Love Medicine: Fiction not History

I need to give it a more careful reading to decide if this article is a legitimate defense, but McKenzie addresses the concern that this novel just reinforces stereotypes about native alcoholism and contrastingly, "sugary romanticism" (62).

of “love medicine.”
I had thought my students’ fears greatly exaggerated until I consulted some of the more widely available reviews. The results were unsettling. Robert Towers, for example, though a novelist himself, discusses Love Medicine as if it were yet another anthropological study of what he calls “a nearly forgotten American Indian tribe.”’ “The subject has much documentary interest,” he writes.* Having shifted the terms of his discussion from fiction to documentary, Towers then collapses the rich diversity of characters this novel presents into the very stereotypes my students feared, making no attempt to cover his tracks: (54)

"For the utter outsider (including a superficial reader), [June's last moment] is the death of a poor Indian prostitute, an occasion for no loftier an emotion than pity" but for June, her rejection of the man as her family's savior and of the bus ride on white highways birthed her homecoming" (58).

"I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness.'" (63, quoted from Levertov, 1975).

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McKENZIE, J. Lipsha’s Good Road Home: The Revival of Chippewa Culture in Love Medicine. AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL 10:3 (1986) 53-63 Retrieved April 20, 2010 from http://aisc.metapress.com/content/k0513608q774741k/