LITR 4332 American Minority
Literature
Literary Style Presentation 2008
Tuesday, 4 November: complete Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (expanded version 1993)
Literary Style Reader: Mary Anne Kane
Literary or Style Objectives (5 & 6)
Objective 5: Minority Narratives
Love Medicine falls within these general guidelines:
√ “Narratives” are stories or plots, a sequence of events in which people act and speak in time.
√ A cultural narrative is a collective story that unifies or directs a community – minority narratives that reflect an ethnic group's experience or range of expression.
√ Minority narratives generally involve involuntary participation, reconnecting to a broken past, and traditional, extended, or alternative families.
5b. Native American Indian alternative narrative: "Loss and Survival"
· Dominant / immigrant culture leaves its past behind to gain rights and opportunities -- the American Dream.
Lyman Lamartine’s American Dream
Lyman Lamartine had a natural ability to make money.
Pg. 181-2:
My one talent was I could always make money….shine shoes…sold spiritual bouquets for the mission…nuns let me keep a percentage. Once I started, it seemed the more money I made the easier the money came….When I was fifteen I got a job washing dishes at the Joliet Café, and that was where my first big break happened.
It wasn’t long before I was promoted to busing tables, and then the short-order cook quit and I was hired to take her place. No sooner than you know it I was managing the Joliet….I soon became part owner,…It wasn’t long before the whole thing was mine.
For Lyman, the American Dream was more of a reality than for most Native American Indians. He was able to make money and do something with his young life. With the money he got from insurance for the Joliet, he and his brother bought a car…the red convertible reflected in the title of this chapter.
Lyman Lamartine’s Nightmare Begins
As time went on, and especially after Henry Junior’s death, his financial prowess failed him.
Pg. 298-9:
I saw my talent for money was useless with the deeper problems. Worse than useless. If I bobbed to the surface, others went down….In the meantime my business fled, my stocks crashed, my money dwindled, accounts failed, and tax information and credit notices showed up in the mail,…Quite a few months had gone by then, almost a year, in which I stayed drunk or messed up on whatever came through the reservation.
Lyman wasted his money and was on the losing end of the American Dream when he went back to his Indian roots, sort of. He signed up with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and went to work for the “establishment.” Even though he was an Indian, he worked for himself.
Pg. 301:
I ignored my mother’s jabs on the subject of selling out, and I went up so fast the trees blurred. In a matter of years, I rose through the ranks,…I gave up trying to look like Henry and turned into myself – short like my mother, but with a Kashpaw mug, bold and unredeemed, eyes narrowed for the bottom line. I repaired my confidence, learned how to benefit from complex tribal development projects….With a sweep of my pen I signed off on go-aheads, freed moneys, or, on the other hand, blocked plans I had no use for by consigning them to my personal limbo – “pending,” or I sent them slogging through “other channels,” “other agencies,” and worst, if I really hated what I saw, slipped the whole proposal off to Washington where it would be finally and hopelessly snarled.
His desire for the American Dream overshadowed his Indian past. He succumbed to the idea of “immediate individual success.”
QUESTION:
Are there others in this narrative who have tried to make the American Dream a reality?
· For Indians, the American Dream of immigration is the American Nightmare, creating an undeniable narrative of loss: the native people were once “the Americans” but lost most of their people, land, rights, and opportunities.
Lipsha Morrissey’s Realization
Lipsha thinks about the hardships in his life. Then he ponders the deaths of his ancestors. He comes to the conclusion that it is the white man’s fault.
Pg. 236-7:
I looked around me. How else could I explain what all I had seen in my short life…How else to explain the times my touch don’t work, and farther back, to the old-time Indians who were swept away in the outright germ warfare and dirty-dog killing of the whites. In those times, us Indians was so much kindlier than now.
We took them in.
Oh yes, I’m bitter as an old cutworm just thinking of how they done to us and doing still.
He voices the thoughts many of his people have…that the Indians took the white man in, and as payment for their help, the white man cheated and killed the Indians…and are still doing it.
QUESTION:
How would this passage reflect the American Nightmare as described above?
· The American dominant culture usually writes only half of the Indians' story, romanticizing their loss (e. g., The Last of the Mohicans) and ignoring the Indians who adapt and survive.
Lulu Lamartine’s Knowledge
The U.S. Government pretended to want to help the Indians, but Lulu knew different.
Pg. 281-2:
All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size….I don’t believe in numbering God’s creatures. I never let the United States census in my door, even though they say it’s good for Indians. Well, quote me. I say that every time they counted us they knew the precise number to get rid of.
Henry Lamartine…knew like I did. If we’re going to measure land, let’s measure right. Every foot and inch you’re standing on, even if it’s on the top of the highest skyscraper, belongs to the Indians. That’s the real truth of the matter.
Of course, since when were higher-ups interested in the truth?
One morning bright and early we got a regulation on our doorstep. It was signed with Kashpaw’s hand as representing the tribal government. In turn, that was the red-apple court representing Uncle Sam.
Lulu knew in her heart and in her head that all of the land previously occupied by the Indians belonged to the Indians…no matter what the U.S. Government said. She also knew that the tribal government was just a puppet to the U.S. Government.
Even after being told she would have to move, Lulu fought “the law” to keep her house on her land. After her house burned down, she still continued to stay there…adapting and surviving when the government tried to take her land away from her.
Pg. 282:
…Let’s just say that I refused to move one foot farther west. I was very much intent to stay where I was.
QUESTION:
Are there others in this narrative who adapted and survived?
Objective 6: Minorities and Language
To study minority writers' and speakers' experiences with literacy & influence on literature and language.
6b. To emphasize how all speakers and writers use literary devices such as narrative and figures of speech.
Lipsha Morrissey’s Rationalization
As Lipsha asks his grandfather why he yells in church, Grandpa Kashpaw says that God won’t hear him unless he yells. This gets Lipsha to thinking about the Biblical God and the Chippewa Gods and how they interact with humans.
Pg. 236:
Our Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least they come around. They’ll do 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. That makes problems, because to ask proper was an art that was lost to the Chippewas once the Catholics gained ground. Even now, I have to wonder if Higher Power turned its back, if we got to yell, or if we just don’t speak its language.
Lipsha realizes that the younger Chippewas have been turned away from their innate religion and turned to the white man’s religion (Catholicism) and that they can’t even talk to their gods in the proper way. He rationalizes the problems of the Indian stemming from the inability to communicate with the white man’s God.
QUESTION:
Would you consider this passage a narrative or a figure of speech? Why?
6e. To note variations of standard English by minority writers and speakers.
Marie Kashpaw’s Return
After living with the old ones, Marie decides to return to her native tongue.
Pg. 263:
“Ahnee, n’kawnis.” She stood in the doorway. Since she had lived among other old people at the Senior Citizens, Marie had started speaking the old language, falling back through time to the words that Lazarres had used among themselves, shucking off the Kashpaw pride, yet holding to the old strengths Rushes Bear had taught her, having seen the new, the Catholic, the Bureau, fail her children, having known how comfortless words of English sounded in her ears.
After seeing what the white man’s influence has brought her people, she decides to not use the words of English, for it reminds her of the deception and lies her people have endured.
QUESTIONS:
Do you think that Marie’s return to her native tongue was solely due to the fact that she moved in to the Senior Citizens?
Do you think she would have been so ready to speak the old language had she not been living with the old people from her tribe?