Love Medicine

Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich's debut novel, first published in 1984 by Holt. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel in subsequent 1993 and 2009 editions. The book follows the lives of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on fictional reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The collection of short stories in the book spans six decades from the 1930s to the 1980s. Love Medicine garnered critical praise and won numerous awards, including the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Plot summary Love Medicine follows the intertwining lives of three central families, the Kashpaws, Lamartines, and Morrisseys, and two peripheral families, the Pillagers and the Lazarres.Kurup, Seema. Understanding Louise Erdrich. University of South Carolina Press, 2016. pp. 4 Members of the families variously reside on the fictional Ojibwe reservations of Little No Horse and Hoopdance, and in Minneapolis-St.Paul and Fargo. Erdrich employs a non-linear format in Love Medicine, and each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, using first-person and third-person limited narration.

Love Medicine begins with June Morrissey freezing to death on her way home on Easter Sunday, 1981, and ends in 1985, with the reunification of June's former husband, Gerry Nanapush, with June and Gerry's son, Lipsha.Gleason, William. "'Her Laugh An Ace':The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine" Love Medicine A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 115-135 Encapsulated between those two chapters are interrelated stories that proceed in loosely chronological order from 1934 onwards.Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine, Harper Perennial, 2016 A pair of stories at the midpoint of the novel converge on a single day in the lives of Lulu Lamartine, Marie Lazarre, and Nector Kashpaw, who are involved in a love triangle.

Characters

Family Tree Rushes Bear (Margaret)====Kashpaw ________|_________

= = = Traditional Ojibwe Marriage

......... Sexual affair or Liaison

=.=.=. Catholic Marriage

| Children born from the above unions

! Adopted Children

Major themes The diversity of critical and theoretical approaches to Love Medicine reflects the book's complexity as a meeting site for multiple forms and conventions. The most prominent themes of the novel are those that are relevant to various literatures and discourses, such as contemporary Native American literature, post modernism, realism, oral storytelling, folklore, and mythology.

Identity and mythology In the vein of contemporary Native American literatures, many characters in Love Medicine are in search of an identity.Owens, Louis. "Erdrich and Dorris's Mixedbloods and Multiple Narratives," Love Medicine A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 53-66 David Treuer identifies "the search for cultural reconnection" as a driving force of Native American fiction, arguing that "self-recovery is achieved through cultural recovery."Treuer, David Native American Fiction: A User's Manual Graywolf Press, 2006. pp. 29-68 Speaking of her own mixed-blood heritage, Erdrich has explained in an interview that "one of the characteristics of being a mixed blood is searching…all of our searches involve trying to discover where we are from."Bruchac, Joseph. "Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets," University of Arizona Press, 1987, pp 77, 79 Louis Owens and Catherine Rainwater have noted that the positionality of Native Americans and writers both coincide on the margins, as people that must observe from the outside.Rainwater, Catherine "Reading Between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich" Love Medicine A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 163-178 Owens states that "the seemingly doomed Indian, or tortured mixed-blood caught between worlds surfaces in Erdrich's fiction, but such characters tend to disappear behind those other, foregrounded characters who hang on in spite of it all […] and, like a story teller, weave a fabric of meaning and significance out of the remnants."

To illustrate Indigenous cultural endurance, Erdrich superimposes Ojibwe mythological narratives and images onto her characters. Owens identifies Nanabozho, a peripatetic trickster and world-creator, as a key intertextual reference in Erdrich's text. Owens points to the first chapter of Love Medicine: true to traditional trickster narratives, in the beginning of Love Medicine, June Kashpaw is seen without a home and on the move. If the purpose of telling Nanabozho stories is to challenge listeners and to obversely remind them of their roots, Owens argues, then the purpose of June's absence in Love Medicine is to underscore each character's enduring place within the tribal community. Furthermore, in Owen's formulation, Just as the trickster transcends time and space, June's death, which occurs on Easter Sunday, disrupts linear Christian time and interweaves it with cyclic/accretive time.

Finally, Owens states that the mythic principle of Nanabozho is made explicit in the Nanapush family name; the revealed patrilineal link between Gerry Nanapush, a fugitive culture hero seemingly capable of shape shifting, and Lipsha, who always has a few tricks up his sleeve, ensures the transmission and survival of Indigenous values in the text.

Land and tribal identity Meditations on land as a formative and nurturing source of tribal identity feature prominently in Love Medicine.Erdrich, Louise. "Where I Ought To Be: A Writer's Sense Of Place" New York Times Book Review, 28 July 1985, pp 23-24 For example, Uncle Eli, with his deep connections to the land, is described as being healthy and robust in his old age, unlike his senile brother Nector, who grew up off-reservation. The primacy of land finds formal expression in Louise Erdrich's artistic manifesto, "Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place." In it, Erdrich articulates a traditional tribal view of place, where generations of families inhabit the same land, and in doing so, imbue the landscape with history, identity, myth and reality. Erdrich contrasts this relationship with Western culture's mutable, progressive view of geography: "nothing, not even land, can be counted on to stay the same." Western literature's alienation from place, in Erdrich's view, is marked by the impulse to document change in the face of an ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation. She explains how American Indian writers write from a different position: for them, "the unthinkable has already happened," and as such, their task is to reconstitute a new birthing place that is capable of "[telling] the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe."

Indigenous humor and survival In multiple interviews, Erdrich has commented on the importance of humor as a mechanism for Indigenous survival and resistance. She states: "when it's survival humor, you learn to laugh at things […] it's a different way of looking at the world, very different from the stereotype, the stoic, unflinching Indian standing, looking at the sunset."Erdrich, Louise and Dorris, Michael.Interview with Laura Coltelli. "Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak" Love Medicine A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 155-158 William Gleason argues that in Love Medicine, humor works by cropping up at "inappropriate" moments, thereby posing a greater question of belonging. Gleason's examples of out-of-place humor include Nector's tragicomic death and Gordie's telling of the Norwegian joke in "The World's Greatest Fisherman," as King is heard physically threatening his spouse outside. In light of the historical "unthinkable" perpetrated against Native communities, Gleason quotes from various theorists to point to the regenerative effect of laughter. It is Lipsha's comical take on the world that allows him to endure heartache and eventually realize that "belonging was a matter of deciding to."Erdrich, Louise. "Love Medicine" Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1984, pp.255 According to Gleason, jokes can also take on an explicitly subversive, if not emancipatory, dimension when they invoke Native American mythology. He identifies Heyoka, a literally and metaphorically backwards facing contrarian jester, and Nanabhozo, a wisecracking trickster, as two incarnations of pan-Indian characters that thrive on jokes. Various characters selectively exhibit different aspects of Heyoka and Nanabhozo in the novel: Lipsha complains of his head being "screwed on backwards,"Erdrich, Louise. "Love Medicine" Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1984, pp.212 in response to a startling revelation from his grandmother, while Marie employs trickery and dark, aggressive wit to survive in the convent. Gleason argues that laughter isn't simply a product of Indigenous longevity in Love Medicine, but rather a key component of it.

Home and belonging Noting how Love Medicine ends with the word "home," and how every character in the novel has a different idea of what home is, Robert Silberman argues that "home […] is an embattled concept, as ambiguous as June Kashpaw's motives in attempting her return;"Silberman, Robert. "Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman" Love Medicine A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 136-154 June's interrupted homecoming is the subtext that haunts the entirety of the novel; simultaneously, her family members each express a desire for a home of their own. While homecoming is a common theme in Native American literatures, Silberman notes that the way Love Medicine engages with the subject evades easy classification, since home represents freedom for some, but entrapment for others. In his essay, Greg Sarris superimposes such ambiguity and anxiety surrounding homecoming onto moments of his own personal life to explore a possible reading of text that transcends Native borders.Sarris, Greg. "Reading Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine as Home Medicine" Love Medicine A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong. Oxford University Press, 2000, pp 179-210 Unlike Catherine Rainwater, who views the experience of reading Love Medicine as a kind of permanent unhoming arising out of irresolvable conflicts between opposing codes, Sarris focuses on Albertine's return to the reservation and Lipsha's return to his familial roots to illustrate how his own personal relationship with home is simultaneously made universal and particular through an encounter with text.

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Love Medicine

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