The Shawl

Louise Erdrich (Karen Louise Erdrich) was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, on June 7, 1954. Of French and Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa and Anishinaabeg) ancestry, she is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Although primarily a novelist, Erdrich has also published many works of short fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. 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 not raised on a reservation, Erdrich’s close ties to her tribe and deep bonds with her extended family helped her to cultivate both a strong sense of her Anishinaabeg identity and an interest in the history of Indigenous American peoples in her home region. These connections shaped her writing, for it was through listening to family lore and Anishinaabeg legends that she first developed an interest in storytelling. She began to craft short stories when she was still a young girl, and her father supported her burgeoning interest by paying her a nickel for each story that she completed.

Erdrich attended Dartmouth University from 1972 to 1976 as part of the school’s first group of admitted female students. During these years, she received further support for her writing and ultimately graduated with a BA in English. She then 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.

A prolific writer, 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 Anishinaabeg, French, and German families, Erdrich’s works evidence her own diverse heritage and illustrate the deep influence her family’s culture of storytelling had on her development as a writer. Her early tetralogy, which includes 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 of reservations and spans multiple generations.

Due to the expansive scope of her novels and short stories, Erdrich’s characters illustrate a wide range of issues faced by Anishinaabeg communities during the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Erdrich depicts the search for Indigenous American identity, the loss (and reclamation) of traditional cultural values, the forced transition from reservation to urban living, trauma, and collective healing. Many of her works track the same group of families through multiple generations, and the way that Anishinaabeg family, life, and culture change over time also emerges as an important theme.

Erdrich has published widely during her career and has penned many critically acclaimed and prizewinning books. Love Medicine (1984) won the National Book Critics Circle award and shares several key elements with “The Shawl,” among them the use of multiple points of view, the theme of lost (and reclaimed) cultural connections, and the juxtaposition of reservation and urban life. A more recent novel, The Night Watchman (2020) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021. In this text, Erdrich examines the impact of violence on Anishinaabeg families and communities, assimilationist policies that relocated Indigenous Americans from reservations to cities, and the processes of collective resistance and healing.

Erdrich lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she also owns and operates Birchbark Books, a store that specializes in Indigenous American authors, sponsors readings and other events to support the careers of new writers, and sells Indigenous American art, traditional medicines, and jewelry.