The Mighty Red

Louise Erdrich is an American author of Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) and French ancestry. Born in Little Falls, Minnesota, she is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, which is an older, alternate name for Anishinaabe. In much of Erdrich’s early writing, she uses the name Ojibwe, but Anishinaabe is now the preferred term. 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 Erdrich was not raised on a reservation, her ties to her community and deep bonds with her extended family helped her cultivate a strong sense of her Anishinaabe identity and an interest in the history of Indigenous peoples in her region. These connections also shaped her writing: Listening to family lore and Anishinaabe legends helped Erdrich develop an interest in storytelling. She crafted her first short stories as a young girl, and her father supported her by paying her a nickel for each story.

Erdrich attended Dartmouth University from 1972 to 1976 as part of the school’s first group of female students. She honed her writing and graduated with a BA in English. Upon completion of her BA, she 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.