412 Louise Erdrich
Lucille’s sister Marie, who takes her in and cares
for her as if she were her own child; indeed, June
becomes so special to Marie that “It wasn’t long
before I would want to hold her against me tighter
than any of the others.” However tight she holds
her, though, Marie cannot erase the wound of June’s
abandonment. Even as a young child, June seems to
have a death wish, exhorting her young cousins to
hang her in the woods during their pretend game of
“horse thief ” and cursing Marie when she puts an
end to the game just in time. June goes on to aban-
don others throughout her life, almost pathologi-
cally. She abandons Marie by going into the woods
to live with Eli, her uncle. She abandons both her
children, King and Lipsha, even going so far as to
attempt to drown Lipsha in the slough before giving
him to Marie, as she herself had been given so long
ago. She abandons her husband Gordie, who then
descends into an alcoholic madness in which he is
visited by her ghost, just as many other characters
will be throughout the Little No Horse series. It is
as though June, by continuing to leave those who
love her in increasingly dramatic fashion, is making
sure she will be missed, as she was decidedly not as
a nine-year-old child foraging in the woods.
While June might be the most dramatic case
of abandonment in the novel, other characters are
motivated by this theme as well. Marie feels aban-
donment throughout life. She is neither Indian nor
white, and she must face the stigma of her family,
the Lazarres, hated by all on the reservation. In an
attempt to find belonging, she goes to live at the
convent, where she is subsequently abused by the
sadistic Sister Leopolda. As Marie battles Leopolda,
she feels abandoned by God as the devil, or the “dark
fish” tries to take her soul. She escapes this horror
and literally runs into Nector, her future husband, on
her run from the convent. Nector and Marie marry
and have many children, but they can never really
be said to have made a life together. Marie props up
the worthless Nector, running the household, get-
ting him involved in tribal leadership, and generally
creating a situation whereby he need do nothing—
only to be abandoned by him in favor of Lulu, her
longtime rival.
Lulu herself has been scarred by her mother’s
abandonment of her. However, unlike June and
Marie, Lulu was abandoned by Fleur “for her own
good.” As the U.S. government’s policies increas-
ingly impoverished the tribe, Fleur sent Lulu to
boarding school. After her return, it becomes clear
that no good came from that move. Lulu spends
the rest of her life using her considerable charms
to move from man to man, forcing herself into a
position in which she will only be the abandoner
and never the abandonee. Moses, Beverly, Nector,
and other unnamed men who are the fathers of her
children are left in succession as Lulu cuts a swath
through life. Her children, however, remain with
her always, indicating that Lulu prizes above all the
mother-child bond that she feels Fleur had broken.
Finally, in what is possibly the most widely
anthologized section of Love Medicine, the chapter
entitled “The Red Convertible,” both Henry Jr. and
Lyman must deal with intense feelings of abandon-
ment—feelings that drive one of them to suicide.
Henry has returned from the Vietnam War trau-
matized by what he has seen and done. Like many
Vietnam veterans, he feels as though the country
for which he risked his life abandoned him when
the war became so unpopular. Lyman, for his part,
worships his older brother and feels that the loss
of that vital connection, which is damaged when
Henry returns and severed when he drowns himself
in the river, has left him alone in the world. How-
ever, Lyman turns his feelings of abandonment into
work, becoming a driven, workaholic businessman
in the process.
So many of the characters in this novel feel the
effects of abandonment, just as American Indians as
a whole were abandoned by the U.S. government.
Some, like Marie, are just written off as unworthy;
others, like Lulu, are abandoned for “their own
good.” In Erdrich’s narrative, abandonment and the
different effects it has on human beings illustrate
well the depths of pain generated by those betrayals.
Jennifer McClinton-Templesex and sexuality in Love Medicine
In Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich uses the theme
of sex and sexuality to give her characters hope
and to bind them to their traditions. She also uses
this powerful and controversial theme to dramatize
the negative aspects of life on the Turtle Mountain