Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures

10. “June Walked over It like Water and Came Home": Cross-Cultural Symbolism in Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine and Tracks

mark shackleton “June Walked over It like Water and Came Home” Cross-Cultural Symbolism in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Tracks The opening section of Love Medicine (1984, rev. 1993) closes with the death of June Kashpaw, “a long-legged Chippewa woman,” on the eve of Easter Sunday: “The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home” (1, 7). Such overt Christian symbolism has prompted the Native American poet and critic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux) to criticize Erdrich for her supposed adulteration of aboriginal writing and “the myths and metaphors of sovereign nationalism” with “Christian-oriented” prose (84, 85). The majority of critics, however, read Erdrich’s use of Christian symbolism as highly qualified and often ironic,1 seeing her fusion of Western and Native mythologies as an instance of cross-cultural fertilization ,2 or, as Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) has put it, “they [Western cultural materials] are now Indian because of the creative development that the native people applied to them” (8). This essay will focus on the symbolic importance of water in two of Erdrich’searlyworks,animportancethatthewriterherselfhasstressed. In a 1986 interview with Hertha D. Wong, Erdrich agreed that the main image in Love Medicine was the recurring image of water as “transformation ” and “a sort of transcendence” and that water/river imagery is “elaborated on in [her] other books” (44). Louis Owens, in his essay on Erdrich in Other Destinies, also mentions the importance of water in Erdrich’s fiction and in Chippewa storytelling, “a people whose tradi10 mark shackleton 189 tional homeland was once the region of the Great Lakes” (197). Owens stresses Erdrich’s mixed-blood identity, which allows insights into both American mainstream and Native American worlds, frequently setting up in her fiction a dialogic hybridized discourse that can be read in (at least) two ways. Thus, Owens reads June’s “homecoming” at the opening of Love Medicine as “the feminine Christ-figure resurrected as trickster ” (196). Taking up the notion of ironic cultural interchange, I shall explore the fusion of Christian symbolism and Anishinabe legends related to water, showing how the two cultures contrast, interpenetrate, and at times ironize each other. Erdrich’s work relies on a fusion of Christian and Native symbolism, but overt Christian symbolism is often placed within a Native context that interrogates and ironizes it. In Love Medicine, for example, any overdetermined Christian reading that would equate June’s walking over the waterasaChrist-likemiracleisunderminedbytheallusionsthatprecede it in which water is more associated with desperation and obliteration than with miracles. June, seeking against all the odds for human contact , looks through the “watery glass” of the Rigger Bar window for her savior (1). He, however, turns out to be a “mud engineer,” who later on passes out into a drunken coma while attempting to have sex with June in his pickup (3). Inside the bar she struggles toward the “beacon” of a blue [Easter] egg, held in the engineer’s hand (2). Temporarily blinded by the bright reflected light of the snow outside, the “murky air” of the bar makes her feel as if she is “going underwater” (2). This is a portrait of a woman who is drowning and is clutching at straws, suggesting that a purely transcendent reading of the ending would be simplistic. The opening of Love Medicine links death and water, associating death more with emptiness and annihilation than with a Christian heaven. Obliteration is evoked by June’s memory of an oil engineer killed by a hose of pressurized water that with one blast had “taken out his insides .” The realization of being “totally empty,” annihilated, is something June can empathize with: “she thought she knew what it might be like” (3). The water hose, “snaking up suddenly from its unseen nest . . . striking like a live thing,” evokes the world of avenging Native gods, like 190 “June Walked over It like Water and Came Home” the Anishinabe water monster Misshepeshu, not the world of Christian spirituality. Thus, June’s walking over water toward “home” alludes to both Christian and Native symbolism. The image at one level suggests transcendence, but water in this opening section is also associated with its reverse—emptiness and destruction. Water, ultimately, is an ambivalent element that can deceive, like the supposedly “mild and wet” Chinook that June chooses to deceive herself with...