Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine Analysis
In "Love Medicine" by Lousie Erdrich, the main character Lipsha Morrissey tells a few different stories, also is trying to help his Grandpa find the faithfulness he once had with Grandma. During the story Lipsha learns a few different lessons. Lipsha learns two important lessons while in the slough. The first lesson Lipsha learns is to be grateful for life. Lipsha says to himself "Lipsha Morrissey, you're a happy S.O.B who could be covered up with weeds by now down at the bottom of this slough, but instead you're alive to tell the tale."
Throughout history, there have been many literary studies that focused on the culture and traditions of Native Americans. Native writers have worked painstakingly on tribal histories, and their works have made us realize that we have not learned the full story of the Native American tribes. Deborah Miranda has written a collective tribal memoir, “Bad Indians”, drawing on ancestral memory that revealed aspects of an indigenous worldview and contributed to update our understanding of the mission system, settler colonialism and histories of American Indians about how they underwent cruel violence and exploitation. Her memoir successfully addressed past grievances of colonialism and also recognized and honored indigenous knowledge and identity.
The novel “Tracks” written by Louise Erdrige is a very engaging, spiritual and powerful story, as it pictures native American culture and their life on reservations at the turn of the 20th century. “Tracks” focuses on a story about a group of Indians living on a reservation in North Dakota in the early 1900s. This group of Indians is four Anishinaabe families who live close to the fictional city of Argus. “Tracks” rotates between two narrators, Nanapush and Pauline; Nanapush is a tribal elder and Pauline is a young girl who is of mixed heritage and also very jealous of Fleur, which leads to her not always being fully accepted in the group. Through this narrative, Erdrige creates a world where these four families are very closely connected and
The book overall had such a big message of family and keeping tradition going. By keeping the family values alive and sticking to their cultural beliefs, they can make it through anything. One of the biggest issues the native culture has is keeping the tradition going. The culture itself has seen so much and has struggles to get back on their feet. Native traditions are important for all generations to understand, they had everything ripped away from them making them rebuild themselves.
Love Medicine The book, Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich is instilled with captivating and intense drama that makes the story come alive. From passages of a Chippewa woman’s mysterious death to several family predicaments, this novel allows readers to quickly become charmed in which a deceased person has the ability to tie a story together. Erdrich keeps readers engaged with religious themes and imagery while developing strong yet concealed fragments of symbolism throughout the story. June Kashpaw, a middle-aged Chippewa woman is situated in Williston, North Dakota.
“Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place to love and be irritated with.” (“Where I ought to Be: a Writer’s Sense of Place”). Whenever she's at a place, she loves to write, she feels inspirational. Louise Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a band of the Anishinaabe.
The tragedy that is the conflict of two cultures, American medicine and Hmong culture, two goods that lead to inevitable outcomes coupled with a distinct language barrier. This book crucially recounts a poignant and touching tragedy of an immigrant child whose origin is the war torn traditional life of Laos’ mountains and now her home is the Merced town in California. Two disparate cultures essentially collide resulting from language barriers, social customs, and religious beliefs. The recount by Anne Fadiman, an editor at the American scholar, sequentially recounts the clash between the American physicians and the Hmong family and thereby revealing how such differences can have an effect on the attitude towards healing and medicine. Review
Native American culture and history has been used for the enjoyment of audiences over many years in film, literature, television, and other forms of media. Not surprisingly, directors and writers hardly ever portray Native Americans accurately. In the play, “Foghorn” by Hanay Geiogamah, and in Mary Tallmoutain’s poem The Last Wolf, reader scan trace their influence into modern day media, even though almost none of it is accurate.
A narrative or story is any report of connected events, real or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images, or both. Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic or formal categories: non-fiction ; fictionalization of historical events ; and fiction proper . Narrative is found in all forms of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television and video, radio, gameplay, unstructured recreation, and performance in general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and other visual arts, as long as a sequence of events is presented. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".
There are many manipulatory tools utilized by humans to strip away an individual’s identity, power, and culture. Within “School Days of an Indian Girl” and “The Problem of Old Harjo”, the Native American main characters experience dehumanization in various practises. In Zitkala-Sa’s 1921 short story “Schooldays of an Indian Girl”, she explores the autobiographical tale of her immersion into a Native American missionary school, and the subsequent discrimination. Additionally, in “The Problem of Old Harjo”, written by John Oskison in 1907, he describes a clash of two cultures between an older Native American, Harjo, and the local white missionaries. In both, “Schooldays of an Indian Girl” and “The Problem of Old Harjo”, Zitkala-Sa and John Oskison
Power by Linda Hogan is a well-described epic novel that speaks for a perspective that people are yet to identify. This book displays a side of U.S., which people do not know of that talk about the conflict between the white and Native world. The Native American’s voice tells that they find the current world full of alienation and harsh for existence since western thinking and Christian thought dominates. Writers use personification for various purposes such as to enhance emotion in a reader, which Hogan successfully employs in her book. In power, the author does not only narrate a story in her novel but also gives examples through characterizing nature and landscape.
In Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, the narrative ends with Lipsha’s perspective as he is told the identity of his parents, June Morrissey and Gerry Nanapush, and reacts to these new revelations. This ending is important in light of the entire novel because it emphasizes the importance of families and claiming their ancestry. This is specifically seen in Lipsha’s confusion and desire to trace his ancestry after being told about his parents and his act of driving June’s car back onto the reservation, in effect, “bring[ing] her home” (367). Lipsha’s desire to discover his family’s ancestry is important in light of the community’s focus on familial relationships, as seen throughout the novel.
This book did a great job in doing what it intended to do. Its goal, I believe, was to shed light on the atrocities and injustices done upon the Native American people, spreading across various tribes. Using multiple primary sources, the author is able to bring accounts of witnesses and quotes forward to prove the points that he wishes to. The objective that the author has made is made clear in the introduction of the book.
In the discussion of Native America, the representation of identity plays a large role in defining meaning to either a particular work or group. In the same way that we may look at ancient Roman architecture and attempt to construct an identity for a civilization and the individuals that made up that particular society. We use artifacts and art to help us define how groups of ancient civilizations looked and acted. The voices of these lost generations become lost or muted, as we as the viewers and interpreters are giving these objects meanings.
Stories have played an undeniably important role in Native American culture throughout history. An integral tradition for Native Americans, storytelling is used a variety of ways, acting as a way for Native Americans to communicate and connect with one another, encourage and give strength through tough times, and pass valuable knowledge down. Many Native American authors have expressed the importance of storytelling in their works, some even utilizing stories to teach about heritage and life lessons. Storytelling is an fundamental tradition in Native American culture, acting as a communal activity and a method of bonding. The importance of storytelling is communicated in an interview with Ceremony author, Leslie Marmon Silko.
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