Saint Marie Lazarre Love Medicine Summary

“Saint Marie” is a chapter from “Love Medicine” written by Louise Erdrich in 1984. “Love Medicine” is her first novel, in which she focuses on the relations between two Chippewa families living on an Indian Reservation. Marie Lazarre is one of the major characters from whose viewpoint we can learn about their lives in the reservation and outside. “Saint Marie” is about Marie Lazarre’s journey to the Sacred Heart Convent at the age of fourteen. This journey is about losing her native religion and converting to Christianity, and by becoming a Christian she will eventually be an Indian saint. “And I'd be carved in pure gold. With ruby lips. And my toenails would be little pink ocean shells, which they would have to stoop down off their high
When she regains consciousness she finds herself lying in a bed surrounded by praying nuns. Ironically enough, what Sister Leopolda did is what the rest of the convent takes to be a manifestation of Jesus Christ’s stigmata. According to James N. Frey, the sister stabbing her with the fork and giving her the stigmata and conferring on her sainthood, “Marie has been transformed from being just another raggedy, anonymous Indian girl into a religious icon with nuns worshipping at her
The Spanish Inquisition was famous for killing thousands of people, Jews and Muslims, and all the others with different kinds of religion. Sister Leopolda is clearly racist and her prejudices enable her to do whatever she wants with those Indian girls to convert them into Christianity. Their native religion is regarded as evil. Since Indian religions are famous for their closeness to nature, their visions through different kinds of rituals with the help of sun dances, unknown liquids and herbs; odd rituals that white Christians have not experienced before, they can be regarded as heretics the same way Spanish Inquisition regarded everybody heretic who did not believe in what they did.
Marie had to be saved from her Evil spirit. This is what we see in the stove scene where she gets her stigmata and is now officially looked at as a saint. She is a converted Christian, leaving behind her “evil”