Louise Erdrich, Native American writer: ‘No one is illegal; we all have the same right to exist’

Birchbark Books in Minneapolis is one of those wonderful bookstores across the United States that ask their employees to recommend titles. The difference is that, at Birchbark, one of the recommenders — who signs her slips of paper as “Louise” — is more than just a reader with good taste. “Louise” is actually Louise Erdrich, 71, a leading voice in Native American literature and one of the most admired writers in the country.

On a recent visit to the bookstore, Erdrich’s picks included a story about the 2016 Standing Rock uprising against the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota (it didn’t stop the pipeline, but it did spark a generational awakening) and Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025). “What Desai does in that novel isn’t easy,” Erdrich points out.

The Minnesota-born novelist belongs to the club of writers — from Saul Bellow, to Colson Whitehead, to John Updike — who have won both of America’s top literary prizes: the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. In her case, she won the first for The Night Watchman (2020) and the latter for The Round House (2012).

In one corner of her bookstore, which also sells crafts and jewelry from Indigenous communities, there’s a wall displaying those two award-winning titles and the rest of her works, including The Mighty Red (2024), her latest novel.

The conversation with Erdrich — who belongs to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, North Dakota — didn’t take place in person in Minneapolis. At the time, the city was occupied by 3,000 ICE agents dispatched by Donald Trump. Rather, EL PAÍS spoke with her by phone. Her reluctance to give interviews is well-known, but in this case, it was also due to a health issue that prevented her from participating in the protests as much as she would have liked.

One slogan was frequently repeated in the protests: “No one is illegal on stolen land.” It also resonated at the Grammy Awards, thanks to singer Billie Eilish.

Erdrich criticizes those who, like Trump, want to deport immigrants from a land that was stolen from its original inhabitants: the Indigenous peoples. “I guess it’s kind of ‘all or none.’ Either everyone is illegal except Native people, or no one is illegal. I don’t think anybody is illegal in the first place. I don’t believe in borders. I believe that everyone has a right to exist on this beautiful planet.”

“This is Dakota land. That’s what we’re on in Minneapolis. But the people who have come here from all over the world have come here to make it better.”

The author feels “proud” about her neighbors’ response. Weeks after the interview, the residents of Minneapolis managed to expel ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

“This city has proven to be strong and brave in the past, like after the murder of George Floyd,” she continues, “but what’s happening now is unparalleled.” Those anti-racist protests — which spread throughout the country — were present in her previous novel, The Sentence (2021). And so, she doesn’t rule out that the uprising in sub-zero temperatures, when the city stood up to Trump after two of its residents, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, were shot to death, could serve as literary inspiration.

Erdrich’s history of activism dates back to the 1973 occupation of the town of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, a turning point in the American Indian Movement. It culminated in Leonard Peltier being sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of two FBI agents, in a trial that was riddled with irregularities. Back then, in her twenties, the writer attended the trial, held in Fargo, North Dakota, in a federal court that was “a couple of blocks” from her home. “I knew some of the jurors. They convicted him out of fear and hatred; there was no evidence,” she recalls.

A couple of months ago, Erdrich adds, she went to visit Peltier, whom Joe Biden pardoned at the end of his term. The pardon came after half-a-century behind bars and decades of support from figures in American culture to secure his release. Erdrich believes that Biden was “a good president” whose “administration was largely made up of devoted public servants.” However, she notes, “his great downfall was that he just didn’t [resign]. And I think I blame the people around him just as much. It makes me angry: we shouldn’t be suffering under this administration.”

The plot of The Mighty Red takes place near where Peltier was tried, in Argos, a fictional town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, on the border with Minnesota. This literary county — reminiscent of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha — was also the setting for the series that launched Erdrich’s career. It began with her successful debut, Love Medicine (1984), and continued with The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988) and The Bingo Palace (1994).

The experience of motherhood

She wrote those books while experiencing motherhood. In a memoir titled The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995), she described this as “devastating, ridiculous, earthy, profoundly warm, rich and deep.” Her body of work earned glowing praise from Philip Roth and placed her at the heart of American literature. Then, Erdrich’s life took a dramatic turn with the 1997 suicide of Michael Dorris, her first husband and the father of her three biological daughters.

They seemed like the perfect literary couple: they met at the university where she studied and he was a professor. Dorris was her first agent, as well as the co-author of one of her novels. They also raised three Native American children whom he had adopted; one of these children died in a car accident. They separated in 1995 and divorced the following year. Dorris took his own life in a motel after being accused of sexual abuse by two of his biological daughters.

Erdrich’s latest novel, written after she became a mother again, tells the story of a community touched by the 2008 financial crisis… a crisis that, in many ways, “the country hasn’t even recovered from,” she points out. The plot revolves around the unlikely courtship and wedding preparations of Gary — a white boy from a good family — and Kismet, a young, bookish goth girl from the Native American community. Kismet is in love with someone else, with whom she reads Madame Bovary (1856). And she works on a sugar beet farm, as Erdrich herself once did, and believes in guardian angels.

Structured in short chapters, the novel is written with the distinctive rhythm that characterizes Erdrich’s prose. It was drafted after the author’s usual intense research process (in this case, on the sugar industry) and is brimming with humor that’s often absurd. This will be familiar to viewers of shows and movies directed by Sterlin Harjo, which have taken center stage in the conversation surrounding Native American culture, after years of being ignored by the mainstream. Above all, the novel will remind readers of the TV series Reservation Dogs, which tells the story of a group of teenagers on a reservation with a penchant for getting into trouble. The characters certainly don’t conform to the stereotypical image of, say, the selectively mute Native American in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

“The dominant culture has tended to portray us as stoic and noble people,” Erdrich admits. “And, while there’s plenty of nobility, there’s also a lot of joking and laughing at those who take themselves too seriously. There’s an attitude of letting life flow as it is… and that includes the ability to see the ridiculous nature of human beings. You can’t take [something] so seriously that you lose sight of the fact that, as a human being, you’re just kind of an oddity on the Earth.”

“The most important virtue in native life is to have humility. Who am I to be cruel and mean? Why would I do that? I’m just one of many. I’m not special. I’m just fortunate to walk this Earth,” she observes.

The writer describes herself as “mixed.” Her father was German: when she was a child, he used to give her five cents in exchange for writing stories for him. Her mother was Ojibwe with French ancestry. The two taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school in Wahpeton, North Dakota.

They had seven children, one of whom is Heid Erdrich, the first poet laureate of the city of Minneapolis. And, for many years, their grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, was the tribal president of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. The protagonist of The Night Watchman is inspired by his struggle against a U.S. senator who, in the 1950s, tried to expel Gourneau’s people from the last piece of land that was reserved for them.

Erdrich has lived in Minneapolis for 25 years. She says she can’t imagine life without her loved ones: “I’m very close with my family,” she emphasizes. She still visits her 91-year-old mother and frequently drives 10 hours to see her relatives who live on the reservation.

That closeness extends to her daughters’ professional lives as well. They are her first readers. “I usually give my books to my daughters,” the writer explains.

Aza, one of her girls, designs the covers for her books. Another, Pallas, works in the bookstore. She was there the day of our visit. Erdrich says it was named “Birchbark” because some of the first books in North America were written by the Anishinaabe on birch bark scrolls. And the books written by their descendants now await readers on the shelves. Sometimes, they come with a note of recommendation from a staff member named Louise.

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