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).

Use this link to access the article on the Nevada campus or use your personal ID to access from the a library home page.
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/

Graduate Presentation by Micah Drew

Susan Stanford Friedman. (1998). Mappings: feminism and the cultural geographies of encounter. Princeton University Press. Retrieved February 11, 2010, from Google Books database

Theory connects
Jane Smiley. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
and
Caroline Kirkland's (pen name Mary Clavers). A New Home, Who'll Follow?
Friedman says identity constantly evolving and not tied to origin - we go to places; values add at each pause (153). Migration

Theme of Moving
They can never go back to who they were at the beginning.
Lidie cannot go back to Quincy.
Mary cannot go back to the East.
What happens to a women forced to change rapidly and quickly?
What future does she have - how to be a woman?
Does the novel narrate Lidie's escape or path to jaded acceptance?

Contribute or Undermine

Professor Dupree told me that she was contemplating the support women exchange with other women and the strategies they use to undermine other women when she first chose books for this curriculum (Dupree, personal communication, November 24, 2009).

She seems to have settled, in the syllabus (January 19, 2010), to the more abstract and academic topic - women contributions to genre. The books continue to include her initial exploration and open discussion about woman's dependency on other women as we are all dependent on vast networks with alternative priorities.

But we may loose a bit of time digging for these relationships; the statement "we'll discuss the discourses about gender" generalizes and risks creating an archetypal discussion about men and women (Dupree, 2010, Course Description). As a class, we should overcome the barrier to explore person to person networks in the novels. As individuals, we rely on support and mitigate efforts to undermine our goals. These women authors provide narrative among give and take. We can analyze the structure of the novel's relationships to give more to one another than the syllabus alone demands.