Windigo Louise Erdrich Analysis

“Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with,” (Wong 49). Louise Erdrich has a very cultural background. Her mother is Native American and her father is German. With her ancestry being Native American, Louise Erdrich writes award winning poems and novels that are based around the folklore of Native Americans. Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954 and was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota (Poetry Foundation & Encyclopaedia Britannica). She was the oldest of her parent’s seven children. Today, she lives close to her family in an American Indian community in Minneapolis and works at Birchbark Bookstore (Rolo). Louise Erdrich has a way of writing a poem in a story-like way by using a lot of imagery, like in Windigo. The first part of the poem she wrote, “ the kettle jumped into the fire/ Towels flapped on the hooks/ and the dog crept off, groaning,” (Poetry Foundation). She brings the words to life and makes it really interesting to read. Erdrich met her future husband, Michael Dorris, in his class she attended in college. Later on during the middle of getting a divorce, Louise’s husband, Michael Dorris, committed suicide (Rolo).

She started researching her ancestry which inspired her writing during her time in college attending Dorris’s class (Poetry Foundation). Here is a part of one of her poems, I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move:

Grandpa said, These are the ghosts of the tree people, moving among us, unable to take their rest.

Sometimes now, we dream our way back to the heron