The Mighty Red

Louise Erdrich is an American author of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and French ancestry. Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, she is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, which is an older, alternate name for Anishinaabe. In much of Erdrich’s early writing, she uses the name Ojibwe, but Anishinaabe is now the preferred term. Erdrich’s grandfather served as the longstanding chairman of their tribe, and her parents both taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in North Dakota.

Although Erdrich was not raised on a reservation, her ties to her community and deep bonds with her extended family helped her cultivate a strong sense of her Anishinaabe identity and an interest in the history of Indigenous peoples in her region. These connections also shaped her writing: Listening to family lore and Anishinaabe legends helped Erdrich develop an interest in storytelling. She crafted her first short stories as a young girl, and her father supported her by paying her a nickel for each story.

Erdrich attended Dartmouth University from 1972 to 1976 as part of the school’s first group of female students. She honed her writing and graduated with a BA in English. Upon completion of her BA, she enrolled in a master’s program at Johns Hopkins University, where she wrote a series of poems and stories that would become her first published works.

Erdrich is a prolific writer and a key figure of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance, a literary movement that is typically dated to N. Scott Momaday’s 1969 Pulitzer Prize for the novel House Made of Dawn—one of the first works of Indigenous literature to garner widespread interest from an American readership, catalyzing a period of increased Indigenous authorship. The first wave of texts was published during the 1970s, examining issues such as cultural reclamation and the importance of ceremony, mythology, ritual, and oral tradition within Indigenous cultures. The second wave led to a new generation of authors and saw an increased interest in texts by female writers, such as Louise Erdrich, Paula Gunn Allen, and Joy Harjo.

Erdrich is known for having created a vast network of interconnected characters, families, and stories that span many novels and works of short fiction. Set in both rural and urban communities across Minnesota and North Dakota and featuring Dakota, Anishinaabe, French, and German families, Erdrich’s works highlight her own multiracial heritage and illustrate the deep influence her family’s culture of storytelling had on her development as a writer. Her early tetralogy—Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994)—examines the interconnected lives of a large group of families living both on and off reservations and spans multiple generations. It highlights an interest in the way that agriculture, particularly sugar beets, reshaped the region surrounding the Red River Valley, connecting it to The Mighty Red.

Erdrich has penned many critically acclaimed and prizewinning books. Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle award and shares several key elements with The Mighty Red, including the use of multiple points of view, strong female characters, and a keen interest in love and the complexity of human relationships. The Night Watchman (2020) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2021. In this text, Erdrich examines the impact of violence on Anishinaabe families and communities, assimilationist policies that forcibly relocated Indigenous Americans from reservations, and the processes of collective resistance and healing. Like The Mighty Red, The Night Watchman features Indigenous characters living within majority-white communities, examining the way that forces such as industrialization have reshaped Indigenous lands. Because of the expansive scope of her novels and short stories, Erdrich’s characters illustrate a wide range of issues faced by Anishinaabe communities during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Erdrich depicts the search for Indigenous identity; the loss and reclamation of traditional cultural values; and the forced transition from reservation to urban living, trauma, and collective healing. Because Erdrich’s works track the same group of families across multiple generations, changes in Anishinaabe family, life, and culture emerge as an important theme.

Erdrich lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she also owns and operates Birchbark Books, a store specializing in Indigenous literature that sponsors readings and events to support the careers of new writers and Indigenous crafters and jewelers. Erdrich is an important member of the local arts and literary scene and contributes regularly to area events and readings.