Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
The Ojibwe are an Anishinaabe people whose homeland covers much of the Great Lakes region and the northern plains, extending into the subarctic and throughout the northeastern woodlands. Ojibweg, being Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands and of the subarctic, are known by several names, including Ojibway or Chippewa. As a large ethnic group, several distinct nations also understand themselves to be Ojibwe as well, including the Saulteaux, Nipissings, and Oji-Cree.
Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area of Michigan on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem is based on oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, but it also contains his own innovations.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was an American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist, noted for his early studies of Native American cultures, as well as for his 1832 expedition to the source of the Mississippi River. He is also noted for his major six-volume study of Native Americans commissioned by Congress and published in the 1850s.
Ojibwe, also known as Ojibwa, Ojibway, Otchipwe, Ojibwemowin, or Anishinaabemowin, is an indigenous language of North America of the Algonquian language family. The language is characterized by a series of dialects that have local names and frequently local writing systems. There is no single dialect that is considered the most prestigious or most prominent, and no standard writing system that covers all dialects.
James Phillip Welch Jr., who grew up within the Blackfeet and A'aninin cultures of his parents, was a Native American novelist and poet, considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance. His novel Fools Crow (1986) received several national literary awards, and his debut novel Winter in the Blood (1974) was adapted as a film by the same name, released in 2013.
Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich's debut novel, first published in 1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel in subsequent 1993 and 2009 editions. The book follows the lives of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on fictional reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The collection of short stories in the book spans six decades from the 1930s to the 1980s. Love Medicine garnered critical praise and won numerous awards, including the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Jim Northrup was an Anishinaabe newspaper columnist, poet, performer, and political commentator from the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation in Minnesota. His Anishinaabe name was "Chibenashi".
William D'Arcy McNickle was a writer, Native American activist, college professor and administrator, and anthropologist. Of Irish and Cree-Métis descent, he later enrolled in the Salish Kootenai nation, as his mother had come to Montana with the Métis as a refugee. He is known also for his novel The Surrounded.
Rez dog is usually a term for outdoor, stray, and feral dogs living on Native reservations in the United States and Indian reserves in Canada. The term has taken on many connotations, and has to some extent become an emblem of and metaphor for reservations/reserves, life on them, and indigenous North Americans in general. For example, a "rez dog" may refer to a resident of indigenous lands.
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, also known as Bamewawagezhikaquay is one of the earliest Native American literary writers. She was of Ojibwe and Scots-Irish ancestry. Her Ojibwe name can also be written as O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua, meaning 'Woman of the Sound [that the stars make] Rushing Through the Sky', from babaam- 'place to place' or bimi- 'along', wewe- 'makes a repeated sound', giizhig 'sky', and ikwe 'woman'. She lived most of her life in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.
Mourning Dove or Humishuma was a Native American author best known for her 1927 novel Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range and her 1933 work Coyote Stories.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a first-person narrative novel by Sherman Alexie, from the perspective of a Native American teenager, Arnold Spirit Jr., also known as "Junior," a 14-year-old promising cartoonist. The book is about Junior's life on the Spokane Indian Reservation and his decision to go to a nearly all-white public high school away from the reservation. The graphic novel includes 65 comic illustrations that help further the plot.
Timothy Patrick Barrus, also known as Tim Barrus, is an American author and social worker who is best known for having published three "memoirs" between 2000 and 2004 under the pseudonym Nasdijj, by which he presented himself as a Navajo. The books were critically acclaimed, and Nasdijj received several literary awards and recognition from major institutions. His "memoirs" dealt in part with issues of two adopted children who suffered from severe problems.
The Birchbark House is a 1999 indigenous juvenile realistic fiction novel by Louise Erdrich, and is the first book in a five book series known as The Birchbark series. The story follows the life of Omakayas and her Ojibwe community beginning in 1847 near present-day Lake Superior. The Birchbark House has received positive reviews and was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for young people's fiction.
Anton Treuer is an American academic and author specializing in the Ojibwe language and American Indian studies. He is professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, Minnesota, and a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow.
Linda LeGarde Grover is an Anishinaabe novelist and short story writer. An enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, she is a professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, as well as a columnist for the Duluth News Tribune.
The Light People is a 1994 novel written by Gordon Henry. The book won the American Book Award in 1995. The Light People is a work of Native American fiction, composed of many distinct but ultimately interconnected stories happening in and around an Ojibwe village in northern Minnesota, and the Twin Cities.
Margaret "Peggy" Seelye Treuer (1943–2020) was an American Ojibwe judge and lawyer. She was Minnesota's first Native American woman lawyer, working as a federal magistrate and tribal court judge for the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, the Red Lake Nation, and the Leech Lake Indian Reservation. A member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, she volunteered with the Native American Rights Fund and worked for the reestablishment of the Menominee Indian Reservation. She earned degrees from the law school of the Catholic University of America and St. Luke's School of Nursing. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Women Judges.
