Native American Issues in Novels
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Louise Erdrich in her novel Love Medicine and James Welch in his Winter in the Blood each address issues of gender and cultural roles among contemporary Native American populations. Both authors indicate how the Native American of today has been forcibly separated from the land and thought of his ancestors and what a devastating effect this has had on Native American society. In both cases, the writers speaks from a position inside that society. Erdrich shows more concern for feminist issues, as might be expected from a writer of her gender, while both writers express a sense of continuing loss in the Native American community and lay blame for this with the federal government and the institutions it has created for the administration and control of Indian affairs, with the land embodying both the traditions of the past and the tenuous hold the tribes have on the present. Louise Erdrich's novel is actually a series of short stories held together by a common setting, common characters, and certain shared themes. The work is essentially an attempt to redress the balance as far as how we view the American Indian and his place in the modern world and to show how the Native American has been exploited and what the consequences have been. It would be difficult to call it a feminist novel, though certainly there are some concerns in the book about women and their plight within the world of the Native American reservation, and there is also some indication of a sense of the de
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as usual how much of the reservation was sold to whites and lost forever (Erdrich 12).
There are fourteen chapters in Love Medicine, each narrated by one of seven characters, and each a self-contained story that at the same time contains references to events and people mentioned elsewhere in the book. Magic is a key element in these stories as it is in Native American life. In one of the stories, "Love Medicine," Nector Kapshaw, his wife Marie, and Lulu Lamartine constitute a love triangle. Nector still wants Lulu even after he has been relegated to a nursing home. His grandson Lipsha catches Nector and Lulu in the laundry room, and after this the boy puts a love potion in Nector's sandwich. Nector chokes to death on the sandwich, leaving Lipsha feeling guilty for what happened. Stories such as this evoke the dichotomies of Native American life and show a mixture of humor and pathos that carries through the entire work. Erdrich also makes a strong statement about the way this world has been shaped by foolish government policies and actions:
Indian against Indian, that's how the government's money offer made us act. Here was the government Indians ordering their own people off the land of their forefathers to build a m
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Approximate Word count = 1652
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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