Michael Anthony Dorris (January 30, 1945 – April 10, 1997) was an American novelist and scholar who was the first Chair of the Native American Studies program at Dartmouth College. His works include the novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) and the memoir The Broken Cord (1989). The Broken Cord, which won the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, was about dealing with his adopted son, who had fetal alcohol syndrome, and the widespread damage among children born with this problem. The work helped provoke Congress to approve legislation to warn of the dangers of drinking alcohol during pregnancy. He was married to author Louise Erdrich, and the two had a family of six children. They collaborated in some of their writing. They separated in 1995. He committed suicide in 1997 while police were investigating allegations that he had abused his daughters. Biography Michael Dorris was born in Louisville, Kentucky to Mary Besy (née Burkhardt) and Jim Dorris. (The senior Dorris was later reported as mixed race, with a Native American father.) His father died before Dorris was born (reportedly by suicide during WWII). Dorris was raised as an only child by his mother, who became a secretary for the Democratic Party. Two maternal relatives reportedly also helped raise him, either two aunts, or an aunt and his maternal grandmother. In his youth, he spent summers with his father's relatives on reservations in Montana and Washington state. The Washington Post reported that he was raised in part by a stepfather. In an article published in New York Magazine two months after Dorris' death, a reporter quoted the Modoc tribal historian as saying, "Dorris was probably the descendant of a white man named Dorris whom records show befriended the Modocs on the West Coast just before and after the Modoc War of 1873. Even so, there is no record of a Dorris having been enrolled as an Indian citizen on the Klamath rolls." The Washington Post reported: "Dorris' father's mother, who was white, became pregnant by her Indian boyfriend, but, the times being what they were, she could not marry him. She later married a white man named Dorris." Dorris received his BA (cum laude) in English and Classics from Georgetown University in 1967 and a Master's degree from Yale University in anthropology in 1971, after beginning studies for a theater degree. He did his field