The Shawl Study Guide

Louise Erdrich is one of seven children born to a German-American father and a Chippewa mother. Both of her parents taught at a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Erdrich credits her love of writing to her father, who she says paid her a nickel for every story she wrote (two of her sisters also grew up to become writers). She attended Dartmouth College from 1972 to 1976, part of the first class of women admitted to the college. While at Dartmouth, Erdrich met the anthropologist and writer Michael Dorris, whose work as the director of the school’s new Native American Studies program inspired her to look into her own ancestry and use it in her writing. During that time, she also worked as an editor for the Boston Indian Council newspaper, The Circle. After graduating from college, she completed an M.A. at Johns Hopkins, and then returned to Dartmouth as a writer-in-residence, where she reconnected with Dorris. They became collaborators on short stories—Erdrich writing and Dorris mainly editing—and eventually began a romantic relationship, marrying in 1981. Their collaboration led to the publication of Erdrich’s debut novel, Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then, she has published over a dozen other novels, three books of poetry, and a collection of short stories, in addition to seven books for younger audiences and several works of nonfiction. She and Dorris separated in 1995, and she now lives in Minnesota, where she owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

Though critics have designated 1969 as the beginning of the Native American Renaissance, that does not mean that Native Americans were not producing literature or other works of artistic merit prior to 1969—this time period is just when the mainstream literary public began to pay attention to it. There are several reasons for this shift in public consideration. First, in the 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of Native Americans who had received substantial English-language education—and who therefore were more likely to graduate from college—was coming of age. This aligned with an overall improvement in conditions for Native Americans in the United States. At the same time, there was a new effort among historians to represent historical events from a Native American perspective and to discuss the harsher truths of the history of European invasion and colonization of North America. These developments in turn led to a rise in mainstream interest in Native cultures, as well as increased activism within Native American communities. Finally, in the 1980s, resources began to be devoted to the development of Native American Studies departments at several universities, including Dartmouth College, where Erdrich went—in fact, her freshman year overlapped with the first year of the college’s Native American Studies program.

Louise Erdrich’s work is considered part of the Native American Renaissance. This term, coined by the critic Kenneth Lincoln, refers to a boom in publication of literary works by Native American authors in the U.S., starting with the 1969 publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Other works published during the Native American Renaissance include Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and James Welch’s Winter in the Blood. In their work, authors who are considered part of this Renaissance emphasize the reclamation of Native American heritage, often writing about protagonists who return to the reservation and embrace traditional tribal life. Many are also concerned with the struggle of reconciling or integrating contemporary American life with a Native American or mixed heritage. Erdrich specifically is known for building on the Native traditions she draws from by bringing their myths and artistic values into her exploration of modern-day Native American life. In her novels and short stories—many of which take place in the same fictional world, with recurring characters—Erdrich often uses a style of multi-voice narration, crafting intricate narratives that slowly reveal the life stories of characters who are subject to fate and the legacies and sorrows if their ancestors, as in “The Shawl.” This style and the use of a fictional area across multiple works has led to comparisons between Erdrich’s work and William Faulkner’s polyphonic Yoknapatawpha novels, which are all set in the fictional Mississippi county that Faulkner created.