Louise Erdrich remains one of the most celebrated contemporary writers of indigenous American heritage. Born in 1954 to a White American father and a Chippewa mother, Erdrich’s first novel Love Medicine was published in 1984 and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. During her career spanning over 30 years, Erdrich has published more than 20 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

The oft-asked question with regards to indigenous American literature is to what extent indigenous writers have remained true to the traditions of their ancestors. Any attempt to answer this question is bound to encounter disagreements -- the first being how to define the traditions of indigenous Americans.

In temporal terms, it becomes difficult to arrive at a conclusive definition of their diverse culture and traditions because the written history alone of these peoples (of course, from the perspective of European settlers) spans over five centuries. Moreover, the written accounts of this period provided by both White settlers and indigenous people are more concerned with cross-cultural negotiation between the colonisers and the natives, and have less to do with recording of the traditional ethos of the natives. A search for an "authentic" or "pure" version of indigenous traditions will have to be extended to the period prior to 1492 CE and is likely to face serious difficulties as the natives had an oral tradition before the arrival of Columbus.

In spatial terms, too, it becomes difficult to draw a conclusive definition of the traditions of these people due to the immense cultural diversity of indigenous tribes. There are said to be "more than three hundred cultural groups and more than two hundred languages in North America when Columbus arrived."

Another relevant line of enquiry is related to situating the literature, especially fiction, produced by indigenous American writers within the American postmodern literary landscape. The period between 1960s and 1990s is, generally, regarded as the postmodern era. This period saw a phenomenal rise in what is called identity politics: politics of colour, gender, race and sexual orientation.

The publication of N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, marks what Kenneth Lincoln terms, "Native American Renaissance". Roemer observes that, as a result of Momaday’s novel winning the Pulitzer, other forms of writings by indigenous American writers -- non-fiction, poetry, drama -- were overlooked in favour of fiction. Critics and theorists interested in postmodern literature also tend to focus on narrative fiction, in favour of drama or verse, for its "supposed superiority in illustrating the problematic of postmodern representations."

The award of the Pulitzer to House Made of Dawn and the so-called "Native American Renaissance" can, thus, be situated within postmodern identity politics which celebrates the "difference" so long as the "different" does not deny the value of "difference." The yardstick to measure the "difference" is, of course, the androcentric, heteronormative, bourgeois, White, Western self.

Situating fiction produced by indigenous American writers within the wider postmodern literary landscape becomes all the more important especially in case of Erdrich who acknowledges her postmodern influences.

Two distinct narrative traditions conflate in Louise Erdrich’s fiction: oral tradition of indigenous Americans and Western (written) literary tradition. While it is tempting to regard these two traditions as mutually exclusive, this neat distinction between the two gets blurred when viewed in a postmodern context. Erdrich’s novels have been called, confusing, circular, serpent-like, thick with characters, shaggy, chaotic, circling back and forth, cryptic and unfathomable.

Looking at the list of adjectives used to characterise Erdrich’s fiction, one might overestimate the extent to which she had been influenced by the oral traditions of indigenous Americans. Erdrich, however, uses "these aspects in a postmodern way and puts them to a postmodern use".

While Erdrich’s fiction, as Julie Maristuen-Rodakowski shows, does contain the history of Chippewa tribe, it does not adhere to the traditions of her indigenous ancestors. It is very convenient to assume that since Erdrich incorporates the history of Chippewa tribe in her novels, she must also be following the traditions of her indigenous ancestors.

Catherine Rainwater, however, disagrees with such a reading of Erdrich’s earlier novels. She is of the view that "Erdrich’s narrative tactics in these novels are derived from both Eurocentric and tribal storytelling forms" and that Western narrative influences do not "eclipse that of tribal raconteurs whose voices have shaped the traditional Ojibwen tales informing Erdrich’s prose."

This means that Erdrich’s work is an example of cultural and literary hybridity and while she draws on both narrative reserves available to her, she subscribes to neither one of them. Her fiction, therefore, forges a new literary form suitable for her concerns and expression. However, this hybridity happens to be situated within postmodernism.

An investigation into Erdrich’s indigenous artistic influences will have to take into account her fiction vis-à-vis oral traditions of her indigenous ancestors.

The salient features of oral traditions of indigenous Americans, according to A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff, are: performance, sense of community, continuity and wordplay. A continually evolving language with humorous wordplay is central to these narratives. Bruce Rosenberg observes that "all of verbal elements in culture… are transmitted by a long chain of interlocking face-to-face conversations between members of the group. All beliefs and values are related orally, face-to-face, and are held in human memory."

The fact that these narratives are never written down and are only held in human memory is very important to the traditional ethos of storytelling. Since it is highly impossible to recall from one’s memory alone the exact version of a narrative one has heard, these narratives are frequently revised by every narrator. And since the audiences form an integral part of the process of storytelling and the performer/narrator is said to incorporate their responses in his/her narrative, recording or re-enacting a particular version of a particular story becomes impossible.

The ephemerality of the experience of both telling and listening to a particular narrative, therefore, becomes central to the ethos of an oral tradition. Since these narratives are oral, their language becomes arbitrary and impossible to fix. As a result of the linguistic arbitrariness and reliance on human memory, an oral culture, as Rosenberg argues, is always revising its past and there remains no one "authentic" version of its past. Indeed, the tropes of a literate culture become inadequate to comprehend an oral tradition unless it takes a written form, that is, it seizes its existence as an oral tradition per se.

Reading Erdrich’s fiction from the perspective of oral traditions, one is inclined to think that she has not remained faithful to their traditions by "writing" fiction. Since her fiction is printed, it is relatively stable and fixed. Rosenberg observes that "print removes a portion of learning from the immediate chain of personal confrontations" which are characteristic of the process of oral storytelling.

This process of continuous confrontation which is integral to the artistic tradition of Erdrich’s indigenous ancestors is missing from her fiction.