Poet Heid E. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe, was born in Breckenridge, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her Ojibwe mother and German American father taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. With her sister, the writer Louise Erdrich, she founded and lead the Turtle Mountain Writing Workshop and The Birchbark House, a fund to support indigenous language revitalization efforts. Since 2010, Erdrich has directed Wiigwaas Press which publishes Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) language books, films, and other media. Erdrich teachesat Augsburg College and lives with her family in Minnesota.
More By This Poet
How It Escaped Our Attention
When a whole being
births into your hands
still you see your hands
no matter how unworldly
the beauty of the child
Then the universe of words
works past cosmology
to a useful name a handle
in English unlike the Indigenous
genderless language of verbs
Moon...
De'an
Dogs so long with us we forget
that wolves allowed as how
they might be tamed and sprang up
all over the globe, with all humans,
all at once, like a good idea.
So we tamed our own hearts.
Leashed them or sent them to camp’s...
Last Snow
Dumped wet and momentary on a dull ground
that’s been clear but clearly sleeping, for days.
Last snow melts as it falls, piles up slush, runs in first light
making a music in the streets we wish we could keep.
Last snow. That’s what...
Intimate Detail
Late summer, late afternoon, my work
interrupted by bees who claim my tea,
even my pen looks flower-good to them.
I warn a delivery man that my bees,
who all summer have been tame as cows,
now grow frantic, aggressive, difficult to shoo
from the house....