Erdrich and Faulkner and what they share

Let's just take a moment, before I get seriously into Louise Erdrich's newest novel, The Round House, to recognize her amazing accomplishment as an American writer: I'm sure I'm about teh 50,00th to compare her with Faulkner, but Faulkner's achievement, devoting a lifetime of fiction to examining the people, the place, the history, and the culture of what he famously called his "postage stamp of native soil" would have seemed to be unique in American literary history, but I think Erdrich has matched his accomplishment, with a lifetime of fiction, in many voices and modes, about the people, the culture, the climate, and the history of a small (Blackfoot?) reservation in North Dakota. Not that their work is identical or in some ways even similar other than in scope, the narrowness of field and the depth of insight and perception, but: in some ways, Erdrich's achievement is the greater in that she has brought public awareness to a fogotten, often marginalized people in a way that no other writer has (though others have followed in her wake); Faulkners's Yoknapatawpha is perhaps a wider field - the various novels focus on a wider range of classes and even races - but he's far from the only writer to chronicle Southern life. Faulkner, however, was more of a groundbreaking writer in style - his "stream of consciousness" took some of the techniques that Joyce and other modernists were developing in Europe and transplanted them to American lit; Sound and the Fury, which daunted so many readers in its time and so many who came to Faulkner in high school, as I did, but now, after decades of postmodernism and contemporary cinema even, seems much more accessible - though my recent attempts to re-read Absalom have been completely unsuccessful. Erdrich's writing, for better or worse, is much more clear, conventional, and accessible that Faulkner's, which in some ways has probably hurt her reputation, making it too easy to shunt her aside as another best-selling ethnic writer, and she's far more than that. The Round House, which did win the NBA last year, is a great example of her work, or at least so far promises to be - as the first chapters introduce a Native American family that is both steeped in the culture of the Rez and also very worldly - the dad a tribal court judge; Erdrich is great at putting the bone in the throat right away, and the novel gets off to a fast start with a teenage boy's mother the victim of a violent crime, which is a mystery and immediately raises questions of culture and jurisdiction: who will see justice done? The local police, the BIA, the tribal court?