Twenty-eight years after Louise Erdrich published her first two books, her work continues to impress and delight readers and critics alike, and her life continues to be a source of interest, even fascination. Why is this true, when some other writers of any ancestry, no matter how much their work is appreciated, are usually just the names on the book, the names that appreciative readers may search for on bookseller’s websites and shelves for those authors’ latest works? And to speak more narrowly, why have so few other women writers of color or specifically American Indian women writers, achieved the level of public acclaim and commercial success as Erdrich has done? Being physically beautiful has not hurt her, but then, Stephen King has achieved comparable popular success and no one would call him beautiful. Other American Indian women writers are also far more than marginally attractive, beautiful many would say; yet, their work has not achieved the critical and commercial success that Erdrich’s has. Many factors have weighed in Erdrich’s favor, not the least of which is talent with a healthy seasoning of luck.
Erdrich was first a poet, and because that medium is so spare, poets have to know words and consider the impact that each word will have on the reader or listener. She carried that finely tuned sensibility over into her prose writing using words that not only move a plot line forward, but appeal to the senses of sight, sound, smell, and touch—words that are not so descriptive or distracting of themselves to slow down the plot but enough to make the reader more acutely aware of the journey they are taking from the first words of a novel to the end. Well-chosen words are all well and good, but Erdrich’s subject matter is a factor as well.
She writes of the culture collision between American Indian societies and Euro-American colonizers, a story 500 plus years old, but largely ignored in the history classes taught in American public schools. Other writers have written on the same subject matter, but even in the 21st century often those stories are set up in binaries—us versus them, savage versus civilized, saints versus sinners, ecologists versus despoilers—which serve to inflame passions rather than to increase cross-cultural understanding of history. Erdrich addresses historical injustice, yes, but she complicates and explicates presenting nuanced stories that are closer to truth, if there is such a thing as one single truth. She creates bad actors and good actors on both sides and some of her characters are both good and bad all in one person.
The geographical settings for her stories are mostly in the upper Great Plains/Great Lakes region of the United States, an area often overlooked in American literature.1 The number of novels set in New York or Los Angeles or some other urban area are legion; perhaps readers think of cities as vibrant and full of history and life simply because more people live there. The people of small town and rural America, however, have made important, often-ignored contributions to the social, economic, and political life of the United States. Some beloved authors have written into the same settings as Erdrich—Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and, more recently, Jane Smiley. While their texts may illuminate, they are also noticeable for what they obscure—the Native American experience that is foundational to the region. Erdrich’s work, however, presents the most multidimensional stories of this region of any writer to date, with all the courage of the pioneer planting crops and surviving against the weather, and of dispossessed American Indians fighting for their land and their survival, and finally, for their recognition and dignity. Erdrich speaks for both groups, but especially for the American Indian voice declaring in the words of the Neil Diamond song, “I am, I said/I am, said I.”2
While she writes stories of a region, they are not regional or provincial, or insular or even distinctly American isolationist as the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize would have the world believe. Her stories are everywhere and everyone’s stories because her characters are imbued with universal human qualities. Every reader can recognize himself or herself in the throes of first love and lust such as Fleur and Eli experience in Tracks, or the desire for revenge that Fleur feels in Four Souls, or the sanctimonious behavior that Pauline displays in Tracks. Readers recognize themselves or people they have known, but unable to put those experiences into words, they/we are grateful that Erdrich can do that for us.
For 28 or more years, Erdrich has sustained her writing effort, continued to produce from her experience and imagination and research, tales of wonder that demonstrate our humanity and inhumanity, make us think, or allow us the repose to not think at all. We are grateful for the gift.
In her own words:
Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply on the earth. We build roads. The ruts and skids of our wheels bite deep and the bush recedes. We make foundations for our buildings and sink wells beside our houses. Our shoes are hard and where we go it is easy to follow. I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words. But even as I write them down I know they are merely footsteps in snow. They will be gone by spring. New growth will cover them, and me. That green in turn will blacken, snow will obscure us all, but, my sons and daughters, sorrow is a useless thing. Much as the grass dies, the wind exhausts its strength, the tree topples in a light breeze, the dead buffalo melt away into the prairie ground or are plowed into newly scratched-out fields, all things familiar dissolve into strangeness. Even our bones nourish change, and even a people who lived so close to the bone and were saved for thousands of generations by a practical philosophy, even such people as we, the Anishinaabeg, can sometimes die, or change, or change and become.3
1. Recognizing that much of the rest of the country largely ignores the Great Plains states of the upper Midwest, University of Nebraska Press has created a series of books entitled “Flyover Fiction,” referring, of course, to the notion that the rest of the country simply flies over that region on their way from one coast to the other but never stops to examine what great value lies within the region.
2. Neil Diamond, “I Am, I Said,” Prophet Music (ASCAP), 1971.
3. Louise Erdrich, Four Souls (New York: First Harper Perennial Edition, 2005), 210.