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Love Medicine Essay

Decent Essays

Love Medicine Since the beginning of colonization of America, there has been the problem of dealing with the indigenous people of the land. After the first attempts in eradicating the population, the American government changed its policy to integration. It is this integration into white society and the severance from the
Indian culture that causes disenfranchisement in the modern Indian reservation.
In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, the contradictory efforts to isolate the Native
Americans on reservations and to make “regular” Americans of them are seen over roughly a fifty-year period. The Morrisseys, Kashpaws, Lamartines,
Lazarres and others must define their relations to alien religions, customs, economic realities, and …show more content…

Lipsha also grows up without knowing of his ancestry and therefore feels incomplete. Added to the stress of this, Lipsha also feels detached from the white society by having the ability to use the old Indian medicines. Yet through the latter part of the book, Lipsha finds redemption from his disenfranchisement by finding the identity of his parents and accepting his talent. It is after he discovers this information that Lipsha crosses the river water and steps into his new existence.

The character of Henry Junior not only illustrates the loneliness of not knowing one’s father, but also of not belonging to the majority race of one’s country. Henry Junior is one of the seemingly infinite amount of sons which resulted from Lulu Lamartine’s “friendliness”. Due to this renowned trait of Lulu,
Henry Junior was never quite sure who his father was. Yet Henry felt no connection with his fatherland either. In fact, fighting for the white man’s war in
Vietnam was inevitably the cause for Henry Junior’s death. The atrocities committed during the war were never forgotten by Henry Junior’s conscience and it isn’t until his suicide in the river that his guilt and alienation is lifted.

The intervention of so-called “western” culture to the Indian population of
North America has created a society of indigenous people that

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