Over the past three decades, Louise Erdrich has become one of the most widely-read and influential contemporary American Indian writers. As the author of fourteen adult novels, in addition to poetry and short fiction, memoir, and books for children and young adults, she is the most prolific, as well. Erdrich is best known for her Matchimanitou, Turtle Mountain, or Little No Horse saga � a series of novels peopled with characters whose fates and families intertwine over the course of a century, on the imagined Little No Horse reservation and in the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. Faulkneresque in many ways, these novels develop compelling characters, both Anishinaabe (or Ojibwe) and white, whose lives and histories are profoundly intertwined in a tangled web of connections.

Connection � a central theme in Erdrich�s work, and one deeply informed by the author�s indigenous roots � ties Erdrich�s work most directly to the challenge and promise of peace. In the worldview of American Indians, the vastly inclusive context of �all my relations,� or �my relatives,� situates and gives meaning to all life, and it serves as the ground for all ethical action. It is a way of being that recognizes the intimate and endless ways in which our lives as humans are connected to family, clan, and community � but also to the larger human and creaturely families, to the natural world, and all aspects of the cosmos�in what Paula Gunn Allen calls �a sacred hoop of be-ing.� Erdrich�s trickster character Nanapush invokes this in the epigram to Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse, explaining the Ojibwemowin equivalent, �nindinawemaganidok.� In this and other novels, Erdrich�s characters are led, by means of their connections to other, through multiple perspectives, worlds, and layers of reality. As characters orient themselves to an ever-widening sphere, hoop, or spiral of influence, responsibility, and relation, readers are drawn in imaginatively and empathically, and we too become implicated in the circling pattern.

These connections are sought and seen, of course, in the context of centuries of colonialism, violence, and injustice, and Louise Erdrich�s vision is no rosy one. Her work exposes the damage done to indigenous communities and cultures, to individuals, and to women, in particular, by a history of domination and its legacy in the U.S. today. Physical and cultural genocide, war and murder, disease and starvation, theft and betrayal, sexual violence, alcoholism, and poverty: these are all manifest in Erdrich�s world. But while multiple forms of domination have clearly torn at the fabric of relation, Erdrich also presents a model for recognizing and working toward restoration of the relational web. Pulling together resources from her own multiple traditions � Ojibwe and Western, oral and textual, sacred and secular � Erdrich weaves together stories full of humor and pathos that present patterns for healing and wholeness, possibilities for peace.

- Sheila Hassell Hughes
Professor of English
University of Dayton