Taylor Barrett
Ms.Brown
Adv American Lit
13 December 2016
Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich is a half Native-American author and poet who uses her background experience and knowledge in her stories. ”Born on June 16, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, she was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Her mother, of Ojibwe descent, was born on the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Reservation while her father was of German ancestry.”(encyclopedia). She has unflaggingly written over 29 pieces of literature and has won 15 awards, and she is likely to receive more. ”At Dartmouth Erdrich started writing poems and stories integrating her Ojibwa heritage and in 1975 she was awarded the Academy of Poets Prize.” (encyclopedia). She was born as the eldest child of a Native-American…show more content… Erdrich involves her all family into her stories, in more ways than just one, and she can thank them for much of her literary knowledge and her brilliant stories. ”Erdrich's father also told stories about his relatives and the towns where he grew up. Erdrich maintains that listening to her family's stories has in some ways been her most significant literary influence.” (Encyclopedia). Erdrich uses everything her family had introduced her to as story ideas, from the representation of family members to what they have shown her. In “Turtle Mountain Reservation” she uses possibly her own grandfather in the poem. ”Grandpa leans back, between spoonfuls of canned soup, and repeats to himself a word, that belongs to a world, no one else can remember.”(lines 25-29). Her grandfather ate canned soups, and like most of the elderly, he talks to himself about the old days, that most people don’t remember. “Uncle Ray, drunk for three days, behind the jagged window, of a new government box, drapes himself in fallen curtains, and dreams that the odd, beast seen near Cannonball, North Dakota, crouches moaning at the door to his body. The latch, is the small
