SOURCE: Sarris, Greg. “Reading Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine as Home Medicine.” In Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts, pp. 115-45. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Sarris offers a critical reading of Love Medicine, using Erdrich's text to explore aspects of Native American literature.]

“Your grandmother didn't want to be Indian,” my Auntie Violet remarked as she put down the photograph of my grandmother I had given her. She leaned forward in her chair, as if for a closer inspection, one last look at the picture, then sat back with resolve. “Nope,” she said, “that lady wanted to be white. She didn't want to be Indian. I'm sorry to tell.”

I shuffled through the assorted black and white photographs I kept in a plastic K-Mart shopping bag. They were pictures I had taken from my grandmother's family album. I handed Auntie Violet another picture, hopeful that she would change her mind, discern something similar, something good, Indian. We were all related, after all. We shared the same history: the invasions by the Spanish and Russians, the Mexicans, and the Americans. We shared the same blood: my father's great-grandfather Tom Smith, my grandmother's grandfather, was married at one time to Auntie Violet's great-grandmother, the Kashaya Pomo matriarch Rosie Jarvis. My grandmother grew up among her grandmother's people, the Coast Miwok who lived south of the Russian River in Sonoma and Marin counties, and she had lived in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Violet and many of my other relatives identified as Kashaya Pomo grew up on the Kashaya Reservation in Kashaya Pomo territory north of the Russian River. I wanted desperately to know everything I could about my grandmother whom I had never known. Grandpa Hilario, her husband, didn't know that much about her Indian background, only where she was from. “Take what pictures you want,” he said as I looked through her album. “Maybe those ladies up there [at Kashaya] can tell you something.”

Violet held the picture close to her face, scrutinizing. She adjusted her glasses, then carefully placed the photograph in the neat line of photos she was making before her on the kitchen table. She reached for her cigarettes. “Nope,” she said. “You see, Greg, those Indians down there, those south people, they lost it a long time ago. Those ones around there. Shoot, they don't have no one speaking their language now. They speak more Spanish, Mexican. A few of them, they didn't even want to be Indian. They're mixed, light-skinned.”

Violet stopped talking to light her cigarette. She pushed the pack of cigarettes to Auntie Vivien who sat directly across from me. Violet was at the head of the table. It was late, around one in the morning. We often visited, talked about people and places until sunup. Now I was sharing the pictures and what I learned from my grandfather during my recent visit with him. In the quiet of the room, in those spaces between our words, I heard loud music coming from a neighbor's house. The heavy bass sounded through Auntie Violet's trailer home walls. I looked down at her clean white-and-orange-flowered oilcloth. Up here on the reservation, on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere, at least forty long, winding miles from Healdsburg, the nearest town, and all this noise.

“Drinking, fighting each other,” Vivien said, as if reading my thoughts. Vivien was quiet, to the point.

“No,” Violet said, exhaling a cloud of smoke, “a few of them people down there, they would ignore us if they seen us in town. Those Bodega ones, especially. Act too good, act white, them people. Like that guy, what's his name. YOUR cousin, Greg. Now he wants to be Indian. But, oh, his mother. Stuck up. Used to be she see us Indians and laugh at us. And what's she got? Who is she?”

Auntie Violet didn't say all that she could have just then. I knew the stories, the gossip that one group armed themselves with against the other. Indians, I thought to myself. “Indians, you know how we are,” my Miwok cousin once said.

I opened the plastic bag, then closed it. What I was sensitive to, what made me uncomfortable, was Auntie Violet's dismissive tone. I knew she loved me; she and Uncle Paul were like parents to me. But wasn't my grandmother a part of me also? Wasn't there some common ground that could be talked about?

“But my grandmother didn't like white people,” I protested. “Look, she married a Filipino. In those days a Filipino was considered low as an Indian. And Grandpa Hilario is dark.”

“Well, she might not liked whites, but she must not liked herself, too. She didn't want to claim all of what she was. Those people, well, besides they had no Indian upbringing really. No language. I know those people. Laugh at us, but others are laughing at them. To whites they're nothing either.”

Violet shifted in her chair, tugged at the ends of her white cotton blouse. “Viv,” she said, “remember what's his name's mother, how she act when she seen us downtown that time? I felt like saying … I just wouldn't lower myself to THAT level.”

Just then a woman screamed from the house across the way. There was a loud crash, a spilling of things, as if a table had been overturned, and the music stopped.

“Oh,” Violet sighed, blowing smoke. “How embarrassing. Gives Indians a bad name.”

I looked down at the oilcloth and the Tupperware bowls of leftovers from dinner. Beans, fried chicken, salad, a plate of cold tortillas. Auntie Violet's pink poodle salt-and-pepper shakers. I looked at her row of my grandmother's photographs. My grandmother, Evelyn Hilario, looking up to Auntie Violet in at least a half-dozen different ways. All of us, I thought, fighting each other. I reached into the plastic shopping bag for another photograph, one where my grandmother might look more “Indian.”

Families bickering. Families arguing amongst themselves, drawing lines, maintaining old boundaries. Who is in. Who is not. Gossip. Jealousy. Drinking. Love. The ties that bind. The very human need to belong, to be worthy and valued. Families. Who is Indian. Who is not. Families bound by history and blood. This is the stuff, the fabric of my Indian community. It is what I found in Louise Erdrich's Chippewa community as I read Love Medicine.

In the first chapter of the novel Albertine Johnson comes home to her reservation after hearing the news of her Aunt June's death. Albertine is one of Erdrich's seven narrators whose interrelated stories readers follow throughout the novel. The death of June Kashpaw becomes the occasion around which the narrators tell their stories, stories that chronicle in a variety of ways life on and around the North Dakota Chippewa reservation. As Albertine comes home, readers witness with her the general reservation setting and the interpersonal dynamics of her family. When I found Albertine caught in the middle of her mother and aunt's bickering about who was white and who was Indian, I immediately thought of the time I came home and spent the night showing Auntie Violet picture after picture of my grandmother. So much seemed familiar.

“That white girl,” Mama went on, “she's built like a truckdriver. She won't keep King long. Lucky you're slim, Albertine.”

“Jeez, Zelda!” Aurelia came in from the next room. “Why can't you just leave it be. So she's white. What about the Swede? How do you think Albertine feels hearing you talk like this when her Dad was white?”

“I feel fine,” I said. “I never knew him.”

I understood what Aurelia meant though—I was light, clearly a breed.

“My girl's an Indian,” Zelda emphasized. “I raised her an Indian, and that's what she is.”

“Never said no different.” Aurelia grinned, not the least put out, hitting me with her elbow. “She's lots better looking than most Kashpaws.”

(LM [Love Medicine] 23)

The bickering about who and what is or is not Indian is not the only phenomenon about Albertine's Chippewa reservation and family that made me think of home. There is the drinking and associated violence. And the bickering, gossiping, and drinking Albertine introduces readers to in the first chapter continue throughout the novel. The general scene readers walk into with Albertine does not change particularly, even though, as some critics (McKenzie 1986; Gleason 1987) suggest, certain characters seem to triumph over it. Images and sounds, bits and pieces of conversations, people and places from home and from the novel came together and mixed in my mind. Albertine in a bar, “sitting before [her] third or fourth Jellybean, which is anisette, grain alcohol, a lit match, and a small wet explosion in the brain” (LM 155). My cousin Elna seated in the neon light of an Indian bar on lower Fourth Street in Santa Rosa. Marie Lazarre Kashpaw responding to the gossip about her: “I just laugh, don't let them get a wedge in. Then I turn the tables on them, because they don't know how many goods I have collected in town” (LM 70). My Auntie Marguerita: “Ah, let them hags talk. Who are they? Just women who kept the streets of lower Fourth warm.” “My girl's an Indian.” “Your grandmother didn't want to be an Indian.” Albertine jumping on June's drunken son King and biting a hole in his ear to keep him from drowning his wife in the kitchen sink and the fighting that follows and the cherished fresh-baked pies getting smashed: “Torn open. Black juice bleeding through the crusts” (LM 38). The loud crash, a spilling of things, as if a table had been overturned.

Drinking, fighting each other.

I began asking questions, if at first only to sort things out. Are these two communities, one in northern California and one in North Dakota, really that similar?¹ Are these conditions and scenes the same for all American Indians? Is this situation the common ground, finally, on which over three hundred different nations and cultures meet? Is there more to see and know about this situation than Erdrich has painted? Where does all of this come from, this bickering, this age-old family rivalry and pain?

This last question brought me back to the feuding families in Love Medicine: the Kashpaws, the Lazarres, the Lamartines, and the Morrisseys. They reflected in their quarrels and pain my own relatives and the families on the Kashaya reservation feuding with other Kashaya families and with Coast Miwok families from the southern territories.

I thought again of the history of the Kashaya and the Miwok families. The Coast Miwoks in the southern territories suffered cultural and political domination early on. The Spanish missionized the Coast Miwoks and broke apart most of the tribes early in the nineteenth century. The northern Indians, the Kashaya Pomo who were colonized by the Russians, were not affected in the same ways. The Kashaya were virtually enslaved by the Russians, but they were not converted to Christianity, nor were they broken apart as a tribe. The Miwoks learned Spanish and changed their ways earlier and faster than the Kashaya Pomo to the north. They had to. No wonder the Coast Miwok people “don't have no one speaking their language now.”² No wonder my grandmother wasn't Indian in ways Auntie Violet is. Still, what the Coast Miwok and Kashaya Pomo people have in common, albeit in somewhat different forms and situations, is that history of cultural and political domination by European and Euro-American invaders. Today so much of our pain, whether we are Kashaya or Miwok or both, seems associated with that history, not just in our general material poverty but also in the ways we have internalized the domination. Low self-esteem. A sense of powerlessness. Alienation from both past and present, the Indian world and the white world, and from the ways the two worlds commingle. We often judge ourselves in terms of the dominator's values (“laughing at ‘Indians’”) or create countervalues with which to judge ourselves (“they act white”; “they're mixed, light-skinned”). We internalize the oppression we have felt and, all too often, become oppressor-like to ourselves.

So one answer, at least, to my question regarding the origins and perpetuation of family bickering and pain at home is internalized oppression. I began seeing signs of internalized oppression as I remembered again people and events at home on the Kashaya Pomo reservation and in the town of Santa Rosa. Our quarrelling, name-calling, self-abuse. And when I looked back at Love Medicine, I found the same signs reflected from my community. And couldn't this be the case? Just as Erdrich's Indian community reflected in ways my Indian community, might not my community with its history reflect that of Erdrich's in her novel? After all, the Chippewa Indians, on whose stories Erdrich's fiction is based, suffered European and Euro-American domination also.

But to answer my question about whether the concept of internalized oppression as I see it pertaining to my community can be applied to Erdrich's fictional Chippewa community, I must turn back to my first questions. Are the two respective Indian communities really that similar? Is life on and around the Kashaya Pomo reservation the same as life on and around Erdrich's fictional Chippewa reservation? Are the conditions and scenes I have noted about both my community and Erdrich's in Love Medicine the same for all American Indian communities? I think of Auntie Violet arranging photographs of my grandmother and seeing in the photographs what she wanted to see, what she knew to be true, and of how I might be doing the same thing with respect to Love Medicine. How might I be perpetuating biases, limiting communication and understanding, rather than undoing biases and opening communication and understanding? My community and that in Erdrich's text do not exist side by side, nor do they necessarily reflect one another in the manner I describe, independently of me. As a reader, and ultimately as the writer of this book, I position the mirror so that certain reflections occur. I am the reader of both my community and the written text. How am I reading? Am I merely projecting my experience and ideas from my community onto the text? Am I thus framing or closing the text in ways that silence how it might inform me? What about the cross-cultural issues between Kashaya Pomo culture and Chippewa culture? What do I know of Chippewa life? Again, are these two different communities really so similar that I can make generalizations suitable for both?

Current discussion regarding reading cross-cultural literatures centers on these same questions. How do we read and make sense of literatures produced by authors who represent in their work and are members of cultures different from our own? If, say, we compare and contrast themes or character motivation, how are we comparing and contrasting? What of our biases as readers? What of the ways we hold the mirror between a canonical text such as Hamlet and a text such as Leslie Silko's Ceremony? Can we read these different texts in the same ways? In this [essay] I want to continue relating how my reading of Love Medicine helped me to recognize and think about (and ultimately talk about) what Erdrich's character Albertine Johnson felt as the “wet blanket of sadness coming down over us all” (LM 29). To relate the story of my reading, I must also discuss my own reading, asking how I read or how anyone reads American Indian literatures written by American Indians. Remember, as many of my questions suggest, my being Indian does not necessarily privilege me as a reader of any and all American Indian texts. My discussions and stories, then, while concerned with my reading of Love Medicine, contribute to current discussions regarding reading of American Indian literatures in particular and cross-cultural literatures in general.

What makes written literatures cross-cultural depends as much on their content and production as on their being read by a particular reader or community of readers. Many Americans from marginal cultures with specific languages and mores write in a particular variety of English or integrate their culture-specific language with an English that makes their written works accessible in some measure to a large English-speaking readership. These writers mediate not only different languages and narrative forms, but, in the process, the cultural experiences they are representing, which become the content of their work. Their work represents a dialogue between themselves and different cultural norms and forms and also, within their text, between, say, characters or points of view. This cross-cultural interaction represented by the texts is extended to readers, many of whom are unfamiliar with the writers' particular cultural experiences and who must, in turn, mediate between what they encounter in the texts and what they know from their specific cultural experiences. As David Bleich observes regarding literature in general, the texts are both representations of interaction and the occasion for interaction (418). Of course this general truth can become more pronounced and obvious in situations where literatures that represent cross-cultural experiences in their content and production are read by readers unfamiliar with the experiences.³ And here the questions surface regarding how readers respond to what they encounter in texts. In their practices of reading and interpretation do they reflect on their making sense of the texts? Do they account for their interaction with what constitutes the content and making of the written texts? In their practices of reading are they limiting or opening intercultural communication and understanding, undoing biases or maintaining and creating them anew?

Scholars who study American Indian oral literatures have become increasingly aware of the fact that the oral texts they read have been shaped and altered not only by those people (for the most part non-Indian) who have collected, translated, and transcribed them but also by the Indians who have told them to these people. As noted, Arnold Krupat defines narrated Indian autobiographies, where a recorder-editor records and transcribes what was given orally by the Indian subject, as original bicultural compositions (31). His definition holds for many, perhaps most, of the American Indian oral texts—songs, stories, prayers—read and studied. Scholars such as Dennis Tedlock and Barre Toelken account for and question their encounters with both the Indian speakers from whom they collect texts and the texts themselves, which they transcribe and attempt to understand.⁴ At its best their work provides a record of the various dialogues they have with the Indians and the Indians' texts. Readers have an account of how these scholars collected the Indian material and how their transcriptions and analysis continue the life of the material in given cross-cultural ways.

Such is rarely the case for Indian literatures written in English by Indians, or for what I am calling in this essay American Indian written literatures.⁵ Most critics neither question nor account for the ways they make sense of what they encounter as readers of these written literatures. Some critics do consider the ways certain Indian writers mediate, or make use of, their respective cultural backgrounds or specific themes considered to be generally “Indian.” But these critics do not seriously consider or reflect upon how they are making sense of and putting together the writers' cultural backgrounds and the writers' texts. They attempt to account for the interaction represented in the texts, but not for their own interaction. They might, for example, attempt in their various approaches to locate and account for an “Indian” presence or “Indian” themes in a text, but they do not consider how they discovered or created what they define as Indian. Citing Michael Glowinski's observation about so much contemporary literary criticism, Bleich notes that critics provide “a history of the literature, while rejecting [their] own historicity” (402). The result is that they do not see how their practices of reading and interpretation are limiting or opening intercultural communication and understanding. They don't see themselves and their work as an integral and continuing part of the cross-cultural exchange. Their practices are characterized by one-sided communication: they inform the texts, but the texts do not inform them and their critical agendas, or at least not in ways they make apparent.

Lester A. Standiford, in his essay “Worlds Made of Dawn: Characteristic Image and Incident in Native American Imaginative Literature,” notes that “it is important that we seek a greater understanding of [Native American imaginative written] literature” (169) and that to gain a greater understanding we must not enforce “old assumptions on those new aspects of a literature that draws from sources outside the Anglo-American heritage” (170). Standiford's strategy for approaching and, subsequently, for helping other readers gain a greater understanding of these cross-cultural texts is to use a generalization gleaned from his studies about Indians and their literatures to find and hence account for that in the texts which is “Indian.” Standiford writes:

I will be speaking of contemporary Indian American poetry and fiction according to this archetypal concept of the poet as shaman who “speaks for wild animals, the spirits of plants, the spirits of mountains, of watersheds” (Snyder, p. 3). If you must have a worldly function of the poet, base it on this example from Snyder's remarks: “The elaborate, yearly, cyclical production of grand ritual dramas in the societies of Pueblo Indians … can be seen as a process by which the whole society consults the non-human powers and allows some individuals to step totally out of their human roles to put on the mask, costume, and mind of Bison, Bear, Squash, Corn, or Pleiades; to re-enter the human circle in that form and by song, mime, and dance, convey a greeting from that other realm. Thus a speech on the floor of congress from a whale” (p. 3). … Poetry that speaks with the voice of the whale resounds with the true power of Indian American imaginative literature.

(171)⁶

Standiford typically moves thus from a generalization about Indians to a citation from an Indian or authoritative non-Indian to support and make legitimate his use of generalization to identify and understand things Indian in the text(s). He then further generalizes or restates the previous generalization, eventually returning to the written Indian text(s). See the pattern again within the following paragraph:

Here [in Durango Mendoza's short story “Summer Water and Shirley”] the key to understanding is the Native American concept of the great and inherent power of the word. Because the boy [in Mendoza's story] can force his will out through his thoughts and into words, he succeeds in his task. This sense of the power of the word derives from the thousands of years of the Native American oral literary tradition. From its labyrinthine and tenuous history the word arrives in the present with inestimable force. As Scott Momaday points out in his essay “The Man Made of Words,” the oral form exists always just one generation from extinction and is all the more precious on that account. And this sense of care engendered for the songs and stories and their words naturally leads to an appreciation of the power of the word itself.

(183)

Using a similar strategy, Paula Gunn Allen, renowned Laguna Pueblo/Sioux literary critic and poet, summarizes (interprets) what she saw in Cache Creek Pomo Dreamer and basket-weaver Mabel McKay and in Kashaya Pomo Dreamer and prophet Essie Parrish and then makes generalizations based on what she saw to further develop and support what she calls a “tribal-feminist” or “feminist-tribal” (222) approach to Indian women's written literatures. Allen says that “the teachings of [Mabel McKay and Essie Parrish] provide clear information about the ancient ritual power of Indian women” (204). She summarizes what she heard Mrs. McKay say during a basket-weaving demonstration as follows:

Mrs. McCabe [sic] spoke about the meaning of having a tradition, about how a woman becomes a basketmaker among her people—a process that is guided entirely by a spirit-teacher when the woman is of the proper age. It is not transmitted to her through human agency. For Mrs. McCabe, having a tradition means having a spirit-teacher or guide. That is the only way she used the term “tradition” and the only context in which she understood it. Pomo baskets hold psychic power, spirit power; so a basketweaver weaves a basket for a person at the direction of her spirit guide.

(204)

Allen then summarizes what she heard from Mrs. Parrish on a “field trip with [Allen's] students to the Kashia⁷ Pomo reservation” (203) and what she heard and saw in the documentary films on Mrs. Parrish and Kashaya religious activities:

In one of [the films], Dream Dances of the Kashia Pomo, [Essie Parrish] and others dance and display the dance costumes that are made under her direction, appliquéd with certain dream-charged designs that hold the power she brings from the spirit world. She tells about the role of the Dreamer, who is the mother of the people not because she gives physical birth (though Essie Parrish has done that) but because she gives them life through the power of dreaming—that is, she en-livens them. Actually, the power of giving physical birth is a consequence of the power of giving nonmaterial or, you might say, ‘astral’ birth. …

The Dreamer, then, is the center of psychic/spiritual unity of the people. … In another film, Pomo Shaman, Mrs. Parrish demonstrates a healing ritual, in which she uses water and water power, captured and focused through her motions, words, and use of material water, to heal a patient. She demonstrates the means of healing, and in the short narrative segments, she repeats in English some of the ritual. It is about creation and creating and signifies the basic understanding the tribal people generally have about how sickness comes about and how its effects can be assuaged, relieved, and perhaps even removed.

(204-6)

Allen relates other observations she has about Indian women and shamanism from a few other tribes (e.g., Kiowa) and proclaims finally:

One of the primary functions of the shaman is her effect on tribal understandings of “women's roles,” which in large part are traditional in Mrs. McCabe's [sic] sense of the word. It is the shaman's connection to the spirit world that Indian women writers reflect most strongly in our poetry and fiction.

(208)

It seems that in Allen's strategy to develop and support a tribal-feminist or feminist-tribal approach to American Indian women's written literatures—an approach that can both locate an Indian (woman) presence in the texts and critique patriarchal tendencies to suppress Indian women's power and subjectivity—she replicates in practice what she sets out to criticize. Allen does not question how she reads each of the Pomo women's words and performances she translates and discusses in her scholarship. She does not examine the women's particular histories and cultures to inform her ideas regarding what she saw and heard. She says these women provide “clear information about the ancient ritual power of Indian women,” but in actuality the Dreaming and other related “ancient” or “traditional” activities associated with Mabel McKay and Essie Parrish that Allen cites to substantiate her claims are tied to the nineteenth-century Bole Maru (Dream Dance) cult, a revivalistic movement discussed in Chapter 4. Though many, if not most, of the more recent Dreamers have been women, the first Bole Maru Dreamer, Richard Taylor, and many of the earlier Dreamers were men. The Kashaya have had four Dreamers in this order: Jack Humbolt, Big José, Annie Jarvis, Essie Parrish. My grandmother's grandfather, Tom Smith, who was half Coast Miwok and half Kashaya Pomo, was one of the most influential Dreamers and doctors throughout the Coast Miwok and southern Pomo territories. How does what Essie Parrish demonstrates in her healing show “the basic understanding the tribal peoples generally have about how sickness comes about”? Which tribal peoples? Where? When? Neither Mabel McKay nor Essie Parrish is allowed to talk back to or inform Allen's conclusions about them. Neither woman has an individual voice represented in the text. Allen provides not direct quotations. Like Standiford, Allen has shaped what she heard and saw to inform the Indian presence in the texts she reads.

How then can Allen's readers take seriously any account she might give of the interaction represented in Indian women's written literatures or of her interaction with the Indian women's texts she reads? While Allen opens important and necessary discussions about American Indian women and their written literatures which make a significant contribution to American Indian and feminist scholarship, she, perhaps inadvertently, closes discussions with those women and the texts she sets out to illumine.⁸

William Gleason, in his essay “‘Her Laugh an Ace’: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine,” works to avoid the tendency to generalize across tribal cultures and histories that is associated with the work of Standiford and Allen. Gleason looks at the ways Trickster, which Gleason refers to as a “pan-Indian character” (60), is presented and functions in Chippewa stories and legends. But then Gleason takes what he has gleaned from his studies of Trickster in Chippewa culture and lore and, without reflecting on how he understood what he studied or on how he uses it in his reading of Love Medicine, he frames what he finds in the novel.⁹ He says of Erdrich's character Gerry Nanapush:

Gerry is Trickster, literally. Alan R. Velie records that “the Chippewa Trickster is called Wenebojo, Manabozho, or Nanabush, depending on how authors recorded the Anishinabe word.” This Trickster (as is true for most tribes) is able to alter his shape as he wishes. … The first time we meet the adult Gerry he performs a miraculous escape: though spotted by Officer Lovchik in the confines of a “cramped and littered bar … Gerry was over the backside of the booth and out the door before Lovchik got close enough to make a positive identification.”

(61)

Later, in another scene from the novel, Gleason finds that:

By … teaming with Lipsha to defeat King in a quick card game (“five-card punk,” Gerry says), Gerry unwittingly re-enacts a classic Chippewa Trickster story. For, according to legend, Manabozho/Nanabush journeys until he meets his principal enemy, “the great gambler,” whom he defeats, saving his own life and the spirit of the woodland tribes from “the land of darkness.”

(62)

Here the strategy and the end result are the same as in Standiford and Allen: nail down the Indian in order to nail down the text. The Indian is fixed, readable in certain ways, so that when we find him or her in a written text we have a way to fix and understand the Indian and hence the text.

I am not suggesting that whatever these critics—Standiford, Allen, Gleason—might be saying is necessarily untrue, but that whatever truth they advance about Indians or Indian written literatures is contingent upon their purposes and biases as readers and their particular relationship with the worlds of what they read or otherwise learn about Indians and with the worlds of the written texts they study. And here I am not suggesting that critical activity is impossible and that critics and other readers cannot inform the Indian worldviews and Indian written texts they encounter. What I am suggesting is that the various Indian worldviews (and whatever else comprises the Indian written texts) as well as the texts themselves also can inform the critics and their critical enterprises, and that genuine critical activity—where both the critics' histories and assumptions as well as those of the texts are challenged and opened—cannot occur unless critics can both inform and be informed by that which they encounter. At some level or at some point in the encounter and interaction between critic and text, there is a dialogue of sorts, even if it is merely the critic responding (dialoguing) by saying, “this is what you are saying to me and I won't hear anything else,” that is, responding in a way that prohibits the text from talking back to and informing the critic about what the text said. But the critics I have cited, and most other literary critics for that matter, do not record their dialogue or even the nature of the dialogue they may have had with what they are reading. Instead, they report the outcome, what they thought and concluded.

Of course, by looking at the essays of Standiford, Allen, and Gleason, much of what characterizes their work as critics becomes apparent. As I have noted, these critics tend to generalize, to “circumscribe and totalise” (Murray 117) the Others' cultures and worldviews in order to “circumscribe and totalise” the Others' written texts. Each uses, most plainly in their encounters with the Indians' cultures and worldviews, what Johannes Fabian has called the “ethnographic present tense.” As David Murray observes:

The effect of this is to create a textual space, in which a culture is shown operating, which is not the same historically bound present as the one in which the reader and the writer live, a product of grammar (the present tense) rather than history (the present). Accompanying this ethnographic present tense is a generalising of individual utterances, so that they illustrate an argument, or fulfill a pattern, rather than function in the context of any dialogue.

(141)

When Standiford, quoting Snyder, describes “this archetypical concept of the poet as shaman ‘who speaks for …’” or when he states “this sense of the power of the word derives from the thousands of years of the Native American oral literary tradition,” he is creating this space Murray describes. Note how Allen describes the work and art of Mabel McKay and Essie Parrish, and how she proclaims “one of the primary functions of the shaman is her effect on tribal understandings of ‘women's roles,’ which in large part are traditional in Mrs. McCabe's [sic] sense of the word.” Gleason quotes Velie: “‘The Chippewa Trickster is called. … This Trickster (as is true for most tribes) is able to …’” Again, these critics overlook their own historicity; they remove themselves from the present of the occasions of their interaction with whatever they encounter and create in their reports a world from which they attempt to separate themselves and purport to understand and describe plain as day. The communication is one-sided and represented textually so that it stays that way. What would happen if Standiford were to question an Indian shaman or storyteller from a particular tribe? How might the content of the Indian's responses and the Indian's language and history inform Standiford's “archetypical concept of the poet as shaman”? How might the Indian's responses, language, and history illuminate the gaps in Standiford's conclusions, his generalizations about Indians? In what ways is the Indian more or less than the poet/shaman who communes with nature? And wouldn't answers to these questions, or at least a consideration of these questions, at least afford Standiford the opportunity to see himself present as a biased thinker tending to shape in certain ways what he hears or reads? Wouldn't he then have the opportunity to see and question how his critical activity opens or closes intercultural communication or how it maintains and creates biases about American Indians? If Mabel McKay and Essie Parrish could talk back to Allen, if Allen could know more of their personal lives and particular cultures and histories, wouldn't she have, or have the opportunity to have, a broader understanding of two women as well as of herself and her critical practices? Might she not see herself as present, as an Indian woman silencing in certain ways those women she wishes to defend and give voice to? How might other elements of Chippewa culture, and the ways Erdrich might understand them, inform both an understanding of the Chippewa Trickster and the character of Gerry Nanapush? Couldn't these other elements inform William Gleason and his approach?

At this point one might ask why readers of American Indian written literatures seem to be generally less reflexive in their work than contemporary readers of American Indian oral literatures such as Tedlock and Toelken. Perhaps because the former are written in English and intended for a reading audience, readers feel that they have the texts carte blanche, that the cross-cultural elements that comprise these texts are somehow transparent (Murray 117), or can be made so, because the writers have provided the readers a medium (English) for looking at them.¹⁰ Perhaps those who study oral literatures—folklorists, anthropologists—are more aware of the current discussions in their respective disciplines regarding translation, representation, and interpretation of the Others and their works of art and literature. Perhaps readers of written literatures cannot escape the tenets of New Criticism and text positivism. I am not sure. But given what constitutes Indian oral literatures and Indian written literatures—songs, stories, as-told-to autobiographies—readers must consider the worlds of both the Indian speaker and the recorder-editor who has mediated the speaker's spoken words for the reader. With Indian written literatures the Indian writer is both Indian speaker and cross-cultural mediator, and readers must consider the Indian writer's specific culture and experience and how the writer has mediated that culture and experience for the reader. In both situations—with oral literatures and with written literatures—readers must interact with the worlds of the texts which are cross-cultural, comprised of many elements foreign to the worlds of the readers.

The task is to read American Indian written literatures in a way that establishes a dialogue between readers and the texts that works to explore their respective worlds and to expose the intermingling of the multiple voices within and between readers and what they read. The objective here is not to have complete knowledge of the text or the self as reader, not to obtain or tell the complete story of one or the other or both, but to establish and report as clearly as possible that dialogue where the particular reader or groups of readers inform and are informed by the text(s). The report, or written criticism, then, would be a kind of story, a representation of a dialogue that is extended to critics and other readers who in turn inform and are informed by the report. Thus in the best circumstances reading and criticism of American Indian written literatures become the occasion for a continuous opening of culturally diverse worlds in contact with one another.

Of course any report, or piece of criticism, represents a dialogue of sorts that the critic has had with the text he or she has read, even if the dialogue is presented as mere conclusions, and that report is extended to critics and other readers who will dialogue with it. But at each step of the way—reading, criticism, response to criticism—the critics as readers, as I suggested above, remove themselves from the encounter, from the present of the occasion of their interaction with what they encounter, so that by the time they write their reports they may not see or think about how they have interacted and are interacting, how their response may be, for example, “This is what you are saying to me and I won't hear anything else.” The Other, the text or whatever else has been encountered, is that which can remind the critics of their presence, of their own differences and culture-specific boundaries. If readers don't hear the texts, if they don't notice and explore those instances where the texts do not make sense to them, where the texts might question, qualify, and subvert the readers' agendas, the readers systematically forsake the opportunity not only to gain a broader understanding of themselves, of their own historicity, but also of the text. Criticism that reveals the questions and problems of reading, evoked by the experience of reading itself, can help illuminate for the critic and for others what has made for cross-cultural understanding or misunderstanding.

More often than not it is something strange and unfamiliar that can make us aware of our boundaries. For many non-Indian readers of American Indian written literatures it may be elements of a particular Indian culture represented in the text that stop them and ask them to think and rethink how they read and make sense of the Others. The same perhaps could be said for Indians reading other Indians' written literatures.

In my own case, as I continued to read and think about Love Medicine. I found myself coming back to the concept of internalized oppression. Erdrich's fictional Chippewa characters manifested the symptoms of this disease just as plainly as many people I knew and was thinking about from home. Marie Lazarre Kashpaw, Albertine Johnson's grandmother and one of the most notable characters in the novel, continually wants acceptance in terms of others' definitions. She believes others' ideas about her and sees no value in who or what she has been, where she comes from, her heritage. Nector Kashpaw, in looking back at his first encounter with Marie who would become his wife, says of her: “Marie Lazarre is the youngest daughter of a family of horse-thieving drunks. … She is just a skinny white girl from a family so low you cannot even think they are in the same class as Kashpaws” (LM 58-59). To a large extent Marie accepts this view of herself. She says early in the novel that “the only Lazarre I had any use for was Lucille [Marie's sister]” (LM 65). And when she overcomes the fear of losing her husband, Nector Kashpaw, to Lulu Lamartine, she says, “I could leave off my fear of ever being a Lazarre” (LM 128).

Marie not only internalizes others' ideas about her, but attempts to beat those others on their own terms in order to gain self-worth in their eyes. As a young girl Marie was determined to go “up there [to the convent] to pray as good as they [the black robe women] could” (LM 40). She saw the convent “on top of the highest hill. … Gleaming white. So white the sun glanced off in dazzling display to set forms whirling behind your eyelids. The face of God you could hardly look at” (LM 41). Of course she realizes in retrospect that she was under an illusion, and, in a hilarious and ironic manner, she does beat the nuns at their own game, getting them to worship her, “gain[ing] the altar of a saint” (LM 53). As a young married woman, Marie reveals her plan: “I decided I was going to make [Nector] into something big on this reservation. I didn't know what, not yet; I only knew when he got there they would not whisper ‘dirty Lazarre’ when I walked down from church. They would wish they were the woman I was. Marie Kashpaw” (LM 66). Marie succeeds: Nector becomes tribal chairman. Then Marie goes to visit Sister Leopolda at the convent, not to see Leopolda but, as Marie says, “to let her see me. … For by now I was solid class. Nector was tribal chairman. My children were well behaved, and they were educated too. … I pulled out the good wool dress I would wear up the hill … It was a good dress, manufactured, of a classic material. It was the kind of solid dress no Lazarre ever wore” (LM 113). Marie battles with Leopolda and sees, finally, the limits of her endeavors to win Leopolda's approval. Marie learns something about love and forgiveness, which she shows when Nector comes home from Lulu Lamartine. Yet as much as learning this lesson may constitute a personal triumph for Marie, it does not seem to help her come to terms with herself as a Lazarre, with the self-hatred associated with her background, which appears to influence so much of her behavior.

Marie says, “I don't have that much Indian blood” (LM 40), which, incidentally, is one reason she felt she could “pray as good as [the nuns] could” (LM 40). Indeed, Marie is light-skinned, a mixed blood so fair that Nector in his first encounter with her calls her a “skinny white girl” (LM 40) as an insult. At the time, face to face with another Indian, Marie would have taken Nector's comment as an insult, but Marie knows that among her Indian people white physical attributes are valued. She says: “I could have had any damn man on the reservation at that time. I looked good. And I looked white” (LM 45). She knows how to insult Nector by hissing at him, “Lemme go, you damn Indian. … You stink to hell” (LM 59). These characters at times both judge themselves and others in terms of the oppressor's values (e.g., white physical attributes), which they have internalized, and hate the oppressor and any sign (e.g., “skinny white girl”) of the oppressor in their own ranks. Racism and hatred are at once directed outward and inward. These characters can't win for losing. Again in the scene cited at the start of this chapter, where Albertine Johnson is caught in the middle of her mother and aunt's bickering, her mother implies that King's wife and white people in general are undesirable. Her Aunt Aurelia says that Albertine is “lots better looking than most Kashpaws,” implying that because Albertine is a mixed blood, “light, clearly a breed,” she is better looking and more attractive than the full-blood Kashpaw side of the family.

These characters' gossip and verbal abuse of others simultaneously work to belittle the other and to elevate the self. They take inventories of others' looks (e.g., light or dark skin) and maintain arsenals of information that can be used against others at any time. Marie Lazarre Kashpaw, responding to the gossip about her, says: “I just laugh, don't let them get a wedge in. Then I turn the tables on them, because they don't know how many goods I have collected in town.” Of course, when it's wrong to be Indian and wrong to be white, when these people can judge one another in terms of the oppressors' values and in terms of their own countervalues, they don't have to look far to find faults in themselves and others. When Albertine Johnson thinks of her family and life on and around the reservation, she thinks of the phrase “Patient Abuse,” a title from her nursing textbook. She says: “There are two ways you could think of that title. One was obvious to a nursing student, and the other was obvious to a Kashpaw” (LM 7).

As I also noted earlier, this patient abuse can be physical as well as verbal. Albertine has been home only a few hours when she finds June's son King, who is drunk, beating up his white wife and attempting to drown her in the kitchen sink. King constantly tells stories about his duty in Vietnam; he bills himself as a war hero in an attempt to remedy his low self-esteem, to garner for himself attention and significance (again on others' terms). As his wife points out, the truth is that King “never got off the West Coast” (LM 239). It seems that when his storytelling does not gain for him the attention he needs from others, or when it is questioned, he resorts to violence to feel power and self-worth. Feeling both guilty about his oftentimes violent past with June and hopeless about his life in general, Gordie Kashpaw drinks himself into oblivion: “Everything worked against him. He could not remember when this had started to happen. Probably from the first always and ever afterward, things had worked against him. … He saw clearly that the setup of life was rigged and he was trapped” (LM 179). While driving drunk, Gordie hits a deer and then, assuming it is dead, that he has killed it, he puts it in his back seat. The deer, still alive, raises its head, and Gordie clobbers it with a tire iron and believes he has killed June. In his drunken stupor he has acted out his self-fulfilling prophecy: he has killed June, he is guilty, nothing works out right for him, and he deserves to be punished. He finds his way to the convent, and outside a nun's window he says, “I come to take confession. I need to confess it. … Bless me father for I have sinned” (LM 184).

Internalized oppression cuts a wide swath. The oppression that occurred during the colonial period has been internalized by the oppressed in ways that the oppressed in postcolonial periods can become agents of their own oppression and destruction. Ironically and inadvertently we work to complete what the oppressor began. At times certain characters sense the depth and breadth of this internalized oppression as a deep, unconscious fear. Albertine says of King: “He's scared underneath” (LM 35). Lipsha Morrissey, King's half brother and June's other son, asks what King is afraid of, but Albertine can only say she “really didn't know” (LM 36). Albertine can't spell out what causes King's fear or, for that matter, that “wet blanket of sadness coming down over us all.” She does not have a way to talk about it. Lipsha wonders “if Higher Power turned its back, if we got to yell, or if we just don't speak its language. … How else could I explain what all I had seen in my short life—King smashing his first in things, Gordie drinking himself down to the Bismarck hospitals, or Aunt June left by a white man to wander off in the snow. How else to explain” (LM 195). Indeed, the sadness is vast, ubiquitous. Isn't its trajectory the history of Chippewa and white inter-relations?

Doubtless internalized oppression is not the only way to think about the sadness, and certainly there is much more to this novel than its sadness. William Gleason sees in the novel that “love, assisted by humor, triumphs over pain” (51). And James McKenzie suggests that June's son Lipsha “completes [the journey home June had begun] some three years and thirteen chapters later in the novel's final scene” (58). McKenzie continues:

Having discovered and embraced his identity and delivered his newly found father—Gerry Nanapush, the embodiment of Chippewa life—to safety in Canada, [Lipsha] heads home to the reservation. Crossing the same river Henry Junior has drowned in (Lipsha calls it the “boundary river” (p. 27), which could only be the Red River, separating North Dakota and Minnesota), he stops to stretch and, looking at the water, remembers the traditional Chippewa custom of offering tobacco to the water. This leads him to thoughts of June, “sunken cars” (p. 271)—clearly a reference to Henry Junior—and the ancient ocean that once covered the Dakotas “and solved all our problems” (p. 272). The thought of drowning all Chippewa problems appeals to him briefly: “It was easy still to imagine us beneath them most unreasonable waves” (p. 272), but he quickly dispels this image of tribal suicide and chooses a more reasonable course. He hops in the car and heads back to the center of his tribal culture, the reservation. Lipsha's concluding words ring a change on the sentence describing his mother's death: “So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home” (p. 272).

(58-59)

This final scene and the novel's ending in general make me consider again the ways I am thinking about the novel and its sadness. Lipsha happens to be in the right place at the right time. Three-hundred pound Gerry Nanapush, recently escaped from prison, shows up at King's apartment where Lipsha is visiting. Lipsha helps Gerry escape to Canada, and en route to the border Lipsha's relation to Gerry is made loud and clear when Gerry says to Lipsha: “You're a Nanapush man. … We all have this odd thing with our hearts” (LM 271). Of course Lipsha and readers learn Gerry is Lipsha's father a little earlier, when Lipsha tells how Lulu Lamartine told him the truth. And as McKenzie notes, Lipsha and Gerry each (like Lulu Lamartine, Gerry's mother and Lipsha's grandmother) “partakes in godlike qualities” (60). Lipsha has “the touch” (LM 190), the power to soothe pains with his fingers, and Gerry, as Gleason notes, is able to “perform … miraculous escape[s].” Once when he was pursued by the local police, “his [three-hundred pound] body lifted like a hot-air balloon filling suddenly” (LM 169). Magically he stuffs himself into the trunk of the car he and Lipsha won from King and stays hidden there until Lipsha has driven a safe distance from the law. When Gerry and Lipsha get to the border, where Lipsha will drop Gerry off, “they [hold] each other's arms, tight and manly” (LM 271). Lipsha then turns around and, as McKenzie noted, crosses the water that his uncle, Henry Junior, drowned in. Lipsha heads back to his reservation, to his home. Lipsha says: “The sun flared. … The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home” (LM 272).

I have trouble with all this.

Can I take this ending as a triumph for Lipsha given the ways and extent to which I see internalized oppression in Erdrich's fictional Chippewa community, in Lipsha's “home”? Has Lipsha or any of the other characters come to terms with the “blanket of sadness” in a way that they can get a handle on it, talk about it, recognize its scope? My agenda and personal experience as a reader surface again, along with all my questions about reading. I come back to myself as mirror holder, as an interlocutor with the world of Love Medicine.

I go home again.

Like Lipsha I traveled far to find my father, and I too headed for home.

I had to go to southern California, over four hundred miles from my family's native homeland in northern California, where I was born and raised.

I worked from a tip my mother's younger brother, my uncle, had given me. I listened to gossip, took notes, followed leads, and found my father in a Laguna Beach high school yearbook. A dark-skinned man in a row of blondes. And I saw myself in that face. Without a doubt. Darker than me. But me nonetheless.

I interviewed several people who went to school with him and my mother. It was my mother's friends who verified what I suspected. Emilio Hilario was my father. They also told me that he had died, that I had missed him by about five years.

I had to find out from others what he couldn't tell me. But now I had names, telephone numbers, addresses. I found a half brother and uncle in town. My grandfather still lived in the old house “out in the canyon” where he had moved his wife and children nearly fifty years ago when he took a job as a kitchen worker in Victor Hugo's, a glamorous waterfront restaurant.

Going to the old house was something. After all these years to find a place that was home, where my own father had grown up, where he had a mother and father, a brother and sister, where he sat at a kitchen table, where he took off his shoes at night and dreamed. Years of wondering leveled now by the sight of a small, ordinary house set back a ways from the road. I turned in the driveway, past the metal mailbox that said HILARIO.

I was amazed by Grandpa, how small he was as he held me in his arms. A small, dark Filipino with quick black eyes holding his six-foot-two, blue-eyed grandson. But I lost track of him. I forgot his first words, “the oldest son of my oldest son,” and I forgot even that it was Grandpa who clutched my wrist and was leading me through the house. I was lost in the photographs. Photographs everywhere. High school graduation. Baby pictures. Family reunions. Weddings. Mostly black and white, except for the newer ones on top of the color TV. They lined the door frames, covered entire walls and the end tables on either side of the sofa. In Grandpa's bedroom there were several photos of my father and uncle in uniforms—football, Navy, Army. One of them caught my attention, a head shot of my father in his sailor's uniform. He was smiling, handsome, his white grin almost boyish. He wrote on the picture:

Dear Mom and Dad,
                    Had fun seeing you last week.
                                        Love,
                    Your Son
                                        Emilio                    May 15, 1951

He also saw my mother that week. Nine months later, February 12, 1952, he would have his first son.

Grandpa and I settled at the kitchen table. I took in other things: the faded beige kitchen walls, the odor of his pipe, the black dog at his side, his thick accent. I watched as he boiled water in an old pot, the kind that is tall with a spout and lid. “Your Grandma, she used this,” he said and poured water in a cup for instant coffee. “She used this to boil her water. Only thing she drank Hobo coffee, just boil the water and run it over the coffee in a strainer.” He set the pot on the stove then picked up a small stained strainer from the stove top. “This is it,” he said. “She sat right there in that chair next to the stove. She smoke and drink Hobo coffee. Here's her ashtray.” He held the small ceramic bowl in his hand then placed it neatly on the stove top with the strainer. He told me she died thirteen years ago. Obviously Grandpa had not changed a thing in the house.

“What happened to my father, Grandpa?”

I had heard my father died of a heart attack. But I wanted to hear it from Grandpa. Had he been sick a long time? Did he suffer?

Grandpa was at the stove watching me. I caught his eyes. He turned around and lit his pipe. Then all at once he put it down in a tin ashtray next to Grandma's ashtray on the stove top.

“Finish your coffee. Then we go to the cemetery,” Grandpa said.

We got on the 405 freeway, then went east through the city of Orange. We stopped at a supermarket and bought flowers, mixed bouquets, the kind you see road vendors selling. I could see now that Grandpa lived by routine. He had probably been coming to the same market, one of dozens we had passed, for thirteen years.

“Something with his heart,” Grandpa said. “All screwed up.”

I was startled, caught off guard when he spoke. He had been quiet, and now the rolling green cemetery lawns were in view. It took me a minute to realize he was talking about my father.

“Yeah,” he said. “Smoke too much. Fix his heart bad. Same thing with your grandmother. She smoke too much cigarettes. Get cancer. I tell 'em not to. Well …”

My grandmother and father are buried next to each other. The graves are close to the road. They are under a small cypress tree that marks the place for me. Grandpa performs a kind of ritual there. He leans over, and with his index finger on the raised letters of the metal grave plaque, he talks to the dead. That day, as always, he went to my grandmother first. He said: “Mom, here is your grandson. You didn't get to know him because …” He didn't finish the sentence. He turned to my father and said: “Son, you can rest now … Your boy is home.”

EMILIO HILARIO EVELYN HILARIO

In Laguna Beach I talked to more people who knew my father—friends, ex-wives, relatives. They told me he was charming, charismatic. He loved his family. He was a fine athlete at one time, a boxer who knocked down Floyd Patterson. But a few people told me that there was another side to him. The drinking and violence. He broke his first wife's jaw. In a drunken brawl he mistook a friend for an enemy and threw the friend out a second-story window. He talked badly about white people. All three of his wives were white. He was alcoholic, overweight, down on his luck when he died of a massive heart attack at fifty-two.

Growing up in Laguna Beach was not easy for any of the Hilario children. My Auntie Rita Hilario-Carter tells me that when she was in fourth grade her teacher told her to clean up another girl's urine. “She told me to do it because when I grew up I was going to be a maid,” Auntie Rita said. “I was the only brown child in the class.” Although the town exalted my father as an athlete, he was discouraged from dating the white daughters of the townspeople.

My father's cousin told me that near the end of his life he would call her sometimes late at night. She said he would be drunk and fighting with his last wife. “How should I kill this white bitch?” he'd holler over the phone. “Strangle her? Drown her?” My father's last wife told me that my father talked about a son he had somewhere in the world. “I want him to feel welcome if he ever finds his way home,” he told her. “I want him to know us.”

I thought of my mother and how she died shortly after I was born so that the truth never got back to Laguna Beach about what happened to her or me. Rumors. Gossip. No one had the full story. Auntie Rita said: “I always wondered what happened to Bunny. No one talked about it. It was hush-hush around our house. Of course I was only about twelve at the time. Bunny was so nice. I thought it was such a big deal that this older white girl would come and take me for ice cream. Hah, little did I know what else was going on!” Ironically, I was born in Santa Rosa, where my mother's mother took my mother to have me, four hundred miles from Laguna Beach, on the same land my father's mother left decades before. And I would be taken in by my father's mother's people. Where was home? Santa Rosa? Laguna Beach? The Kashaya Reservation?

Before I left Laguna Beach, I went back to Grandpa's house. I wanted to visit and say goodbye.

He was waiting for me. He had coffee ready. Two old photo albums, one on top of the other, were on the kitchen table. On a faded green cover I saw in an elaborate scroll the words “Family Album.” Grandpa sat next to me and opened the top album. He started talking about the assorted black and white photos. “This is your grandmother when I met her … Oh, that's her sister, Juanita … That's your great-grandma, the old Indian from up there, Old [Tom] Smith's daughter …” It was truly a miracle. Pieces of a puzzle fell together. With names, I now knew how I was connected to everyone I knew. I could trace my genealogy. Auntie Violet was actually my grandmother's cousin. I had dated a girl from the reservation who was my second cousin, my father's first cousin. Grandpa told me that he met Grandma in East Los Angeles. She had come from northern California to stay with her sister.

“Did she speak Indian, Grandpa? Did she tell any of the old-time stories?”

“Take what pictures you want,” he said. “Maybe those ladies up there [at Kashaya] can tell you something.”

We went through the second album, and then Grandpa found a plastic K-Mart shopping bag for me to put the photos in. I felt shy. I didn't want to take too many, leaving gaps all over Grandma's pages. I took my time and picked out a little over a dozen. Then I stood up and looked around one last time before I had to go.

The house wasn't the same as when I first walked in. It was familiar now, and not necessarily because I had been in the place before and knew its layout. It was the photos. The smiling faces. The uniforms. Party dresses. Sportcoats and ties. I kept thinking of what I heard from the people I talked to during the last few days. Grandpa caught me standing in the middle of the living room. He handed me the plastic bag of pictures.

“It's too bad,” he said. “I tell your father not to smoke. Your Grandma, too. It done 'em in. Too much smoking … Heart, you know. Cancer … I tell 'em not to.”

“Yeah,” I said and hugged him.

I had driven nearly five hundred miles by the time I reached Auntie Violet's place. Nine hours north from Laguna Beach on Highway 101 and then the long climb from Healdsburg to the reservation on top of the mountain. Still, I was wide awake, excited.

I told Auntie Violet and Auntie Vivien everything I learned. Uncle Paul, Violet's husband, sat and listened for a long time too. I sounded like Auntie Violet. I rattled off names, went up and down family trees. I knew names. I knew my relations. I was telling Auntie Violet things she didn't know. I knew what happened to Rienette “Nettie” Smith, my great-grandmother, and her three children, Juanita, Albert, and Evelyn.

“Grandma Rosie knew that old lady. She knew them people,” Auntie Violet said.

I could tell in Auntie's voice that she was holding back something. I saw it in her eyes, as if she was watching for something behind her or underneath the table that might pop out anytime. She was anxious to see the pictures, and it wasn't until she had four or five of them in front of her that she let out what she was holding back, that my grandmother didn't want to be Indian. Her people were stuck-up, not good Indians. Related, yes. But so what? Auntie knew.

Auntie kept the photographs in front of her all night. Now and then she glanced at them, even after we finished talking about my trip and my grandmother. She reminded me how lucky I was to have been raised around Aunt Mabel and close to people on the reservation. “You learned from a great Indian,” she said, referring to Mabel McKay. I was lucky. I was lucky to know Mabel and I learned a lot from her, things I would not have known otherwise. I wanted to tell Auntie that I agreed with her, that I was lucky. And I wanted to thank her and Uncle Paul for all they had done for me, all the love they had shown. But I was tired. I hardly remember getting up from the table and going to bed.

I woke early, before anyone else, and made my way to the kitchen. You could still smell food, the heavy odor of homecooking, but now it was cool, damp. And the kitchen was dark, the curtains pulled over the windows and across the sliding glass doors. I went to open the curtain next to the kitchen table when I caught sight of Auntie's row of my grandmother's pictures. They seemed so still. Everything else had been cleared away—the leftovers in Tupperware bowls, Auntie's pink poodle salt-and-pepper shakers. I started for the photographs. I say I started, but I didn't actually move, except to stand up straight and look around the room. Photos everywhere. Auntie's case of babies' pictures. Pictures of her Mom and Dad, Auntie Essie and Uncle Sid. In one picture Auntie Essie is standing in front of the roundhouse in her beaded buckskin ceremonial dress. And there is a picture of Auntie Violet with Robert Kennedy.

I heard birds outside. I thought of what Auntie said about my grandmother. Again I had the urge to pick up the photos left on the table. But I couldn't move. I felt as if my slightest gesture would wake the entire household.

Home, I thought. Home again.

I could be jealous of Lipsha. He got to meet his father, see him face to face. They “held each other's arms, tight and manly.” Of course miracles happened for both of us. The miracle of finding our fathers. The miracle of being lucky enough to be raised and cared for by our own people, even when we didn't know about our blood relation to those people, and then the miracle of finding out. The miracle of always having been home in some way or other. But none of those miracles changes the nature of home for Lipsha or for me. There is still the drinking and violence, gossip and bickering. Indians fighting each other. Is finding our fathers and knowing our families love us as much as they can medicine enough? Lipsha observes: “The sun flared. … The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home.” If in the novel we were to see Lipsha make it home, as I did, what would he find?

As I noted earlier, certain of Erdrich's characters sense the depth and breadth of the problems around them. Certain characters have their moments, their insights that help them come to terms with the pain. At the funeral of Grandpa (Nector) Kashpaw, Lipsha felt his “vision shifted” (LM 211). He says:

I began to see things different, more clear. The family kneeling down turned to rocks in a field. It struck me how strong and reliable grief was, and death. Until the end of time, death would be our rock.

So I had perspective on it all, for death gives you that. All the Kashpaw children had done various things to me in their lives—shared their folks with me, loaned me cash, beat me up in secret—and I decided, because of death, then and there I'd call it quits. If I ever saw King again, I'd shake his hand. Forgiving somebody else made the whole thing easier to bear.

(LM 211)

Lulu Lamartine reflects on her long affair with Nector Kashpaw, Marie Lazarre Kashpaw's husband, and says:

We took our pleasure without asking or thinking further than a touch. We were so deeply sunk in the land of our greed it took the court action of the tribe and a house on fire to pull us out.

Hearing [Marie's] voice I tried imagining what Marie must have thought. He came each week in the middle of the night. She must have known he wasn't out taking walks to see the beauty of the dark heaven.

(LM 231)

Later Lulu confesses: “For the first time I saw exactly how another woman felt, and it gave me deep comfort, surprising” (LM 236). Here Lulu is able to empathize with another human being, to see the limits and consequences of her needs and wants. The same thing happens for Marie Lazarre Kashpaw who attends to Lulu with the kindness of a mother in the Senior Citizens' home. As Lipsha reports, “[Marie] and Lulu was thick as thieves now” (LM 241).

These characters' insights, their moments of understanding and forgiveness, are a balm for the soul, certainly love medicine. And the fact that they are telling their stories, leading us through their pain to some resolution about it, means that they are talking, that they do in fact have a way of talking about the pain. But do their insights and stories touch upon a large cause of so much of their pain? Does their love medicine treat the symptoms of a disease without getting at the cause?

Again, the disease I am talking about, internalized oppression, cuts a wide swath. So much is unconscious, passed down through generations, family to family. So much is unrecognizable. Is Marie Lazarre Kashpaw simply an insecure woman driven to garner for herself self-worth? Isn't her insecurity, her denial of her origins, rooted in a history of which she is a part? Is King merely another male with low self-esteem who must beat his wife to feel significant and powerful? Is Gordie just another drunk, down on his luck? As I said earlier, to me much of the pain these characters experience and inflict upon one another is tied to colonialism, and ironically and inadvertently they work to complete what the colonizer began. Gabriele Schwab observes: “Only when the colonized's own native culture has been relegated to the political unconscious and become internalized as the Other, only then is the process of colonization successfully completed. As Fanon shows, the success of any cultural liberation would depend upon reaching these unconscious domains” (130). If Erdrich's characters' insights and stories, if their forgiveness and empathy, can put them in touch with that which is unconscious and historical, then the cause of the disease can be treated. I'm not sure this happens. Lipsha says “I had perspective on it all.” What is “it”? If “Forgiving somebody else made the whole thing easier to bear,” did forgiving expose what “the whole thing” is? Can Lipsha now name what King is afraid of? Can Lulu's empathy for another woman open the door to their shared history? Does it?

Of course readers of Love Medicine sense the larger historical picture. As Peter Matthiessen writes on the jacket cover of the first edition of Love Medicine, Erdrich “convey[s] unflinchingly the funkiness, humor, and great unspoken sadness of the Indian reservations, and a people exiled to a no-man's land between two worlds.” Robert Silberman notes that “[Erdrich's] concentration on personal, family matters may be intentional, but the sense of being removed from political events is a powerful statement about marginality and disenfranchisement while also suggesting a preferred concern with the personal and private life of the community” (114). And given the larger historical picture and the nature of these characters' lives, there is no doubt the insights and stories of Lipsha and Lulu are triumphant. But, again, are their triumphs great enough to touch that which is a large source of their pain, at least as I see it?

And here I must come back to questions raised at the start of this chapter. I must come back to where I started, for the pain and the triumphs of Louise Erdrich's fictional Chippewa community may not be as I see them or have read them. Again, is Erdrich's Chippewa community really that similar to what I know of and read into my own Indian community? Am I merely arranging photos just as Auntie Violet did? What about the specific circumstances of Chippewa colonial history that may affect both the nature of Chippewa oppression and of Chippewa triumph over that oppression? How has Erdrich as a writer understood that history? How might I understand it?

These are just some of the questions that I should pursue regarding internalized oppression and Love Medicine, although I do not have space here to fully explore them. Then again my purpose was not to come up with definite answers. Rather, I hoped to raise questions, to expose my interaction with Erdrich's novel, and to extend my story of that interaction to other readers. Other readers with other stories can explore what I have said and what I have left unanswered. They can continue what I have just barely started. A testimony of the novel's power and strength is that it shocked me into thinking about my own community, and by looking back and forth at the community in the book and the one I know as Home, I found a way, however tentative, to think and talk about the pain in both places. The book raised questions for me about my own community, and it touched my own pain and the history of that pain. Reading Love Medicine became Home Medicine.

In closing I want to tell one last story, because I cannot stop thinking about it. It has lived with me through the writing of this essay. I want Auntie Violet and Louise Erdrich and others to have the chance to see it. So I need to tell it.

It is about Crawling Woman. She was a Coast Miwok woman who was born in the old village that was called Nicasias, near the present town of Nicasio in Marin County. Crawling Woman is not a real name. It is how she is remembered. Even her great-great-granddaughter, Juanita Carrio, the noted Miwok elder and matriarch who told me the story, could not remember a real name for Crawling Woman. She was one of my grandmother's ancestors too, though I'm not sure of the blood connection.

Anyway, she got that name because at the end of her life she became childlike, an imbecile, Juanita said. She did not know anybody or anything. She didn't talk. She only made babylike sounds and cried. And she crawled. She crawled everywhere, out the front door, up the road, into the fields. People said she was at least a hundred and ten years old by that time. She was a grown woman when the first Spanish missionaries invaded her home. She was a grandmother by the time General Vallejo's Mexican soldiers established a fort in Petaluma, and when California became a state in 1850, she was already a very old woman.

She never talked about her past. She was quiet and she worked hard. Kept her nose to the grindstone, Juanita said. She washed clothes for the Americans and she sold fish she caught herself. This was when she was over eighty years old. But people did know some stories about her. Once she ran away from the mission in San Rafael. She heard horses come up and she hid in a dry creekbed. She was on her stomach, face down, flat out and stiff as a board. It wasn't until she was home, back in Nicasias, and had opened her eyes that she realized the men who picked her up and loaded her onto the wagon bed were Indians.

No one can remember how she lost her mind, whether gradually with age or suddenly, say from a stroke. She became a nuisance. She had to be watched all the time. She would get out of the house and go great distances. She could crawl as fast as a person walked, even at her great age. She would hide and then resist coming home when she was found. Juanita's mother used to babysit the old woman. She was just a young girl at the time, and to get the old woman to behave she would put on an old soldier's jacket they kept in the closet. Crawling Woman would see the brass buttons on the coat and let out a loud shriek and crawl as fast as she could back to the house.

That coat was the only thing she recognized, Juanita said.

Notes

1. For purposes of clarification and simplicity I am referring to both the Coast Miwok community and the Kashaya Pomo community as my one Indian community. As noted at the start of this book, Coast Miwok and Kashaya Pomo people share a long history of trade, intermarriage, and cultural exchange.

2. Mrs. Juanita Carrio, a Coast Miwok elder who passed away in 1991, did possess a large Coast Miwok (Nicasias dialect) vocabulary, but she did not consider herself a fluent speaker. No one living knows as much of any Coast Miwok language as Mrs. Carrio did. People may know a few words or phrases. Sarah Smith Ballard (1881-1978), a Bodega Miwok, was the last fluent speaker of a Coast Miwok language. Her Bodega Miwok dictionary was published by the University of California Press in 1970.

3. This general truth can become more pronounced and obvious also when readers are familiar with the culture or cultural experiences being represented and have difficulty with the representation or the ways in which the writer has presented the cultural experiences. Some contemporary Kiowa readers, for example, might have trouble with N. Scott Momaday's prose and narrative format in The Way to Rainy Mountain. How would certain Chippewa readers see their experiences as represented in Erdrich's rich, figurative, largely standard English?

4. Toelken lists Tacheeni Scott, an Indian speaker and collaborator, as co-author of their work together on certain texts.

5. Certainly non-Indian fiction writers, most notably James Fenimore Cooper, have written about Indians in their fiction. For purposes of clarity here I would refer to their work about Indians as non-Indian literature about Indians. Without a doubt, their work is cross-cultural; after all, they mediate and represent what they find in people from cultures different from their own—American Indians.

6. Standiford in this instance cites Gary Snyder, a romantic non-Indian poet who generalizes about Indians to support his ideas about ecology and so forth. Here, then, Standiford is basing his generalization about Indians on another's generalizations about Indians. How might individual Indian voices from a particular tribe talk back to or inform these generalizations across tribal cultures and histories? How might the generalizations be qualified in the context of a specific culture and history?

7. “Kashia” is a variant spelling of Kashaya. “Kashia” is used in many of the ethnographies and older government records.

8. At various times in her work, Allen sets out to show how people from various communities read the same Indian text differently. In her essay “Kochinnenako in Academe: Three Approaches to Interpreting a Keres Indian Tale” (in The Sacred Hoop), Allen presents “A Keres Interpretation” (232) and “A Feminist-Tribal Interpretation” (237). Yet each point of view or perspective appears a generalization created by Allen. She writes, for example: “A Keres is of course aware that balance and harmony are two primary assumptions of Keres society and will not approach the narrative wondering whether the handsome Miochin will win the hand of the unhappy wife and triumph over the enemy, thereby heroically saving the people from disaster” (234). Is this the case for all Keres individuals? Another example: “A feminist who is conscious of tribal thought and practice will know that the real story of Sh-ah-cock and Miochin underscores the central role that woman plays in the orderly life of the people” (239). And, again, I ask: A feminist who is aware of which tribal thought? What tribe? What feminist? In creating and presenting multiple points of view, how might Allen, as creator/writer of these points of view, have diminished the complexity and power of those points of view? Who is Allen as mediator and presenter of the different points of view?

9. Earlier in his essay Gleason refers to scholars such as Freud in his discussion of the function of humor in general. Can Freud's model of the function of humor be applied to all American Indian cultures? To Chippewa culture? If so, how and under what particular circumstances? How is Gleason reading both Freud and the Chippewa Indian culture to make sense of what he encounters in Love Medicine?

   In this essay I have not discussed critical approaches that are comparative, where critics examine, say, written literatures by different Indian writers in relation to one another or to Western canonical works (e.g., The Odyssey, Absalom, Absalom!). Clearly, and perhaps even more obviously, the questions and concerns I have raised throughout this essay would apply to comparative approaches.

10. As Murray points out, “the ideal of transparency here is also an ideal of totality—a totality of understanding, in which we can seal off the work of art, and see it whole, or we can circumscribe and totalise the other culture in which it operates” (117). He suggests that even while Tedlock is reflexive and dialogical in his work, Tedlock works with, or toward, an ideal of totality, of obtaining a full and complete knowledge of the Other (117).