Love Medicine 411a vision quest that returns him to that experience
of pain. Unbeknownst to him, Lipsha carried this
pain inside him throughout his childhood to now.
By reliving it, he better understands himself and his
mother’s actions. As a result, his feeling of emptiness
lessens.
Lipsha is not free from internal or external
conflict, but he can more easily define his own
identity once he deals with this difficult history.
While Lipsha must confront a past he did not even
know he had, Zelda Kashpaw’s personal identity is
a conscious reaction to her past. As a young child,
Zelda watches her father burn down the house of
Lulu Lamartine, the woman with whom he had an
adulterous affair. As the flames grow and she con-
templates her father’s powerlessness, young Zelda
decides never to be controlled by love as an emo-
tion. Years later, she does, in fact, fall in love with
Xavier Toose, but she uses personal and spiritual
power to resist him. Hardening herself again him
and his entreaties, Zelda controls her natural feel-
ing. Though she marries and has children, she never
relinquishes her iciness; her harsh personality keeps
her distant from others, but her desire to rescue
Shawnee Ray, Xavier’s niece, shows that she still
harbors feelings for her first love. After 30 years, she
finally goes to him. Ready to give up her past and
the dependence of her personal identity on hardness,
Zelda, like Lipsha, starts a new life.
Even Lyman confronts a difficult past experi-
ence to forge a new identity. During his vision
quest, Lyman recalls his most painful moment,
when he watched his brother Henry walk into
the water and drown himself after returning from
Vietnam. Holding onto this memory has left
Lyman with regret and loneliness, and it cer-
tainly has contributed to his gambling, a mind-
numbing pastime. As he dances in Henry’s clothes
to connect with his brother, Lyman hears Henry
tell him to put away his ratty garments. Dancing
for himself for the first time since Henry’s suicide,
Lyman feels Henry to be in a place where it is
“calm.” Some of this peace will strengthen Lyman
as he reconfigures his relationship to that painful
memory and develops his own personal identity.
Erica D. Galioto
LOUISE ERDRICH Love Medicine
(1984, 1993)
Love Medicine, one of the most widely read and
often studied works of American Indian literature,
was first published in 1984; it was republished with
an added chapter in 1993. A collection of inter-
related short stories, it is the first installment in the
series that would eventually come to be informally
known as the Little No Horse Saga. In its pages we
are introduced to the families we will meet again and
again in the course of the six works that are set in
and around the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reser-
vation in North Dakota.
The main characters of Love Medicine are from
the generation of Indians who were born in the
early part of the 20th century. They are too young
to know what life was like for the Chippewa before
the American government allotted their land, but
they are old enough to have learned many of the
traditional ways from their elders. They are perpetu-
ally caught between the traditional and the modern:
less seduced by the modern than their children, but
more adapted to it than their parents. The three
most prominent characters are Marie Lazarre Kash-
paw; her husband, Nector Kashpaw; and her rival
and his lover, Lulu Nanapush Lamartine. Through
these three characters and their various offspring,
Erdrich explores such themes as love, tradition,
abandonment, guilt, death, sex and sexuality,
commodification/commercialization, reli-
gion, parenthood, and survival.
Love Medicine is a delightful, complex, and mov-
ing story. Its interwoven tales can be sometimes con-
fusing, sometimes ambiguous, and sometimes hard
to read. But because it tells the story of a generation
of Indians whose lives were almost always confus-
ing, ambiguous, and hard, this approach seems quite
appropriate.
Jennifer McClinton-TempleabandOnment in Love Medicine
As a child, June Morrissey Kashpaw, the character
whose death scene opens Louise Erdrich’s Love
Medicine, was abandoned by her alcoholic mother,
Lucille. She lives alone in the woods, no one knows
for how long, surviving off pine sap, grass, and
the buds from trees. Eventually, she is brought to