Love Medicine By Louise Erdrich: A Cultural Analysis

The Disney film Pocahontas can be viewed as a false portrayal of American history. Although it may have been made for entertainment purposes, Pocahontas is regarded to be a coming of age film for children due to its didacticism. The life lessons that one could possibly take away from the film are considerably positive, but the depiction of Native American and European cultures is deceitful. Most Disney films involve “epic romances,” in the case of Pocahontas one is not necessarily needed to convey the message of the film. Even though historical films cannot always be accurate to actual events, this film manages to stray away from the actual historical story of Pocahontas entirely. Due to this, children are presented with false information

An emphasis on family is one of the central facets of Native American culture. There is a sense of community between Native American. Louise Erdrich, a Chippewa Indian herself, writes a gripping bildungsroman about a thirteen year old boy named Joe who experiences all forms of family on the Native American Reserve where he lives. He learns to deal with the challenges of a blood family, witnesses toxic family relationships, and experiences a family-like love from the members of the community. In her book, The Round House, Louise Erdrich depicts three definitions of the word family and shows how these relationships affect Joe’s development into an adult.

Another literary element in Love Medicine is theme. Two themes from this novel are family and assimilation. The family relationships of the Kashpaws are so important and confusing in this novel. It is demonstrated by the family tree diagram in the beginning of the novel. The author would not have put the diagram there, if family is not an important. Another theme is assimilation of the Native Americans to the American culture. The family partially assimilates from its Chippewa roots to those of Western Christians. As a child Marie desires to have a life with the nuns, so she rejects her tribal heritage and assimilates. However towards the end

Pocahontas is a Walt Disney Pictures animation released in 1995 following the Disney Princess franchise. The movie is about Pocahontas, a native American lady whose home is invaded by Englishmen who wishes to exploit the land’s resources and to “civilize” the people living there. However, one of the Englishmen, John Smith, fell in love with Pocahontas. This essay studies the stereotypes of native American and them being essentialized in the media as being savages, sexism and also over romanticization, as represented in the movie.

Throughout the stories told in both Mohawk Saint and The Unredeemed Captive, the unintended consequences of attempting to convert the American Indians to Christianity are powerful players in the unfolding events. When these Christian groups arrived in the New World, they came armed with the word of God that they wished to share among a group of people that have never before encountered the concept of Christianity. While eventually these relationships improved and Christians and American Indians began to have closer contact, there were still results from the conversion process that no one could have expected when the progress had started. In both of these stories, the unintended consequences of the encounters between Christian religious and

Happiness is a euphoric state, it is the light at the end of the tunnel, it is what individuals seek to achieve. Human beings inherently want to be happy. Happiness is unique because it has seven billion different definitions. In his book Immune to Reality, Daniel Gilbert argues that individuals are only as happy as the subconscious function of their brain allows them to be. Additionally, he questions the state of happiness by citing the psychological immune system. The psychological immune system is a subconscious process of the human brain, which favorably rationalizes human decisions whether they were right or not, regardless of outcome it always finds something favorable to take away. In Barbara Fredrickson’s Love 2.0, she introduces the vagus nerve as a biological apparatus to increase loving potential; Fredrickson links higher levels of loving potential to increased overall health. Most importantly, Fredrickson establishes the relationship between love and happiness as an interdependent one, “Having at least one close relationship like this is vital to your health and happiness” (108). Fredrickson believes that humans have the power within them to biologically alter themselves and to shape their own identity. Inversely, Malcolm Gladwell proclaims that human identity is shaped by the environment an individual is subject to in his book The Power of Context. Gladwell affirms that humans have the power to shape their identity, however only by changing the

[4] Disney even goes on further to suggest that their intentions have a modern relevance when they say that “It is an important message to a generation to stop fighting, stop killing each other because of the color of your skin” (Pocahontas 37). It is quite clear that Disney never intended to write or rewrite history, as they have been so viciously attacked for doing. They are writing about tolerance and understanding, while at the same time they are giving back some respect to the indigenous people of America. James Pentecost, the producer of the film, feels that “moviemakers shouldn’t be handcuffed when using real stories as jumping-off places for works of entertainment” (Kim 24). Disney simply liked the idea of Pocahontas; they liked the message that it conveyed, and they made it applicable to Hollywood.

Savages!” (songlyrics.com). There was an imaginary form of ideology being represented for the real conditions of existence by the Native American’s during this time (Althusser 155). “The starting-point is the simple one that ideology is read from film texts, consciously or unconsciously, and the relationship between each text and its culture are traceable to ideological roots.” (Turner, 1999, p.171) Pocahontas gives viewers a different picture of the Native Americans role during this time. In addition to Native American’s being criticized and misrepresented from their actual history, they were also portrayed as a Willow tree, Meeko, and Flit, whom were all objects in nature or animals. Because all Native American characters were the animals and the objects in nature, their heritage and people get pushed to the edge of society because they are made out to be different [to be objects and animals]. They are marginalized because they are different from the westerners. This impacts the ideology of social exclusion and misrepresentation of a social group. The Native American’s are misinterpreted through society today due to movies like Pocahontas portraying their people as animals, objects, or misinterpreting their role in history with negative connotations in the text. “Importantly ideological approaches reject the view of the film text as ‘unitary’ in meaning; that is, as making only one kind of sense, without considerations, exceptions, or variations in the

He describes it as, “They had been laid out/ in tainted rooms,/ their eyelids glistening,/ their dough-white hands/ shackled in rosary beads.” Through this depiction of the dead we can see the preparation that went into the body, it had been washed and laid out in a very traditional way, the way hat it had been done for centuries. This sense of tradition can, in a lot of ways, help ease some of the pain from the loss, the sense of belonging to a community of people with a set of traditions that even the dead have a right to. We also see how important the rosary is to the Catholics that this is describing, so important that Heaney mentioned it in his description, symbolizing that the rosary beads and the religion that they belong to still trap the body that they are attached to, even in death.

In Louise Erdrich’s Famous work of poetry, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways”, shows how the context of the work and the author play major roles in understanding the poem from different aspects and angles to see between the lines of what we really call life. The Author Louise Erdrich is known for being one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and her writing on Native American literature is seen throughout the world. Through word decision, repetition, and symbolism bringing out her incredibly fierce tones, the author recalls the hurt and enduring impacts of Native American children being forced to attend Indian boarding schools. These schools emerged of a post-Civil War America in an effort to educate and also “civilize” the American Indian people.

In the novel “Love Medicine” written by Louise Erdrich, Erdrich covers multiple stories, and her main focus on the story “The Red Convertible” is to reveal her style in writing after being part German and Native American. Louise was born to her father Ralph Erdrich which told many stories throughout her childhood which pushed her into becoming the writer she is today. Where storytelling had become an important part of her life style. Her mother Rita Erdrich came from the indigenous group, the Ojibwe which was a huge influence on her life. Her mother and her grandmother also played a role in making her the writer she is today giving her the inspiration to write about the reservation life as she does in her novel. In her academic career, Lousie Erdrich attended Dartmouth College and received her master’s Degree at Johns Hopkins University. Louise pursued her interest in storytelling and wrote stories that many readers believed were not hers to

Now we will shift gears and look at the stereotypes and microaggressions that are in the Disney film Pocahontas. Son of the late Walt Disney, Roy Disney had the following to say regarding Pocahontas: “Pocahontas is a story that appealed to us because it was basically a story about people getting along together, which is particularly applicable to lots of places in the world today” (Amy, 55). Roy Disney’s comments are intriguing considering how offensive the film is to Native Americans, and how stereotypical and violent the film turned out to be. Allegedly the Disney production team intended to immerse themselves into the native World of Pocahontas’ and the culture for which she existed to get a better understanding of her lifestyle and to make the film as authentic as possible. They were said to have conducted historical research about Pocahontas and the time she lived (Amy, 53). Pocahontas is one of the few Disney films where the stereotypes are not hidden subtly in the storyline as microaggressions, but instead are set out front and center to grab the viewers’ attention, in a clear attempt to offend Native Americans.

Louise Erdrich’s book, Love Medicine is said to be an authentic narration when it comes to Native American life. This essay looks at the similarities between the love triangle that is depicted in Erdrich’s novel, along with the male-female relationships which are described in Ruth Landes ethnographic study of Ojibwe women and gender, which was first published in 1938 (Introduction). Parallels between the two books certainly exist. One is even able to substitute the characters of Nector Kashpaw, Marie Kashpaw, and Lulu Lamartine, into an almost identical situation in Landes’ book The Ojibwa Woman, due to the similarities.

It is easy to see that current events and issues of the world around them have had an impact on authors and what they have written from the stories in this time period. The Native American authors wrote stories describing life during and after white man came to America. We read Oratory’s by two Native American’s COCHISE and CHARLOT. They gave heart-wrenching speeches, giving great details into the history of the tribes and the devastating effect the white man had on them. Author Zitkala Sa gave us a powerful interpretation of her life as a Indian and how the white’s coming to America affected her life.

In Camilla Townsend’s book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend points out that there are many historical inaccuracies and myths that are associated with the story of Pocahontas. Using historical evidence to support the story of Pocahontas, Townsend attempted to create an accurate timeline bringing the past to the present. At the same time, the Disney film Pocahontas attempted to depict Algonquian culture accurately, however, according to history, much of the material presented in the film is full of misconceptions and is historically imprecise. In fact, Disney’s Pocahontas epitomizes John Smith and