American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Now that she was in the city, all the daydreams she’d had were useless. She had not foreseen the blind crowd or the fierce activity of the lights outside the station. And then it seemed to her that she had been sitting in the chair too long. Panic tightened her throat. Without considering, in an almost desperate shuffle, she took her bundle and entered the ladies‘ room. (LM, 131) This panic, depicted in the novel Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, is felt by Albertine Johnson, a fifteen-year-old who is running away from home, not an untypical situation except that Albertine is a Native American and the home she runs away from is a reservation, one similar to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in north central North Dakota. Albertine sits in a bus depot in Fargo, ND, her destination, her panic partly attributable to the fact that she’s never been away from home alone. Through the depiction of the fictitious lives of multiple generations in Love Medicine and Beet Queen, Erdrich portrays the movement from an ​​Indian culture to American culture, with the process of assimilation culminating in one individual in particular, Albertine Johnson. These two novels are part of a tetralogy proposed by Erdrich (Trucks, the third novel, has been published recently and expands more fully on the members of the earlier generations). Of the two novels that are the basis of this article, Lave Medicine provides more information about this cultural transition, but Beet Queen also provides relevant information, despite the fact that it’s not based totally on Native American culture. In these two novels, Erdrich traces the unique Indian history of the Turtle Mountain Reservation in a manner that is both captivating and informational for the reader, providing an enjoyable fictional story that is solidly based in the facts of the Chippewa Indians of the Turtle Mountain Reservation.