Having grown up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, Erdrich absorbed much of the traditional lore and story-telling habits of the Ojibwe people when she visited her grandparents on the nearby Turtle Mountain Reservation. Even though she did not learn her tribe's language, Ojibwemowin, until the age of thirty so that she could get the jokes, she absorbed the stories and traditional oral lore of her Ojibwe ancestry as a young child listening to the flow of stories in the conversation of her family. This early experience provided a significant resource for her work both in its content and its technique. Her creation of strong and self-contained rural and village settings inhabited with several families of characters who continue through her novels as well as her reliance on multiple narrators strongly resembles the work of William Faulkner. The fiction and ethnographic works of the Salish-Cree mixed-blood writer, D'Arcy...