Written under the supervision of Pavla Veselá, PhD, and submitted on 3 January 2012, this essay was part of my total coursework at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. The essay is published with the kind permission of the faculty.

Religion in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine

In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, religion plays the key part, being virtually irreplaceable in our understanding of the contemporary Native American culture. The role it plays, however, is rather a grim one, its roots stretching back to the times of religious intolerance and massacres. Nowadays, the descendants of the Native tribes have to find their way through the difficult terrain of a cultural landscape imprinted with both Native and non-Native traditions which, of course, poses many a question to them regarding their own identity (Stookey, 35). Should they adhere to their ancient religion and traditions, or succumb to the majority and forget all of these in the favor of Christianity? The problem is not only that this is an immensely difficult question to answer, but also that the two religions and cultures are so vastly different, “this cultural tension results in confusion as well as spiritual and psychological ill health” (Sanders, 129). This essay is to deal with this sort of clash between Christianity and the Chippewa religion in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.

Before we start discussing the contemporary state of affairs, however, it might be useful to make a historical detour and see how exactly this problem originated. The root of all this evil is to be found in the times when one of the principle policies of the US government was to transform Native Americans into carbon copies of Anglo-Americans by means of missionary activity, the sole objective being to use religion in order to get rid of the Indian while saving the man (Wiget). The missionaries, French Jesuits in particular, therefore “pushed tirelessly into the territory around the Great Lakes, attempting to convert the natives to Christianity” (McKinney, 154). As Karen Janet McKinney points out, most natives resisted this religious onslaught for many years but eventually had to accept it due to the fact that their world has changed. The buffalos they were hunting slowly disappeared, same as the forests, and the tribal communities were disintegrating in consequence of many a death from contagious diseases (McKinney, 155). The problem is that even though the Jesuits were very successful in eradicating the Native religions, imposing their own religion proved to be a problem. The missionaries were simply unable to fully replace the native religions with Christianity, leaving the natives in a state of profound religious confusion („Faith Might be Stupid…“).

This brutal struggle between the two religions is also reflected in the relationship between memory and forgetfulness, a theme which permeates the novel. Memory is connected to the Chippewa people, with the remembrance of their traditions and religion, whereas forgetfulness with the memory-eroding forces of Catholicism and the missionaries’ toil to make the natives forget their past and their culture (Cavill). Let us examine, for example, the scene of Marie being scolded by Leopolda in Sacred Heart Convent. After the scolding itself has happened, just when the nun salves the girl’s scalded back, Marie says: “The pain had kept me strong, and as it left me I began to forget it; I couldn’t hold on. I began to wonder if she’d really scalded me with the kettle. I could not remember. To remember this seemed the most important thing in the world. But I was losing the memory” (Erdrich, 56). Marie forgetting the act of brutal violence the nun did to her clearly mirrors this dialectical relationship between memory and forgetfulness. By including this scene, Erdrich not only points out to the atrocities the missionaries did to her ancestors in the name of God, but perhaps even urges her contemporaries not to forget them, however easy it might be. In the novel, Marie surely never forgets what Leopolda did to her. She may have felt pity for the woman on her deathbed, but she will always bear that memory with her.

Having discussed the history for a while, let us now take the religions one by one, and examine the relationship Erdrich and her characters have with them, starting with Christianity. In many a scene throughout the book, it is made clear that the characters either despise Christianity and struggle against it, or do not in the least understand it. Perhaps because of the prominence of Christianity, represented for the most part by the Sacred Heart Convent “up the hill” (41), we see the efforts of this institution to dispossess the characters of their cultural inheritance so clearly (Stookey, 46). It is therefore no wonder that they would want to actively resist the one and only God being forced on them. After all, they have every reason to hate Him for the most heinous crimes have been perpetrated against them in His very name („Faith Might be Stupid…“). All of these issues are reflected in the character of Marie. Initially, she imagines God as a “dark and monstrous water creature” (Bookstove), a depiction of Christianity which certainly is not particularly flattering, only to be eventually punished for her general unruliness by the sadistic nun. The scene of Marie’s scolding mirrors and “embodies the worst excesses committed against the [Natives] by the Catholic Church” („Faith Might be Stupid…“). Even if we were to draw conclusions from this scene alone, we may say that “Catholicism is seen to have an almost exclusively negative influence on the [Chippewa] people” (Bookstove). There are more examples of the inefficiency and ineptness of the Church, though.

As evidenced by the deaf God scene, the Catholic Church is also depicted as completely useless to the Chippewa people. In this scene, when attending a mass in a church, Lipsha’s grandfather insists on shouting out the prayers, believing that “God don’t hear me otherwise” (194). Afterwards, Lipsha states that “God’s been going deaf,” (194) pointing to the sense of spiritual or religious abandonment many natives feel („Faith Might be Stupid…“). In other words, Christian God does not help the Natives in any way. He is “absent and inactive” (Bookstove).

As it was previously mentioned, the characters in the book also show a profound lack of understanding of the Catholic Church, of its function and its mechanism. This is perhaps best evidenced in Lipsha’s trying to bless the two turkey hearts with the holy water, thus presenting his superficial knowledge of the inner workings of the Christian miracles. Due to the fact that, from the historical points of view, conversions to Christianity have most often been nominal and superficial, it is really not surprising that his faith is more like an amalgam of assorted superstitions that a coherent theology („Faith Might be Stupid…“). In other words, he does not really know what to do because nobody has ever told him. His grasp of the Catholic faith is shallow and incomplete, Catholicism still remaining only the “white man’s religion” („Faith Might be Stupid…“), “incompatible or badly suited for the lives of the [Natives]” (Bookstove).

Now that we have asserted that Erdrich depicts Christianity as completely unsuitable for the Chippewa people, what does she say about their own ancient religion? Sadly, if the situation with Christianity was bad, the one with the native religion is even worse. The only character that is still fully connected to the old traditions and religion is Uncle Eli, but by the time the novel arrives to the present, he is already rather old and on the fringes. As for the rest of the characters, it must be said that they only appear to have a very vague idea of their Native traditions and religion. In the first chapter, for instance, Lipsha and Albertine go lie in a wheat field to watch the northern lights, and Albertine feels a strange sense of oneness with the universe (Stookey, 44), she feels “as if the sky were one gigantic memory of us all” (34). In spite of the lyrical quality of this scene, we cannot say whether the two characters are aware of its spiritual implications in relation to their Chippewa religion, but judging from the countless subsequent scenes, it is safe to presume that they probably do not.

The exploits of Lipsha Morrissey and his attempts to obtain the love medicine also illustrate how the vestiges of the Chippewa religion have been diminished almost to the point of absurdity („Faith Might be Stupid…“). Lipsha obviously does not believe in the old traditions all that strongly, questioning their validity, perhaps even considering them laughable. He himself states at his grandfather’s funeral: “I told myself the old superstitions were just that – strange beliefs” (241) He was certain that the medicine would work only “because of the faith of the recipients, rather than the power of the medicine itself” (Bookstove). In other words, his ridiculous attempt to create a love potion for his grandparents by feeding them the hearts from frozen turkeys he had personally blessed with holy water demonstrates his perfunctory acquiescence to both Catholic and Chippewa traditions („Faith Might be Stupid…“).

The Chippewa religion was complex, with a vast mythology and a complicated set of beliefs and practices (McKinney, 154), but it is the sad truth that Catholicism has weakened the people’s bonds to their own religion and caused them to almost completely forget how to properly seek help from their gods. This inability to properly speak to the gods is also discussed by Lipsha after the aforementioned church scene as he observes that “we just don’t speak [their] language” (195). The reason for this may be of purely practical nature for even within the reservations, “Indians have not practiced their own religion or spoken their own language” (Sanders, 142). The native languages nowadays are almost died out. Let us consider, for instance, that even Love Medicine itself was written only in English, and not in the original Chippewa language.

Not only is the ancient Chippewa language long forgotten, it is, along with anything pertaining the native culture, even described in the book as being evil, and as such is completely denied. Marie, in particular, is as a young girl very proud of her more or less fair complexion, denying her heritage in order to embrace Catholicism, for she believes that all things native are simply bad. Think, for example, of her once saying that “evil was a common thing I trusted. Before sleep sometimes [Satan] came and whispered conversation in the old language of the bush. I listened.” (46) Clearly, her belief that Satan speaks the ancient language of her tribe implies that the Chippewa tongue is in her mind associated with undesirable evil (Stookey, 142-3).

In spite of the shallowness of the understanding and, perhaps, even maleficence of the Chippewa religion, it is still depicted in the book as a viable alternative to the omnipresent, yet clearly ineffective Christianity (Ward, 275-6). If we, once again, come back to Lipsha Morrissey, he may shed some light onto this issue. When attending his grandfather’s funeral, his ponderings lead him to the conclusion that “our Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least they come around. They’ll do you a favor if you ask them right. You don’t have to yell. But you do have to know, like I said, how to ask in the right way.” (195) Even though asking the right way might prove to be more difficult than he might think, these gods still appear to be more helpful that the One and Only.

Louise Erdrich weaves her story in such a way that Christianity and the Chippewa religion manage to coexist side by side in spite of the fact that the first one is generally disliked and the latter one misunderstood. Simply put, she “depicts a society where the aboriginal world of ghosts, gods, […] curses and spiritual healers freely mingles with the Catholic universe of masses, miracles, […] and holy water” („Faith Might be Stupid…“). The question remains, though, whether it is possible to ever reach a viable balance between the two religions. Unfortunately, after all that has been said, this seems highly unlikely. Characters searching for a healthy balance between these diametrically opposed cultures are simply predestined to fail. Let us remember June, for instance, who in her youth managed to survive in the woods perhaps for many days, but who was in her adulthood killed by a snowstorm because she has already lost her touch with the natural world, with her roots and traditions; or Marie, who in spite of trying with all her might to become a good Christian girl in her youth found this goal unrealistic and the religion vile, but who never really got in touch with the ancient Chippewa traditions.

If any sort of balance between the two religions is simply an impossible goal, is atheism the way out? Once again, the answer has to be negative. The Natives, as they are depicted by Erdrich in this novel, are aware of the less than perfect quality of their situation, but they cannot disengage themselves from the urge to believe in at least some god. As it is stated in the very last chapter of the book: “Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through” (245). Atheism is therefore out of the question.

Is there anything, then, that Erdrich offers to her readers instead of Christianity, the Chippewa religion, or atheism? As Cheryl A. Chatfield believes, we may find spirituality not anywhere outside, but inside the characters themselves, in their commitment to themselves and to each other (Chatfield). Instead of the non-functioning or unintelligible or simply non-present religions, she offers this sort of practical spirituality which is not about gods or some higher beings, but about loving one another, one’s family, and one’s tribal connections. It is perhaps a bit too smooth or optimistic belief, especially considering the fact that not all characters in the book are on good terms with each other, but it is a rather soothing way to look at the issue. In spite of the family ties and all the comedy in the book, as far as religion is concerned, the picture would otherwise be too bleak and grim.

Bibliography:

Cavill, Jim. “Syncretism as Rejection of Catholicism in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Bookstove 27 December 2011. 27 December 2011 <http://bookstove.com/book-talk/syncretism-as-rejection-of-catholicism-in-louise-erdrichs-love-medicine/>

Chatfield, Cheryl A. “Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.” Ezine Articles 27 December 2011. 27 December 2011 <http://ezinearticles.com/?Love-Medicine-by-Louise-Erdrich&id=1986686>

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. Orlando: Bantam Books, 1989.

“Faith Might be Stupid, but it Gets us Through (Part 2).“ Laughter Hope Sock in the Eye’s Blog 27 December 2011. 27 December 2011 <http://laughterhopesockintheeye.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/faith-might-be-stupid-but-it-gets-us-through-part-2/>

“Faith Might be Stupid, but it Gets us Through: The Syncretic Collision in Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (Part One).“ Laughter Hope Sock in the Eye’s Blog 27 December 2011. 27 December 2011 <http://laughterhopesockintheeye.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/faith-might-be-stupid-but-it-gets-us-through-the-syncretic-collision-in-love-medicine-by-louise-erdrich-part-one/>

McKinney, Karen Janet. “False Miracles and Failed Vision in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” Critique Winter 1999: 152-159.

Sanders, Karla. “A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.“ MELUS Summer 1998: 129-153.

Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Ward, A. Joseph. “Prayers Shrieked to Heaven: Humor and Folklore in Contemporary American Indian Literature.“ Western Folklore Summer-Autumn 1997: 267-279.

Wiget, Andrew O. “Louise Erdrich (Chippewa) (b. 1954).” 28 June 2008. 27 December 2011 <http://college.cengage.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/erdrich.html>