Tracks 415incentives for some tribal members to sell their
land allotments to timber companies. The resulting
economic and bureaucratic transformation attacks
traditional ways of life on the reservation. Against
the backdrop of these challenges, the novel details
the complicated relationship between Fleur Pillager
and Eli Kashpaw as well as that between Nanapush
and Margaret Kashpaw, and it traces Pauline Puyat’s
path to becoming the nun Sister Leopolda.
Unlike Love Medicine, Tracks proceeds chrono-
logically, but the plot structure is complicated
by alternating narrators. Pauline’s idiosyncratic
Catholicism and self-righteous nature result in an
unreliable narration that contrasts with Nanapush’s
traditional, wise, and compassionate perspective.
Their competing narratives create a plot that is, at
times, contradictory and that reflects the ambiguity
of oral storytelling.
Ultimately, the novel centers on themes includ-
ing survival, family, tradition, commodifi-
cation/commercialization, parenthood, and
suffering. Readers meet characters who lose land,
health, loved ones, and a personal sense of security.
However, despite the bleak world shaped by winter,
famine, illness, and cruelty, Erdrich’s novel is
resolute in depicting characters who find ways to
adapt and survive.
David Allred
Family in Tracks
Family interactions provide people with security
and fulfillment as well as conflict and sorrow, and
this conflicted inheritance forms one of the themes
in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. As in many of Erdrich’s
interconnected novels, the world of Tracks is inhab-
ited by members of a handful of families: the Pillag-
ers, the Morrisseys, the Lazarres, the Kashpaws, and
others. These family identities serve as a key mode
of characterization so that a character’s personality
is often influenced by his or her family ties. For
example, the Pillagers are practitioners of traditional
healing and knowledge and because of this are
respected and feared by others. This family iden-
tity informs Fleur’s seemingly supernatural power
to evade death, to bargain for the life of her children,
and to harm men who wrong her. In contrast to
the respect afforded the Pillagers, the Morrisseys
and Lazarres are more dubious families, and given
his family identity, Napoleon Morrissey’s lechery is
hardly a surprise to informed readers.
However, at the same time that Tracks suggests
fixed family identities, the novel also shows dynamic
elements of family formation in the fused clan of
Nanapush, Margaret, Fleur, Eli, and Lulu. Nanapush
adopts Fleur as a kind of daughter after her family
dies of disease at the beginning of the novel. Later,
Margaret comes to live with Nanapush along with
her son, Eli, who has children with Fleur. Pauline
observes (from the outside) that “[the group] formed
a kind of clan, the new made up of bits of the old.”
Together, this fused family earns money to pay taxes
on the land, supports one another in sickness, and
struggles for survival during cold, grim winters.
Given such descriptions of family interaction,
Tracks clearly shows the nurturing power of family
and the pathos of broken family bonds. As part of
this theme, both Fleur and Pauline search for a place
to belong, and both become mothers during the
course of the book’s events; however, their experi-
ences contrast sharply. Both are essentially homeless
early in the novel, but after living with the Morris-
seys, Pauline eventually becomes Sister Leopolda
and finds a home in the convent. Fleur loses her
family at the novel’s outset but finds a home with
Nanapush, Eli, and Margaret. On these quests to
find a home, both women also have children. How-
ever, their responses to motherhood are very differ-
ent: Fleur struggles for her children, while Pauline
abandons her child. Fleur gives Lulu her own food
and is highly protective of Lulu by not allowing her
out of her sight. She also shows a mother’s tender
regard: After losing a baby in childbirth, Fleur and
Eli bury the child in the traditional Ojibwe way, by
wrapping the body and tying it high in a tree. In
anguish over her loss, “Fleur [hears] her vanished
child in every breath of wind, every tick of dried
leaves, every scratch of blowing snow,” and when a
fierce storm comes, Fleur disappears into the woods
to place an umbrella over the body.
In contrast to Fleur’s deep and fierce love, Pau-
line heartlessly abandons her child. When she is
pregnant with Marie, Pauline tries to force a mis-
carriage and asks for an abortion. During childbirth,
she refuses to push, being willing to die and take