Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich (1954 - ) is a novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, memoirist, and young adult-and-children’s book writer. She is also a bookseller in the retail sense, the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I remember reading short stories by her in Atlantic Monthly in the late 70s, confident and powerful stories, exotic for being set in contemporary Chippewa communities in the upper Midwest. Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation, matrilineally descended. She was Dartmouth ‘76, the first class of women at the college. A writer since childhood, she arrived on the American literary scene practiced and graceful and eloquent — and has only fulfilled and transcended the promise of those early stories, which became the novel Love Medicine (1984).
The novel before The Sentence (2021), The Night Watchman (2020), won the Pulitzer Prize.
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Tales Retold
Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Tales Retold
Charles Eastman, in collaboration with his wife, Elaine Goodale Eastman, has assembled in this collection a composite, condensed sampling of his tribe's values, and presents them in a language that is at once direct and engaging. To say these allegories are 'wise' begs the question; they are the distilled conclusions of generations upon generations of Plains society and point to the essence of what it is to be a decent, thoughtful, respectable human being--a Sioux Tao told in prose a child of any culture, of any time, can comprehend.
Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa) (1858-1939) was a mixed-blood Sioux who became one of the best-known Indians of his time. He earned a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth and a medical degree from Boston University. From his first appointment as a physician at Pine Ridge Agency; where he witnessed the events that culminated in the Wounded Knee massacre, he sought to bring understanding between Native and non-Native Americans. He wrote eleven books, some, such as Sister to the Sioux (also available as a Bison Book), in collaboration with Elaine Goodale Eastman. His From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian, Indian Boyhood, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, Old Indian Days, and The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation are all available as Bison Books.