The Plague of Doves Study Guide

Louise Erdrich was born in central Minnesota to a German father and a French-Chippewa mother. Erdrich’s parents encouraged her writing from a young age: Erdrich’s father gave her a nickel for each story or poem she wrote, while her mother helped Erdrich discover Chippewa history and folklore. Erdrich attended Dartmouth for college, where she met her longtime mentor (and eventual husband) Michael Dorris. After graduating, Erdrich began to publish more seriously, and her first solo novel, Love Medicine, won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award—the first debut novel in history ever to do so. Erdrich’s marriage fell apart in the late 1990s, and her output lessened as she helped her three young daughters process the traumatic split (which involved disturbing allegations against Dorris). After the divorce, however, Erdrich returned to writing with a vengeance, publishing a series of novels (including The Plague of Doves in 2008 and her 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Night Watchman) as well as some non-fiction articles and children’s books. Many of Erdrich’s novels share overlapping characters and geographic locations, largely taking place in and around Chippewa (or Ojibwe) communities in Minnesota and North Dakota. Erdrich, who currently resides in Minneapolis, also owns and operates Birchbark Books, a bookstore focusing on Native American literature and art.

While Erdrich emphasizes that most of the events in The Plague of Doves are fictional, she notes that there was a real person named Paul Holy Track who inspired her work. Much like the character Holy Track in the novel, who is lynched by white vigilantes as a young teenager, Paul Holy Track was hanged by a racist mob in Emmons, North Dakota in 1897. There are also two other important historical strands that Erdrich leans on in the novel. First, the surveying expedition that Joseph Coutts goes on with Emil Buckendorf and the Peace brothers draws inspiration from a real-life Red River town-site speculation conducted in 1857 by Daniel S. B. Johnston. And second, the figure of Louis Riel, revered by many members of Evelina Milk’s family, was a real (and sometimes controversial) historical figure. Riel held political office in the Canadian government, but he also emerged as a leader of Métis Indian resistance against the encroaching power of White Canadian settlers.

Erdrich was certainly influenced by her ex-husband Michael Dorris, a non-fiction writer and the chair of Native American studies at Dartmouth. She might also have been influenced by other writers in the so-called “Native American Renaissance,” including N. Scott Momaday, who is most famous for his Pulitzer-prize winning novel House Made of Dawn. But Erdrich’s most obvious literary influence is the famous American novelist William Faulkner, who set many of his novels in the same fictional county (Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi). Similarly, Erdrich would go on to create and populate her own fictional communities, like Pluto (the setting of her “Justice” trilogy, including Plague of Doves) or Argus, North Dakota (the setting for Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks, among others).