Love Medicine By Louise Erdrich Summary

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.

In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will

“We live the Old Way” are the words that author, Catherine Knutsson, uses to introduce readers to the fascinating culture of the Métis Indians in her intriguing book, Shadows Cast by Stars (1). Set in an unspecified future, sixteen year old protagonist, Cassandra Mercredi, finds herself and her family fleeing from the mainland of UA and going to find refuge on “The Island” (Knutsson 21). They have been targeted because they are “marked by the precious Plague antibodies in [their Native American] blood” (Knutsson 1). According to Essentials of Young Adult Literature, Knutsson’s book is categorized as American Indian and Indigenous Literature (Short, Tomlinson, Lynch-Brown, and Johnson 177). After analyzing the text, the categorization is correct because the story is told from the perspective of the protagonist, Cassandra, who provides readers are given insight into the cultural beliefs and values of the Métis tribe. Additionally, her character communicates the traditional roles of men and women within the tribe, while integrating cultural details that provide authenticity to the story.

When the first colonists landed in the territories of the new world, they encountered a people and a culture that no European before them had ever seen. As the first of the settlers attempted to survive in a truly foreign part of the world, their written accounts would soon become popular with those curious of this “new” world, and those who already lived and survived in this seemingly inhospitable environment, Native American Indian. Through these personal accounts, the Native Indian soon became cemented in the American narrative, playing an important role in much of the literature of the era. As one would expect though, the representation of the Native Americans and their relationship with European Americans varies in the written works of the people of the time, with the defining difference in these works being the motives behind the writing. These differences and similarities can be seen in two similar works from two rather different authors, John Smith, and Mary Rowlandson.

Erasure. Imagine having almost every detail of your life – your beliefs, your family, your culture, and success – erased by those only focused on their own personal gain. That is what happened to Native Americans over the course of American history. Due to the settler colonialism that laid the foundation of our nation, many Native Americans became the victims of horrific abuse and discrimination. As “whiteness” became the ideal in society, Native Americans lost their voices and the ability to stand up for themselves. Through her memoir, Bad Indians, Deborah Miranda reveals the truth of the horrific pasts of California Native Americans, and gives her ancestors’ stories a chance to finally be heard. In the section “Old News”, Deborah Miranda writes poems from the “white man’s” perspective to show the violent racism committed against Native Americans, as well as the indifference of whites to this violence.

The narrator of “Happy Trails” deals with a large internal conflict of choosing between his confining environment and the evolving world existing outside of the Native American culture. These restrictions exist because Native Americans attempt to preserve a culture that is rapidly dying out. They view technology as the enemy because it ruins human contact which breaks community, a cohesiveness Indians largely value. This position makes Native Americans look

Lives for Native Americans on reservations have never quite been easy. There are many struggles that most outsiders are completely oblivious about. In her book The Roundhouse, Louise Erdrich brings those problems to light. She gives her readers a feel of what it is like to be Native American by illustrating the struggles through the life of Joe, a 13-year-old Native American boy living on a North Dakota reservation. This book explores an avenue of advocacy against social injustices. The most observable plight Joe suffers is figuring out how to deal with the injustice acted against his mother, which has caused strife within his entire family and within

The American desire to culturally assimilate Native American people into establishing American customs went down in history during the 1700s. Famous author Zitkala-Sa, tells her brave experience of Americanization as a child through a series of stories in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Zitkala-Sa, described her journey into an American missionary where they cleansed her of her identity. In “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Sa uses imagery in order to convey the cruel nature of early American cultural transformation among Indian individuals.

In the article “A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine” by Karla Sanders, argues that the Native American people are having a hard time finding themselves through the community, religion, and identity because of other traditions are becoming more prominent than theirs. Sanders relies on the article “Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the fiction of Louise Erdrich” by Catherine Rainwater. Rainwater helps construct Sanders article by providing examples in the story. The examples Rainwater pinpoints helps clarify how Native Americans are dealing with the interference of another religion. Also, another article that Sander used to establish her article was “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: Loving

The complex (incompatibility) of the Anishinabe culture and Western society provided for the complete breakdown and restructuring of traditional Native American society. Time- honored culture, belief systems, and conception of self underwent severe distortion under Western Colonialism. Louise Erdrich in her novel, Tracks, draws heavily on the complex nature of the Anishinabe deity Misshepeshu and the Western spiritual construct of Jesus Christ, to create a cultural metaphor for the assimilation of native identity. This metaphor, seen in the relationship between Pauline and Fleur, illustrates the traumatic relationship between the lost identity of self and the steps one will take to find purpose and acceptance.

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.

Tracks is a fictionalized account of the Chippewa people in the early 1900. The novel primarily focuses on the Chippewa’s struggle to maintain and continue practicing their culture while at the same time embracing and resisting the European American hegemony. Erdrich recreates this conflict, allowing us a glimpse into the friction between those who refused to mingle their beliefs, those who accepted some European American ways and those Chippewa caught in the middle. In reconstructing the plot Erdrich cleverly couples the destruction and exploitation of nature with the treaties that the White Americans signed among the Chippewa to confiscate their lands. For this reason the novel mostly comprises the struggle to regain, maintain, enforce and

The reservation pastor, Father Travis Wozniak, also feels the turbulence brought upon by the gifting of the child through Emmaline’s confessions to him about her true feelings. The intimacy of the conversations Emmaline has with Father Wozniak show how essential he is to the community and its inner workings. Since this situation is not common, the reader can feel excluded from the rituals of the Native American reservation. Thus, the ability to look on from afar is something that should be appreciated for it gives a glimpse of a sacred community that most do not

In the story, “Love Medicine”, the author, Louisa Eldrich, uses symbols and the Turkey heart is representative of many things presented in the story; Such as Grandpa’s outlook on life, his relationship with Grandpa, Lulu and his battle with Alzheimer’s. The turkey hearts represent grandpa's outlook on life.

Improvising Medicine by Julie Livingston made me feel different emotions throughout the book. That is what kept me reading this ethnography since there are sections that were funny, depressing, inspiring, and cheerful. There are parts in the book where I laugh, cry, smile, and even mad that I want to throw the book across the room. I was able to connect with the people in the book and see that they are not "savages" as how many portrayed them. Not only was it great on getting the reader 's attached, but it grabs their attention on how life is over there compare to what we hear or see in the media.