SOURCE: "Erdrich and Dorris's Mixed Bloods and Multiple Narratives," in his Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, pp. 192-224.

[In the following excerpt of an essay devoted to Louise Erdrich's writings, Owens examines how Native American identity is constructed in Dorris's A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.]

Despite the importance of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn in 1969, no American Indian author has achieved such immediate and enormous success as Louise Erdrich with her first novel, Love Medicine. A bestseller, Love Medicine not only outsold any previous novel by an Indian author, but it also gathered an impressive array of critical awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award for Best First Novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or...