[In the following essay, Farrell provides an interpretation of the symbolism behind June's death in the “The World's Greatest Fishermen” chapter of Love Medicine.]

Set mostly on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, Louise Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine, opens on the morning before Easter Sunday with the death of June Kashpaw, an event that sets into motion both memories and actual returns to the reservation by the other characters. Erdrich's Easter setting is important, as is the title of the first section. “The World's Greatest Fishermen,” which elicits images both of Christ—able to feed a crowd on only two small fish—and of Uncle Eli, a traditional Chippewa fisherman. This pull between Christianity and traditional American Indian beliefs is everywhere evident in this opening chapter, especially in June, a character for whom a sense of balance or spiritual unity, traits that critic Paula Gunn Allen claims essential to Native American identity, remains elusive. Presented as a Christ-like figure, June is a character caught unhappily between native tradition and the contemporary world. Although many critics read June's death in this opening chapter as a moment of transcendence, I believe that it is, instead, a failed “homecoming” which must be rewritten by her son Lipsha Morrissey in the novel's final pages.

As a young child, June seems thoroughly Indian. Marie Kashpaw, June's adoptive mother, speculates that she is “the child of what the old people called Manitous, invisible ones who live in the woods” (65). She is traditional, like her Uncle Eli, and in fact, chooses to live with him rather than with Marie and her family. Yet, when the novel opens, we see June walking somewhat aimlessly “down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota” (2). She is set squarely in a contemporary America characterized by white exploitation of Indian lands. When a man beckons to June from a bar, she enters, and is “momentarily blinded,” guided only by a blue egg in the man's white hand, what she believes to be “a beacon in the murky air” (2). Any kind of safety offered by this “beacon,” however, is only illusory. The egg is a Christian symbol of rebirth and renewal, and it is held out to her in a white hand. June is “blinded” by the white Christian world that has displaced native traditions. In fact, Erdrich describes June's entry into the bar as “going underwater” (2). Elsewhere in the novel, water is associated with suicide, with death and oblivion, and with giving up rather than surviving. Henry Jr. drowns in a river, and Nector Kashpaw is depicted in a famous painting as a doomed Indian brave, plunging from a high cliff into the churning water below. Elsewhere he swims into a lake and contemplates staying on the bottom forever. Marie thinks of small stones at the bottom of the lake, and imagines “how the waves are grinding them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear” (73).

June herself is compared to an egg in this opening section—wearing her pink turtleneck “shell” she is equally fragile, her skin “hard and brittle” (4). After she eventually allows the white man from the bar to “peel” her, June falls out of his heated truck into the cold, experiencing “a shock like being born” (5). At this point, June sets out to walk home to the reservation, despite her thin boots and the harsh “Chinook” wind: “the snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home” (6). In her similarity to Christ, June is ultimately a character who acquiesces to a dominant white view of the American Indian, accepting and embodying the Christian myth of forbearance. Elsewhere in the novel, we see what Christian faith has meant for Indians historically. Marie tells the pointed story of a group of “bush Indians who stole the holy black hat of a Jesuit and swallowed little scraps of it to cure their fevers. But the hat itself carried smallpox and was killing them with belief” (42). Faith in a Christian God has not done Indians any more good than faith in the U.S. government; as Lipsha Morrissey says, it has kept them waiting “when the goods don't deliver” (203). June, then, fails because she goes to a heavenly “home” rather than forcing a politically subversive earthly home. She never makes it back to the reservation; her rebirth leads only to her death. Just as Christianity fails the Catholicized Indians in the novel who “just don't speak its language” (195), June's death, which Albertine Johnson and other characters suspect is a suicide, fails to create the sense of belonging implied in the language of homecoming initially used to describe it. Albertine, in fact, describes that Easter Sunday as a portent only of a “false spring” (6).

We see June's willingness to play the role of the victim, when, as a child, she insists on being “hung” by Gordie and Aurelia. Presumably playing cowboys and Indians, June coolly tells Gordie: “You got to tighten [the rope] … before you hoist me up” (67). She explains to Marie that she deserves to die because she “stole their horse” (67). June's acceptance of white stereotypes of Indians and her eagerness for death in this scene should alert us to the possibility that, despite the claims of many critics, her death in the opening chapter suggests defeat rather than transcendence. Her death is especially problematic when we realize that survival, the ability to survive in the face of threatening genocide, becomes in itself a defiant political act and a cause for celebration in much American Indian literature. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Erdrich goes so far as to say that “survival becomes a moral question.” After all, as Nector reminds us, for the whites he knows, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Thus, when he is hired for the “biggest Indian part” in a Hollywood movie, Nector dies “right off,” realizing that “death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater.” And when he poses for the famous Plunge of the Brave portrait, he is depicted as a “noble savage” jumping off a cliff into “certain death” below (90-91). But when Erdrich talks about survival, she means cultural survival as well as physical. June's death, with its Christian overtones, is linked to what the book presents as a false kind of belonging—assimilation. Albertine imagines her Aunt June “not only dead but suddenly buried, vanished off the land like that sudden snow,” and realizes that she, too, feels “buried” as she finds herself “far from home, living in a white woman's basement” (7).

Unlike characters in the novel who either die or assimilate, Lipsha Morrissey mixes ingredients from his dual cultural heritage and thus survives. Lipsha initially seems to go wrong by acquiescing to Christian views as his mother June had done. Parroting a mainstream view of Indians, all the while recognizing the “lie” he has waded into, Lipsha admits, “I told myself love medicine was simple. I told myself the old superstitions was just that—strange beliefs” (203). For a few brief moments, Lipsha submits to the Christian notion of faith: “And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the goods don't deliver. … Faith might be stupid but it gets us through. … I finally convinced myself that the real actual power to the love medicine was not the goose heart itself but the faith in the cure” (203). As a result, Lipsha's love medicine, concocted to rekindle his grandfather Nector's love for his grandmother Marie, goes terribly wrong.

Lipsha's return to the reservation at the end of the novel, however, is a conscious effort to nurture and preserve his community. Neither an act of acquiescence nor of giving in, but a practical, tricksterlike attempt at survival, Lipsha's return home makes the best of circumstances as they exist for contemporary American Indians. Lipsha's “coming home” is an explicit rewriting of his mother June's suicidal “homecoming.” After the arrival of Lipsha's father, Gerry Nanapush, and the poker game at King Kashpaw's apartment. Lipsha imagines that “the Easter snow” associated with June's death had “resumed falling softly in [the] room” (262). The novel closes with Lipsha driving back to the reservation in “June's car”: the car bought with the insurance money from June's death. For King, who owns the car, it represents materialism, King's assimilation into white culture and acceptance of white values. A prison informer who turns state's evidence against Gerry Nanapush, King even refers to himself by the code name “apple” (a pejorative term for assimilated Indians: red on the outside, white on the inside) in his Vietnam fantasies. Lipsha, however, as June's other son, offers a different path than that suggested by either June or King (death or assimilation). Lipsha, driving June's car, comes to “the bridge over the boundary river,” presumably dividing the reservation from the outside world. There, he contemplates “vast unreasonable waves” which “solved all [their] problems.” Yet his recognition that his family and community live on dry land suggests his refusal of death, his commitment to struggle, to survival. Rather than surrendering to the water, he crosses it. The bridge suggests Lipsha's ability to bridge cultures. Whereas June represents the danger of cultural assimilation as she, Christlike, walks on the water to her death, Lipsha crosses the water in a car; in trickster fashion he uses tools of contemporary American culture to facilitate the survival of his own tribal community.

Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986. 161.

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

Moyers, Bill. “An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” Bill Moyers' A World of Ideas. Alexandria, VA. PBS. 1988.