Her mother, Rita Joanne Gourneau Erdrich, was a daughter of Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal chair Pat Gourneau. Both her mother and her father, Ralph Erdrich, were teachers at the Indian school in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where Erdrich grew up. Mary Korll, her paternal grandmother, was of German descent and ran a butcher shop, much like Mary Adare in Erdrich's second novel,
The Beet Queen (1986). Her parents' commitment to education led Erdrich to the first coeducational class at Dartmouth, where she won her first poetry prize and graduated with a B.A. in English in 1976. Also at Dartmouth, Erdrich first met Michael Dorris, then a professor of anthropology. During her college years she worked at a variety of jobs, including hoeing sugar beets, picking cucumbers, lifeguarding, waitressing, weighing dump trucks, and developing photographs. After graduation she taught in the Poetry in the Schools program sponsored by the North Dakota Arts Council. She entered the creative writing program at Johns Hopkins in 1978, earning her M.A. the next year with a collection of poems as her thesis. She then edited
Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper, before returning to Dartmouth in 1981 as writer-in-residence.
On 10 October 1981 Erdrich married Dorris and began a productive literary union.
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