![]() ![]() ![]() Child, a historian for the University of Minnesota and a Red Lake Ojibwe, said she was thrilled that Erdrich was writing about the termination era. But as she looked at her grandfather's letters, “All of a sudden it was: Ah, I'd been working on this book all along.”īrenda J. ![]() But after the Hall of Honor ceremony in 2018, she put the letters in chronological order against the timeline of the termination attempt, and suddenly the magnitude of what the government had planned to do, and what her grandfather had done to stop them, became clear.Įrdrich had been struggling to write another novel, reaching that familiar stage where she was pretty sure that she had no more books in her. “I couldn't stop thinking about what he had done.”įor years, she had read and reread her grandfather’s beautiful letters - handwritten to her parents in elegant boarding school script, packed with news and stories and laced with great humor. ![]() “I thought, this is extraordinary,” she said. Then Patrick Gourneau was inducted posthumously into the North Dakota Native American Hall of Honor, and she began to realize more fully the role he had played in saving the band. Erdrich, 65, grew up knowing that her grandfather had been involved in preventing termination, but for a long time she didn't have a strong understanding of what that meant. ![]()
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