Love Medicine: Family Values Among the Dispossessed

Paper Summary:

Louise Erdrich uses her disjointed multiple narrative style to represent the similarly fragmented lives of her Native American characters whose home lives and family values cannot be expected to be what mainstream America would consider "normal" because their native traditions are no longer intact. Everything that their ancestors once stood for has been destroyed. The original natives of this continent, are now outsiders, alienated from the value systems established by the newcomers in their own homeland.

From the Paper:

"Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine is "a collection of interrelated short stories" ("Voices from the Gaps") with different narrators, about a group of Native Americans who are connected in confusing extended family relationships. As critics point out, telling stories in this disjointed way is part of the Anishinabe oral tradition in which characters evolve in stories told episodically over time (Stokes). Love Medicine centers around four Anishinabe* families, and although the Morrissey's, Lamartines, Kashpaws and Pillagers don't always get along, the underlying connectedness of the separate individuals is vital to these stories. In Louise Erdrich's world of dispossessed, alienated Native Americans, boundaries between families and kinship ties are often obscured and connections need to be discovered. For Erdrich's characters, biological ties and nuclear families are less important than tribal kinship."

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