22 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
short-story cycle and novel genres; the articles by Cox, Slack, and Suzanne
Ferguson will be especially useful for this study.- Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, served as tribal chair of the Turtle
Mountain Band and mingled Catholicism with tribal religious customs—
smoking the pipe, using traditional medicine. This blending she saw enacted
in her family and community is an important element in her fiction. Thus
students might find it fruitful to ponder not only instances of cultural conflict
but also the significance of cultural blendings in her imagined worlds. Patri-
cia Riley’s article on mixed bloods will be useful here; also helpful is Dennis
Walsh, “Catholicism in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tracks,” American
Indian Culture and Research Journal, 25, no. 2 (2001): 107–127, as well as the
articles by Shackleton, Ruppert, and McKinney. How are these blendings
enacted on a personal level (for instance, the alliance between Lulu and Marie)
and how on a tribal or communal level? What values ultimately make blend-
ings and alliances possible, and what new values do such cultural blendings
make possible? The articles by Schneider and Schultz, although centered on
other topics, should also be consulted for their readings of community.
RESOURCES
Primary Work
Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, eds., Conversations with Louise Erdrich
and Michael Dorris ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).
Collection of interviews with Erdrich and Dorris, separately and together, con-
ducted between 1985 and 1994. The book includes a useful introduction and
chronology.
Criticism
Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton, eds., A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise
Erdrich (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
Detailed genealogies, time lines, geographies, and a dictionary of characters for
each of Erdrich’s first six novels; useful given the many characters and the com-
plexities of their relationships.
Susan Castillo, “Women Aging into Power: Fictional Representations of Power
and Authority in Louise Erdrich’s Female Characters,” SAIL: Studies in
American Indian Literatures, 8 (Winter 1996): 13–20.
Notes that, unlike in many traditional American texts where female protagonists
die at a young age, in Erdrich’s works female characters are presented at various
stages of life.
Allan Chavkin, ed., The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich (Tuscaloosa: Uni-
versity of Alabama Press, 1999).
Focuses on games of chance in Erdrich’s novels; the role of the carnivalesque; hunt-
ing; and female power; offers an essay comparing the two versions of Love Medicine,
although fails to take into account the role of retelling in native oral traditions.