American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Readers and critics have long noted the important presence of Catholicism in most of Louise Erdrich’s novels, notably Love Medicine (1984 and 1993), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and Tales of Burning Love (1996). The Bingo Palace (1994) and The Antelope Wife (1998) focus on Chippewa’ culture and spirituality, and largely exclude Catholicism. I believe the critics are incomplete in their analyses of the roles of Catholicism in Love Medicine and Tracks where it is a much more central theme than in Erdrich’s other fiction. My chief purpose in this article is to provide a broader and deeper view of the matter in question than anyone has previously attempted by joining literary, biographical, and historical analyses. My argument concerning Love Medicine is that the conflict of Catholicism with shamanic religion and traditional culture provides perhaps the strongest single unifying addition to the 1993 revised edition of the novel. Additionally, I argue that the same theme in Tracks is considerably more ambivalent than it is in Love Medicine-and more pervasive than the critics have acknowledged. I especially press for a revised view of Pauline, one of the two narrators in the novel, who later becomes Sister Leopolda and appears in several other Erdrich novels. In the second part of this study, I assemble Erdrich’s comments in interviews regarding Catholicism in her life and works and draw conclusions about these remarks, especially in regard to the novels in question. Erdrich, in both the fiction and interviews, identifies the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation as an important source for the settings of the two novels. Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton also assert that the reservation can easily be identified as Turtle Mountain in Love Medicine and Tracks, though in other novels both the fictitious reservation and Argus, a fictional town, are removed from the actual Turtle Mountain Reservation. My contribution here is to assemble a short history of Catholicism on that reservation and to speculate that Erdrich’s fictional settings could indeed be closely based on historical realities.