A Healthy Balance: Religion, Identity, and Community in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine

Abstract

well as spiritual and psychological ill health. Critics have argued that Erdrich's fiction depicts the valiant survival of Native American people and their struggle to regain their nearly forgotten cultural heritage.2 While Erdrich's fiction certainly portrays the value in cultural knowledge, Love Medicine, as Catherine Rainwater has shown, uncovers the resulting ambivalence experienced by her characters as they attempt to reconcile their Native American heritage with the expectations of the dominant white culture in the modern and postmodern United States.3 The ambivalence created in this attempted reconciliation underscores the difficulty faced by Erdrich's characters in reaching a balance between the spheres of past and present, personal and communal, private and public. Love Medicine presents characters searching for a healthy balance between seemingly diametrically opposed cultures. This search for a healthy balance is evinced in the characters' belief systems, in their relationships with each other, and within their own sense of personal identity. Marie Kashpaw, June Kashpaw, Lulu Lamartine, Nector Kashpaw, and Lipsha Morrisey contend with their personal identities and beliefs, others' perceptions and expectations, and their place in their families and community. Love Medicine depicts characters whose searches lead them to discard obsolete identities as they journey to