Louise Erdrich Love Medicine 1984/93

Native languages http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7206411.stm

Internet resources http://www.geocities.com/bigorrin/chippewa_kids.htm http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012776738606739689892%3Alg7yc_jsxlo

EN223 website http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/undergraduate/current/modules/fulllist/special/en223/texts/lovemedicine

Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place In a tribal view of the world, where one place has been inhabited for generations, the landscape becomes enlivened by a sense of group and family history. Unlike more contemporary writers, a traditional storyteller fixes listeners in an unchanging landscape combined of myth and reality.

Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place For its full meaning, it should be heard I the [tribe’s] language and understood within that culture’s world view. Each place would then have personal and communal connotations. […] Old people would nod when parts were told the right way. It would be a new story and an old story, a personal story and a collective story, to each of us listening.

Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place Instead of viewing a stable world, as in pre-invasion Native American cultures, instead of establishing a historical background for the landscape, American writers seem bound into the process of chronicling change and forecasting destruction, of recording a world before the world’s very physical being shifts.

Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place Contemporary Native American writers have therefore a task quite different from that of other writers [..] In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe.

Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place Through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, products, paranoias, dialects, and failures, we come closer to our own reality. It is difficult to impose a story and a plot on a place. But truly knowing a place provides the link between details and meaning. Location, whether it is to abandon it or draw it sharply, is where we start.

LOUISE ERDRICH LOVE MEDICINE Not one but many: Chippewas / Ojibwes AIM & Wounded Knee Louise Erdrich is part Chippewa, part European American Narrative Technique “either side of the line” Trickster Aesthetics & Liminal Consciousness

Website version Christianity versus shamanic religion Trickster Aesthetics Characters of equal status and polyphonic narrative development

Find examples of: “All my relations” Indian Humor Mutual focalizing References to AIM and Wounded Knee A sense of place and its people History as loss Stories of contemporary survival Heteroglossia

Video clip of Michael Dorris http://www.rolandcollection.com/home.aspx#D1286

Preparation For Thursday seminar in week 5, everyone come with one comment &/or idea &/or piece of information, etc. For the Thursday seminar in week 7, please would everyone familiarize themselves with all the EN223 website materials on Erdrich. Then, either write a review of an online resource concerning Erdrich or her writing, or draft a short website contribution on Love Medicine.