Michael Dorris

1945-1997

    Michael Dorris was born on January 30, 1945. Dorris graduated from Georgetown University in 1967 with an English and Classics major. He then went to Yale University where he earned a graduate degree in Anthropology. Dorris' ancestry, part American Indian, led him to ethnographic fieldwork in an Athapaskan village of Tyonek, Alaska. In 1970, he earned an M.Phil. degree from Yale and then taught at Franconia College for a year.

    Dorris' final position was at Dartmouth College. He began teaching there in 1972. His major accomplishment at Dartmouth College was the founding of the Native American Studies Program. Dorris took his own life on April 11, 1997.

Books written by Michael Dorris are:

• The Broken Cord: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Loss of the Future
• Native Americans Five Hundred Years After (with photographer Joseph Farber, 1975)
• A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987)
• A Guide to Research on North American Indians (with Mary Byler and Arlene Hirschfelder, 1988)
• The Crown of Columbus (with Louise Erdrich, 1991)
• Working Men (1993)
• Rooms in the House of Stone (1993)
• Paper Trail (a collection of essays, 1994)
• Cloud Chamber (1997)

Resources:

Former link, http://nativeauthors.com/search/bio/biodorris.html  (2007)

http://www.ameranthassn.org/septobit.htm 

Written by: Students in an Introduction to Anthropology Class, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Minnesota 1997