{"id":167140,"date":"2024-03-25T11:04:26","date_gmt":"2024-03-25T15:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167140"},"modified":"2024-03-25T11:06:37","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T15:06:37","slug":"a-conversation-with-louise-erdrich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/03\/25\/a-conversation-with-louise-erdrich\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Louise Erdrich"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Angela Erdrich.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Paris Review\u2019s Writers at Work interview series has been a hallmark of the magazine since its founding in 1953. These interviews, often conducted over months and sometimes even years, aim to provide insight into how each subject came to be the writer they are, and how the work gets done, and can serve as a kind of defining moment\u2014crystallizing a version of the writer’s legacy in print. Of course, after their interviews appear in our pages, many writers just keep going, and their lives undergo further twists and turns. Sometimes, too, there are gaps and omissions in the original interviews that can become clear as time goes on. This is part of why we\u2019re launching a new series of web interviews called Writers at Work, Revisited. The first will be an interview by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain with Louise Erdrich, who was originally interviewed<\/a> for the magazine in 2010.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Americans have most often viewed Indians through an anthropological lens; the desire to understand us through difference overtakes all else and creates a permanent distance between the seer and the seen. It is the oldest story in America, and over time has exerted such pressure on Indians that we’ve become explainers nonpareil in every facet of our lives\u2014our fiction being no exception. Once you see it you cannot unsee it; the sheer amount of explaining<\/em> directed at non-Native readers that takes place in Native writing is remarkable. The best of us, though, continue to do what good writers in this country have always done: produce fiction that is more in conversation with the aesthetic lineage of English literature than any particular audience or political question. From the start Louise Erdrich’s writing has had this quality, and her large body of work is a lodestar for the Native writers who have come after her, showing us how to write past America’s ideas and expectations about Indians into places both more tribally specific, and more human. Her work acts as the primary bridge between the writers of the Native American Renaissance\u2014N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko\u2014and the explosion of Native writing currently taking place. Her characters, regardless of their culture or history, remind us of that great paradox of humanity, that we are all profoundly different, and very much the same. Perhaps most importantly her work reminds us that good fiction is made up of good sentences.<\/p>\n

I had expected, because of her lack of public presence, to meet a writer who was something of a recluse. When I finally made it to Minneapolis, however, I found her to be open, self-effacing, funny, generous, and troublingly up-to-date on the politics of the moment\u2014in both America and Indian country. She was also familiar to me in that way Indians are regardless of what tribe or geography they come from. She spends most days, when she is not traveling to various parts of the Midwest for familial and ceremonial reasons, working in her bookstore, Birchbark Books, one of the finest independent bookstores in the country. The store is the only one of its kind: owned and curated by a major Native writer, run by Native employees, where you can find a copy of Anna Karenina<\/em> a few feet from abalone shells and sweetgrass. Louise was gracious enough to take time from her usual day of working in the back office to talk with me in the basement of the store.<\/p>\n

\u2014Sterling HolyWhiteMountain<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

How\u2019s your car? You were having some trouble with it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I got pulled over last night. I\u2019ve never seen a cop so perplexed. He was skeptical about everything, which I get. I said, I\u2019m moving out to Massachusetts for seven months, and I have to be in Minneapolis tomorrow morning for an interview. Here I am in this old truck I got from my sister that\u2019s full of my junk. I didn\u2019t have insurance. I was going to get it yesterday morning, but I started having engine troubles and forgot all about it. So I\u2019m driving most of the night through endless North Dakota and into Minnesota at forty miles an hour\u2014any faster and the engine would quit. He ended up letting me off.<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

I hope you thought your novel out on that slow ride. I remember, when I started out, I was always writing poems about the desperate women in the breakdown lane, which was where I always found myself because I also had an unreliable car, a Chevy Impala station wagon. It would overheat, but a great car.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

This is after college? I\u2019d love to hear about how you got started.<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

Start the car? If the key didn\u2019t work, I used a slot-head screwdriver and a hammer. Writing? I don\u2019t actually know. I always wrote, then at some point I realized it was the only grown-up thing I knew how to do. After college, I was living in Fargo and got a seventy-dollar-a-month office at the top of a building that looked out on the horizon. That\u2019s when I started Love Medicine<\/em>, in that office.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There’s a set of problems that belong only to Native writers, and I\u2019ve noticed that Indians often end up working these problems out alone because they don’t have someone to talk with who understands. When I started writing it was hard to find Native writers I could look to. Did you feel that way when you started?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

I like what you said about the set of questions that belong only to us. There were fewer well-known Native writers back then. But there was James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon J. Ortiz, Janet Campbell Hale, Paula Gunn Allen, Beatrice Mosionier, and of course N. Scott Momaday. Roberta Hill and Ray Young Bear were poets I admired. Joy Harjo was and is cherished by us all. There were more Native writers when you were coming up\u2014you had Sherman Alexie. And Eric Gansworth\u2014a formidable writer, intelligent and warm. Still, I know what you mean, because it\u2019s not just writers who are Native. It\u2019s writers with your own particular tribal background. Did you find writers online?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Not at all. Because when I first got going, the internet was in its nascent stages \u2026 there was nothing! I didn\u2019t know there was such a thing as a Native writer until I read Alexie\u2019s first book, around the time James Welch came to speak in one of my classes at Missoula. You wrote a great introduction to the 2008 edition of Winter in the Blood<\/em>, which is arguably Welch\u2019s masterpiece. Did Welch influence your work?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

Yes, most definitely. His work still influences me, especially Winter in the Blood<\/em> and Fools Crow<\/em>. I met him only once or twice. He struck me as an extremely modest man. As a writer, too, he was able to step aside and let his characters exist on the page free of judgment. His style was never forced, self-consciously artful, or designed to impress. The Heartsong of Charging Elk<\/em> and Fools Crow<\/em> are more ornate and language-driven, but his characters are still formidable searchers. I have always been impressed with The Indian Lawyer <\/em>because, in the character of Sylvester Yellow Calf, Welch wrote about an Indian professional, someone who had come out of a tough background and had been touched with grace, athletically and intellectually. James even gave him a complicated love life and conflicts that were about being Indian but were really in the context of trying hard to be a conscientious human being. Also, since no Pulitzer Prize was awarded in 1974, the year Winter in the Blood <\/em>was published, I think it should be posthumously awarded to James Welch for that book.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Is being free of judgment important to you as a writer?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

It is one of the most important things.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve noticed that some younger Native writers feel that they\u2019re not supposed to be influenced by non-Indians. How do you think about that?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

To begin with, if you\u2019re not working in your traditional language, you are working in the colonial language, an automatic influence. I can barely speak to a four-year-old in Ojibwe, let alone write in it. But I own the curse and glory of English, a language that has eaten up so many other cultures and become a conglomerate of gorgeous, seedy, supernal, rich, evocative words. There is no purity\u2014that is the great advantage of English. It\u2019s so expressive, so flexible. We have to reverse-colonize English by reading far and wide.<\/p>\n

A writer has to be indiscriminate and read promiscuously. I\u2019m influenced by everything I\u2019ve ever read, and I read incessantly, with no regard to genre or what I was supposed to be reading. I\u2019ve read for pleasure, and pleasure for me includes challenging reads as well as novels that have that addictive quality I kind of adore. I\u2019m reading Harlem Shuffle <\/em>by Colson Whitehead for the second time. And in the past couple of years I\u2019ve read Magda Szab\u00f3, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia Butler. Leslie Marmon Silko, of course. Tove Ditlevsen. Olga Tokarczuk. Isak Dinesen, Edward St. Aubyn. A person has got to read Stendhal, Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, Goethe, Woolf, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O\u2019Connor, and then James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and of course N. Scott Momaday. I read every Native writer I can find. Right now I\u2019m reading Eric Gansworth and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. I love Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>. Angela Carter and her short story \u201cThe Fall River Axe Murders,\u201d about Lizzie Borden\u2014I keep rereading that story. It\u2019s deadly and dark and funny. I love spy novels. I\u2019ve read all of Graham Greene, Le Carr\u00e9. My daughter Pallas just gave me Mick Herron\u2019s Slough House<\/em> series\u2014catnip. Sometimes you just love part of a book\u2014for me, it\u2019s the first part of Portrait of an Unknown Lady<\/em>, by Maria Gainza. And wait, then there is Amitav Ghosh\u2014a class of his own. Likewise, Nuruddin Farah. Sorry, I\u2019m being a bookseller.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When I was nineteen, I read On the Road<\/em>, and I immediately just started writing. I\u2019ve avoided rereading it for so long because I thought, Oh God, it\u2019s going to be awful. But recently I gave it a shot\u2014 it was better than I thought it would be. There are some really, really beautiful sentences, that elegiac tone. The thing I didn\u2019t remember is how much talk about Indians there is in that book\u2014and the way he talks about them, or us, is stupid. But I also kind of don\u2019t care because I don\u2019t go to Kerouac for realistic writing about Indians. Can you really enjoy a writer, flaws and all? Are there limits?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

I often like the flaws in books. I suppose it is heretical of me to say that Moby-Dick<\/em> is flawed, but Melville dropped the relationship with Queequeg to go off in a hundred marvelous directions. There is a hole in the book, and I don\u2019t mind it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You mentioned Faulkner.\u00a0He showed me a way to write about a place and a history and a people. How has he influenced you?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

What resonates for me in Faulkner\u2019s work is his way of building chains of outrageous circumstance. His aching, damaged characters hook you in the heart; his low-key greedy villains are funny in an appalling way. Spotted Horses<\/em> is one of my favorite novellas of all time. The image of the South in shocked resentment, sullen and fallen, resonated for me not because the culture of enslavement was anything but depraved, but because Faulkner\u2019s characters are always in contention with history\u2014with a sordid glory, I guess. And now we see that played out here in our country with desperate attempts to cling to a mythical whiteness.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I was at Standing Rock in 2016, and it felt like a war zone. Native people are profoundly connected to the U.S. military\u2014either as part of it or at odds with it. How do you think about that relationship?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

The U.S. military is woven into the history of the conquest of Native people and the wars of extermination. Boarding school history starts with military forts being turned into government boarding schools. Land was taken from Native people for military bombing sites. Tribal corporations use Native preference to subcontract for non-Native military contractors. It goes on and on.<\/p>\n

Native people fight in great disproportion to our population. We have the highest serving level of population of any group in the U.S. In the First World War, there were Indians fighting, and we didn\u2019t even have U.S. citizenship. On this subject, Winona LaDuke wrote a terrific book with Sean Aaron Cruz called The Militarization of Indian Country<\/em>. And then there\u2019s Leslie Marmon Silko\u2019s iconic novel Ceremony<\/em>, the best novel ever written about the relationship between Native people and the military.<\/p>\n

When I went to Standing Rock, the complexity of this relationship was clear. Sheriffs all through the Midwest and West had diverted officers from their forces. The National Guard was involved, so that\u2019s the U.S. military, plus private contractors like TigerSwan, and various community forces were all working at the behest of a multinational corporation. But then, remarkably, U.S. military veterans, including many Native veterans, showed up to support the protesters at Standing Rock. They were standing against their own military.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think there’s some way to change the larger narratives about Indians and Indian country?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to see more narratives about the glorious things that Native people do.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Have you ever been to the Blackfeet Reservation? That\u2019s where I\u2019m from.<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

I have, quite a few times.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where I grew up, right next to the mountains. I\u2019m a little hesitant to use language like this, but they are like our holy lands. Chief Mountain is in the northeast corner of the park and is one of our primary spiritual sites. On the one hand, I grew up with this incredible experience of beauty in the park\u2014hiking, climbing, swimming\u2014and on the other hand, I grew up hearing stories about how the mountains were taken from us. I learned how they were acquired, and it was basically like, You\u2019re either going to sign them over to us or we\u2019re just going to take them. My politics are very sovereignty-oriented \u2026 like, fuck, restore our sovereignty, give us our sacred sites back.<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

I\u2019m the same. I\u2019d like to go from the nice first step of land acknowledgment to giving back actual land. Within the boundaries of the original treaties, not the ones our ancestors were starved out to sign. My ancestors originated on Lake Superior. I go back there often, and I take in a phenomenal sense of eternity. Mooningwanekaaning, known as Madeline Island, and the Apostle Islands are ancestral homelands, and it burns deep to have them stolen, as all national parks and shores are stolen. In 2017, a fifty-year lease on the north end of Mooningwanekaaning came due and the Bad River Ojibwe rejected a lease renewal or buyout. They needed that money, but they took the land back.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How do you navigate these political issues as a fiction writer?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think about politics when I write. I think about the characters and the narrative. My novels aren\u2019t op-eds. Nobody reads a book unless the characters are powerful\u2014bad or good or hopelessly ordinary. They have to have magnetism. If you write your characters to fit your politics, generally you get a boring story. If you let the people and the settings in the book come first, there\u2019s a better chance that you can write a book shaped by politics that maybe people want to read.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You and Natalie Diaz won the Pulitzer in 2021\u2014the first Native people to win it since Momaday in 1969.<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

The Pulitzer didn\u2019t go to me\u2014it went to The Night Watchman<\/em>, a book about my grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who worked to fight termination. He worked around the clock, supporting his family, running a farm, being a night watchman for the first tribal factory, and galvanizing a movement to save our tribe. After returning from Washington, D.C., he suffered a series of strokes. Our family has always had a great deal of sorrow over his sacrifice. When I found out about the prize, I called my mother and said, \u201cGrandpa won the Pulitzer.\u201d It was very moving to me, to my mother, to my family, my people. And my personal joy in receiving this prize along with Natalie Diaz was pretty simple. It was very moving. All Indigenous people are Anishinaabeg in our language, so let\u2019s just chalk up a win for the Anishinaabeg.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Are there other victories you\u2019ve been chalking up?<\/p>\n

ERDRICH<\/p>\n

Well, there\u2019s Reservation Dogs<\/em>, beginning and ending on its own terms. Dyani White Hawk had a piece in the Whitney Biennial. Raven Chacon\u2019s Voiceless Mass<\/em> was awarded the Pulitzer. Owamni, a Dakota restaurant here in Minneapolis, won a James Beard Award in 2022. I\u2019m not going to pretend these recognitions aren\u2019t important. We have a very different set of motives in our art. We are honoring our politics, our loved ones, our traditional foods, our history, and we\u2019re struggling against over half a century of murderous dispossession and silence. Chacon has said Voiceless Mass<\/em> is about \u201cthe futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power.\u201d And Diaz\u2019s Postcolonial Love Poem<\/em> is a rapturous stream of intelligence.<\/p>\n

We punch way above our weight culturally and politically\u2014think about how many Native women have won political races and taken charge in the last few years. Deb Haaland, Peggy Flanagan, Sharice Davids, Ruth Buffalo, and others. Or charismatic activist-writers like Winona LaDuke. And Native people who lead in entertainment. I\u2019m a big fan of Jana Schmieding and Zahn McClarnon. Add the casts of Reservation Dogs<\/em>, Rutherford Falls<\/em>, Dark Winds<\/em>. Sometimes I feel like we\u2019re fighting for our sovereignty joke by joke, book by book, political win by win, and that\u2019s not even bringing wild rice and the ribbon skirt into the picture. Let ribbon-skirted women rule the world. Don\u2019t you think ribbon-skirted women should rule the world?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he formerly held a Stegner fellowship. His work has appeared in<\/em> The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and<\/em> The Paris Review. His story “This Then Is A Song, We Are Singing”<\/a> appeared in the <\/em>Review‘s Winter 2021 issue. He is an unrecognized citizen of the Blackfeet Nation.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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