Fourth Post: Love Medicine

Does your novel represent a non-American culture? What does it say about that culture?

My novel, “Love Medicine” represents Native American culture. I do not know much about Native American culture, but I have noticed a theme of “brokenness” in the novel so far. I believe this theme may suggest that the Native American culture is broken. From what I know about Native Americans is that the Whites never treated them well. We took their land and treated them poorly when we settled here. They were never seen as Americans. I believe that the Whites mistreatment of the Indians may have led to the brokenness of their culture. Since they had to deal with the mistreatment, they may have felt broken. Also, I believe that many people often leave reservations, which may pull families apart, adding to the broken culture. This book also shows that the families that live on the reservations are very close. This idea of family closeness makes sense to me because they live in the same place so they can always be together. I am a bit jealous of this because I would love to be closer with my relatives, but they all live far away so it is hard to remain close. The closeness is first shown in part two of chapter one, when Albertine returns to the reservation and they have a family gathering. So far, it is not clear why Albertine has left the reservation in the first place. When her Aunt June dies, Albertine’s mom does not invite her to the funeral and instead sends a letter to inform Albertine of the death. By making inferences, I believe that Albertine may have left the reservation because she wanted a different life. It explains her studying so maybe she wanted a better education and had to leave her family to do so. Perhaps the reason why she was not invited to the funeral was because she left the reservation, adding to this common theme of “brokenness”. I believe that when people return back to the reservation, everyone becomes close again because they want to spend time with whoever is returning. Again, most of this post is filled with inferences that could be wrong, but I am excited to keep reading to find out if any inferences I made were correct.