(In Tracks, we learn that Leopolda, or Pauline, is actually Marie’s mother. In the subsequent stories appear such unique characters as Lulu Lamartine, a passionately intense woman, also a trickster fi gure Marie Lazarre, a strong-willed woman who passes on that strength to her children Nector Kashpaw, who loves Lulu but married Marie and fathered their child, June and Sister Leopolda, whose confusion over her identity and her place in the world of the reservation sent her into the convent. As Louis Owens observes, however, June is something of a trickster figure, and after her death, she constantly reappears, like Christ, in the subsequent stories, thereby confl ating her Native American and Christian background (195). The story is told from the perspective of her niece, a college student, who struggles to understand the meaning of June’s death. The first and one of the most memorable stories is that of June Kashpaw, who meets her death in a blizzard on Easter Sunday. Sister Leopolda carries a long wooden pole meant for opening high windows, but instead of its intended use, she uses the pole to beat Satan out of her. Set on the Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, the stories focus on the Kashpaw, the Lamartine/Nanpush, and the Morrisey families. Sister Leopolda is a cruel and abusive woman, and she sponsors Marie when she decides to join the convent as a young girl. Several times the narrators relate the same scene from several different perspectives. The stories in Love Medicine, told from different characters’ points of view, begin in 1981, move back to 1934, and then conclude in 1948, a fragmentation that obliquely underscores the fragmentation of the Native Americans themselves.
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