Thursday, June 18, 2009

Who is Louise Erdrich?

Louise Erdrich was born in 1954 at Little Falls, Minnesota. She is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe of North Dakota. The Chippewa are also called the Ojibwa, or, in their own Algonquian language, the Anishinabe, both of which terms appear in Erdrich’s work. Erdrich’s French-Chippewa mother and her German-American father were teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Wahpeton, Minnesota. Her maternal grandmother was tribal chairwoman on the Turtle Mountain Reservation. After attending Dartmouth College where she studied under her future husband and collaborator, Michael Dorris), Erdrich received her M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1979 and later edited the Boston Indian Council’s newspaper, The Circle. Erdrich also held a variety of other jobs, such as lifeguard, waitress, prison poetry teacher, and construction flag signaler, which she has said greatly helped her writing. The winner of numerous prizes for her literature, she has published both fiction and poetry.

Background Information for TRACKS

Tracks is her 1988 novel that tells the story of Fleur and a Native American tribe in the early 20th century. The lifestyle for the tribe is ending and the story is presented by Pauline and Nanapush, two of the main characters in the novel. The book takes place over a more than a decade.

Characters

Fleur Pillager (Main Character)
Pauline Puyat - She is an example of a mixed heritage of Anglo and Native American heritage and an unreliable narrator.
Nanapush
Eli Kashpaw
Margaret Kashpaw
Lulu Nanapush
Nector Kashpaw
Father Damien

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Pre-Reading Questions to Ponder

This story is another selection that you can add to last year's AMERICAN DREAM literature. Unlike most of what we studied at that time, Tracks reflects the dreams of the Native Americans. Think about these questions. You may do whatever research you need in order to be able to respond to these issues when we gather together in August.

• What is the relationship between Native American identity and American identity?

• How does Native American literature reflect or help create a sense of what it means to be Native American in the United States?

• What does this literature help reveal about the experience of having a multicultural identity?

• How does the conception of American Indian identity depend upon the writer's identity?

• What is Native American literature?

• What makes Native American traditions from different regions distinctive?

• How has Native American literature been influenced by politics on and off the reservation?

• How are Native American oral traditions shaped by the landscapes in which they are composed?

• What role does the land play in oral tradition?

• How does the notion of time in American Indian narratives compare with notions of time in Western cultures?

• How does the chronology of particular narratives reflect differing notions of time?

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Harper Collins TRACKS Guide

This great source contains background information, as well as a complete study guide for our novel.

http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/2905/Louise_Erdrich/index.aspx

TRACKS: Analysis

As in the other books of the Chippewa tetralogy, Erdich’s themes are enduring and interlinked: the necessity for belonging to a family, whether natal or adoptive, and often not conventionally formed; the lure of home, in its difference from alien places and its necessary welcome; and the awe-inspiring power of love, whether erotic or familial. Because this is the earliest in time of all the novels, the contrast between a still mostly virginal reservation and even a small town (as Argus is then, early in this century) is a drastic one for the mostly Indian cast of characters. Besides the residents of Argus, only the priest and the nuns of the convent are white, although there is a sharp division between the “skins” such as Nanapush, Fleur, and Eli, all of them wise in the ways of the woods, and the “breeds,” such as the Morrisseys and Lazarres, who tend to take the white man’s road. Although Erdrich’s decision to forgo the omniscient narrator who might have directly reflected her own sympathies makes the reader dependent for information on the two contrasting first-person voices of Nanapush and Pauline, one easily infers that it is the former and not the latter with whom she empathizes, and, as a corollary, the woods-loving rather than the town group that she favors. Visiting Nanapush at his cabin, Fleur sums it up: “ ‘I shouldn’t have left this place.’ ”

Tracks has a structure that, for the sections Nanapush narrates, is necessarily circular. At some indeterminate time after 1924 (when she would have been only ten), he is trying to explain her mother to a Lulu who is nubile enough to have engaged herself to a Morrissey. He begins with his rescue of the girl Fleur during the terrible winter of 1912; her stubbornness emerges at once in her refusal of his nurturing any longer than is absolutely necessary and her return to Lake Matchimanito to live alone: “A young girl had never done such a thing before.” A mature woman at the end of the book, she again refuses Nanapush’s offer of a home and, her cabin forfeit and surrounded by the dozens of oaks she has felled in a final magic gesture, sets off alone hitched to a greenwood cart. Fleur’s stubbornness is parallel to her daughter Lulu’s, as Nanapush knows, and his role in the story is not only to explain to Lulu that it was her mother’s love that sent her away but also to urge her, implicitly, toward a similar independence that he sees she will forfeit if she marries an unworthy man.
Pauline’s chapters, as they alternate with this circular story, are necessary to let the reader know what Nanapush does not—the Argus episode, for example. They are informed by malice, however, and are correlative in their lying and warped view of events to the threat that assimilation represents to the Chippewa way of life.

Symbolism, too, has much to do with contrasts between the assimilated and the traditional way of life. The umbrella that Fritzie Kozka gives Fleur in Argus she later uses to shade her dead baby’s traditional Chippewa grave—a box set high in a tree. The white woman’s white fan that Nanapush has kept in his third wife’s French trunk he lends Eli to aid in his initial wooing of Fleur. A pair of patent leather shoes, so inappropriate for the woods, a gift to Lulu from Eli, are charred when Margaret, angry that they have injured her little girl’s feet, throws them into the fire. All these icons are piled in Fleur’s cart with her family’s gravemarkers as she leaves Nanapush’s sight at the end of the novel.
A complex narrative device revolves around the trope of playing cards. Fleur’s skill at cards earns for her not only the money with which to pay the annual fee on all the Pillager lots she has inherited but also the animosity of her male opponents and Lulu. Her gift from her earnings to Nanapush is a new deck of cards to replace his years-old pack. Finally, drawing on actual Chippewa myth involving the presence in heaven of gambling (along with all other pleasures), Pauline sees Fleur involved in a ghostly card game with her three dead former opponents: This time the stakes are her and Eli’s child’s life, and this time she loses. Of such combinations of myth and reality is the whole novel made.

Monday, June 15, 2009

TRACKS: Characters

Part I:

Nanapush, one of two first-person narrators. He is an old and authoritative Chippewa speaking to his “adoptive” daughter, Lulu, as he tries to dissuade her from marrying one of the Morrisseys. Named for his tribal trickster figure, he is a survivor along with Fleur (whom he has saved) of the consumption epidemic of 1912 and a mythic figure in his own right. He claims to have guided the last buffalo hunt, seen the last bear shot, and trapped the last beaver with a pelt of more than two years’ growth.

Pauline Puyat, a young mixed-blood woman whose unreliable narration moves from prevarication to madness in the course of the book. She is from a family of despised “skinners” of fur with no clan name. She is obsessed with Fleur Pillager, whose brief and tragic career in Argus and later troubles on the reservation (some of Pauline’s making) she chronicles with increasingly vicious relish, to an indeterminate audience. Torn between fleshly desire (she bears a baby, Marie, whom she then abandons) and bizarre imagings mixing Native American and Catholic beliefs, she passes herself off as white and becomes a nun.

Fleur Pillager, rescued by Nanapush from her familial cabin on Lake Matchimanito during an epidemic. Tall, strong, and attractive, she is said to be the lover of Misshepeshu, the lake’s spirit, who protects her from drowning and gives her power over her enemies. During a summer working in Argus at Kozkas’ butcher shop, she angers three male employees by winning repeatedly at cards. They rape her in revenge, and she (perhaps) calls forth the tornado that destroys them. Because these events are related only by Pauline, Fleur’s character remains enigmatic, as does the parentage of her child, Lulu. With the encroachment of whites, her magic is no longer dependable.

Eli Kashpaw, the son of Margaret (Rushes Bear) and lover of Fleur. He is the father of their dead child. He is caught between the woods where, like Fleur, he feels most at home, and the assimilative instincts of his mother and his brother, Nector.

Margaret Kashpaw, the fourth wife of Nanapush, mother to eighteen children, and betrayer (along with her practical son, Nector) of both Nanapush and Fleur. She uses their combined and hard-earned money to pay late fees on Kashpaw property only, so Nanapush’s property is forfeited to the encroaching lumber company.

Lulu Pillager, the daughter of Fleur, a beautiful, wild, somewhat spoiled child. Sent to government school by her desperate mother, then retrieved by Nanapush and Margaret, she listens restlessly to Nanapush’s part of the tale.

Maureen Fries. "Tracks." Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, Revised Third Edition. Salem Press, 1998. 5 Jun, 2009


Part II:

The most important character in Tracks is Fleur Pillager, a strong and beautiful woman, who seems to be a shaper of the forces of the land, particularly those of a lake near her home. Unlike Erdrich's previous novels in which nearly all the significant characters have a narrative voice, Fleur is seen only through two other characters: Nanapush, a wise, fun-loving tribal leader, and Pauline Puyat, a tormented mixed breed who envies Fleur's beauty and power. Nanapush's view of Fleur is friendly and caring; Pauline is fearful and shows a desire to humiliate a rival. Both views establish Fleur as an almost mythic figure. If Fleur spoke in her own voice, it would be harder for Erdrich to project Fleur's mythic dimension.

When Fleur succeeds in getting the money to pay her family's land fees and live the life of her ancestors, the test for her culture is whether she can find a traditional man — brave, responsible, and a good hunter — with whom to raise a family. Eli Kashpaw represents such a man, and the quality of their love is a measure of the tribe's success. The tribe feels and appreciates their symbolic role, as if Eli and Fleur were winning a victory for them through their love.
Pauline, who also loves Eli, disrupts the relationship by setting up a sexual liaison for Eli with a young girl whom she hopes will destroy his love for Fleur. The plot temporarily works, but it is the death of Fleur and Eli's baby and a crooked land deal by Eli's brother, Nector, that effectively ends Eli and Fleur's relationship.

Pauline is usually present for the negative crises in Fleur's life: her rape in Argus, the childbirth that results in death, and her dispossession from her land. Nanapush, on the other hand, vicariously participates in the love of Eli and Fleur, since he acts as Eli's confidant. Pauline's narrations are filled with horror, gloom, and perversity, while Nanapush is the source of nearly all of the novel's humor.

Margaret Kashpaw, Eli's mother, is an important character. Nanapush comes to love her, and he, along with Fleur, is betrayed by her. Since Margaret is proud and seems loyal, her swindle regarding the tax money is difficult to accept; she seems to have strength of character and honesty. When people such as this in a culture crack, little can be done to keep that culture together. Small wonder that Fleur attempts to kill herself, Unsuccessful, she eventually leaves the reservation with a cart, the same one we see her with in The Beet Queen (1986). Nothing is left in her culture to protect.

Craig Barrow. "Tracks: Characters." Beacham's Encylopedia of Popular Fiction. Ed. Kirk H. Beetz. Vol. 7. Beacham-Gale, 1996. 8 June 2009.

TRACKS: Context

All of Erdrich’s fiction offers believable portraits of strong, capable, and interesting women. This is probably as reflective of the pronounced matriarchal tradition in Chippewa tribal life as it is of the role models that Erdrich has credited among her relatives and friends. Of all of her female portraits, Fleur, Pauline, and Margaret Kashpaw (Rushes Bear, a name she earns from a confrontation in this novel) are among the most memorable. In Tracks, there is no female bonding such as that seen in The Beet Queen: Each of these women is bound into her own psyche and her own world. Their coming together in the novel results from need rather than from any genuine liking. None of them, however, is reducible to the kind of stereotype—love object, goddess, mother figure—so prevalent in (mostly male-authored) earlier portraits of women.
Margaret, who is in the process of assimilation, is a churchgoing Catholic whose family name (“cash-paw”) implies a turning away from the woods and toward the white man’s road. Her sons are divided: Eli prefers the woods and the old ways, as is seen in both Love Medicine and The Beet Queen; Nector represents the future of the tribe, as is especially apparent in Love Medicine but also here in his selfish use of Nanapush and Fleur’s allotment money to pay the fine on Kashpaw land. Margaret's late-blooming love affair with Nanapush is damaged (although not permanently) by her acquiescence in this act, and she—along with Nanapush—redeems Lulu from the government school and rears her. She is a strong representative of matriarchy in the book.

Pauline represents the most evil presence in the series, here in her role as provacateuse and prevaricator, and in The Beet Queen and Love Medicine as the disturbed (and disturbing) hater disguised in a nun’s robe. She seems to be an objective correlative of the baneful influence of the Catholic church on the Chippewa, and, as a half-breed, she is vulnerable to the lure of whiteness (her own is revealed to her in a vision). Yet even here Erdrich tends to resist stereotype: Pauline’s consciousness of her own unattractiveness is a strong impetus to her bizarre actions and ultimate madness, and a reminder of the premium that was placed on beauty in earlier literature and the price that women must pay for it in social terms.

Fleur’s portrait is Erdrich’s masterpiece. In her gallery of remarkable females, no other is so enigmatically attractive. Fleur’s passion, independence, and endurance win the reader’s heart. Her brief appearances in both The Beet Queen and The Bingo Palace indicate the extent of her influence in the whole series. In all Western literature there are very few women like Fleur: To use the term “Earth Mother” of her is to suggest one of her dimensions but not to encompass her totality. Fleur indicates Erdrich’s ability to penetrate through previous female characterizations and to find for modern women a role model that is significant not only for Native Americans but also for all women who read to discover themselves in the imaginations of gifted writers.

Monday, June 8, 2009

TRACKS: 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.

Balance Chow. "Tracks." Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition. Salem Press, 2000. 3 Jun, 2009

Sunday, June 7, 2009

TRACKS: Form and Content

TRACKS shares with the other novels of Louise Erdrich’s Chippewa tetralogy—Love Medicine (1984, rev. 1993), The Beet Queen (1986), and The Bingo Palace (1994)—its form, a series of short interconnected tales reminiscent of oral Indian narrative cycles; its use of contrasting voices, often recounting the same episodes from different points of view; and many of the same characters. Erdrich’s continuing concern with American Indian family formation and with the development of character over many years here focuses on the crucial time of 1912 to 1924, when widespread disease; the consequences of the Allotment Acts of 1887 and 1904, when reservation land was divided and sold off (usually to whites); and the bitter division between full-bloods and mixed-bloods (in current slang, “skins” and “breeds”) over policy all tore apart the fabric of Chippewa society. This breaking of the “sacred hoop” is Erdrich’s main subject here, and she examines her subject through various memorable portraits of strong Indian women.

Strong is not always, however, good. Pauline Puyat—along with Nanapush, one of the two first-person narrators of the novel—is an unreliable and steadily deteriorating character. She does not have, like Nanapush, a direct narratee for her story. Nanapush reminds the reader throughout that his primary audience is Lulu, whom he has helped to rear, has saved from the government school she loathed, and now attempts to dissuade from an unwise marriage to a Morrissey) one of the “breed” families of villains, profiteers reminiscent of Faulkner’s Snopeses). Pauline, however, seems to be addressing herself, which is appropriate, considering the self-absorption that she constantly exhibits in the novel. Since no omniscient narrator spans both worlds, as is the case in Love Medicine and The Beet Queen, readers must choose between Nanapush’s and Pauline’s often conflicting reports. Because Nanapush’s is a seasoned, comic, and often touching voice, one tends to rate his account as being more accurate than Pauline’s, especially as she moves from the comparatively normal tone of her first narration through increasing psychosis and utter madness.

For both of them, the focal character is Fleur, “the last Pillager,” who comes from a clan that is legendary for its magic and shamanistic power. Three times she almost drowns in Lake Matchimanito, and three times she is saved. During her brief summer in Argus—the only time she lives away from the bush—she is raped (or so Pauline says), revenges herself on the three men responsible, and conceives Lulu, to whom her story is being told. Her passionate mating with Eli results in another pregnancy, Pauline’s jealousy, and Pauline’s deliberate causing of the death of her child. Eli’s familial connection with Margaret and Nector, who cheat Nanapush and Fleur of their land, causes the couple’s permanent rupture and, eventually, Fleur’s sending Lulu away to government school. In a stunning climax, Fleur’s magic and woods knowledge defeat, at least temporarily, a logging company’s attempt to rape her land. Nanapush’s late-blooming love for Margaret Kashpaw and Pauline’s murderous movement from marginal status to sisterhood in a convent and proclamation of her own pure white blood, as well as her bearing and discarding of Marie, are interwoven with Fleur’s fascinating but ultimately tragic destiny.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Erdrich: Identity

Louise Erdrich’s identity as a mixed blood, the daughter of a Chippewa mother and a German American father, is at the heart of her writing. The oldest of seven children and the granddaughter of the tribal chair of the Turtle Mountain Reservation, she has stated that her family was typical of Native American families in its telling of stories, and that those stories became a part of her and are reflected in her own work. In her poetry and novels, she explores Native American ideas, ordeals and delights, with characters representing the European American and Native American sides of her heritage.

Erdrich entered Dartmouth College in 1972, the year the Native American Studies Department was formed. The chair of that department was Michael Dorris, who later became her trusted literary collaborator and eventually her husband. Her work at Dartmouth was the beginning of a continuing exploration of her ancestry, the animating influence in her novels.

Erdrich frequently weaves stories in nonchronological patterns with multiple narrators. Her characters are multidimensional and entertaining while communicating the positives and negatives of Native American life in the twentieth century. Family relationships, community relationships, issues of assimilation, and the roles of tradition and religion are primary motifs in her novel, TRACKS.


Picture of Louise Erdrich taken by her husband, Michael Dorris

Jacquelyn Kilpatrick. "Louise Erdrich." Magill’s Choice: American Ethnic Writers. Salem Press, 2000. 3 Jun, 2009

Friday, June 5, 2009

TRACKS: Literary Precedent/Technique

As in much of Erdrich's work, the literary influence of Faulkner is evident. The friendly and hostile narrators of Tracks are reminiscent of the narrators that present a picture of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury (1929). Since the tribal vision of Nanapush and the jealous vision of Pauline both magnify Fleur's importance, the significance of her life becomes much greater as a result.
As Nanapush says, Fleur is the "funnel of our history," so what happens to her happens to the tribe. This substitution of character for tribe allows Erdrich to simplify and compress her story; Fleur's personal story translates into the tribe's story.



Craig Barrow. "Tracks: Techniques/Literary Precedents." Beacham's Encylopedia of Popular Fiction. Ed. Kirk H. Beetz. Vol. 7. Beacham-Gale, 1996. 18 June 2009

Thursday, June 4, 2009

TRACKS: Meanings

The struggle for survival is one of the most obvious themes in Tracks. All the major characters in the novel are survivors of not only the environment, famines, and epidemics, but also the historical reality of genocide, dispossession, and deprivation. Despite the sense of doom overshadowing the entire Matchimanito reservation upon the encroachment of outside interests, however, upholders of the tribe’s cultural tradition have fought in the best way they can: Fleur by crushing the lumber crew and Nanapush by campaigning for the position of tribal chairman.

The struggle for survival, which reaches tragic proportions, is closely related to the theme of cultural conflict. Ostensibly, the Christianity of Pauline, though half-baked, is pitted against the traditional wisdom of Nanapush, who is nevertheless conversant with white culture. The native way of life, together with its tribal kinship system and symbiotic relationship with the environment, is challenged by the white way of life, including its nuclear family, exploitation of natural resources, greed for land, and oppression by legal codes. The mixed-bloods, caught between the two ways of life, lean toward one pole or the other, but while adapting to the cultural change, they also exhibit symptoms of dysfunctionality and confusion. Their predicament, which is epitomized by the conversion of Pauline, pervasive alcoholism, incestuous marriages aimed at amassing land, the subsequent loss of land due to swindling, the disintegration of family ties, and so forth, is also a kind of tragedy bordering on pathos.

Out of the entropic and fragmentary chaos created by cultural conflict, however, in Tracks there are also prospects of a cultural synthesis, which conceivably could begin from the mutual “contamination” of the white and the native cultural conditions. Pauline’s Christianity, for example, is rife with indigenous beliefs and visions, whereas Nanapush, despite his traditionalism, is conditionally receptive to the white practices that hold promises for the revival of the tribe. These mutual “contaminations” suggest the possibility of certain cultural exchanges that might lead to a new consciousness for the community.

The drive toward a new consciousness is in fact the motivating force behind the seemingly dichotomized perspectives of Nanapush and Pauline, whose narratives are dialogic rather than mutually exclusive, though in the competition for credibility and authority it is Nanapush’s narrative that succeeds in reestablishing a sense of order. Significantly, the implied audience of Nanapush, Lulu, can be regarded as the receptacle of the new consciousness. Growing up in the middle of her mother’s struggles but educated at the government school, where she is segregated from her traditional heritage, Lulu is not unlike the mixed-bloods trapped between two worlds. Nanapush exhorts her to seek out Fleur, and despite her resistance to his narrative (she stops her ears), she is inevitably reintroduced to her roots and the destiny of her people. Although the formation of the new consciousness hinges on Lulu’s willingness and ability to integrate the two cultures in her future life, Nanapush has left enough tracks for the pursuit through his artful storytelling.

Balance Chow. "Tracks." Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition. Salem Press, 2000. 1 Jun, 2009

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

TRACKS: Related Titles

Tracks is part of a tetralogy that includes Love Medicine (1984), linked short stories; The Beet Queen (1986), novel; and The Bingo Palace (1994), novel.

While Tracks stands as an independent work, the novel gains in resonance when seen in the context of Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. The butcher shop and its owners, the Kozkas, and other characters, such as Russell Kashpaw, were introduced in The Beet Queen. The sadistic nun, Sister Leopolda of Love Medicine, who tortures Marie Lazarre, is none other than Pauline, one of the narrators of Tracks, and the girl she is torturing in Love Medicine is her own illegitimate daughter, the girl she tries to abort and unwillingly gives birth to in Tracks. Erdrich's newer novels seem to enlarge previous ones, deepening the texture of her fictional world.
In Tracks Erdrich has simplified her narrative perspective and her story line, creating a novel more symbolically compressed and unified than her earlier works. Tracks is a more painful book than its predecessors, and possibly more powerful.

Craig Barrow. "Tracks: Related Titles." Beacham's Encylopedia of Popular Fiction. Ed. Kirk H. Beetz. Vol. 7. Beacham-Gale, 1996. 4 June 2009

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

TRACKS: Social Concerns/Themes

In TRACKS, Erdrich deals not only with individual American Indian lives but the loss of a tribe's land and identity during a crucial period from 1912 to 1924. In the novel Native Americans are attacked by illnesses and hunger, and annual land fees and taxes cause many to lose their land and homes. Their ties to their ancestors are severed, and the mythic significance of the land is destroyed when loggers change its face.

While whites show ugly faces in TRACKS, particularly in the rape of Fleur Pillager and her loss of home and land, the face of economic and governmental dispossession of the tribe is more Indian than white. Erdrich chooses to dramatize Native Americans undoing the lives of their kinsmen. Pauline Puyat, a mixed breed and one of the novel's two narrators, shows the terrible effects of white influence on her life, particularly that of the Catholic Church, which Pauline has absorbed along with the native American myths of place. Her tormented version of Christianity is more life-denying than the tribe's myths which focus on the land. To become a nun, Pauline denies her heritage, her language, her daughter, and her lover. Instead of a God of love we see a God of sexual torment, vindictiveness, envy, sadism, and pride. Other Native Americans betray their trust in exchange for white favors as Bernadette does with the Agent; Nector and Margaret use money that others helped to raise to pay taxes on their land.

Probably even more pernicious is the corruption of love Erdrich presents in the novel. Fleur Pillager and Eli are the soul of the tribe. When their love is warped by the threat to the land, Fleur takes up a wandering existence. Even Nanapush, an old tribal leader and the other narrator of the novel, is betrayed by a longtime friend, Margaret, a woman he loves.

With so many victims it might seem as if TRACKS is a reformist melodrama of innocent victims and evil victimizers. The losses here, however, are irreversible, and Tracks is more a tragedy than a political tract.

Craig Barrow. "Tracks: Social Concerns/Themes." Beacham's Encylopedia of Popular Fiction. Ed. Kirk H. Beetz. Vol. 7. Beacham-Gale, 1996. 8 June 2009

Monday, June 1, 2009

TRACKS: Discussion Prompt #1

1. While Native Americans participate in their own undoing in Tracks, whites are the originating cause. What acts by whites, either by contact or law, seem most pernicious in the imagined world of this novel?