She is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized Ojibwe people.
The couple separated in 1995 and then divorced in 1996; Dorris would also take his own life in 1997 as allegations that he sexually abused at least three of the daughters whom he raised with Erdrich were under investigation.
She was the oldest of seven children born to Ralph Erdrich, a German-American, and Rita (née Gourneau), an Ojibwe woman of French descent.
Erdrich's maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, served as tribal chairman for the federally recognized tribe of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians for many years.
During her first year, Erdrich met Michael Dorris, an anthropologist, writer, and then-director of the new Native American Studies program.
While attending Dorris' class, she began to look into her own ancestry, which inspired her to draw from it for her literary work, such as poems, short stories, and novels.
During that time, she worked as a lifeguard, waitress, researcher for films,[19] and as an editor for the Boston Indian Council newspaper The Circle.
[29] In 1979, she wrote "The World's Greatest Fisherman",[30] a short story about June Kashpaw, a divorced Ojibwe woman whose death by hypothermia brought her relatives home to a fictional North Dakota reservation for her funeral.
"[15] At her husband's urging, she submitted it to the Nelson Algren Short Fiction competition in 1982 for which it won the $5,000 prize,[15] and eventually it became the first chapter of her debut novel, Love Medicine, published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston in 1984.
[33] Erdrich later turned Love Medicine into a tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and The Bingo Palace (1994).
[19]" They got started with "domestic, romantic stuff" published under the shared pen name of "Milou North" (Michael + Louise + where they live).
Leslie Marmon Silko accused Erdrich's The Beet Queen of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples.
Tales of Burning Love (1997) finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the previous books, and introduces a new set of European-American people into the reservation universe.
[40] The Plague of Doves focuses on the historical lynching of four Native people wrongly accused of murdering a White family, and the effect of this injustice on the following generations.
Her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Night Watchman[41] (2020) concerns a campaign to defeat the 'termination bill' (introduced by Senator Arthur Vivian Watkins), and Erdrich acknowledged her sources and its inspiration being her maternal grandfather's life.
[42] Her most recent novel, The Sentence, tells the fictional story of a haunting at Erdrich's Minneapolis bookstore, set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd's murder, and the resulting protests.
[44] She continued the series with The Game of Silence, winner of the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction,[45] The Porcupine Year, Chickadee, and Makoons.
[46] Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003) traces her travels in northern Minnesota and Ontario's lakes following the birth of her youngest daughter.
[48] Although many of Erdrich's works explore her Native American heritage, her novel The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) featured the European, specifically German, side of her ancestry.
The novel includes stories of a World War I veteran of the German Army and is set in a small North Dakota town.
Like Faulkner's, Erdrich's successive novels created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness.