He teaches Native American literature, the modernist novel, Nabokov and Proust, and he is the translator or many Ojibwe stories and texts. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Canada, a Pushcart Prize, the 1996 Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the Pen West prize in 1999. He has held a Bush Artists Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowship and a U of M McKnight Land-Grant Professorship.