“'Nothing?' Mom said piercingly, “Nothing to go home with?” He gave me a brief, meaningful look. After all, I had come home, even without a husband, without children, driving a wrecked car” (Erdrich, 13). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThis moment from Louis Erdrich's Love Medicine captures the life of Albertine Johnson in a memoir after the death of her aunt, June, as she sits in a kitchen with her mother and Aunt Aurelia. Albertine, like many of her generation, attempted to move away from the reservation, receive an off-reservation education, and sustain the means to live and a new life in a more stereotypical American lifestyle, not that of a Native American Chippewa . Aurelia and Zelda, Albertine's mother, argue about why June was in the middle of nowhere the winter evening she froze to death. They deal with his death by seeking the why and how behind it. Aurelia simply states that there is no reason why June should have returned home, as life on the reservation held nothing for her. Offended by the implication that a life might be nonexistent without the mutual love of a husband or great successes to share, Zelda counters with the simple question "Nothing to come home to?" (Erdrich, 13). Because his daughter returned despite seemingly having no reason to return home. The passage mentioned above has significance in this novel as it introduces the characters' constant struggle to define home and their reasons for returning or staying in the place they call home. The characters in Love Medicine are complicated, very different and full of surprises. However, there is one constant in all their lives: the reservation and the resulting family community they find there. Some characters are removed from their birth parents but taken in by others, some characters remain with one or two birth parents, others attempt to leave their family behind and create a path for themselves. Whatever course their lives have taken, escape from the reservation community is virtually impossible. People are extremely interconnected through their inheritance, sexual relationships, subsequent adoptions and marriages. Younger generations of Chippewa children attempt to build a life outside the reservation. Albertine, for example, led an adequate life in American society. She is educated, lives alone and holds down a job. However, the news of her aunt's death makes her rush home. She hasn't returned for a specific reason, but she's dealing with the loss of one of her own. This aunt, her role model and inspiration is dead, so part of how she defines life is dead too. Only by returning to the place that formed her, to the people who can identify with her loss, will she be able to come to terms with it and leave a sustainable, fully formed individual once again. She, like others of her generation, relies on the constancy of the Chippewa community to allow her experiential life to exist. Not unlike Albertine, Marie Lazarre, her grandmother experienced coming off the reservation. Marie had a desire to get away from her wild and untamed family reputation by joining the nuns on the hill. Here, she could transform into a saint, a person who was revered and glorified instead of being the girl associated not just with Indians, but with low-class Indians. He wanted a new life elsewhere. However, when life in the convent got tough, when she felt threatened and mistreated by the nuns, she ran home. Marie, after making her way up the hill to hire a new person, took only a few seconds to decide that the booking,.