SOURCE: Barry, Nora, and Mary Prescott. “The Triumph of the Brave.” Critique 30, no. 2 (winter 1989): 123-38.

[In the following essay, Barry and Prescott examine gender and social roles within Native American communities in Love Medicine, contending that “Erdrich challenges the romantic vision of Native Americans as destined for cultural oblivion.”]

In Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, native American Nector Kashpaw recalls modeling for the painting Plunge of the Brave. “There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death.” The painting represents a common romanticized white perception of native Americans. When Nector goes on to say “that the greater world was only interested in my doom,” he is recognizing this long-standing historical attitude. “The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse” (91). As if to prove the validity of Nector's claim, even sympathetic reviewers of the novel such as Scott R. Sanders see Erdrich's characters as “doomed Chippewas” (Sanders 9).¹

Nector Kashpaw, for one, has other plans. “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). More importantly, Erdrich challenges the romantic vision of native Americans as destined for cultural oblivion. To fully comprehend the vitality and promise of Nector and Erdrich's other characters, it is important to recognize the context of native American culture. Erdrich's novel really celebrates native American survival and credits spiritual values with that survival. In this presentation of these spiritual values of men and women, Erdrich reworks Paula Gunn Allen's notion of complementary, gender-based ritual traditions.

Every part of the oral tradition expresses the idea that ritual is gender-based, but rather than acting as a purely divisive structure, the separation by gender emphasizes complementarity. The women's traditions are largely about continuity, and men's traditions are largely about transitoriness or change. Thus, women's rituals and lore center on birth, death, food, householding, and medicine (in the medical rather than the magical sense of the term). … Man's rituals are concerned with risk, death, and transformation. …

(Allen 82)

Erdrich modifies Allen's notion of complementarity by focusing on the failure of rituals and traditions that divide according to gender. According to Erdrich's holistic vision, survival and continuity depend upon a character's ability to internalize both the masculine and the feminine, the past and the present.

It is apparent in Love Medicine that rituals and traditions that are exclusively male will no longer work. For instance, through King Kashpaw, Henry Lamartine, Jr., and Gordie Kashpaw, Erdrich presents the failure of the warrior tradition. Although King brags of his exploits in Vietnam, both his half-brother Lipsha Morrissey and his cousin Albertine Johnson strongly suspect him, and his wife Lynette admits that he was never there. “‘He never got off the West Coast’” (239). King's empty bravado debases a tradition that welcomed a warrior's accounts of his accomplishments but at the same time demanded that those accounts be accurate. But Vietnam would not have provided King with the experience that he is entitled to as a potential culture hero. After all, Henry Junior actually faces combat in Vietnam but has no rich stories to tell, nor can he communicate the horror that he did experience. He cannot tell Albertine, for instance, about seeing himself in the face of a dying Vietnamese woman.

You, me, same. Same. She pointed to her eyes and his eyes. The Asian, folded eyes of some Chippewas. She was hemorrhaging.

Question her.

Sir, she is dying, sir.

“And anyway, what could I have asked? Huh? What the hell?”.

Albertine was looking at him, staring at him. He realized he had spoken out loud.

(138-39)

His memory is fixed both on the untraditional attack upon a woman and upon the likeness between the victim and himself, a Chippewa warrior fighting a white man's war. Henry carries his memory like “shrapnel deep inside of him, still working its way out, [enough] to set off the metal detector in the airport” (134). Because Henry is denied the ritual catharsis of recounting his exploits when the warrior tradition of the past does not agree with the present reality of an untraditional war, his memories explode and destroy him.

Like Henry, Gordie Kashpaw is haunted by the memory of using his boxer's hands, the vestiges of a warrior tradition, against a woman and by losing “the big one” (173). “He'd been a boxer in the Golden Gloves. But what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June,” his wife (172-73). Gordie's hands embody his power, but traditional outlets for his power are not available to him. What is more, he fails when he attempts to adapt his skill to the contemporary white ritual of boxing. As a result his hands “managed to do an alarming variety of things while he was not looking” (173). King, Henry Junior, and Gordie are doomed, but only because they are fixed upon their inabilities to measure up to the demands of traditional masculine ritual, and because they are unable to imagine anything else for themselves.

For Erdrich, Nector Kashpaw is a pivotal character, one who has accumulated some of the complements so necessary to survival. He avoids the romanticized doom of the warrior in Plunge of the Brave by relying upon others, including his brother Eli. Nector has been alienated from native American tradition because his mother chose to send him to the white man's school. This decision has enormous repercussions, for Nector acquires the skills necessary to be recognized by whites as a successful twentieth-century native American leader in his role as tribal chairman. Eli, however, is the rightful heir to leadership in a traditional sense and stands as a reminder of Nector's loss. “Eli has second sense and an aim I cannot match, but he is shy and doesn't like to talk. In this way it is a good partnership. Because I got sent to school, I am the one who always walks into town and sells what we shoot” (57). Fortunately for Nector, a failed hunter, Eli possesses the traditional education and skill necessary to the hunter-provider. Eli's familiarity with hunting ritual links Nector to a tradition that he would otherwise never know. Through Nector and Eli, Erdrich is reworking the familiar native American motif of twins as complements and competitors.²

Nector's eventual loss of mind and memory in old age may seem like retribution for his compromise with the white world. After all, he has apparently turned his back upon the Chippewa way of life in favor of survival, status, and accommodation to white government. Erdrich, however, reveals that Nector was maneuvered into his position by his mother and then Marie. The novel strongly suggests that Nector's withdrawal from reality may in fact be one of the few choices that he makes for himself. Nector's grand-daughter, Albertine, sees his apparent senility not as the price he has to pay for succumbing to the temptation of power but rather as absolution. “Perhaps his loss of memory was a protection from the past, absolving him of whatever had happened. He had lived hard in his time. But he smiled into the air and lived calmly now, without guilt or desolation” (18). Another member of Albertine's generation, Lipsha Morrissey, interprets Nector's condition as the result of a conscious choice. “So I figure that a man so smart all his life … would know what he's doing by saying yes. I think he was called to second childhood like anybody else gets a call for the priesthood or the army or whatever. … No, he put second childhood on himself” (190-91). In a sense Nector's second childhood is a renewal, a reclamation of his Chippewa heritage of solitariness.³ Once again, Eli exemplifies the tradition. Even as a young man Eli prefers the woods while Nector goes into town to spark the girls. His withdrawal is a way of life recognized by Nector's wife, Marie.

I thought of Eli, how he had gone quieter and hardly came out of the woods anymore. He would not come around. He never thought of women. He was like a shy animal himself when he got trapped in a house.

Then I said right out loud in that bedroom, “He's a man!”

(125)

Each brother has chosen his own retreat; the two are more alike in old age than they have ever been.

Erdrich is subtly using Nector's second childhood, his second chance, to reaffirm her larger message that not all Chippewas are doomed. Nector's personal triumph is qualified, however, because it causes enormous loss and suffering among his family. Marie, for instance, “mourned him like the dead” (192). And Albertine's questions about the past go unanswered. “Grandpa shook his head, remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time. Or at least it seemed that way to me” (18). Nector's valuable memories are unavailable to his interested heirs because ultimately he cannot reconcile the past—his native American heritage—with the present in a healthy way. Like Henry Junior, Nector cannot express his memories, and his inability deprives his grandchildren of part of their rightful inheritance. For Erdrich, past and present must be complementary. She demonstrates her feeling by highlighting Nector's loss and by juxtaposing that loss against the gains experienced by characters who holistically incorporate the past into their present.

Eli Kashpaw, confident, secure, and respected by the members of his family, is grounded in the complementarity that Erdrich values so highly. He is a memorial to the past, for he lives traditionally in his old age, ignoring modern influences that have threatened and distracted Nector, Henry, Gordie, and King. As a hunter, Eli is unmatched. As Gordie puts it, “Say Albertine, did you know your Uncle Eli is the last man on the reservation that could snare himself a deer?” (27). He continues to brag on Eli's behalf, as though the family shared in the accomplishment of a man who could still practice the old skills. “‘Only real old-time Indians know deer good enough to snare,’ Gordie said to us. ‘Your Uncle Eli's a real old-timer’” (28). Only Eli still remembers the old Cree language and oral traditions. Faced with the monumental Eli, King has to confess that he has never shot a bow. When King replaces Eli's old hat with his own that proclaims “World's Greatest Fisherman,” “Eli sat calmly underneath the hat. It fit him perfectly. He seemed oblivious to King's sacrifice …” (31). Eli is appropriately oblivious to King's sacrifice and retreat because the hat is a simple, expected, and ritualistic acknowledgment of Eli's power. King's white wife, Lynette, completely misses the point of the gift, of course, and eventually snares back the hat. Lynette is ignorant of Eli's significance and the tradition of generously giving away what is valuable to the giver.

Additionally, Eli's manliness can accommodate the nurturing behavior that Allen would probably associate with the rituals of food and householding that she attributes to women. He adopts June, and besides sharing with her his knowledge of the woods, he mothers her in a way that she can trust.

When June lived with him she'd slept on the cot beside the stove, a lump beneath the quilts and army blankets when he came in to get her up for the government school bus. Sometimes they'd sat together looking out the same window into cold blue dark. He'd hated to send her off at that lonely hour. Her coat was red.

(174)

Eli's behavior is unorthodox and encourages gossip because in his relationship with June he demonstrates complementary male and female ritual. The distinction between Eli and Nector is clear on this point, for Nector suffers from the pressure of providing for his brood and has no time to complement his responsibilities with the pleasures of nurturing and householding:

After a few years the babies started walking around, but that only meant they needed shoes for their feet. I gave in. I put my nose against the wheel. I kept it there for many years and barely looked up to realize the world was going by, full of wonders and creatures, while I was getting old baling hay for white farmers.

(93)

Because Nector has been caught up in a ritual that white society has traditionally reserved for men, he senses that he is missing experiences that Eli's way of life allows. Living as a hunter-trapper, Eli can enjoy Nector's children during the spring and summer, when the furs are thin, teaching them in his soft voice “how to carve, how to listen for the proper birdcall, how to whistle on their own fingers like a flute” (69).

Nector's wife, Marie Kashpaw, is one of Erdrich's strongest characters because her life, like Eli's, is a blending of two complementary gender-based traditions. Her life includes risk, transformation, householding, and medicine, as well as an integration of past and present. Her participation in womanly ritual is obvious in her willingness to absorb orphan children into her own family. Her role in the novel is most prominent, however, when she is taking risks and drawing upon the past. Marie, rather than Nector, undertakes the quest for a vision in adolescence.⁴ The vision is unorthodox, since her guardian spirit is Sister Leopolda, a sadistic Roman Catholic nun, but Erdrich makes it clear that Marie's vision, incorporating power and compassion, guides her at crucial points for the rest of her life. By the end of “Saint Marie,” she is worshipped as a saint just as she had envisioned, although her stigmata are fraudulent. Interestingly enough, the adoration she enjoys foreshadows the status she gains as Nector Kashpaw's wife. But the most compelling feature of Marie's vision is her capacity to pity Leopolda, her torturer, even as she gloats over the ironic fact that Leopolda has canonized her to hide her own crimes.

My heart had been about to surge from my chest with the blackness of my joyous heat. Now it dropped. I pitied her. I pitied her. Pity twisted in my stomach like that hook-pole was driven through me. I was caught. It was a feeling more terrible than any amount of boiling water and worse than being forked.

(56)

Her battle with her vision appears to have left Marie with enormous power, for she immediately snares Nector. She leaves the dust and the deadliness of the convent behind and opts for life, for Erdrich hints that Gordie may well have been conceived on Marie's way home. She practices the compassion that her vision teaches her when she takes in homeless children, most significantly June and Lipsha, and when in her old age she helps Lulu, her rival, regain her sight. In traditional fashion she reacquaints herself with her vision at a crucial time; her second encounter with Leopolda prepares her to forgive Nector's attempt at desertion and to accept him back.

Upon hearing that Sister Leopolda is dying, Marie revisits the convent after twenty-three years to show off her position and her refined daughter Zelda. Sister Leopolda is unimpressed, though, and soon the two are locked in another power struggle. Marie focuses on the insane nun's spoon, which seems to represent her power. “I wanted that spoon because it was a hell-claw welded smooth. … It had power. … If I had that spoon I'd have her to stir in my pot. … I'd have her helpless in the scar of my palm” (120). Marie tries to trick Leopolda into giving up the spoon, but the nun reads Marie's mind and they fight almost to the death in a combat that is clearly spiritual in its significance.

… She clung to the iron handle with both hands and kept grinning into my face. I grinned back at her, just to even things, and that was when I felt she got the better of me, for suddenly my face stretched and the air around me flattened. On her breath, in which I kneeled, was the smell of turned earth. Her gaze, in which I struggled, was a deep square hole. Her strength was the strict progress of darkness.

“Hold on!” I yelled, frightened, for it seemed just as if I was falling fast into her eyes and would be covered up by flowers and clods of earth unless she pulled me back.

And she did pull. She stood me up, and then I sat down on the bed with her. Once I was there I let go of the spoon.

(122)

The passage makes it clear that Leopolda is Marie's antagonist, but at the same time she is an essential spiritual guide, pulling Marie up from darkness and death. Marie gains from this experience and in turn pities a shocked and terrified Nector, pulling him home. “So I did for Nector Kashpaw what I learned from the nun. I put my hand through what scared him. I held it there for him. And when he took it with all the strength of his arms, I pulled him in” (129). As with Marie's first encounter with Sister Leopolda, out of the vision comes the power Marie needs. To readers unfamiliar with the tradition of the vision quest, Marie's clashes with Leopolda may seem horrific. But, while the horrors of Henry Junior's warrior experience cannot be salvaged by tradition, Marie's visions can, and the horror becomes transformed into positive power for Marie.

Lulu Lamartine is Marie's powerful counterpart, her lifelong rival for Nector's affection, and, ironically, her companion in old age. Lulu is a worthy adversary because she is as effective at complementarity as Marie is. The two characters mirror one another in their role as mother, in their ability to take risks, in their way of blending past and present, and in their wielding of power in old age. Lulu challenges the tribe when her land is in danger of being sold to a manufacturer of tomahawks, fearing the threat to the old way of life that the factory represents. “It was the stuff of dreams, I said. … The United States government throws crumbs on the floor, and you go down so far to lick up those dollars that you turn your own people off the land” (223). Lulu alone seems mindful of the conflict between the old values and the influences of the white standard of economic success. It is not surprising then that Lipsha tells Lulu's son Gerry Nanapush years later that “people were starting to talk, now, about her knowledge as an old-time traditional” (268).

Lulu serves as a conduit between past and present for other characters, including Bev Lamartine, Nector, and Lipsha. When Bev returns to claim the seven-year-old boy that he believes is his son, she helps him recapture the kind of life-renewing passion that they had enjoyed years earlier even as they grieved over her husband Henry's death. She heals the rift between past and present for Nector when she accepts his apology for abandoning her in favor of Marie. Erdrich dramatizes this healing and rekindling of their love in a scene that is comic and reminiscent of ritual at the same time.

“So your butter's going to melt,” she says, then she is laughing outright. She reaches into the backseat and grabs a block. It is wrapped in waxed paper, squashed and soft, but still feels fresh. She smears some on my face. I'm so surprised that I just sit there for a moment, feeling stupid. Then I wipe the butter off my cheek. I take the block from her and I put it on the dash. When we grab each other and kiss there is butter on our hands.

(98)

The healing oil is a kind of love medicine, mending a wound that has divided past and present, Lulu and Nector. Most significantly, Lulu reconciles past and present for Lipsha when she reveals the truth about his parentage. She recognizes both Lipsha's need to know that his mother did not try to murder him and his need to accept June as his mother rather than Marie. Lulu encourages Lipsha to enrich his present by confronting his past in the person of his father, Gerry Nanapush.

The structure of the novel highlights Lipsha's reconciliation with his mother and with the past, for June opens Love Medicine and her son closes it. The prose that describes Lipsha's journey home with the car, his inheritance for June, echoes Erdrich's final description of June. “The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home” (272). June undertakes a similar journey when she walks into the blizzard. “The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home” (6). Although June appears only briefly and dies in the opening pages of the novel, Erdrich uses June to dramatize the tension between masculine and feminine ritual, past and present.

June inhabits a netherworld between the masculine and feminine; her life lacks structure because she feels no connection to either tradition, nor can she blend the two. Throughout her life, she wanders into the worlds of masculine and feminine ritual inconsistently. As a child, she participates in masculine ritual with Eli, wearing a hat just like his. “They went into the woods with their snares and never came home empty-handed” (69). Marie observes June's identification with Eli and traces it back to the incompetence of June's mother, who had completely neglected the child and fostered a mistrust of women. “It was a mother she couldn't trust after what had happened in the woods. But Eli was different” (69-70). June does not become Eli, however, nor is she ever comfortable with the feminine rituals of wives and mothers. Her marriage with Gordie is on-again-off-again, so she is not always available to her son King. She gives her second son, Lipsha, to Marie to raise, watching him grow only from a distance. Her efforts to succeed in the white world as beautician, secretary, clerk, and waitress fail, too. It is understandable that June feels dislocated in these traditionally feminine roles. On the other hand, when she is with Gerry Nanapush she demonstrates a shred of housekeeping ritual. “‘She liked order. We'd live in motels. She would always arrange the room real neat, put everything away, make the bed every morning even though they'd strip it that afternoon’” (269). Although she is apparently unaware of it, the chaos in June's life is the result of a fragmented gender identity. Eventually June breaks, inwardly and outwardly. “As time went by she broke, little by little, into someone whose shoulders sagged when she thought no one was looking, a woman with long ragged nails and hair always growing from its beauty-parlor cut. Her clothes were full of safety pins and hidden tears” (8). Because June tries early to adopt a woodlands tradition that is no longer workable in most cases—Eli is an exception—she cannot carry into her adult present the life that made her childhood secure.

June cannot securely reconcile her past with her present in life, but Erdrich prepares us for a resolution in June's death through references to Easter. Erdrich uses Easter in a familiar way to represent reconciliation and transcendence. When Easter eggs appear in the story, they carry the usual symbolic significance, suggesting June's metamorphosis, her progress toward transcendence. Erdrich establishes June as egg-like early in her encounter with Andy the mud engineer. “He peeled an egg for her, a pink one, saying it matched her turtleneck. She told him it was no turtleneck. You call these things shells. He said he would peel that for her, too, if she wanted, then he grinned at the bartender and handed her the naked egg” (2). Her likeness to the colored egg establishes June's fragility, for while the egg's shell offers protection, it still is easily broken and peeled away. Although June is accustomed to being picked up, she is vulnerable because she clutches at the possibility that her experience with this man will be different from the others. “The eggs were lucky. And he had a good-natured slowness about him that seemed different. He could be different, she thought” (3). As the afternoon wears on, her optimism fades and she senses her own fragility. “She was afraid to bump against anything because her skin felt hard and brittle, and she knew it was possible, in this condition, to fall apart at the slightest touch” (4). This perception leads to a further illumination, akin to a vision, revealing an inner self that is strong and pristine.

But as she sat there, something happened. All of a sudden she seemed to drift out of her clothes and skin with no help from anyone. Sitting, she leaned down and rested her forehead on the top of the metal toilet-roll dispenser. She felt that underneath it all her body was pure and naked—only the skins were stiff and old.

(4)

At this moment, June's doorknob, which she carries with her for security to ensure that no one will break into her room, rolls out of her purse. The doorknob, an egg that is hard as stone, acts as a kind of personal medicine, warding off fragility.⁵ “She put it in the deep pocket of her jacket and, holding it, walked back to the booth through the gathering crowd. Her room was locked. And she was ready for him now” (4). This vision of her metamorphosis both sustains her and predicts her transcendence. She finally leaves Andy, falling out of his truck—“It was a shock like being born” (5)—and immediately decides to set out for home on foot. The old ways of her past become her present as she evaluates the conditions of wind and earth. “A Chinook wind, she told herself. She made a right turn off the road. … So she stepped on dry ground where she could and avoided the slush and rotten, gray banks. It was exactly as if she were walking … to Uncle Eli's warm, man-smelling kitchen” (6). June turns her back on the white conveniences of bus, truck, and even highway. She now has a direction, literally and spiritually, which leads to her transcendence. It is, however, ironic that when June calls upon the knowledge of her past, she mistakes an impending blizzard for the warm Chinook.

Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.

The snow felt deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.

(6)

Although June dies, Erdrich's description includes no sense of death. The references to Easter and walking upon the water instead suggest miracles and magic. And, of course, June lives in her family's memories and in the repercussions of death, which are central to the novel. In her transcendence, June finally seems comfortable with her past and her present; she feels secure, solitary, and she has a direction. Her confidence contrasts with the discomfort that is apparent when she enters the bar to begin the sordid courtship ritual with Andy, who is already peeling eggs. “Although the day was overcast, the snow itself reflected such light that she was momentarily blinded. It was like going underwater. What she walked toward more than anything else was the blue egg in the white hand, a beacon in the murky air” (2). June is ready to play a part, but she is out of her element, working her way through dark water into a sinister situation.⁶ When she rejects Andy, she walks over the water, defining herself through risk, transformation, and death, the elements of men's ritual.

Although she has managed to integrate her past with her present and is no longer trapped between the rituals of two genders, June is not one of Erdrich's whole characters, capable of blending masculine and feminine ritual. Gerry Nanapush, on the other hand, lives holistically because he can integrate past and present and acknowledge the significance of the feminine. He combines the tradition and magic of his father, Old Man Pillager, and mother, Lulu Lamartine, with a modern political sensibility. Just as Marie Kashpaw's vision modifies tradition so that it is compatible with twentieth-century experience, Gerry brings the warrior tradition up to date as one of the leaders in the American Indian Movement, the “famous Chippewa who had sons wrote for him, whose face was on protest buttons, whose fate was argued over in courts of law, who sent press releases to the world” (258). Gerry also is Erdrich's modern equivalent of ancient Trickster, defiant against authority, mischievous, capable of appearing and disappearing almost at will, living beyond the norm, yet tolerated and even revered on the reservation. He is a leader, clown, and father-creator, according to Lipsha's descriptive litany.

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 kinnikinnick in the most radical groups.

That was … Dad.

(48)

Gerry mimicks Trickster's all-inclusiveness, so it is not surprising that his manner is sometimes feminine.⁷ “So many things Gerry did might remind you of the way that a beautiful courtesan, standing naked before a mirror, would touch herself—lovingly, conscious of her attractions” (166). Erdrich's suggestions about Gerry's feminine component are unmistakable. More importantly, though, Gerry appears at crucial times so that he might participate in feminine ritual. His connections with birth are strong; he fathers Dot's child Shawn in spite of the difficult circumstances. “The child, for example, had been conceived in a visiting room at the state prison. Dot had straddled Gerry's lap in a corner the closed-circuit TV did not quite scan. Through a hole ripped in her pantyhose and a hole ripped in Gerry's jeans they somehow managed to join and, miraculously, to conceive” (160, our italics). To attend the birth of the child, Gerry fashions one of his miraculous escapes from prison.

When Gerry meets his son Lipsha for the first time at the end of the novel, he is attending a difficult birth of sorts. Lipsha has learned from his grandmother, Lulu, that June and Gerry are his parents, information that Lulu understands will “‘make or break’” him (245). Apparently Lipsha is on his way toward being broken when, overwhelmed by feelings of shame, he enlists in the army. Vision saves him, however, because he recognizes that the warrior tradition as it now exists is false and will fail him. Then the awareness that he wants to meet his father coincides with his cry for a vision.⁸

So I let the tears fall, my hands shredding the bag, until the face of Old Grand Dad was revealed and the clerk told us to take it outside. By then I was half smashed. Everything seemed to hang in a sharp-edged silence. It was there, before the peeled, kicked-up doorway of the Rudolph Hotel that I got the word on what I should do.

(247)

Lipsha receives the word when an old Sioux warrior's empty whiskey bottle hits him between the eyes. Drawing on the power he has inherited from Old Man Pillager, Lulu, and Marie, he envisions that Gerry will escape from prison soon, and he goes to the Twin Cities to meet him. When Gerry materializes at King's apartment, he discreetly acknowledges Lipsha as his son. “The way he laughed, and then the slow method his eyes took me in by notches, when he was back to himself again, gave me reason to believe that he knew whose son he looked at” (260). During the card game with King, Lipsha and Gerry cooperate by using Lulu's crimping system to cheat King out of his inheritance. Later Gerry, an accomplished escape artist, comforts his troubled son and saves Lipsha, a deserter now, from the army police by showing him an escape route.

“Look here,” he said. “I didn't have to go in the army because my heart is slightly fucked. It goes something like ti-rum-ti-ti instead of ta-dum.”

“Oh,” I said. “Lucky for you.”

“Lucky for you too.”

I kept on steering.

“You're a Nanapush man,” he said. I could feel him looking at me. I could feel the soft, broad, serious weight of all his features. “We all have this odd thing with our hearts.”

He put a hand out and touched my shoulder.

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.

(270-71)

Gerry launches Lipsha into the world, giving him a new start, and Erdrich's language emphasizes the younger man's rebirth as well as an integration with the universe that comes with the awareness of his identity.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand.

(271)

Lipsha experiences a symbolic birth, attended by Gerry, who appropriately participates in a ritual that is fundamentally womanly.

Evidence suggests that Lipsha has inherited his mother's feminine features and his father's attention to womanly obligations. Albertine recalls King's teasing Lipsha for his girl-eyes and notices his strong resemblance to June. “Lipsha was June's boy, born in one of those years she left Gordie. Once you knew about her and looked at him, it was easy to tell. He had her flat pretty features and slim grace …” (8). Just as Gerry's grace is a small sign of his larger connection with what is womanly, Lipsha's appearance complies with his attention to womanly roles. He sweeps and cleans on the reservation, functions customarily performed by women, and his caring for the old ones deviates from the masculine ritual of the hunter-provider toward the feminine ritual of caretaking. Lipsha appears to be in no danger of becoming trapped in the masculine rituals that have become dead-ends for King, Gordie, Henry Junior, and Nector.

Erdrich reenacts folklore tradition through Gerry and Lipsha, particularly the figures of Trickster and the unpromising hero. By calling upon ancient types, Erdrich injects vitality into a situation where her Chippewas appear to be doomed. To grasp the extent of their power, it is necessary to understand how these characters reflect their ancient ancestors. The unpromising hero, according to the myths, is an orphan raised by an old woman, sometimes his grandmother. Although it eventually becomes apparent that he is the son of a powerful spirit, he demonstrates no power at the beginning and is considered a person without significance. Having been given certain tools by an old woman the unpromising hero often embarks upon a journey that presents a series of trials. After successfully overcoming these trials, he returns to his people as a culture hero.⁹ Lipsha's experience parallels the formula, for Marie takes him in and becomes for all practical purposes his grandmother. He is unaware of his powerful grandfather, Old Man Pillager, and his magical father, Gerry Nanapush. Lipsha himself confesses that Grandma Kashpaw “used to call me the biggest waste on the reservation and hark back to how she saved me from my own mother, who wanted to tie me in a potato sack and throw me in a slough” (189). He shows some promise, however, because he has the power to heal. It is apparent in the section “Love Medicine,” though, that Lipsha is not yet a mature caretaker of his power. He dares to try to work the potent love medicine that would revive passion between Marie and Nector, but when the ancient prescription proves too difficult to follow, he improvises and bungles.¹⁰ “I ignored all the danger, all the limits … so I played with fire. I told myself love medicine was simple. I told myself the old superstitions was just that—strange beliefs” (202-03). His toying with tradition has serio-comic consequences, resulting as it does in Nector's demise. Lipsha's growth begins after Nector's death, when two old women impel him on his search for his place in the scheme of things. First Lulu offers Lipsha significant information about his heritage and teaches him how to cheat at cards. Then by broadly hinting that Lipsha should help himself to her savings, Marie provides the means for the journey that will present the trials he needs to overcome if he is to progress. With the help of his trickster father, Lipsha gambles for his just inheritance and wins the car that his half-brother King bought with June's insurance money.¹¹

Traditionally the new culture hero returns home with prizes or gains them from the tribe as recognition of his new status. Lipsha's great prize is his awareness of himself, his sense of belonging and of being a real person. Even though he has the car to show for passing his tests, his triumph is internal. It consists of being a man who will never be trapped by rituals exclusive to men and who has the capacity of reconciling his present with his past. In addition to gaining a father and a heritage, he learns that his mother's behavior requires no forgiveness. “I tell you, there was good in what she did for me, I know now. The son that she acknowledged suffered more than Lipsha Morrissey did. The thought of June grabbed my heart so, but I was lucky she turned me over to Grandma Kashpaw” (272). Lipsha's reconciliation of past and present takes on social significance through his potential as practitioner of the old medicine. But he will probably go back to his sweeping and cleaning, unlike the traditional culture hero, whose manly power manifests itself in his honored status.

Lipsha's return to an apparently menial life is no more an indication of the profundity of his experience than baby Shawn's weightlessness can accurately account for the power that she may well have inherited from her father, Gerry, and his grandparents, Old Man Pillager and Lulu. Albertine and Dot decide to weigh Shawn on the state-mandated scales used to control the weight of trucks on the highways.

She was such a solid child, she seemed heavy as lead in my arms. I placed her on the ramp between the wheel sights and held her steady for a moment, then took my hands slowly away. She stared calmly into the rough distant sky. She did not flinch when the wind came from every direction, wrapping us tight enough to squeeze the very breath from a stone. She was so dense with life, such a powerful distillation of Dot and Gerry, it seemed she might weigh about as much as any load. But that was only a thought, of course. For as it turned out, she was too light and did not register at all.

(170-71)

Dot and Albertine's perception of Shawn's weight is not necessarily an illusion simply because she does not register on the scales. Babies cannot be weighed on truck scales, and Shawn's power cannot be measured quantifiably or in terms that white culture depends upon so heavily to accurately describe a particular reality. Rational, empirical thinking patterns cannot comprehend the medicine emanating from Old Man Pillager and descending to his son Gerry and his grandchildren Lipsha and Shawn.¹² Similarly, Erdrich establishes Lulu and Marie as women of great power, although they appear to be two rather pathetic elderly ladies in an old folks' home. Nector's personal triumph over the masculine rituals dictated by the white power structure could be misunderstood because it wears the guise of senility. Nor could conventional white culture register the weight and power of Eli Kashpaw's traditional life any more than it could understand June's ultimate transcendence.

In Love Medicine, Erdrich forces readers to peer into the breach that separates two ways of viewing the world and human experience. Her native American characters may not appear to carry any weight even for sympathetic, astute readers unfamiliar with the possibilities that native American culture allows, for such readers may be trapped in the white culture's mythology of the Indian so romantically dramatized in Plunge of the Brave. Rather than showing readers a civilization in decline, Erdrich offers a vision of a culture that continues to evolve. Even as she posits that the old gender-based rituals of hunter and warrior are no longer fulfilling, she draws upon the rich tradition of folklore and vision to offer characters a promising context for growth—one that is contemporary and ancient at the same time. It is ironic, of course, that the rich imaginative life represented by vision and folklore, a life that conventional, American, white culture would not put at a premium, provides Erdrich with a route through which her art can work. Just as important, vision and folklore are valuable resources for characters to call upon as they develop identities. Marie, for instance, understands the significance of her vision and the role of Sister Leopolda in her life. Gerry glories in his trickster identity, and Lipsha, the unpromising hero, finally recognizes that his power is no mere superstition but instead is part of his inheritance.

I have some powers which, now that I think of it, was likely come down from Old Man Pillager. And then there is the newfound fact of insight I inherited from Lulu, as well as the familiar teachings of Grandma Kashpaw on visioning what comes to pass within a lump of tinfoil.

(48)

Lipsha is an evolving person and by the end of the novel he can describe his evolution and that of his beloved culture in terms that are concrete and cosmic. Standing over the boundary river that he must cross to reach the reservation, he recalls that “I'd heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land” (272). Erdrich's novel acknowledges those who are dying in the waves or hiding beneath them, but ultimately draws its meaning from the characters learning how to live on dry land.

When characters call upon tradition to guide their lives, they reconcile the distant and recent past with the present. Erdrich seems to argue for the value of experience that is all of a piece, and this holistic view is compatible with her emphasis upon rituals and roles that are not gender-based. Characters trapped in or between gender-based roles are unfulfilled. Those who take advantage of the fluidity between past and present and are free enough to incorporate into their experience rituals complementing the gender-based behavior that is expected of them will survive and even triumph.

Notes

1. Sanders' views echo Marco Portales' evaluation in the New York Times, which mentions the “unpromising, uncertain future” unfolding before Erdrich's younger characters. Additional reactions to Love Medicine by such reviewers as Dee Brown, Ursula Le Guin, Karl Kroeber, Kathleen Sands, and Linda Ainsworth appear in Studies in American Indian Literatures 9:1 (Winter 1985).

2. Complementary and/or competitive twins appear in many North American mythological traditions including the Chippewa. See Victor Barnouw, Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales and Their Relation to Chippewa Life (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977) 15, 75 as well as Paul Radin and A. B. Regan, “Ojibwa Myths and Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 41 (1928): 84-86.

3. Ruth Landes discusses the solitariness of the traditional Chippewa hunter in Ojibwa Religion and the Medíwiwin (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1968) 5.

4. The vision quest was particularly important for adolescent males. However, when discussing the role of vision of Ojibway tradition, Landes notes that there were some exceptions for females. She also elaborates on the importance of the vision quest in learning and in securing “mystic protection” (21-39). Barnouw also discusses this important ritual (8).

5. Stones are often emblems of a spiritual manito bond, but such emblems also can be man made. These emblems objectify the spiritual bond and are tools enabling a vision to work (Landes 38).

6. In the Chippewa tradition underwater creatures are associated with misfortune (Landes 28-31). Barnouw interprets water and water monsters as symbols of the unconscious and of repression in the Chippewa tradition (245n).

7. Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz in American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) describe Trickster as “A rebel against authority and the breaker of all taboos. He is what the best-behaved and most circumspect person may secretly wish to be. He is … at the same time imp and hero—the great culture bringer who can also make mischief beyond belief, turning quickly from clown to creator and back again. … In an ordered world of objects and labels he represents the potency of nothingness, of chaos, of freedom—a nothingness that makes something of itself. There is great power in such a being, and it has always been duly recognized and honored by Indian people” (335). In his commentary “On the Psychology of the Trickster” in Paul Radin's The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken Books, 1972) C. G. Jung notes that even Trickster's “sex is optional despite its phallic qualities: he can turn himself into a woman and bear children” (203).

8. Landes describes “crying for pity” as an important aspect of the Ojibway vision quest (21). Paula Gunn Allen analyzes the numerous references to this wide-spread ritual by contemporary native American authors throughout The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986).

9. John Bierhorst summarizes the qualities of these Cinderella types in The Mythology of North America (New York: William Morrow, 1985) 156-60. More elaborated details appear in Robert H. Lowie, “Studies in Plains Indian Folklore,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 40:1 (1932). For an Ojibwa tale that follows the unpromising hero pattern see Radin and Regan (70-76).

10. Lipsha's failure to follow the traditional formula appears to be a variation on the familiar bungling-host tales associated with Trickster. Bierhorst summarizes elements of these tales (13).

11. The unpromising hero often traditionally faces a gambling trial where his life is at stake. An Ojibwa version appears in Radin and Regan (61).

12. Old Man Pillager, whose power is respected and feared by the characters in Love Medicine, admirably reflects the description by Landes of the cultural and social position of powerful old Medís (44-59).

Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Barnouw, Victor. Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales and Their Relation to Chippewa Life. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1977.

Bierhorst, John. The Mythology of North America. New York: William Morrow, 1985.

Erdoes, Richard and Alfonso Ortiz. American Indian Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984.

Jung, C. G. “On the Psychology of the Trickster.” The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology. Ed. Paul Radin. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.

Landes, Ruth. Ojibwa Religion and the Medíwiwin. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1968.

Lowie, Robert H. “Studies in Plains Indian Folklore.” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 40:1 (1932).

Portales, Marco. “People with Holes in Their Lives.” Rev. of Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich. New York Times 23 Dec. 1984, 6.

Radin, Paul and A. B. Regan. “Ojibwa Myths and Tales.” Journal of American Folklore 41 (1928): 84-86.

Sanders, Scott R. “Comments on the Art of Louise Erdrich.” Studies in American Indian Literature 9:1 (Winter 1985).