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