Louise Erdrich: Reproductive Nightmares, Real and Imagined

On George W. Bush’s  first day in office in 2001—which also happened to be the twenty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade—the new president re-imposed the global gag rule, withdrawing US family-planning aid from foreign NGOs that provide legal abortion services or referrals. The same year, he also passed the Patriot Act, which was sometimes referred to as the “Anti-Terrorism Bill,” if only to mask the surveillance privileges it granted the government over American citizens—that is, anyone with a phone, bank account, email, credit reports, and a proclivity for Internet browsing. And that same year, novelist Louise Erdrich gave birth to her youngest daughter, Azure.

Feeling enormously perplexed and stricken by what she viewed as political backtracking, Erdrich turned to her craft. Erdrich’s past work, especially her fiction, often wrestles with social themes of family, justice, community, the duality of Native American experiences, and the burden of heritage. The writer was born in 1954 in Little Falls, one of the oldest cities in Minnesota, to a German American father and a French Ojibwe mother. Her parents met while her dad was teaching at a Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation, where her mother lived and where her grandfather was the tribal chair.

Erdrich’s rich relationship with her family and heritage cannot be disassociated from the worlds she builds in story. There is so much to learn about Native communities through art, and there is also the pure pleasure of Erdrich’s storytelling style, which has been called “rich but plain” and “a genre of one.” I read her stories and become replete in the same way I do at a concert when I realize the music is all around me, not just in my ears. One of my favorite lines about Erdrich comes from John Freeman: “Language contains meaning that is greater than our intended meaning—and Erdrich, of all the living American writers, uses that capacity to the greatest ability.