Revision, Change, and the Native American Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine(s)

This chapter discusses the revisions and expansions that Louise Erdrich made, first in 1993 and again in 2009, to her highly successful debut novel Love Medicine (1984). It first provides a brief background to contemporary Native American literature and Louise Erdrich in particular, and continues to analyze the revisions that Erdrich made in Love Medicine against the background of the development of Native American writing; the allegiance to the oral tradition as a vehicle for cultural preservation; and finally, the motivations that the author herself has provided for the revisions of both Love Medicine and The Antelope Wife, and that are part of her overall writing practice. I conclude that her revisionary practices can be situated in the complex interplay between the purposes and rich possibilities of oral storytelling on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations of literary (re)writing on the other.