414 Erdrich, Louise
in individual people, and we also see how the novel
makes a larger statement about the survival of Indi-
ans and Indian culture in the 20th century.
Tradition survives among the Indians on the
Little No Horse reservation. We see this perhaps
most clearly in the title chapter. Lipsha, determined
to win the heart of his grandfather back for his
grandmother, attempts to make a love medicine, an
ancient bundle of magic that will shift Nector’s alle-
giance away from Lulu and back to Marie. Lipsha
says, in reference to the old native religion, “Our
Gods aren’t perfect, is what I’m saying, but at least
they come around. They’ll do a favor if you ask them
right.” Because the native Gods are, in a sense, still
around, Lipsha is able to imagine himself a medicine
man and devise his own love medicine for Nector.
However, because survival is survival, not necessarily
domination, his plan goes a bit awry. He tries to take
a short cut, buys two frozen turkey hearts instead of
the hearts of live Canada Geese he originally sought
to procure, and tells Marie to eat one herself and
feed the other to Nector, who promptly chokes and
dies.
What is so important about this chapter in terms
of survival, however, is that even though Nector
passes away, due in part to Lipsha’s botched attempt
at traditional medicine, the Kashpaw family and the
larger tribe around them survive this death. In fact,
Nector himself survives the death, as he comes back
to his family as a ghost. Erdrich provides an excel-
lent metaphor here for Indian survival. Even if the
visible signs of life have gone, the spirit still lingers,
and lingers palpably, enabling the survival of the
culture as a whole.
In the chapter entitled “The Tomahawk Factory,”
we see another story of survival, both individual and
collective. Lyman, deep in the depths of depression
following his brother Henry’s suicide, about which
he is experiencing the guilt of a survivor, says he has
sunk to a place so low that he is unable to move from
it. But, like the many survivors before him, he pulls
himself up from the depths and soon finds himself
in charge of a large Bureau of Indian Affairs–run
factory on the reservation. Ironically, the Indians
make plastic facsimiles of their traditions—toma-
hawks, cradleboards, purses, moccasins, and so forth.
It would be easy to read this state of affairs as a fail-
ure to survive—sacred traditions reduced to plastic,
people with once vast lands crowded onto a reser-
vation. However, Erdrich wants the reader to look
deeper here: What has survived, without question,
are the Ojibwe (Chippewa) people and their spirit.
For instance, Lulu tells Lyman before the factory
opens, “I’ve got your job applicants broken down to
clans and families. Hire ten from each column and
you’ll be all right.” That the clans and families have
survived through years of relocation, disease, and
poverty is far more important than the actual goods
they will be making in that factory.
Just as important as the stories of group sur-
vival in Love Medicine are the stories of individual
survival, the most dramatic of which is the story of
Marie. In the chapter entitled “Saint Marie,” Marie’s
story is told in graphic detail. She has escaped from
the squalor of the Lazarre home, only to enter the
depraved world of Sister Leopolda. Leopolda has
convinced a vulnerable Marie that she and the devil
are in a fight for Marie’s soul. She beats Marie with a
poker, pours boiling water in her ear, and eventually
stabs her in the hand and knocks her unconscious.
Marie not only survives this beating but comes to
see that she can have strength even after having
been brought so low. She says, “Rise up!... Rise up
and walk! There is no limit to this dust!” And Marie
will survive this having been brought to dust; she
will survive to create a family and be counted the
strongest among them. Like the rest of her tribe, and
the rest of the community in Love Medicine, she will
embody both the kind of survival that is just barely
alive and the kind of survival that is thriving in the
face of oppression.
Jennifer McClinton-TempleERDRICH, LOUISE Tracks (1988)
Tracks is Louise Erdrich’s second in a series of inter-
related novels that depict a fictional Ojibwe (Chip-
pewa) reservation in North Dakota. The novel’s
action takes place between 1912 and 1924, the
years preceding the action in Erdrich’s first novel,
Love Medicine, and details key events of the preced-
ing generation. Tracks depicts a time of social and
geographic upheaval as the federal land policies
set forth in the Dawes and Burke Acts provide