I'd Rather Be Between the Hedges

Who is Louise Erdrich?

Louise Erdrich was born in 1954 at Little Falls, Minnesota. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe of North Dakota. The Chippewa are also called the Ojibwa, or, in their own Algonquian language, the Anishinabe, both of which terms appear in Erdrich’s work. Erdrich’s French-Chippewa mother and her German-American father were teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Wahpeton, Minnesota. Her maternal grandmother was tribal chairwoman on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. After attending Dartmouth College where she studied under her future husband and collaborator, Michael Dorris), Erdrich received her M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1979 and later edited the Boston Indian Council’s newspaper, The Circle. Erdrich also held a variety of other jobs, such as lifeguard, waitress, prison poetry teacher, and construction flag signaler, which she has said greatly helped her writing. The winner of numerous prizes for her literature, she has published both fiction and poetry.