Tracks by Louise Erdrich

First published: 1988

Type of plot: Family

Time of work: Winter, 1912-spring, 1924

Locale: Matchimanito, a fictional reservation in North Dakota

Principal Characters:

• Nanapush, an Anishinabe elder who tells Fleur’s story of survival to Lulu, his adopted granddaughter
• Pauline Puyat, the other narrator, a fanatical nun
• Fleur Pillager, a survivor of epidemics and deprivations thought to possess supernatural powers

The Novel

Tracks deals with the devastation of the Anishinabe (also known as Chippewa or Objiway) people between the winter of 1912 and the spring of 1924 in Matchimanito, North Dakota. The novel focuses on the life of Fleur Pillager and those with whom she comes into contact, dramatizing their struggle for survival as well as their many-faceted conflicts. In alternating chapters, the story is narrated by Nanapush, a tribal elder, and Pauline Puyat, a fanatic nun of mixed heritage. The two narrators complement but at times also contradict and undermine each other.

At the age of seventeen, Fleur is rescued by Nanapush during a severe winter when inhabitants of Matchimanito are found dead from consumption and starvation. After recovery, she goes to Argus to work at a butcher shop. There, she meets a younger girl, Pauline, who has known her as a survivor of two drownings and hence is convinced that Fleur is the chosen one of Misshepeshu, the lake monster. Pauline reports how Fleur, having aroused the desires of three male workers and beaten them at the card table, is sexually assaulted. Russell, Pauline’s nephew, tries to stop it but to no avail. Later, a tornado strikes the town, and the three men take refuge inside a meat locker, refusing to let Pauline and Russell in. Russell shuts them in from the outside, freezing two of them to death. After the incident, Pauline returns to the reservation, where she learns that Fleur is pregnant. It is uncertain how Fleur becomes pregnant, but according to Nanapush, through personal insights and love medicines, he has helped Eli Kashpaw, a hunter, win her passionate love. Fleur’s childbirth proves to be so difficult that she almost dies. The baby, given the name of Lulu Nanapush, is in fact the person Nanapush addresses throughout his narrative.

Meanwhile, Pauline becomes a helper in Argus at a farm belonging to Bernadette Morrisey. Awakening to her sexuality, Pauline experiments with Napoleon, Bernadette’s brother, but finds herself attracted to Eli instead. Spurned by him, she retaliates with the love potions, thus causing Eli to have sex with Sophie, Bernadette’s daughter. Sophie is punished by her mother, who sends her away. She goes to Fleur’s cabin and kneels in her yard for days on end, jeopardizing the relationship between Fleur and Eli. To avenge Sophie, Clarence, Bernadette’s son, attacks Margaret, Eli’s mother, by tying her up and shaving her bald. The insult leads Margaret, Nanapush, and Fleur to retaliate.

The sexual relationship between Pauline and Napoleon has led to her pregnancy. After giving birth to Marie, whom she turns over to Bernadette, Pauline joins Sister Anne’s convent, where she sees visions of Christ. Determined to remove the devil from Indian country, she returns to the reservation. Fleur, who is again pregnant, gives birth prematurely one day when Pauline comes to visit. Pauline is too clumsy to help Fleur stop the bleeding. Fleur loses consciousness, and the baby dies.

The winter begins to get harsh again, and food is running out. Furthermore, Father Damien, the Catholic priest, brings news that the land allotted to the Pillager, Kashpaw, and Nanapush families would be foreclosed unless they pay their taxes. Faced with the crisis, Fleur is affected by a mysterious illness. She undertakes a healing ceremony, which Pauline disrupts ruthlessly. Eventually, the Kashpaws, Nanapush, and Fleur manage to pool their resources to pay the taxes. Nector Kashpaw (Eli’s brother), entrusted to take the money to pay the taxes, betrays Nanapush and Fleur by making the payment toward Kashpaw land. The betrayal agonizes Fleur, alienates her from Eli, and causes her to attempt suicide by drowning.

Pauline, increasingly determined to become a martyr of her new faith, attempts to confront the lake monster—her idea of Satan. In her delusion, she runs into Napoleon and strangles him instead. Afterward, she takes her vow and becomes Sister Leopolda.

The lumber company has started cutting down the trees near Fleur’s cabin. Desperate, Fleur sends Lulu to the government school for the sake of safety and plots her revenge. Secretly, she has sawed the trees around her cabin at the base, so that they remain lightly held. When the lumber company’s men come to move her by force, the trees tumble down, crushing men and wagons beneath them. Finally, Fleur leaves her home ground. Having witnessed the way influence is exercised by bureaucratic means, Nanapush runs for tribal chairmanship in order to help the Indians. He is elected and, after many attempts, manages to retrieve Lulu from the government school.

The Characters

Although Fleur is the central figure of the novel, the reader’s understanding of her character is mediated by Nanapush and Pauline, who also serve as the narrators of the novel.

From the perspective of Nanapush, Fleur is a real victim, like many others including himself, of harsh winters, diseases, starvation, government policies, and the scheming of outsiders such as lumber companies and even mixed-blood Indians. A bond exists between Nanapush and Fleur, who warmly calls him “uncle” and treats him as such. For Nanapush, however, Fleur is not only human and daughterly, but also symbolic of the historical predicament of the Anishinabe. As a young woman, Fleur has won his recognition by holding on to the traditional way of life, thus making her an ideal companion for a young man like Eli, who also lives by traditional ways. Thanks to her spiritual and moral strength, which surpasses her passion for Eli, she has turned into a woman warrior in the end, though paying the high price of losing her daughter and husband for her refusal to compromise.

The charming and eerie qualities of Fleur as a character are largely derived from Pauline’s narration, unreliable as it is because of Pauline’s delusions. From her perspective, Fleur is both a peer and a legend. As a peer, she is a model and a rival for Pauline, who is fascinated and overshadowed by her magnetic attraction, especially her sexuality, which Pauline tries to emulate, or else jeopardize. As a legend in the eyes of Pauline, Fleur is not only a miraculous survivor of drownings and hardships, but also a powerful sorceress endowed by the lake monster with the ability to wreak havoc. Yet as Pauline’s religious fanaticism increases, for her Fleur begins to lose her individuality; instead, she has come to stand for the kind of Satanic paganism that Pauline must deter and oppose. Willfully, Pauline has turned Fleur into a flat character by obliterating the latter’s genuine personality, an important part of which is Fleur’s humane treatment of her and her nephew.

Because of her delusions, Pauline is an eccentric character. She is given more character development and psychological depth than the others, and her own experiences are rather extraordinary. Not unlike Fleur, she is a victim of the times; being a mixed-blood, however, allows her to imagine and to test the possibility of being non-Indian. Her confusions about herself as a woman and as an Indian have led to blunders of calamitous proportions, as for example her sexual liaison with Napoleon and her scheme on Sophie and Eli. Overcompensating for her guilt as well as her sense of insecurity, Pauline becomes a devious megalomaniac who, in the name of white religion, sanctifies herself and demonizes the others, in effect becoming an instrument of oppression with a martyr complex. From a literary point of view, however, Pauline’s psychological problem is also the source of the many magically dramatic episodes in the novel.

By contrast, in the case of Nanapush, the cultural model for his character is not Christian saints but the Native American trickster. Not only is his name reminiscent of the trickster figure Naanabozho, his wit, resourcefulness, and trickery in both speech and action also qualify him as a trickster. More important, just as the trickster can be a cultural hero, Nanapush has indeed become a hero of his tribe in his struggle, as an elder and later on as the tribal chairman, to regain control of the tribe’s destiny. Being the foster parent of Lulu, whom he teaches to respect her mother and appreciate her origin, Nanapush embodies the vitality and resilience of the native culture.

Intricately related to one another in life but diametrically opposed in their perspectives, Nanapush and Pauline together provide a fantastic and yet realistic portrayal of Fleur as a stubborn survivor of her clan. In the process of their narration, they also characterize themselves and each other as representatives of two ways of life emanating from a single tragedy.

Critical Context

Tracks (1988) is designed, chronologically, as the first in a tetralogy about the lives of a group of Anishinabe originating from Matchimanito, a fictional locale based on the White Earth Reservation in North Dakota. The action started in Tracks is extended and expanded in The Beet Queen (1986) and Love Medicine (1984). Because the characters in the novels are intricately related through marriages and liaisons, they constitute a huge, extended family; as such, the cycle can be seen broadly as a family saga. Since the novels share in common the technique of multiple narrators who have stories of their own to tell, the polyphonic saga as a whole is an archive of a cross-section of Native Americans whose destinies intersect and diverge.

The creation of Matchimanito as a world populated by characters steeped in the myths and legends of the Anishinabe is by no means just an aesthetic diversion. Rivaling William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in the magnitude of social significance, the world of Matchimanito is also a space for history to be rediscovered, imagined, explored, clarified, and interpreted.

Tracks is a literary text charged with such a historical mission, the focal concern of which is the dispossession of native land and its aftermath. As Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris explained in a 1988 article, “Who Owns the Land?,” by that time only 53,100 out of 830,000 acres originally promised to the Anishinabe remained in the tribe’s possession. The grim conditions on the White Earth Reservation, on which Matchimanito is based, epitomize the historical injustices imposed upon the Anishinabe and exemplify the intercultural and internal conflicts as well as the social problems created by the legal instruments of the United States government. Although Erdrich as an artist has always resisted moralizations, the collective memory by which her novel is informed leaves conspicuous tracks to be traced.

Bibliography

Brogan, Kathleen. “Haunted by History: Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Prospects 21 (Annual, 1996): 169-192. Brogan focuses on the themes of death and preoccupation with the past. She views Erdrich’s novel as a “contemporary Ghost Dance,” suggests that translation is necessary to the survival of Native American culture, and shows how Nanpush and Pauline try to establish history by reconstructing the past.

Burdick, Debra. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,The Beet Queen, and Tracks: An Annotated Survey of Criticism Through 1994.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20 (Summer, 1996): 137-166. Discusses the cyclical nature of time, diversity of narratives, lyrical prose style, tragicomic appeals of characters (including the trickster figure), and the cultural significance of three of Erdrich’s novels.

Flavin, James. “The Novel as Performance: Communication in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” Studies in American Indian Literature 3, no. 4 (Winter, 1991): 1-12. Noting that the novel form, unlike the indigenous oral song or tale, is questionable as a vehicle for expressing American Indian subjects, Flavin discusses Erdrich’s use of assumed orality to overcome this difficulty. Particularly with the narrator Nanapush, addressing a listener and constant reference to the Chippewa language are noticeable devices.

Larson, Sidner. “The Fragmentation of a Tribal People in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17 (Spring, 1993): 1-13. A review of the novel, with special focus on the impact of the General Allotment Act of 1887, which was to divide tribally allotted lands among individual Native Americans.

Peterson, Nancy J. “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” PLMA 109 (October, 1994): 982-994. Peterson argues that Tracks is neither historical realism nor postmodern historical fiction. Instead it lays the foundation for a new historicity and reform history, which has been destroyed by poststructuralists. An interesting analysis of the novel.

Rainwater, Catherine. “Reading Between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich.” American Literature 62 (September, 1990): 405-422. A semiotic reading of Tracks, focusing on narrative codes that contribute to its thematization of liminality, fragmentation, and cultural conflict.

Schumacher, Michael. “A Marriage of Minds.” Writer’s Digest, June, 1991, 28-59. Erdrich and her husband, Michael Dorris, discuss the collaboration they claim for all their work, whether jointly published or bearing only the name of one (as in Tracks). They note the importance of orality in this process, both as they talk out their ideas to each other and as they attempt to reproduce Indian oral tradition.

Sergi, Jennifer. “Storytelling: Tradition and Preservation in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks.” World Literature Today 66, no. 2 (1992): 279-283. The storyteller relies on memory and a chain of tradition. In Tracks, Nanapush uses repetition, parallelism, rhythms suggestive of speech to a named audience (Lulu), and actual Chippewa myths to give poetic and historic voice to the story.

Tanrisal, Meldan. “Mother and Child Relationships in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” American Studies International 35 (October, 1997): 67-79. Tanrisal examines key mother figures in Erdrich’s work, including Marie Kashpaw in Love Medicine; and Pauline Puyat, the “anti-mother,” and Fleur Pillager, the “mythic mother,” in Tracks.

Towery, Margie. “Continuity and Connection: Characters in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16 (Fall, 1992): 99-122. An overview article that maps out the intricate—fragmented but connected—relationships among the characters in Tracks, The Beet Queen, Love Medicine, and episodes possibly intended for the fourth volume of the family saga.

Walker, Victoria. “A Note on Narrative Perspective in Tracks.” Studies in American Indian Literature 3, no. 4 (Winter, 1991): 37-40. Of the two participatory narrators in Tracks, one (Pauline) is a liar and the other (Nanapush) speaks not to the reader but to his “adoptive” granddaughter Lulu. Erdrich’s refusal to use an omniscient narrator means that one must judge for oneself between a mean-spirited, lying woman and a warm, humorous, appealingly talkative old man.