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Eli Kashpaw
Nector and Marie’s daughter, Albertine’s mother, and sister to Aurelia and Gordie. As a young girl, Zelda considers joining the Sacred Heart Convent, but she instead marries Swede Johnson, a white man from off-reservation, and soon gives birth to Albertine. After Albertine’s birth, Swede joins the army but goes AWOL during boot camp and never comes back. Zelda raises Albertine alone in a trailer on the edge of her family’s reservation land and keeps the books for the priests and nuns at the convent. Zelda is a deeply devout Catholic, and when she asks Albertine if she has met any “marriageable boys,” Albertine knows that Zelda really means Catholic boys. Zelda is a proud Ojibwe woman, and even though Albertine’s father is white, she insists that her daughter “is an Indian.” Albertine and Zelda have a strained and difficult relationship, but they value and love each other nonetheless, which underscores Erdrich’s primary argument of the importance of family within Native American culture.
Zelda Kashpaw Quotes in Love Medicine
The Love Medicine quotes below are all either spoken by Zelda Kashpaw or refer to Zelda 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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Explanation and Analysis:
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Zelda Kashpaw Quotes in Love Medicine
The Love Medicine quotes below are all either spoken by Zelda Kashpaw or refer to Zelda 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.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
