SOURCE: McKinney, Karen Janet. “False Miracles and Failed Vision in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.” Critique 40, no. 2 (winter 1999): 152-60.

[In the following essay, McKinney explores the negative influence of Catholic missionaries on the Chippewa people and the impact of Catholicism in Erdrich's Love Medicine.]

In the last decade of the twentieth century, American culture seems increasingly at war with itself; racial and cultural divisions appear to be at once more marked and more insidious than ever before. We read the endless essays in “liberal” journals, listen to reactionary shoutings on the radio, and turn with disgusted disbelief from the “talk” shows on television. Then, some works of literature come to our rescue, as the reflecting ponds in which we can see some sort of truth that we can feel seep into us on an emotional, even a spiritual level. Louise Erdrich is a purveyor of such works, a novelist who writes from her perspective as a person of both Chippewa and German ancestry, sometimes assisted by the late Michael Dorris, her former collaborator and former husband—also of mixed heritage. In all four of her novels, from her first, Love Medicine, to her latest, The Bingo Palace, Erdrich tells the story of an extended North Dakota family, both German and Native American, whose members are racked by conflict both societally and personally. Her novels are, in one sense, a microcosm of the cultural schizophrenia that infects American life at every level. They have as a primary ingredient a deep sense of the history of both her people that illuminates but never overwhelms her fiction, a history containing seeds of a national mental illness.

An underlying theme in Erdrich's novels is the destructive influence of Catholicism on the Chippewa people. In her view, when a people's spiritual beliefs are directly attacked and an alien belief system is foisted upon them, the destruction of their culture is practically inevitable. As Catherine Rainwater defines it, a conflict occurs between codes, or “belief systems and ways of organizing society,” specifically between “codes originating within Western-European society and those originating within native American culture.” Listing several conflicting codes, she argues that the concept of linear time battles the concept of holistic or “ceremonial” time, and the benign exploitation of the natural world encounters the exploitation of technology at the expense of natural systems. At the top of the list, however, is the conflict between Christianity and shamanistic religion (406). Rainwater argues that Erdrich makes the clash of religious or spiritual belief systems paramount and integrates it into her fiction. More specifically, she shows that a clash between the Catholic dogma of the miracle and the native belief in personal vision is central to the other problems and complexities of life for the native peoples with which she is familiar, specifically the Chippewa of the Turtle Mountain Reservation. To clarify those issues, I first examine the historical background of the Chippewa's early encounters with Catholic missionaries and second, analyze the character of Lipsha, a young Chippewa man central to Love Medicine. His struggle to find his own way between the two conflicting belief systems is the main focus of Erdrich's novel.

To examine properly the validity of Erdrich's focus, one must examine, in some depth, the history of the complex relationship between the Catholic missionaries and the native and mixed blood people of Algonquin descent who inhabit northeastern and north-central North America. That history began in the early 1600s when, less than one hundred years after the French began to explore northeastern North America, Samuel de Champlain arrived to take control of the colony and sought missionaries to go into the largely unexplored wilderness areas to convert the natives. Champlain chose as his missionaries the Jesuits, an order whose approach to religious life was not one of seclusion and prayer but of battle and domination. These men took part in periodic exercises in which they were encouraged to imagine in detail the torments of hell. That training was intended to impress upon those priest—soldiers the urgency of their mission of saving souls (Grant 5). Throughout most of the eighteenth century, French Jesuit missionaries pushed tirelessly into the territory around the Great Lakes, attempting to convert the natives to Christianity. According to Grant's account, they met with little success at first because of a monumental lack of understanding between the converters and potential convertees. Because the natives had no churches with regular hours of worship and no ceremonies that the Jesuits were able to identify as religious, they concluded that these people were too primitive to have a religion and that, spiritually speaking, they were empty containers waiting to be filled (22). When the missionaries understood that many of the native people's everyday acts had a spiritual significance, they tended to dismiss such behavior as mere superstition.

The ethnocentrism of the Jesuit missionaries had both cultural and religious roots. That era, after all, was one when wars raged in Europe between countries that each believed itself superior to its enemies. The English felt themselves to be superior to the Scots as the French did to the English. That the Jesuit missionaries felt superior to native cultures that lacked the advanced technology, grand buildings, and the concept of private property of European culture is not surprising. These missionaries believed not only that their culture and its Christian religion were superior to the native people's beliefs, but that their particular sect was superior to any other form of Christianity and, of course, to any other religion in the world. Theirs was not a particularly merciful creed; the Jesuits believed that the natives were condemned to eternal torture, like all other nonbelievers, if they died without becoming Catholics. In a letter preserved in The Jesuit Relations, a compilation of letters written by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, one Jesuit stationed in the New World writes, “We go to declare war against Infidelity, and to fight the Devil in the very heart of his country” (284).

Who were the native people whom the Jesuits worked so hard to convert? The largest group of natives who came into early contact with the French were members of the Algonquin people, which comprised different tribes with shared customs and a similar language. Most of the native people of Erdrich's novels are Chippewa (or Objibwa), the most numerous of the Algonquin tribes. At the time of their initial encounter with the Jesuits, the Algonquins were hunters and fishers who lived throughout the Great Lakes area; later, some migrated west to follow the disappearing buffalo. Erdrich's tribe, the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, settled in the wooded Turtle Mountain area of what became North Dakota, partly because the landscape was like that of their original home in the eastern woodlands (Camp 19-20).

It is not surprising that the Jesuits had difficulty understanding the Chippewa, for no two cultures could have been more different politically and religiously. The Jesuits knew only the tightly hierarchical kingdoms of Europe; the Chippewa's political structure tended to be loosely organized. Because of the mobility necessary for following game animals, a man and his wife and children tended to form a self-sufficient unit, traveling on their own in the winter and in the summer coming together with a few other families to form a village. Chiefs existed but had little actual power to enforce their will (Barnouw 6). Thus, the Chippewa were more individualistic than many other tribes; nowhere was that more evident than in the most central part of their religious belief—the vision quest. All young boys and, in some groups, young girls, would go away from the rest of the family to fast and pray for a vision that would indicate who or what would be the youth's guardian spirit. That spirit might be in the form of an animal, a person, or even a spirit that would provide guidance for the young person throughout his or her life (Danziger 15). Although that vision was the most important one a person would have during his or her lifetime, the Chippewa considered all dreams to be of significance and believed that their correct interpretation was crucial if they were to make use of the insight the dreams conveyed. The Chippewa religion was complex, with a vast mythology and a complicated set of beliefs and practices concerning healing the sick and bringing good luck in the hunt, but its foundation was the vision—the intense revelation to the individual. The Chippewa believed that individuals, if their motives were pure, had the ability to find truth and spiritual solace within themselves. Thus, when the missionaries came proclaiming that they possessed the only spiritual truth that existed, the Chippewa were skeptical, to say the least.

The Christianity that the Jesuit thrust on the native peoples is not the version that most twentieth-century Christians would recognize, particularly their understanding of the function of miracles in Christianity. First, the Jesuits believed in the sacramental quality of the ritual of baptism and thought that all unbaptized persons were automatically condemned to damnation. As Francis Parkman records in The Jesuits of North America, the Jesuits were relentless in their efforts to baptize those on the point of death. He writes, “They found especial pleasure in the baptism of dying infants, rescuing them from the flames of perdition, and changing them […] ‘from little Indians into little angels’” (151). John Gilman Shea, like Parkman a respected nineteenth-century historian, records that a missionary took credit for a woman's recovery from dire illness after she had professed belief and been baptized (257). The missionaries used the idea of miracles primarily to create fear and awe in the hearts of their native audience and to bring them to conversion. The Jesuits took credit for natural phenomena, pretending, and perhaps even believing, that they were able through their prayers and rituals to control the natural world. Parkman records an event in which missionaries claimed credit for a rainstorm that followed an extended period of drought. They promised the people that if they would accept the Christian god, rain would fall. Parkman writes, “The processions were begun, as were also nine masses to St. Joseph; as heavy rains occurred soon after, the Indians conceived a high idea of the efficacy of the French ‘medicine’” (157). Missionaries also took credit for even more spectacular events. One Jesuit priest reported with glee how a severe earthquake and a subsequent eclipse of the sun had a positive effect on the unbelievers (Grant 53-54).

Perhaps the saddest fact about the Jesuit's medicine-show variety of Christianity is that it hid and perverted what most Christians believe to be the truth about miracles. That view is expressed clearly by C. S. Lewis, one of the most respected Christian apologists of our time, in his treatise on the subject:

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. […] Every other miracle prepares for this or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature's total character, so every Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about.

(131)

Robert A. Larmer, another respected theological scholar, echoes Lewis's position. He comments that “those who believe in miracles do not think of them as permanently inexplicable events, but rather as events which especially reveal the character and purposes of God” (80).

Belief in the use of miracles in the Jesuit manner did not begin until after the death of St. Augustine in the fifth century (Ward 3). Early missionaries in Europe and Asia stressed the similarities between the beliefs of non-Christian people in magic and the Christian belief in miracles rather than the differences (10). The medieval Church found it quicker and easier to overwhelm people with magic tricks and incredible feats of bravery than to find simple ways to explain Christian theology. In the seventeenth century, that tradition was established in mainstream Catholicism, of which the Jesuits were a part.

But, unlike the European “pagans,” many of whose rituals the early Church incorporated into Christianity, most natives continued to reject Christianity for many years. The eventual acceptance of Catholicism, at least officially, occurred only after the native people realized that the most basic aspects of their world, which had remained constant for thousands of years, were permanently being altered. The buffalo and other game animals were disappearing, as were the trees in the forests. The white men were even claiming to own large parcels of the land, a concept totally foreign to the natives. As the French and other Europeans became stronger, many native people realized that they were the “wave of the future,” and that accepting the French religion would help them to deal with French technology and culture. In addition, death from contagious disease was so rampant that tribal elders were fast disappearing, and entire tribal communities were disintegrating. Because Catholicism at least allowed one to face death with resignation, many people felt it was now the only honorable fate left to them (Grant 42).

As the years went by, Catholicism became integral to Chippewa society, and traditional beliefs seemed to weaken or even disappear, a transformation accelerated by the government's practice of forcibly removing Chippewa children from their homes and sending them to boarding schools to be “re-educated” as white people. Many sociologists agree that the Chippewa culture has essentially vanished. Harold Hickerson writes that “in terms of the aboriginal past, the Chippewa culture is a shambles, so much have the people everywhere had to accommodate to the new conditions imposed by their relations with Euro-Americans” (17). Noted writer and Catholic missionary Carl Starkloff agrees: “The Indian culture, save perhaps among a few tribes or groupings, is a shredded culture, an amalgam of white and Indian living patterns, a precarious perch between two or amid many more troubled traditions” (956). Even so, although the Catholics were successful in eradicating native religions, they were much less successful in imposing their own.

In Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich conveys the results of Chippewa history, showing the depth of the Catholic influence on her people in the 1980s. She does so both by satirizing the Catholic emphasis on miracles and by revealing the uncertain state of traditional spiritual beliefs, including the vision quest. In the story of Lipsha, a central character in the novel, Erdrich paints a picture in miniature of the plight of all Chippewa, and to some degree, of all native people in America. Lipsha, something of a rebel, lives with an elderly couple he calls his grandparents. He believes that he has seen through the falseness of the Catholicism the whites have thrust on his people. “Grandpa,” he says “was the one who stripped me of my delusions” (193). Lipsha recalls how he always liked the “cool, greenish inside” of the mission church until one day he went to mass with Grandpa Eli, who shouted out the entire rosary at the top of his lungs. “‘God don't hear me otherwise,’” Grandpa explains. Lipsha thinks about the troubles that have haunted his family—the alcoholism, the promiscuity, the cultural disintegration—and agrees that, like the government, God has gone deaf. But Lipsha has little with which to replace Catholicism. He admits to himself that, although he knows about the old gods who would “do a favor if you ask them right,” his people no longer know how to ask: That ability, says Lipsha, “was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground” (195). Erdrich's own grandfather, who was the tribal chairman on the Turtle Mountain Reservation, practiced both Catholicism and the traditional Chippewa religion (Berkley 58), so Lipsha's confusion is something Erdrich likely knows firsthand.

Confused or not, Lipsha has a special gift that he calls “the touch.” He can help relieve physical suffering by laying his hands on people; “the medicine flows out of me,” he says (190). But he is helpless when his grandmother asks him for love medicine to make Grandpa love her again. He very much wants to help these two people who are the only parents he has ever known, but he fears he is out of his depth when it comes to a miracle like that. Lipsha decides to kill a pair of mating wild geese, birds that mate for life, and feed the hearts to his grandparents. Executing the plan proves difficult, however; and when Lipsha fails to catch any geese after a day of waiting crouched in the swamp, he falls into the same error as the old-time Jesuit missionaries. He decides to fake the miracle. He knows that what he is doing is wrong. “I looked at birds that was dead and froze,” he admits (203). In fact, Lipsha is so worried about his deception that he decides to hedge his bets and get his grocery-store turkey hearts blessed by a nun at the convent. When he fails to convince her to give the blessing, he is desperate and secretly puts his hand in the holy water and blesses the hearts himself. Though Lipsha's behavior seems contradictory, it is merely a symptom of his internal conflict. He wants to return to his ancestral belief system, but his knowledge is so fragmented that such a return is almost impossible. He also finds it more difficult than he had thought it would be to shake off the Catholic beliefs drummed into him since infancy. Lipsha's knowledge of both religions can be helpful, but sometimes that knowledge freezes him into inaction “between contradictory systems of belief” (Rainwater 405).

When Grandpa chokes on the turkey heart and dies, Lipsha believes that he has lost his touch because he tried to cheat, to use parts of the white religion in which he has no real faith, a religion of which he retains only a vague impression. Catholicism for him, and by implication, for most Native Americans, consists of a set of ritual behaviors that have no bearing on everyday life. Lipsha's realization that it is impossible to combine the two religious systems is revealed in his anguished comment, “I knew the fuse had blown between my heart and my mind and that a terrible understanding was to be given” (209).

At this point, in a desperate search for meaning, Lipsha leaves home for the city. When he sees an army recruiting office under a banner reading, “Today's Action Army,” he enlists almost without thinking. A short while later, looking at the toothless, worn-out veterans in the lobby of his run-down hotel, he has a realization: “This here was yesterday's action army” (247). As critics Nora Barry and Mary Prescott put it, Lipsha sees that “the warrior tradition as it now exists is false and will fail him” (133). Frightened at the turn his life has taken, Lipsha wishes that he could meet his father, who, Lipsha has recently discovered, is Gerry Nanapush, a famous convict and folk hero. As Lipsha shares whiskey with an old veteran, he searches internally for guidance. When the whiskey is gone, the old man walks away, tossing the empty bottle over his shoulder. Suddenly, hit between the eyes by a bolt from the blue in the form of a bottle of Old Granddad, Lipsha has his vision:

No concrete shitbarn prison's built that can hold a Chippewa, I thought. I realized instantly that was a direct, locally known quote of my father, Gerry Nanapush, famous politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert, escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement, and smoker of many pipes of kinnikinnik in the most radical groups. […] According to my vision, he would make a break for freedom soon.

(248)

Lipsha now realizes that he has inherited his powers from his ancestors. Instead of being unique in his gift of the touch, he now sees himself as part of a community with strong traditions; he now has real power to put his wishes into action. Operating solely on luck and instinct, he locates his father in his half-brother King's apartment. He and Gerry get to know each other on the long drive of escape to Canada in King's car, which they had won from him in a card game, by a combination of luck and craftiness. Lipsha's new feeling of belonging is cemented by his father's information that a heart defect running in the family will keep Lipsha out of the army as it had Gerry. When he parts from his father across the Canadian border, Lipsha turns to go home:

Near dawn, I came to the bridge over the boundary river. I was getting pretty close to home now so I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge, got out to stretch, and for some reason I remembered how the old ones used to offer tobacco to the water.

(271)

A vague memory that his ancestors offered tobacco is about all he knows of the ancient rituals. Yet there is an uneasiness about Erdrich's description of Lipsha's spiritual homecoming. He crosses his own personal bridge to wholeness, but his connection to his traditional past still seems tenuous in spite of his good intentions. One of Lipsha's final comments, almost the last sentence in the novel, reveals much about Erdrich's evaluation of modern Chippewa culture. Lipsha remembers hearing somewhere that an ancient ocean used to cover the land hereabouts. He thinks to himself, “It was easy to imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land” (272). Lipsha has a connection with the tribal past through his spiritual and imaginative powers, but for most of his people that past is as remote from everyday life as water is separate from “dry land.” It seems likely that he has achieved his own survival, but the survival of his people as a viable society is still in doubt.

In Lipsha, Erdrich illustrates how the schizophrenic state of Chippewa society in the 1980s is a direct result of the work of the Catholic missionaries. She portrays the church as having betrayed the people with false miracles and hollow magic. But the greatest tragedy, she believes, is that the core of Chippewa society is gone. The vision that had always been the individual's guide to an understanding not only of the spiritual world but also of the corporeal world is weakened and hard to understand. Lipsha's vision helped him stay out of the army, although it did not give him much guidance for living a life that could be meaningful and happy in terms of values found in Chippewa culture.

In Love Medicine, Erdrich offers little hope for anything resembling a happy ending. She portrays survival, but of the individual only. Her people's culture could not withstand the onslaught of a dominant, alien religion combined with a government that allowed and encouraged the rape of the natural environment and the removal and indoctrination of children. Although Erdrich is a writer of the first rank whose lyricism and powerful images will doubtless guarantee her a place in mainstream American literature, the sociopolitical aspect of her fiction cannot be ignored. She is a Chippewa and thus a survivor of a holocaust. Her anger is buried in her fiction, occasionally breaking through to the surface. She forces her readers to reject the sentimentalization of the past to which our society is so prone and to regard our history with clearer vision. For only if we are able to see clearly do we have any hope of going forward.

Works Cited

Barnouw, Victor. Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977.

Barry, Nora and Mary Prescott. “The Triumph of the Brave: Love Medicine's Holistic Vision.” Critique 30 (1989): 123-38.

Berkeley, Miriam. “Interview with Louise Erdrich.” Publishers' Weekly 230 (1986): 58-59.

Camp, Gregory. “Working out their Own Salvation: The Allotment of Land in Severalty and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Band, 1870-1920.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 14 (1990): 19-38.

Danziger, Edmund. The Chippewa of Lake Superior. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, 1984.

Grant, John Webster. The Moon of Wintertime: Missionaries and the Indians of Canada in Encounter Since 1534. Toronto and Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 1984.

Hickerson, Harold. The Chippewa and Their Neighbors. New York: Holt, 1970.

The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963.

Larmer, Robert A. Water into Wine: An Investigation of the Concept of Miracle. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen's UP, 1988.

Lewis, C. S. Miracles: A Preliminary Study. New York: Macmillan, 1947.

Parkman, Francis. The Jesuits in North America. Boston: Little, 1963.

Rainwater, Catherine. “Reading between the Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” American Literature 62 (1990): 405-22.

Shea, John Dawson Gilmary. History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States, 1529-1854. New York: E. Dunigan, 1855.

Starkloff, Carl F. The People of the Center: American Indian Religion and Christianity. New York: Seabury, 1974.

Ward, Benedicta. Miracles and the Medieval Mind. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982.