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Gerry Nanapush
Marie and Nector’s son, June’s husband, and King’s father. Gordie is an alcoholic who falls off the wagon not long after June’s death as a means of coping with his guilt over the lifelong abuse he subjected her to. Gordie’s ill treatment of June began when they were just children, when he tried to hang her from a tree during a game of cowboys and Indians, and this abuse continued into their adulthood and marriage. Gordie seems determined to drink himself to death, and he indeed succeeds, but not before he finally accepts responsibility for the role he played in June’s death. While Gordie is not directly responsible for June’s death, his abusive behavior is in large part what drives her away from the reservation in the first place, where she dies of exposure during a snowstorm. Gordie finally accepts responsibility for his role in June’s death after striking a deer with his car. He thinks the deer’s hide may earn him a bottle or two of liquor on the reservation, so he loads it into his car. The deer, however, isn’t dead, merely stunned, and Gordie is forced to bludgeon it to death with a tire iron. In the throes of acute alcohol withdrawal, Gordie hallucinates and believes he has instead killed June, and he goes to the Sacred Heart Convent to confess. During this hallucination and subsequent confession, Gordie finally admits his abusive behavior and seeks forgiveness for June’s death, and then promptly resumes drinking himself to death. He later shows up at his mother, Marie’s, and when she doesn’t have any liquor in the house, he drinks Lysol (a chemical-laden disinfectant) out of desperation for the alcohol content. Like his son, King, Gordie’s character underscores the ugly truth of domestic violence. As Gordie’s son grows up watching his father abuse his mother, King likewise abuses his own wife, Lynette, which implies that domestic abuse often runs in families and is repeated from generation to generation.
Gordie Kashpaw Quotes in Love Medicine
The Love Medicine quotes below are all either spoken by Gordie Kashpaw or refer to Gordie Kashpaw. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
The World’s Greatest Fisherman Part 2
Quotes
Far from home, living in a white woman’s basement, that letter made me feel buried, too. I opened the envelope and read the words. I was sitting at my linoleum table with my textbook spread out to the section on “Patient Abuse.” There were two ways you could think of that title. One was obvious to a nursing student, and the other was obvious to a Kashpaw. Between my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis. When it broke out it was almost a relief.
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Crown of Thorns
Quotes
Her look was black and endless and melting pure. She looked through him. She saw into the troubled thrashing woods of him, a rattling thicket of bones. She saw how he’d woven his own crown of thorns. She saw how although he was not worthy he’d jammed this relief on his brow. Her eyes stared into some hidden place but blocked him out. Flat black. He did not understand what he was going to do. He bent, out of her gaze, and groped beneath the front seat for the tire iron, a flat-edged crowbar thick as a child’s wrist.
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Gordie Kashpaw Quotes in Love Medicine
The Love Medicine quotes below are all either spoken by Gordie Kashpaw or refer to Gordie Kashpaw. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
The World’s Greatest Fisherman Part 2
Quotes
Far from home, living in a white woman’s basement, that letter made me feel buried, too. I opened the envelope and read the words. I was sitting at my linoleum table with my textbook spread out to the section on “Patient Abuse.” There were two ways you could think of that title. One was obvious to a nursing student, and the other was obvious to a Kashpaw. Between my mother and myself the abuse was slow and tedious, requiring long periods of dormancy, living in the blood like hepatitis. When it broke out it was almost a relief.
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Crown of Thorns
Quotes
Her look was black and endless and melting pure. She looked through him. She saw into the troubled thrashing woods of him, a rattling thicket of bones. She saw how he’d woven his own crown of thorns. She saw how although he was not worthy he’d jammed this relief on his brow. Her eyes stared into some hidden place but blocked him out. Flat black. He did not understand what he was going to do. He bent, out of her gaze, and groped beneath the front seat for the tire iron, a flat-edged crowbar thick as a child’s wrist.
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