SOURCE: Barry, Nora, and Mary Prescott. “The Triumph of the Brave.” Critique 30, no. 2 (winter 1989): 123-38.

In the following essay, Barry and Prescott examine gender and social roles within Native American communities in Love Medicine, contending that “Erdrich challenges the romantic vision of Native Americans as destined for cultural oblivion.”

In Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984, native American Nector Kashpaw recalls modeling for the painting Plunge of the Brave. “There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death.” The painting represents a common romanticized white perception of native Americans. When Nector goes on to say “that the greater world was only interested in my doom,” he is recognizing this long-standing historical attitude. “The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse” (91). As if to prove the validity of...