Debra Magpie Earling, author of the 2002 novel "Perma Red," does not appear as a named character in her text, which has been designated as a work of fiction. Eighteen years in the making, "Perma Red" is an intricate, intimate expression of self-life narration that is Earling's act of publicly honoring the Aunt Louise she never met but who has lived with Earling daily through family and community stories. "Perma Red" is set on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana in the 1940s, where turbulent Native-Anglo antagonisms continue to constrict social, educational, and economic spaces for the reservation's Native inhabitants as part of the colonial legacy. In lush prose, with minimal dialogue, Earling describes Louise White Elk's difficult, dangerous life and in doing so offers up an eloquent fictionalized eulogy to Earling's actual Salish Aunt Louise, who died brutally and young on the Flathead Reservation in 1947. In this essay, the author discusses how Earling has fictionalized the lives of her family members in "Perma Red." (Contains 40 notes.)