SOURCE: Owens, Louis. “Erdrich and Dorris's Mixedbloods and Multiple Narratives.” In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, pp. 192-224. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Owens discusses the dominant thematic concerns of Love Medicine, particularly the novel's examination of race and religion.]

Despite the importance of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn in 1969, no American Indian author has achieved such immediate and enormous success as Louise Erdrich with her first novel, Love Medicine. A best-seller, Love Medicine not only outsold any previous novel by an Indian author, but it also gathered an impressive array of critical awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award for Best First Novel, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the L.A. Times award for best novel of the year.

Why such astounding success for an author writing about a subject—Indians—in which Americans had previously shown only a passing interest (and that predominantly in the romantic vein mined by non-Indian authors)? The answer to such a question delves into the heart of Louise Erdrich's achievement with Love Medicine as well as her very popular second and third novels, The Beet Queen (1986) and Tracks (1988). And to examine Erdrich's fiction closely is also to explore that of her husband/agent/collaborator, Michael Dorris, whose first novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), has also been received with enthusiasm by readers and critics.¹

Like almost every other Indian novelist, Louise Erdrich is a mixedblood. A member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa band, Erdrich is of German, French, and Chippewa descent. She was born in Minnesota and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught in the Wahpeton Indian School. In her novels, Erdrich draws upon both her mother's Chippewa heritage and her experiences as the daughter of a Euramerican growing up in middle America. Both the wild reservation bushland and the weathered edge of the North Dakota prairie permeate her novels, stamping their character upon Indian and non-Indian alike. “When you're in the plains and you're in this enormous space,” Erdrich has stated, “there's something about the frailty of life and relationships that always haunts me.”²

In her published novels—the first three of a planned quartet—Erdrich weaves genealogies and fates as characters appear and reappear in successive, interconnected stories. This web of identities and relationships arises from the land itself, that element that has always been at the core of Native Americans' knowledge of who they are and where they come from. Central to Native American storytelling, as Momaday has shown so splendidly, is the construction of a reality that begins, always, with the land. In Erdrich's fiction, those characters who have lost a close relationship with the earth—and specifically with that particular geography that informs a tribal identity—are the ones who are lost. They are the Ishmaels of the Indian world, waiting like June Kashpaw to be brought home. Imagining her role as a storyteller, Erdrich has explained: “In a tribal view of the world, where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history. Unlike most contemporary writers, a traditional storyteller fixes listeners in an unchanging landscape combined of myth and reality. People and place are inseparable.” In laying out her fictional terrain, a coherently populated geography often compared to that of William Faulkner, Erdrich tells stories of survival, as she has also explained: “Contemporary Native American writers have therefore a task quite different from that of other writers. … In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe (cultural annihilation). And in this, there always remains the land.”³ Perhaps it is, in part, Erdrich's positive emphasis upon survival that has endeared her to the reading public. Though the frailty of lives and relationships and the sense of loss for Indian people rides always close to the surface of her stories, Erdrich's emphasis in all three novels is upon those who survive in a difficult world.

Like every other Native American novelist, Erdrich writes of the inevitable search for identify. “There's a quest for one's own background in a lot of this work,” she has explained. “One of the characteristics of being a mixed-blood is searching. You look back and say, ‘Who am I from?’ You must question. You must make certain choices. You're able to. And it's a blessing and it's a curse. All of our searches involve trying to discover where we are from.” She has commented upon her own identity as a writer conscious of both her Indian heritage and her somewhat insecure place in the American mainstream: “When you live in the mainstream and you know that you're not quite, not really there, you listen for a voice to direct you. I think, besides that, you also are a member of another nation. It gives you a strange feeling this dual citizenship. … It's kind of incomprehensible that there's the ability to take in non-Indian culture and be comfortable in both worlds.”⁴

The seemingly doomed Indian or tortured mixedblood caught between worlds surfaces in Erdrich's fiction, but such characters tend to disappear behind those other, foregrounded characters who hang on in spite of it all, who confront with humor the pain and confusion of identity and, like a storyteller, weave a fabric of meaning and significance out of the remnants.

Love Medicine is an episodic story of three inextricably tangled generations of Chippewa and mixedblood families: the Kashpaws, Morriseys, Lamartines, and Lazarres. In fourteen chapters, seven narrators weave their many stories into a single story that becomes, very gradually, a coherent fabric of community—a recovered center. Along the way, Erdrich's masterful use of discontinuous and multiple narrative underscores, formally, the displacement and deracination that dominate her narrators' tales while at the same time forcing upon the reader his or her own sense of radical displacement and marginality. Ultimately, however, the fragmentated narratives and prismatic perspectives of the novel emphasize not the individual anguish of an Abel, Jim Loney, Cecelia Capture, Chal Windzer, Archilde Leon, or most other protagonists of Native American novels, but the greater anguish of lost communal/tribal identity and the heroic efforts of a fragmented community to hold on to what is left.

Love Medicine begins with an illumination of liminality—a conflation of Christian religion and Native American mythology, of linear/incremental time and cyclic/accretive time—on the “morning before Easter Sunday.” Like the traditional trickster narrative, the story opens with the protagonist, June Kashpaw, on the move: “June Kashpaw was walking down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, killing time before the noon bus arrived that would take her home.”⁵ Soon, the character around whom this novel will cohere is dead, and it is ironic that June is attempting to “kill” time—to break the entropic grip of linear, Western time—while it is precisely this time that is killing June, the historical time that has eroded a Chippewa sense of identity just as it has overseen the loss of the Chippewa's traditional homeland. Rather than return from her desperate life to the reservation, June walks deliberately into a blizzard and accepts her death. Like Tayo's mother and Helen Jean in Silko's Ceremony, June is one of those women who have washed up in the no-woman's-land of prostitution on the parasitic edge of the reservation, displaced and alone. When she decides to go with one of the roustabouts from a bar rather than return home, she thinks, “The bus ticket would stay good, maybe forever. They weren't expecting her up home on the reservation” (3). With a bus ticket that will never expire, and no expectations, June assumes the role—like trickster—of a permanent traveler, infinitely dislocated with no family/community/tribe to expect her return. Her fragmentation is emphasized when Erdrich writes: “And then she knew that if she lay there any longer she would crack wide open, not in one place but in many pieces” (5). As with virtually every other aspect of June, this fear of cracking into “many pieces” represents a kind of dialogic, a hybridized utterance that can be read in two ways. In a Euramerican context it underscores June's alienation, approaching schizophrenia, her loss of a centered identity. Fragmentation in Native American mythology is not necessarily a bad thing, however. For the traditional culture hero, the necessary annihilation of the self that prefigures healing and wholeness and a return to the tribal community often takes the form of physical fragmentation, bodily, as well as psychic deconstruction.

With no family to draw her home, June deliberately chooses death, for as Albertine Johnson tells us in the novel's second chapter, “June grew up on the plains. Even drunk she'd have known a storm was coming” (9). Raised by her Great-uncle Eli, the one character in the novel who never loses touch with either earth or identity, June knows where, if not who, she is: “Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction” (6). And Erdrich ends the first chapter with the words, “The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home” (6). She comes home to an “unchanging landscape … of myth and reality,” the feminine Christ-figure resurrected as trickster, the fragmented culture hero made whole within memory and story, returning through the annual cycle of Easter/spring—death/resurrection—to her Indian community as mythic catalyst.

Erdrich begins Love Medicine with a subtle displacement of time and an invocation of peripatetic trickster, “going along.” Just as the traditional trickster's role is not only to upset and challenge us but also to remind us—obversely—of who we are and where we belong, June will figure throughout the novel as a touchstone for the other characters. Just as the tribal community in Ceremony desperately wants Tayo's lost mother to come home, the response of characters throughout Love Medicine to June's loss will underscore each character's sense of identity within the tribal community and, concomitantly, each character's potential for survival. And just as trickster transcends both time and space as well as all other definitions, June does indeed “kill time” as she moves freely, after death, in the thoughts and stories of the other characters. Jay Cox has noted June's resemblance to trickster, suggesting perceptively that June is the “chaotic everything” to all the characters in Love Medicine and that “June's death in the first chapter does little to impede her spirit from going along throughout the novel.”⁶ When, at the end of the novel, Lipsha Morrissey crosses the water to “bring her home,” we know that Lipsha has finally arrived at a coherent sense of his place within the community (including the land itself) from which identity springs. And at the novel's end another trickster will be on the move as Gerry Nanapush heads across the “medicine line” into the depths of Canada, telling Lipsha, “I won't ever really have what you'd call a home” (268). Lipsha, son of the two powerful characters with whom the novel opens and closes—June Kashpaw and Gerry Nanapush—ends the novel on a note of profound resolution of identity.

By the time June walks away from the car toward her death, it is very likely after midnight and therefore officially Easter Sunday, the day the “snow fell deeper … than it had in forty years.” By invoking Easter, Erdrich brings into the novel the myth of the crucifixion and resurrection, an analogy ironically underscored when she writes that June's ejection (with her pants pulled halfway up) from the warm car into the cold “was a shock like being born” (5). By associating June with both Christ and trickster, Erdrich underscores the twin elements that will make whole the fragmented lives of the novel: the commitment beyond the self that lies both at the heart of the Christian myth and, very crucially, at the center of the American Indian tribal community where individualism and egotism are shunned and “we” takes precedence over the “I” celebrated in the Euramerican tradition, and, just as important, a refusal to acquiesce to static definitions of identity. When she writes that “June walked over it like water and came home,” Erdrich merges an image of Christ with the primary element that will figure prominently throughout the book: water. Erdrich has said, “In Love Medicine the main image is the recurrent image of the water—transformation (walking over snow or water) and a sort of transcendence. … The river is always this boundary. There's a water monster who's mentioned in Love Medicine. It's not a real plot device in Love Medicine. It become more so in Tracks. … We really think of each book [of the planned quartet] as being tied to one of the four elements.” In the same interview, Erdrich and Dorris point out that the central elemental image in The Beet Queen is air, while in Tracks it is earth.⁷ As in House Made of Dawn, this beginning is also the novel's ending, a circularity familiar to Native American storytelling, and it underscores the important place of water imagery in Chippewa storytelling, an importance understandable for a people whose traditional homeland was once the region of the Great Lakes.

Our first encounter with a family in the novel comes through Albertine in the second chapter.⁸ After describing her relationship with her mother as “patient abuse,” Albertine arrives home simply to be ignored at first by both mother and aunt. Albertine is one-half Swedish, the daughter of a white father who abandoned his wife and child at Albertine's birth, an Anglo outcast “doomed to wander” (the quintessential Euramerican condition of eternal migration). Albertine's mother is Zelda, one of the daughters of Nector Kashpaw and Marie Lazarre. Marie, a mixedblood who insists, “I don't have that much Indian blood,” is from a family considered white trash by their Indian neighbors. Albertine, who thinks of herself as “light, clearly a breed,” is approximately one-quarter Chippewa, but she identifies as Indian, complaining bitterly about allotment and following Henry Lamartine down the street just because he looks Indian.

Though Albertine has run away in the past and has apparently flirted with the kind of disastrous life that killed June, she is the character in the novel who, among those of her generation, is most secure in her identity, a certainty provided, ironically, by her mother, who says defiantly, “I raised her an Indian, and that's what she is” (23). Zelda, married for the second time to a Scandinavian husband and living in a trailer on the edge of the reservation, is the one who has the strength and certainty to retrieve her father, Nector, from the clutches of Lulu Lamartine and the one capable of providing her daughter with a sense of self lacking in many of the novel's characters. Albertine's strength comes from this unshakable knowledge of who she is and from her awareness that the past is a formative part of the present. Albertine emphasizes the power of the past—through stories—to inform the present when she says of June: “She told me things you'd only tell another woman, full grown, and I had adored her wildly for these adult confidences. … I had adored her into telling me everything she needed to tell, and it was true, I hadn't understood the words at the time. But she hadn't counted on my memory. Those words stayed with me” (15-16). The past permeates the present, coexisting through cyclical temporality within the spatial reality of the Native American world, staying with us, telling us in a single breath where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. As nearly every Native American author has sought to demonstrate, the loss of the past means a loss of self, a loss of order and meaning in the present moment, and an inability to contemplate a future that is part of that moment. Storytelling serves to prevent that loss; it bears, as Michel Foucault has said, “the duty of providing immortality.”⁹

It is Albertine who understands the motivation of her great-grandmother, old Rushes Bear, in keeping Eli at home while allowing Nector to be educated at the government school. “In that way,” Albertine explains, “she gained a son on either side of the line” (17). And it is Albertine who points out that Eli, who “knew the woods,” had stayed mentally sharp while Nector's “mind had left us, gone wary and wild” (17). When Albertine, always seeking stories of the past, asks Nector to “tell me about things that happened before my time,” the old man just shakes his head, “remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time” (18). Schooled by the government to be a bureaucrat, Nector has been molded into chairman of his tribe by his ambitious wife, Marie, but he has retained only the meaningless ciphers of dates and names that have neither bearing nor mooring in Albertine's world. He has become a victim of mechanical, entropic, historic time, while his brother has remained alert to the reality of his more traditional life on the other side of the time-line. Finally, it is Albertine who puts June's (as usual, contradictory) accomplishment into perspective for us when she intones: “Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons” (35). June's sons are King and Lipsha, one recognized and damned, the other abandoned and saved.

Lipsha is June's reckless victory, just as her legitimate son, King, epitomizes her defeat and the defeat of all the failed characters in the novel. Throughout most of the novel Lipsha does not know who his parents are; he lacks an identity and even believes of his mother that she “would have drowned me” (37). When Albertine comes close to telling him the secret of his mother, Lipsha refuses to hear, saying, “Albertine, you don't know what you're talking about.” He goes on to declare, “As for my mother … even if she came back right now, this minute, and got down on her knees and said, ‘Son, I am sorry for what I done to you,’ I would not relent on her” (36). Ultimately, Lipsha will relent on her; like Tayo in Ceremony, he will forgive his mother for abandoning him; and by bringing her home, he will come home to a knowledge of who he is. When Albertine asks, “What about your father? … Do you wish you knew him?” Lipsha replies, “I wouldn't mind” (37). At the end of the novel Lipsha will meet his father, Gerry Nanapush, and he will realize that his own healing “touch” has descended most powerfully from Old Man Pillager, the shaman who is the trickster's father and who will figure prominently in Tracks.

Gerry Nanapush, described by Lipsha as a “famous politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert, escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement, and smoker of many pipes of kinnikinnick in the most radical groups” (248), is the most unmistakable trickster of the novel, bearing the traditional name of the Chippewa trickster, nanapush or nanabozhu. Impossible to contain, a shapeshifter capable of impossible physical feats, when he arrives at King's apartment to confront the stoolie who has informed on him, Nanapush speaks the classic trickster line: “‘I want to play,’ said Gerry very clearly and slowly, as if to a person who spoke a different language. ‘I came to play’” (262). Gerry Nanapush is “mainly in the penitentiary for breaking out of it,” (“breaking out” is, of course, trickster's modus vivendi) and, according to Lulu, “In and out of prison, yet inspiring Indian people, that was his life. Like myself he could not hold his wildness in” (227). Nanapush is a culture hero and shaman/trickster. At the same time, Nanapush, who, according to Albertine “shot and killed … a state trooper” on the Pine Ridge Reservation (170), bears a strong resemblance to American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, imprisoned for the alleged murder of two FBI agents at Pine Ridge. In an interview, Erdrich described her response when she attended Peltier's trial: “When the jury came back with that guilty verdict, I stood up and screamed. It was a real dislocation growing up thinking there was justice, and then seeing this process and knowing they were wrong in delivering that verdict.”¹⁰

Like so many other characters in fiction by Indian writers, Lipsha's quest is for a sense of self and authenticity. Lulu Lamartine, his grandmother (whom Lipsha describes as “the jabwa witch”) and a female trickster, finally forces him to listen to the story of his parentage. About his mother, June, Lulu says, “She watched you from a distance, and hoped you would forgive her some day” (244). About his father, Lulu says, “There ain't a prison that can hold the son of Old Man Pillager, a Nanapush man. You should be proud that you're one” (244). Finally, Lulu sees directly to the heart of Lipsha's strangeness, saying, “Well I never thought you was odd. … Just troubled. You never knew who you were. That's one reason why I told you. I thought it was a knowledge that could make or break you” (244-45). Upon learning of his heritage, Lipsha muses: “I could not help but dwell upon the subject of myself. … Lipsha Morrissey who was now on the verge of knowing who he was” (244). Seeking his father, Lipsha declares, “I had to get down to the bottom of my heritage” (248), and once he sits down to play cards with his father, Lipsha says, “I dealt myself a perfect family. A royal flush” (264). Lipsha has learned to mark the cards from his grandmother, Lulu Lamartine, and Gerry recognizes the feel of trickery on the deck: “Those crimps were like a signature—his mother's” (260). And, as the patterns of his heritage and identity become clear, Lipsha deals, saying, “I dealt the patterns out with perfect ease, keeping strict to Lulu's form” (263).

Finally, when he learns that Lipsha is on the run from the military police, Gerry works his magic, beginning with an affirmation of his son's identity: “‘You're a Nanapush man,’ he said. … ‘We all have this odd thing with our hearts.’” Nanapush reaches out a hand and touches his son's shoulder, and Lipsha says, “There was a moment when the car and road stood still, and then I felt it. I felt my own heart give this little burping skip” (271). With a “heart problem,” Lipsha will fail his physical and be exempted from the military, and to his father's relief he will not have to become a fugitive. The “odd thing” about Nanapush hearts is, of course, their ability to care deeply for others, individuals and Indians as a whole. This is the “love medicine” of the novel, as Lipsha comes to realize after Nector's blackly comic death when Lipsha tells Marie, “Love medicine ain't what brings him back to you, Grandma. … He loved you over time and distance, but he went off so quick he never got the chance to tell you how he loves you. … It's true feeling, not magic” (214).

In the figure of Nector, tribal chairman and patriarch of the Kashpaws, who are “respected as the last hereditary leaders” of the tribe (89), Erdrich introduces the clichéd view of the “vanishing American.” Nector has been in a Hollywood movie. “Because of my height,” he says ironically, “I got hired on for the biggest Indian part” (89). The biggest Indian part, however, isn't much: “‘Clutch your chest. Fall off that horse,’ they directed. That was it. Death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater” (90). Nector escapes from cinema death to the wheat fields of Kansas, where he is paid to pose for a painter. “Disrobe,” the artist says, and Nector, stalling for time, replies, “What robe?” The painting that results is entitled Plunge of the Brave and shows a naked Nector leaping to his death in a raging river. Nector, who possesses perhaps the most subtly ironic sense of humor in the novel, concludes: “Remember Custer's saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well from my dealings with whites I would add to that quote: ‘The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse’” (91). Nector says finally, “When I saw that the greater world was only interested in my doom, I went home on the back of a boxcar. … I remembered that picture, and I knew that Nector Kashpaw would fool the pitiful rich woman that painted him and survive the raging water. I'd hold my breath when I hit and let the current pull me toward the surface, around jagged rocks. I wouldn't fight it, and in that way I'd get to shore” (91). Nector recognizes the epic and tragic role white America has reserved for the Indian, a role in which, as Bakhtin pointed out, the hero must perish. For Indians who go to the movies or read novels, it would indeed appear that the greater world is interested only in their doom, and Nector articulates the direction of Indian characters in nearly all novels by Indian authors when he says, “I went home.” Going home to reservation, family, tribe, or simply an Indian identity is the way Native Americans create “another destiny or another plot.”¹¹

Nector also articulates here the strategy he will follow throughout the course of his life: he goes consistently with the current, never fighting very strongly if at all. Thus he ends up married to Marie Lazarre because she simply takes him, forcing him to abandon at least temporarily his true love, Lulu Lamartine. Thus he allows Marie to manipulate him into the tribal chairmanship and a somewhat stable and respectable life. And thus he is swept late in the novel into Lulu's passionate current for a brief time before being towed to anchorage at home by his determined daughter, Zelda. “Call me Ishmael,” Nector says, taking the line from Moby-Dick, the only book he has read. “For he survived the great white monster,” Nector explains, “like I got out of the rich lady's picture. He let the water bounce his coffin to the top. In my life so far I'd gone easy and come out on top, like him. But the river wasn't done with me yet” (91-92).

What Nector fails to understand about Ishmael is that Melville's narrator survives for two primary reasons. The first is that he alone is able to see both good and evil—he is the “balanced man” aboard the cursed Calvinist ship named for the Pequots, a tribe slaughtered by the colonists in the name of a monomaniacal Calvinist vision. And the coffin that bounces Ishmael to the surface of the sea belongs to Queequeg, the Indian to whom Ishmael is bound by a shared bed and pipe. Ishmael floats atop the symbol of Queequeg's doom as Melville's novel ends. If Nector is Ishmael the survivor, it is at the expense of his Indian self. And it is clear in the novel that Nector, though he is an effective bureaucratic leader for the tribe, has lost a great deal. When he signs the letter evicting Lulu from her home, he assumes no responsibility for the act, saying, “As tribal chairman, I was presented with a typed letter I should sign that would formally give notice that Lulu was kicked off the land” (104). Lulu is being evicted so that a factory making “plastic war clubs” and other false Indian “dreamstuff” (in Lulu's words) can be built. Lulu's perspective is the Indian one: “If we're going to measure land, let's measure it right. Every foot and inch you're standing on, even if it's on the top of the highest skyscraper, belongs to the Indians. That's the real truth of the matter” (221).

When he comes to the agonizing decision to leave Marie for Lulu, Nector says, “It seems as though, all my life up to now, I have not had to make a decision. I just did what came along … But now it is one or the other, and my mind can't stretch far enough to understand this” (106). In coming to a decision, Nector has attempted to confront the monsters in his life for the first time when he takes off his clothes and dives into the lake: “I swam until I felt a clean tug in my soul. … I gave her [Lulu] up and dived down to the bottom of the lake where it was cold, dark, still, like the pit bottom of a grave. Perhaps I should have stayed there and never fought. … But I didn't. The water bounced me up” (103). In diving deep into the lake, Nector has dared the water monster, Missepeshu, who, according to Lipsha, “lives over in Lake Turcot” (194). And as a Chippewa he has assumed even greater risk, for as Lulu explains, “drowning was the worst death for a Chippewa to experience. By all accounts, the drowned weren't allowed into the next life but forced to wander forever, broken shoed, cold, sore, and ragged. There was no place for the drowned in heaven or anywhere on earth” (234).

In spite of his official position with the tribe, and despite the fact that he is, as Lipsha points out, a kind of Indian monument unto himself, Nector is, like the Ishmael with whom he identifies, one of the novel's cultural outcasts. Nector wanders mentally between Indian and white worlds, eventually retreating to a second childhood where responsibility will never be forced upon him. In contrast, Eli, who has lived closer to the traditional Chippewa ways, knows precisely who and where he is to the end. In Eli the past is alive, and King's white wife, Lynette, perceives this when she shrieks, “Tell 'em Uncle Eli. … They've got to learn their own heritage! When you go it will all be gone!” (30). It is Eli who shows Nector's progeny “how to carve, how to listen for the proper birdcall, how to whistle on their own fingers like a flute,” and it is Eli who remembers how to hunt in the old ways.

In Love Medicine, the searing pain of Indian lives found in such novels as House Made of Dawn, Ceremony, Winter in the Blood, The Death of Jim Loney, Sundown, The Surrounded, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, and others is not as immediately evident. Lives and loves fail in Love Medicine, but not with the whetted edge found in fiction by most other Indian authors. Deracination is the crucible in which identities are both dissolved and formed, but the suffering is kept at a distance through the constantly shifting narrative and surface complexity of the text. Caught up in the tangled lives of mixedbloods who have the foolishness, cruelty, and courage to love whom they will and abandon what they must, the reader experiences the human comedy of these generations. But the non-Indian reader is not made to feel acutely, as he or she is in other Indian novels, a sense of responsibility for the conditions portrayed. Unlike many other works by Native Americans, Erdrich's first novel does not make the white reader squirm with guilt, and this fact may well have contributed significantly to the book's popularity with mainstream American readers. However, to say that Erdrich does not foreground the oppression and genocide that characterize white relations with Indians over the centuries is not to say that Love Medicine ignores that aspect of Indian consciousness. Formally, the novel's fragmented narrative underscores the fragmentation of the Indian community and of the identity which begins with community and place; and the fragmentation of this community, the rootlessness that results in an accumulation of often mundane tragedies among the assorted characters, subtly underscores the enormity of what has been lost.

In addition to this subtle fabric of alienation, deracination, and despair that forms the backdrop for the often darkly comic drama in this novel, Erdrich provides brief glimpses of more pointed Indian resentment. Even Lipsha, troubled by a tangled identity but also perhaps the most compassionate character in the novel, can be very bitter, musing upon “the old time Indians who was swept away in the outright germ warfare and dirty-dog killing of the white,” and admitting, “Oh yes, I'm bitter as an old cutworm just thinking of how they done to us and doing still” (195). Albertine, heading home, declares, “The policy of allotment was a joke. As I was driving toward the land, looking around, I saw as usual how much of the reservation was sold to whites and lost forever” (11). The Catholic Church itself comes in for a severe scourging in the form of Sister Leopolda, the mad nun who tortures Marie Lazarre and struggles with Satan. Leopolda, as we discover in Tracks, is the mother who abandoned and never acknowledged Marie, the Indian who denied her Indianness, the demented murderer of her daughter's father, and the Christian who never relinquished her belief in Missepeshu, the lake monster of Matchimanito. Though Father Damien in Tracks will redeem the church considerably, in Leopolda we are confronted with evidence as damning as that McNickle presents in The Surrounded. About this thread in Tracks, the “prequel” to Love Medicine, Erdrich has said, “There are two major Catholic figures in Tracks, Pauline [Leopolda] and Father Damien. Pauline took over the book. She's every aspect of Catholicism taken to extremes. … There's no question that the church on reservations has become more tolerant, and that there have been many committed priests who fought for Indian rights. But the church has an outrageous view on women—damaging and deadly.”¹²

Erdrich does not ignore the racism and brutality of Euramerica's dealings with Indian people, but for the first time in a novel by a Native American author, she makes the universality of Indian lives and tragedies easily accessible to non-Indian readers. Kashpaws and Morrisseys and Lazarres and Lamartines are people readers can identify with much more easily and closely than they can with an Archilde, Able, or Tayo. These tangled lives are not so radically different from the common catastrophes of mainstream Americans, certainly no more so than those dreamed up by a Faulkner or Fitzgerald. And yet no reader can come away from Love Medicine without recognizing the essential Indianness of Erdrich's cast and concerns.

Notes

1. Despite obvious stylistic differences between A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Louise Erdrich's three novels, both Erdrich and Dorris insist that each of their novels has been to some extent a collaboration. In a 1989 conversation with me, Michael Dorris said simply, “We've worked very closely together on each of the novels,” and in a published interview, he explained: “The process of everything that goes out, from book reviews to magazine articles to novels, is a give and take” (Sharon White and Glenda Burnside, “On Native Ground: An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris,” Bloomsbury Review 8 [1988]: 17).

2. J. H. Tompkins, “Louise Erdrich: Looking for the Ties That Bind,” Calendar Magazine, Oct., 1986, 15.

3. Louise Erdrich, “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer's Sense of Place,” New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1988, 1, 23.

4. Joseph Bruchac, ed., Survival This Way, 77, 79, 83.

5. Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, 1 (subsequent references to the novel will be identified by page number in parentheses in the text).

6. Jay Cox, “Dangerous Definitions: Female Tricksters in Contemporary Native American Literature,” Wicazo Sa Review 5, no. 2 (1989): 19.

7. Herta D. Wong, “An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris,” North Dakota Quarterly 55 (1987): 210.

8. While it is tempting to see in Albertine a version of the author, Michael Dorris has declared, “There's the assumption that because this character has some education, she must be Louise. And it's certainly not” (Wong, “Interview,” 206).

9. It should be noted, of course, that Foucault says at the same time that the “authored” work “now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer” (Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism, 264).

10. Tompkins, “Louise Erdrich,” 15.

11. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 7.

12. Laurie Alberts, “Novel Traces Shattering of Indian Traditions,” Albuquerque Journal, Oct. 23, 1988, G-8.