“Erdrich arrived auspiciously at Dartmouth in red cowboy boots as a member of its first coed class and first modern Indigenous cohort, and she graduated in a pair of refurbished moccasins,” the magazine reported. In a 2015 profile in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, she spoke about the dangers of climate change as well as “ the environmental damage being inflicted on the landscape of her childhood, which she sees regularly when visiting friends and family in North Dakota.” In 2019, the magazine named her one of Dartmouth’s 25 most influential alumni. In 2009, she gave the commencement address on the Green and received an honorary degree. She is a national treasure.”Įrdrich was a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth in 1992, 2011, and 2012. “Perhaps more than any other contemporary writer, Louise has helped to elevate the national IQ on issues of social, historical, and legal significance relating to Native peoples. Bruce Duthu, the Samson Occom Professor of Native American Studies.

“I hope we never take for granted the gift of storytelling that Louise Erdrich has shared with us for decades,” says N. Paulson, Brenda Silver, and the other Dartmouth professors who encouraged my writing.” “This is my grandfather’s story, and the prize made my mother happy,” Erdrich said upon hearing the news.

The awards were announced on June 11.ĭescribed on the Pulitzer website as “a majestic, polyphonic novel about a community’s efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination,” the story is based on the life of Erdrich’s activist grandfather, a night watchman at a factory near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota.Įrdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and the mother of Aza Erdrich Dorris ’11. Louise Erdrich ’76 has won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her critically acclaimed novel The Night Watchman (Harper 2020).

The night watchman author