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.