The American Century: Literature since 1945 789always takes care to relate what happens with her exceptional characters to the larger
narratives of what has happened, in the West, between American Indians and whites.
To that extent, she is telling a tale that derives its power from its typicality, its roots
in the history of a people. That is just as true of the fourth novel in the tetralogy,
The Bingo Palace (1994). The title here refers to a bingo parlor owned by a member
of the Lamartine family, Lyman. But another member of the Chippewa, Lipsha
Morrissey, is the central character: a young man who has returned home from Fargo
in search of a meaningful life. “Money is alive,” Lyman tells Lipsha, as he tries to
persuade him to invest, to come in with him on “a more enormous bingo hall.”
Circulating around the tensions created by this proposal, the novel then explores the
dualities and tensions in Native American culture and, not least, the difference
between the solidity of ritual, ceremony, and community and the abstractions of
power and money – between seeing the land as an extension of being and seeing it
simply as “real estate.”
The link Erdrich habitually forges between the extraordinary and the ordinary,
personal story and Native American history, is particularly noticeable in the third
and arguably the finest book in the tetralogy, Tracks, published in 1988. “We started
dying before the snow,” the novel begins, as one narrator, Nanapush, takes his
audience back to 1912. This was a crucial time. The challenge of white disease killing
Native peoples, which Nanapush refers to here, becomes a paradigm of cultural
invasion and crisis. The spread of epidemic disease, we learn, land loss, confinement
on reservations, forced assimilation, and intertribal conflicts – all had a traumatic
effect on Indian communities. Covering the years from 1912 to 1924, Tracks then
dramatizes the deep divisions between “conservative” and “progressive” or “hostile”
and “friendly” members of these communities; that is, between those who were
resistant to the pressure from federal government to assimilate into white society
and culture and those who were more positively responsive. Rather than dramatizing
those divisions in conventionally historical terms, however, Erdrich, typically for
her, turns to the personal. History, for her, is not so much a singular, objective
narrative as a multidimensional, often magical one created out of the conflict
between various vibrant and often fallible voices. The voices are many, as Erdrich
spreads her story out to an extended network of characters whose lives are all
dramatically altered by the struggle to cope with the forces undermining traditional
Chippewa culture. But two voices matter, in particular, since the story is structured
around two alternating narrators. One is Nanapush, the storyteller whose story
begins the book. His stance is clear from the fact that he refers to his people as the
“Anishinabe,” meaning First or Original People, the tribal name for itself, rather
than “Chippewa,” the name given by the US government to the tribe in legal
agreements. The other is a woman called Pauline Puyat, of mixed Chippewa and
white ancestry, who tries to deny her Indian identity and leaves the Indian community
to become a nun.
The life of Nanapush, as he recalls and narrates it, straddles the time from when
the Chippewas still lived freely off the land to when they lived off government
supplies on the reservation. “I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot.GGray_c05.indd 789ray_c 05 .indd 789 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM