If you cannot see the Ojibwe in Louise Erdrich, perhaps that's because two centuries of popular culture have depicted this nation's first people as cartoons. You can hear Erdrich's paternity in her Teutonic surname; her mother is half-French and half-Ojibwe, a group known also as Chippewa, who are among the many indigenous people on this continent collectively called Anishinaabe.
In the novel The Antelope Wife, Erdrich writes, "You make a person from a German and an Indian, for instance, and you're creating a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself." I met Erdrich this October in Minneapolis, at a restaurant next door to the small independent bookstore she owns, Birchbark Books. I read the quote from The Antelope Wife back to her and she laughed. "Absolutely," she said. "I was thinking of myself."