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A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

 

While single, in 1971, 1974, and in 1976, he adopted two boys and one girl, all of whom had Sioux heritage. In 1979, he became a full professor founded and chaired the Native American Studies Department at Dartmouth. He wed Louise Erdrich, a graduate of Dartmouth and known author, and in 1981. They later produced three additional girls. He started publishing anthropological studies in 1975, but Erdrich encouraged him to write fiction. They began publishing poetry and short stories under the name Milou North, and they collectively began to work on all literary products that either produced. His many awards in Native American Studies helped him to become strong in his ethnicity and later write the work A Yellow Raft in Blue Water in 1987.
             The idea of a group of people bound together for a common purpose is one older than civilization. "Family- originated a survival tactic for prehistoric hunting/gathering tribes. Times continue to change and a common motif in late 20th century literature consists of dysfunctional families and domestic problems. Michael Dorris' brilliant work, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, portrays three generations of Native American women. Dorris, also having Native American genealogical roots, allows us to peer into, not only a dysfunctional family of three women, but the arduous life of a minority culture, and the need for individuals of mixed-blood origins to search for their identities of how they fit into society. Despite all odds and hurdles of which they encounter individually, they find through their experiences, that a single beam under pressure will bend, but three formed in a triangle will spread stress of one point to all others and stay firm. .
             Rayona, a fifteen-year-old girl of mixed blood, finds herself lost in contradictory culture and cannot find a certain group of society to belong to. She describes herself having "long frizzy hair- (Dorris 3) and "push[ing] five-ten, taller than any other girl[s] at [her] school- (5).


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