Louise Erdrich’s Twin Cities: A Literary Mapping

A full report of Louise Erdrich’s Twin Cities: A Literary Mapping can be found here.

In this project, I am creating a data visualization based on novels by Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich that are fully or partially set in Twin Cities, including Love Medicine (1984, 1993, 2009), Antelope Woman (1998), and Future Home of the Living God (2017). The Twin Cities—Minneapolis and St. Paul—were developed through the colonization of Bdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ Dakhóta homelands and over the course of the twentieth century became a major urban center built around Wakpá Tháŋka and Hoǧáŋ Waŋké Kiŋ, also known as the Mississippi and St. Croix rivers. It was a destination for Black Americans migrating out of the Deep South and for Indigenous peoples of different tribal nations in the wake of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. It is the founding place of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968 and became known worldwide in the summer of 2020 as the place of the police killing of George Floyd. After White Americans, the cities’ main populations are Black, Mexican, and Indigenous (of which the majority are Dakhóta). It is also a major destination for Somali and Hmong immigrants. While the most widely known writer from Twin Cities may be F. Scott Fitzgerald, who featured Minneapolis in his first commercial literary success, This Side of Paradise (1920), contemporary writers Louise Erdrich, Heid Erdrich, David Treuer, Danez Smith, Kao Kalia Yang and others offer a view of Twin Cities from the perspective of peoples marginalized and harmed in similar and different ways within the U.S. settler colony. Beginning with the work of Louise Erdrich, I bring together literature, history, and geography in an interdisciplinary mapping project that will produce a visualization of the literary worlds created by writers who set their work in Twin Cities in order to discern what it might tell us about the relationships between literature, representation, space, and power.

Researcher: Balraj Gill

gill_hmui_report_2021.pdf495 KB