Louise Erdrich Discusses Activism, New Novel, and ICE Protests in Minneapolis

Louise Erdrich, the 71-year-old Native American novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner, owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, where she recommends titles and displays her award-winning works. Her latest novel, The Mighty Red (2024), is set in North Dakota's Red River Valley and explores themes from the 2008 financial crisis through an interracial courtship. Erdrich belongs to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and has a long history of activism dating to the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation. She recently visited Leonard Peltier, whom Joe Biden pardoned after decades of imprisonment. During a phone interview with EL PAÍS, Erdrich criticized Donald Trump's immigration policies while 3,000 ICE agents occupied Minneapolis, noting the city's resilience after expelling them weeks later. She connected current protests to the 2020 George Floyd uprising, which inspired her novel The Sentence (2021). Erdrich's career began with Love Medicine (1984), and she has won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Night Watchman (2020) and the National Book Award for Fiction for The Round House (2012). Her family includes her mother, who is Ojibwe with French ancestry, and her sister Heid Erdrich, Minneapolis's first poet laureate. Erdrich's daughters are involved in her work, with one designing her book covers and another working at Birchbark Books.