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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Need to Return Home

The desire to return home motivates many characters in Love Medicine. The novel opens with the image of a woman, June, who gives up the bus ticket that would take her home to share a drink with a stranger, but at the end of the opening scene, June wanders into the snowy field “and came home.” The novel comes full circle as June’s son, Lipsha, symbolically brings her home at the end by returning to the reservation with the car purchased with her insurance money. For Lipsha, home is literally the reservation and symbolically it is his newfound self-awareness. He resists the pull of the flowing river, the pull that tugs at characters such as Gerry to keep moving. Even ghosts return home, including June in “Crown of Thorns.” 

Marie and her home are the center of much of the novel’s action, comforting and secure. Ironically, Sacred Heart Convent is the novel’s anti-home, a prison-like place from which to flee. Marie sends one of her sons to the government school but hides the other in the root cellar under her floor for safe-keeping. For Nector, home is Marie. When he strays with Lulu during the scene with the government butter, he says, “I’ve got to get home with this butter,” words that suggest that home is also fidelity. 

The Effects of Family Dysfunction and Abuse 

In Love Medicine, traumas of the past repeatedly take their tolls on the present. Domestic abuse and unfaithfulness between spouses are common. The opening story portrays King beating and trying to drown his wife in full view of other family members and their infant son. The young Marie enrolls in Sacred Heart school to escape a life of poverty and abuse, but the abuse she suffers there is even more damaging and extreme. Often fueled by alcohol in the novel, abuse causes deep suffering, most dramatically between Gordie and June. The abuse that Henry Junior has likely suffered during his time as a Vietnamese prisoner leads to his low self-esteem, alcohol abuse, and suicide. After Henry Junior’s return from the Vietnam War, he is unable to lead a normal life because he no longer feels safe or able to trust. Children who witness abuse, such as King Junior, can be fearful, anxious, and depressed, as the damage of dysfunction seeps through generations. The entire Chippewa community has been abused by racism and prejudice, moved westward by an abusive United States government. Unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, and domestic violence are the effects of this systemic mistreatment. 

Resisting Assimilation and Land Loss 

As it applies to Native Americans, assimilation refers to the process by which individuals are forced to abandon their Native American culture and replace it with white culture. Lulu, Nector, Eli, and Marie’s generation survive epidemics, government land claims, and forced institutionalized education. Many of these practices were intended to strip Native children of their heritage and force them to assimilate. However, many of the characters in Love Medicine resist assimilation and try to hold onto their Chippewa roots and customs. Marie sends Nector to the government school but keeps Eli home with her. She still speaks the Chippewa language. 

Perhaps the best example of assimilation is Nector’s role in the Hollywood Western. His only job was playing a Native American stereotype by falling off a horse and dying. He is further exploited by the painter of The Plunge of the Brave in which he falls off a cliff nearly naked. Similarly, the nuns at Sacred Heart try to assimilate their students, but Marie escapes and resists. The reservation preserves the old ways, protecting them from the whites. Eli can still snare a deer, cook skunk, and fish for trout. He sings the traditional Cree songs. Gerry is respected among the tribe for escaping from prison so many times. Marie’s house is still “like a communal property for the Kashpaws,” preserving the traditions of sharing and open doors. Lulu even resists being counted in the United States’ census. In their own ways, these characters defend themselves against assimilation. When the tribal council threatens to take Lulu’s land and her house, it’s the last straw for her. This situation was Native American against Native American, forcing one of their own off the land to build a factory that makes cheap plastic toys, which she calls “false value.”

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