Love Medicine

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.[1] 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.[1]

Identity and mythology

In the vein of contemporary Native American literatures, many characters in Love Medicine are in search of an identity.[4] 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."[5] 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.”[6] 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.[4][7] 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.”[4]

To illustrate Indigenous cultural endurance, Erdrich superimposes Ojibwe mythological narratives and images onto her characters.[4] Owens identifies Nanabozho, a peripatetic trickster and world-creator, as a key intertextual reference in Erdrich’s text.[4] 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.[4] 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.[4]

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.[4]

Land and tribal identity

Meditations on land as a formative and nurturing source of tribal identity feature prominently in Love Medicine.[8] 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.[3] 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.[8] 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.”[8] 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.[8] She explains how American Indian writers write from a different position: for them, “the unthinkable has already happened,”[8] 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.”[8]

Indigenous humor and survival

In multiple interviews, Erdrich has commented on the importance of humor as a mechanism for Indigenous survival and resistance.[2] 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 form the stereotype, the stoic, unflinching Indian standing, looking at the sunset.”[9] William Gleason argues that in Love Medicine, humor works by cropping up at “inappropriate” moments, thereby posing a greater question of belonging.[2] 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.[2] 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.”[10] According to Gleason, jokes can also take on an explicitly subversive, if not emancipatory, dimension when they invoke Native American mythology.[2] 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.[2] Various characters selectively exhibit different aspects of Heyoka and Nanabhozo in the novel: Lipsha complains of his head being “screwed on backwards,”[11] in response to a startling revelation from his grandmother, while Marie employs trickery and dark, aggressive wit to survive in the convent.[2] Gleason argues that laughter isn’t simply a product of Indigenous longevity in Love Medicine, but rather a key component of it.[2]

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;”[12] 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.[12] 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.[12] 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.[13] 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,[7] 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.[13]


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