Louise Erdrich is an American author known for her fiction rooted in her Native American heritage. Erdrich’s mother was a Chippewa, and her father was German American. Many of her characters have mixed Native American and white backgrounds and deal with issues of cultural identity.
© ZUMA Press/Alamy Images

People in the United States observe Native American Heritage Month each year in November. During this period, many Native tribes celebrate their cultures, histories, and traditions. It is also a time to raise awareness of the challenges Indigenous people have faced in the past and today, along with their contributions to the United States as its first inhabitants.

Louise Erdrich is a Native American author. In June 2021, Erdrich won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel “The Night Watchman” published in 2020. She based the novel on her grandfather who was a council-member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. He fought the termination policy that went to Congress in 1953. The book weaves together a family story and the Chippewa efforts to preserve the tribe’s land and treaty rights in the mid 1900’s. The Sentence (2021), set in a bookstore in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, is both a murder mystery and a ghost story.

The Game of Silence tells the story of a young Ojibwa girl during the mid-1800′s who sees her people and their way of life threatened when white settlers come to their land.
The Game of Silence by Louise Erdrich. Text and illustration copyright © 2005 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers.

Karen Louise Erdrich was born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Many of her books reflect on her German American and Chippewa heritage and deal with issues of cultural identity. Erdrich’s books also draw on Native American culture, mythology, and storytelling traditions.

Erdrich earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1976 and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1979. She has published 28 books and won the National Book Award in 2012 for her book “The Round House.” Erdrich owns Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that focuses on Native American literature.