ABSTRACT
Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) is one of the most prolific and widely read novelists writing about Native American life in the United States. Her publications include 13 novels, a short story collection, three books of poetry, five works of children’s fiction, and several essays and nonfiction manuscripts. Primarily regarded as a novelist, Erdrich has penned stories marked by humor, irony, spirituality, trickery, magical realism, myth, and indeterminacy-she displaces linear and chronological narrative forms with structures and tropes that nuance the duality of Native American subjectivity produced by geographic, political, social, and cultural location within and outside of the United States. An estimated 5.2 million American Indian or Alaska Natives are citizens of the United States, 22 per cent of them living on reservations and trust lands and 78 percent residing in cities and communities across the United States and the world.1 For Erdrich, the experience produces
an edge of irony. If you have a Native American background, it’s also a non-Western background in terms of religion, culture, and all the things that are important in your childhood. There’s a certain amount of commitment because when you grow up and see your people living on a tiny pittance of land or living on the edge, surrounded by enormous wealth, you don’t see the world as just.2
