Love Medicine
LOVE MEDICINE Love Medicine is a compelling saga of two Native-American Chippewa families whose lives interweave through several generations. ... Religion, medicine, commerce, and education are distinctive qualities of this evolving mixed culture. In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, the fundamental human capacities for love and the boundaries of identity are portrayed in this Native-American culture exposing the realism of the human experience. ... Her act of forgiveness and overpowering her struggles entail not only a definition of her identity, but as an act of compassion and love medicine. As Marie Kashpaw’s identity revived her capability to love, June Kashpaw, however, lost her identity of her way of living causing her downfall- death. ... The reader can sense wholeness within June’s identity with death that forged strength and continued life in June and within all the characters involved in Love Medicine. Love Medicine represents how the Morrisseys, Kashpaws, Lamartines, Lazarres and others must define their relations to alien religions, customs, economic realities, and family and social structures. ... In Love Medicine we see the consequences of the actual Western settlement: a conflict of identities often submerged in alcoholism, violence and despair but just as often redeemed by courage and nobility.