, The Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band is under contract. Both women are academics, Earling at the University of Montana in Missoula and Washburn at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Most of the American Indian women writers began their literary endeavors writing poetry, perhaps because that is a more accessible medium; poems can be written in short bursts. Each poem is usually a complete thought that needs no further elaboration, and can be put into a collection to make a book. Short stories require a more continuous effort, but the form stands alone, and like poetry, short stories can be arranged within a collection or revised and connected, as Erdrich has done into a longer narrative. Novels, on the other hand, require a sustained effort, often of years, and such lengths of time are a luxury that many American Indian women writers simply do not have available when they must earn a living and care for a family. Few have the determination and stamina to labor for years at a novel, as Mourning Dove did, while enduring poverty, ill health, bad relationships, and the disdain of others. Lucky is the woman like Erdrich who has early success and financial backing so that she can devote the necessary amount of time to creating longer pieces of writing.
At the time of this writing in the spring of 2013, it seems that few American Indian women are writing for publication, whether in the genre of poetry, short stories, novels, or creative nonfiction. There are American Indian men who continue literary careers, of which Sherman Alexie is the most notable. He and Erdrich are probably the two most recognizable names in American Indian literature. Alexie has more than 20 books to his credit—poetry, short stories, and novels, and two films derived from his work. Both have achieved commercial and critical success.
For more than 25 years, Cherokee writer Robert J. Conley has quietly but continuously published short stories and novels without the commercial success and fanfare that Erdrich and Alexie have received. Partly, this lesser-known quality may be because Conley’s work has until recently been published by an academic press through the University of Oklahoma rather than through commercial presses. Academic publishers have less money to promote their authors’ works than do the commercial publishers such as Harper Collins, but an advantage of publishing through an academic press is that authors’ works are kept in print longer, which gives such books the opportunity to gain acceptance and sales over a period of time. Usually, commercial presses drop authors whose book sales do not meet rather high sales quotas. Further, academic publishers are usually more willing to look at what might be termed niche writing, while commercial presses want to publish books that have a broad appeal, and thus, higher sales.
Conley’s work is mostly historical crime fiction set in the particular time just before and after the Cherokee Removal from the eastern United States via the Trail of Tears in 1836–1837 to Oklahoma Territory. His writing is tight; his characters, both the historical ones and the invented supportive actors, are finely drawn and well-rounded, and his plots are historically accurate. One of his more innovative books is Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1992). The main character is a child who is the recipient of historical information conveyed by his grandfather, but Conley supports the grandfather’s stories by including accurate historical sources such as letters from prominent figures contemporary with Cherokee Removal and the full text of treaties between the Cherokee Nation and the U.S. government.
Another more recent Cherokee novelist is Tom Holm, whose first novel, The Osage Rose: An Osage Country Mystery (2008), was another book from an academic publisher, which means it did not get the publicity that the work deserved. Also historical fiction, Holm himself calls the work a “who-dun-it.”18 The book details the results of three separate events from the 1920s: the Volstead Act, which ushered in prohibition, the Tulsa race riot of 1921, which killed more African Americans than any other similar event in American history, and the Osage Oil murders, where Osage and other American Indians of Oklahoma were murdered for the ownership of their oil-rich land. Holm’s work, too, is tightly written with believable, complex characters—of White, African American, Osage, and Cherokee origins—and grounded in historical accuracy. The Osage Rose is his first novel, but Holm, had previously published academic books and articles about American Indian historical situations, such as The Great Confusion in Indian Country: Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era (2005), and Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War (1996). A sequel to The Osage Rose is in production.
David Treuer is another Ojibwe novelist like Erdrich, but from Leech Lake Reservation, rather than from Erdrich’s Turtle Mountain. His three novels, Little (1996), The Hiawatha (1999), and The Translation of Dr. Appelles: A Love Story (2006), were critically well-received, but did not attain great commercial success. These stories, like Erdrich’s, feature both White and Ojibwe characters, but the overall tone of the work is darker, with almost none of the humor that Erdrich employs to lighten even the darkest story. Treuer won the Pushcart Prize, and his books have been editor’s picks from major newspapers, but none of the major prizes have come his way.
Erdrich has won every major American literary award with the exception of the highest, the Pulitzer Prize, which still eludes her, but may be in her future. Her work has been and continues to be critically and commercially successful, but perhaps it is the commercial success that has denied her the Pulitzer. There are still some critics who are of the notion that if writers are commercially successful then they cannot also be “good” writers, worthy of enshrinement with the greats, even though Erdrich’s work has often been compared to Faulkner. Starving in a garret may not be a requisite for the highest literary acclaim, but it helps. Even some native writers have dismissed Erdrich as “commercial, mere popular fiction.” Erdrich has committed the dual sins of appealing to the masses and making money, something that Hemingway, at least, of the decorated greats also did, but was forgiven, possibly because he was a man.
The Pulitzer is the highest American literary award, but the Nobel is the highest honor in the world, and that seems out of reach for Erdrich at this time considering the mood of the prize committee for the Nobel. In an Associated Press interview in 2008, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that hands out the Nobel Prizes in Literature stated:
Of course, you can’t get away from the fact that Europe is the center of the literary world, not the United States . . . The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.19
Toni Morrison, an African American woman, was the last American who won the Nobel Prize (1993). The academy has in the past given the award to writers who wrote in detail about situational events within their own countries—subjects that would have held little interest for people not of those nations, except that those events were coincidentally part of greater trends in the world. V. S. Naipaul, for instance, wrote novels of Asian people in the Caribbean, and how many people in the larger world are unaware that there are descendants of migrants from the Asian subcontinent who have long resided in places like Trinidad. How much more insular and narrow could a writer’s subject be than a novel about a man of east Indian descent named Biswas desiring to buy a house in Trinidad, and the comedy of manners of his life?20 Naipaul’s work happened to coincide with larger world issues regarding social distance of class, of the desire to belong and to fit into a preconceived notion of what it means to be successful. Undoubtedly, Naipaul’s work is of the highest quality and deserving of recognition, but it was not lack of quality that the Swedish Academy cited as evidence for failing to consider any American authors for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.
However, to ignore world writers of color in juxtaposition with the work of Erdrich might fulfill Engdall’s claim that Americans are “too isolated, too insular.” There are many writers of color—both men and women—producing outstanding work that might be at least in the pool of potential nominees for a Nobel Prize along with Erdrich.
Ngugi wa thiong’o, a Nigerian writer of Gikuyu ethnicity, is one of the best known African writers producing novels, plays, poetry, critical works, and a memoir, Dreams in a Time of War (2011). His writing career has spanned close to 60 years, beginning with the publication of his novel, Weep Not, Child in 1964, and continuing with five other novels and multiple articles and critical works. His writing illustrates the colonial experience of African Indigenous people, their struggles for independence and efforts to end corruption in their new states. Ngugi invented the concept of decolonization of the mind, which has been adopted and adapted by Indigenous people around the world.
Chinua Achebe, also of Nigeria but of Igbo ethnicity rather than Gikuyu like Ngugi, is probably the mostly widely read African author, particularly well known for his novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), which has become a standard text book for high school literature courses as well as at the university level. This book accurately details the devastating effect of Christian missionizing efforts in an African Indigenous community. Eerily, it closely parallels the American Indian experience with Christian missionaries as well as that of Canadian First Nations. A prolific writer, Achebe has 31 published books that include novels, poetry, short story collections, critical works, and children’s stories, all of which draw upon his oral tradition roots. Nobel watchers have speculated for years that Achebe would win the prize, but not so far.
Nigeria seems to produce some of Africa’s best writers from multiple ethnic roots. Amos Tutuola was a Nigeria from the Yoruba tribe, the son of cocoa farmers, who only achieved six years of school, yet wrote and published multiple works that, like Achebe and Ngugi, drew upon folk tales and oral traditions. His first novel is The Palm Wine Drinkard (1952), and he published at least 11 more books of stories. He died in 1997 at the age of 76.
Buchi Emecheta, as an Igbo Nigeria woman writer, chronicles the experience of Black African women, both in Nigeria and in the diasporic world of England. Her first published work was the novel, In the Ditch (1972), and she has followed that with more than 20 additional novels, plays, children’s books, and her autobiography, Head Above Water. Emecheta has said that she sees the future of literature in Africa as being in the hands of African women, “because, they, as modern women, are combining the slave tongue [English] . . . with an African consciousness. . . . Women are carriers of cultures in whatever language.”21
On the other side of the world, two New Zealand Indigenous writers from the Maori tribe, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace, have contributed their work to the world of literature. Ihimaera has published 15 novels and 17 short story collections. His most famous work is probably The Whale Rider (1987), which was made into a successful movie in 2003 in spite of a cast of mostly unknowns. The story is classic, a girl who is traditionally excluded from positions of power because of her sex, fights to overcome prejudice to become a leader, but there are no clichés here. Ihimaera’s family and social conflicts are real and believable.
Patricia Grace in 1975 published the first collection of short stories, by a Maori woman, Waiariki. She went on to publish seven more collections of short stories, three children’s books, and six novels, including Potiki (1986). Her work, like that of fellow Maori Ihimaiera and the African writers, Achebe, Ngugi, Tutuola, and Emecheta draws upon her Indigenous culture and storytelling as well as the experience of colonized subjectivity.
North across the medicine line, among others, Eden Robinson is a relatively young (born in 1968) First Nations woman writer of Haisla and Heiltsuk heritage. Her first book was Traplines (1996), a critically acclaimed collection of four longer than usual short stories. Perhaps, she is naturally more comfortable with narratives longer than the short story because her next two books are both novels, Monkey Beach (2000) and Blood Sports 2006). The best known is Monkey Beach with a young adult main character who tells the story in flashbacks of her brother’s disappearance and the search for him, while also revealing the family history that contributed to the brother’s disappearance. References to Elvis Presley, an uncle who is an old hippie, a mystical grandmother, and a mother who disbelieves in the unseen spirits, all contribute to a story of trauma and healing set on the northwest coast of Canada. Themes here will resonate with Erdrich readers. There is youthful (and adult!) promiscuity, family and community violence, secrets and indiscretions as well as the underlying theme of a people still enduring and working to overcome the effects of colonization.
All of these writers of color, men and women, not only from America but from Indigenous populations on multiple continents have contributed their words to the body of human knowledge, enriching the lives of those of us who read. And one of the main themes for many of these writers is the effects of colonization, its continuance in some places, and the postcolonial condition in others.
That same theme runs throughout all of Erdrich’s work in the situation of American Indians pre-contact times, in the traditional post-contact past, and in the modern era. That is not an isolationist, America-only theme, but representative of the history and continuing saga of Indigenous people from Africa and Asia, North and South America, New Zealand and Australia, and points in between. Her work resonates with readers, learned and barely lettered, not only in the United States, but around the world. She writes the stories of injustice and of the urge to right wrongs of the past while living and thriving in the present; her work is about the humanity and inhumanity inherent within everyone, and the depths and heights of emotion that are not distinctly American, but universal. It may be that a future Swedish Academy will recognize the error of their thinking. It may be simply that Erdrich’s time has not yet come for a Nobel, or even a Pulitzer.
Commercially, Erdrich is one of the most successful authors of any nationality, race, ethnicity, or gender. Her books continue to sell, from Jacklight and Love Medicine to The Porcupine Year and The Round House. She continues to win awards, to pack people in for her readings, and to be asked to speak at significant events. Many authors make only a modest living, if that, from royalties on their books. The “real” money comes from selling the rights for a film production, or creating their own film of one or more of their novels, but that has not happened for Erdrich, as it did for Sherman Alexie. Her writing simply does not lend itself well to screenplays. Erdrich’s work contains a great deal of narrative rather than dialogue—information provided by the author directly to the reader or through the inner thoughts of the characters, which is difficult to translate into film, where the viewer can only grasp what is said by the actors or the actions performed without words. Getting inside the mind of the character/actors (when her work is translated to stage or film) can only be achieved by having them speak their thoughts aloud, or by having a narrative voice-over, which was one of the problems Marsha Norman encountered when converting The Master Butcher’s Singing Club into a stage production. In order to get across ideas and information that Erdrich provided in the narration, Norman had to enlist an actor to step out of character and speak directly to the audience. That rarely works. Audience members feel like children or students being lectured by a parent or a teacher rather than seeing a story unfold naturally before their eyes. Someone may yet successfully translate one or more of Erdrich’s novels to the stage or screen, but if that never happens, Erdrich will not be hurt financially.
Twenty years after Erdrich was chosen by People magazine as one of the 100 most beautiful people, she was again on public view as one of 12 renowned Americans chosen as subjects for the television program, Faces of America, on PBS.22 The show examined the genealogy and contributions to America society of 12 Americans from Erdrich to Yo Yo Ma. Gates and his staff researched the family history of each participant, which for Erdrich included both the German and Ojibwe strands of her heritage. Among other issues, Erdrich discussed why ancestral history is central to the existence of Native Americans; self-identity and her grandfather’s influence on whether or not she belonged in her tribal nation; and her grandfather’s role against the federal government policy of terminating their relationship to tribes and their status within the United States in the 1950s. The episode proved not only that Erdrich is still a public figure, but provided an opportunity to educate the general American viewer about the historical, political, and economic positioning of American Indians, as well as proving that 20 years after the People Magazine appearance, Louise Erdrich is still beautiful in mind, body, and soul.
Her readers will continue to be delighted whenever she releases a new novel or collection of short stories or poetry, and she will gain new readers who appreciate her, and lucky they are for they will have the joy of reading not only the novel they just found, but all her preceding work as well, a feast of letters. As one of the most prolific American writers, and American Indian writers, there is every reason to believe she has more stories yet to tell and much more family life to enjoy with her daughters, her extended family, and friends.’
1. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1995).
2. Ibid., 424.
3. Ibid., 361–423.
4. Ibid., 431.
5. See Billy J. Stratton, Buried in Shades of Night: Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.
6. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Third Ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 49–50.
7. Ibid., 240.
8. See Frances Washburn, “Zitkala Sa: Bridge Between Two Worlds,” in Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West, eds. Shirley Anne Leckie and Nancy J. Parezo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
9. Mourning Dove [Hum-ishu-ma], Cogewea the Half-Blood (Boston: Four Seas Co., 1927. Reprint Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. First Bison Book Printing, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
10. Jay Miller, Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1190), xii.
11. Ibid.
12. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1940.
13. Dorothy R. Parker, Back cover, Singing an Indian Song: A Biography of D’Arcy McNickle (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).
14. Leslie Marmon Silko, “Book Review of Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen,” Impact: Albuquerque Journal Magazine, October 7, 1986 (Reprint: Studies in American Indian Literature. V10.4, Fall 1986): 177.
15. American Library Association Banned Books website, www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/aboutbannedbooks.
16. Amiri and Amina Baraka, eds., Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (New York: Morrow, 1983).
17. Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock, eds., Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992).
18. Author conversation with Tom Holm, May 9, 2012.
19. Aislinn Simpson, The Telegraph, October 8, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/USA/Nobel-literature-prize-judge-Americans-authors-insular-and-ignorant.html.
20. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
21. Jussawalla and Dasenbrock, eds., Interviews, 99.
22. Henry Louise Gates, Jr., Faces of America. PBS, February 10–March 3, 2010. www.pbs.org/wnet/facesofamerica/profiles/louise-erdrich/10/.