Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich's Tracks - MIUSE

PHILOLOGIA 42 (2011) 119-135 

1. Introduction 

It Comes Up Different Every Time: 

Narrative Point of View 

in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks 

Anthony Piccolo 

Although her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), was an immediate popular and 

critical success and continues to be her most well-known and best-read work, Louise 

Erdrich has since proven herself to be a prolific and important contemporary American 

writer with thirteen novels to date plus a range of work in other genres (e.g. poetry, 

short fiction, memoir). Her ability to employ a postmodern sensibility while writing 

from the perspective of a contemporary Native American woman has attracted 

significant critical and scholarly attention. 

Born on June 7, 1954 in Minnesota, Erdrich was raised in North Dakota by her 

French-Ojibwe mother and German-American father. Her fiction deals primarily, 

though not exclusively, with the interrelations among Indians, mixed-bloods, and 

whites on and around a North Dakota reservation and in the fictional town of Argus, 

North Dakota 1 . Formally, her novels are noted for their experimental aspects: a 

complex intertextuality among the novels, a fluid interweaving of past and present in 

the telling of her multi-generational family sagas rather than a linear chronology, and 

especially her use of multiple points of view (or “polyvocality”) as a narrative 

technique. Erdrich‟s narrative approach is often compared with William Faulkner‟s 

(cf. As I Lay Dying with its fifty-nine chapters told from the first-person points of view 

of fifteen different characters), and with its ten perspectives (six from first-person 

points of view), Love Medicine is a prime example of Erdrich‟s use of “polyvocality.” 

In Writing Tricksters, Jeanne Rosier Smith refers to Love Medicine as an “almost 

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It Comes Up Different Every Time: Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks 

dizzying array of narrators and characters” (93-94) in which the reader is presented 

with “not just numerous versions of reality but a multiplicity of realities” (93). 

David Treuer (a fellow Chippewa, novelist, and a scholar of Native American 

literature) runs counter to most critics of Love Medicine, particularly with regard to the 

effect of Erdrich‟s use of multiple narrative points of view. I quote a passage from 

his Native American Fiction at length because of its pertinence to my discussion of 

Tracks later: 

The use of figurative and symbolic speech and thought by the first-person 

narrators [in Love Medicine] creates a mirage of sound. It gives the appearance of 

polyvocality when, in fact, all the characters share the same consciousness. . . . 

There is no sense in any of the chapters that there are contested truths or contested 

versions of reality. . . . Nor is there a sense . . . that the narrator or narrators are 

untrustworthy. Nor do Love Medicine’s multiple narrators . . . give us different 

realities, different interpretations of the same reality. (45) 

Treuer‟s views on the polyvocality (or lack thereof) in Love Medicine is a matter 

of debate among readers and critics of the novel. Treuer does not discuss Erdrich‟s 

third novel, Tracks, in his book; if he did, however, I believe his critique would be 

the antithesis of his evaluation of multiple narrators in Love Medicine. Rather than a 

multiplicity of narrators, Tracks is divided into alternating chapters between two 

narrators: Nanapush (an older, full-blooded Ojibwe) and Pauline Puyat (a young, 

mixed-blood woman). Rather than sharing “the same consciousness,” in personality 

and politics, Nanapush and Pauline stand at opposite extremes to each other and speak 

with noticeably distinct voices. In the words of Susan Perez-Castillo, “the reader 

shuttles between, not two different perceptions of reality, but two diametrically 

different realities” (qtd. in Smith 97). Lorena L. Stookey describes Nanapush and 

Pauline as “characters who are unsympathetic and often hostile to one another, [who] 

respond in very different ways to the circumstances of their times” (71). Stookey 

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also differentiates Pauline‟s manner of narration from that of Nanapush‟s as the 

difference between a “diatribe” and a “dramatic monologue” (71). Jeanne Rosier 

Smith notes that 

the narrators of Tracks are more openly hostile to each other‟s stories (each 

claiming the other lies) . . . and their philosophical and social differences reflect a 

community in the grip of spiritual and political crisis. (94) 

The crisis confronting the Ojibwe 2 in Tracks is experienced and responded to very 

differently depending upon who is telling the story. As Perez-Castillo observes, 

Pauline narrates from a place of “disease, death, spiritual despair” whereas Nanapush 

speaks from the position of “courageous and irreverent survivors” (qtd. in Smith 97). 

Also, as Connie A. Jacobs writes, “the truth of events lies somewhere in between the 

versions of these two narrators” (118). The reader does, indeed, continuously need to 

“shuttle” between the two versions of reality presented by Nanapush and Pauline. 

Erdrich presents us with these two essentially hostile, competing narrators and, thus, 

places the reader in a position of negotiating between the narrations in search of the 

truth. Although, as we shall see, our sympathies will clearly lie with Nanapush rather 

than Pauline, Erdrich ensures that neither narrator is completely unbiased and 

trustworthy. What we are finally left with is a realization of the inevitable ambiguity 

inherent in any accurate presentation of events. This ambiguous nature of the truth is, 

I believe, the point of the novel. Before, entering into a discussion of Erdrich‟s use 

of these two narrators and the reader‟s confrontation with the ambiguity, it will be 

useful to first to discuss the historical background of the novel and the significance of 

the moment in history when the story opens. 

2. Tracks and History 

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Louise Erdrich‟s novel Tracks concerns itself with events on or around the Ojibwe 

Indian reservation in North Dakota between the winter of 1912 and the spring of 1924. 

It could be said, however, that the story truly begins twenty-five years earlier with the 

passage of the Dawes Act (or General Allotment Act) on February 8, 1887 by the 

United States Congress. The purported intention of the Dawes Act was to improve 

the lives of Native American Indians by encouraging assimilation with the larger white 

society. To do so, the government stipulated that reservation lands (previously held 

in communal ownership by the Indian tribes) would now be divided into smaller 

parcels and allotted to individual families. The plan was that individual property 

ownership would encourage the abandonment of “Indian” ways of life and the 

adoption of acceptable “white” means of livelihood such as farming. The actual 

results, though, were what one could easily predict: the Dawes Act led not to 

prosperity but to further decimation of Indian tribes. The Dawes Act stipulated a 

“grace period” of twenty-five years, during which there would be no assessment or 

payment of property taxes while Indians were adapting to their new “profitable” 

lifestyles. At the end of the twenty-five years period of grace, yearly payment of 

taxes would become due. As individual Indians and families found themselves 

unable to pay their property tax, the land would be put up for auction and sold. Some 

Indians who did prosper were able in increase their landholding at the cost of their 

neighbors misfortune, but most often the lands went out of the tribe to white-owned 

enterprises such as lumber companies. 

Erdrich never directly refers to the Dawes Act; however, Tracks begins in 1912 at 

the historical moment when the twenty-five year exemption on property tax payments 

allowed by the Dawes Act would have ended. The first chapter is titled “Winter 

1912/Manitou-geezisohns/Little Spirit Sun” (chapter titles are given in English, 

Ojibwe, and in literal translation). The opening scene of the novel takes place in late 

winter. Their numbers already reduced by a previous small pox epidemic and the 

usual hardships of starvation and illness brought on by North Dakota winters, the 

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Ojibwe have now encountered another “white man‟s disease,” tuberculosis. Fleur 

Pillager (the central figure in the novel) has lost all of her family and lies near death 

herself. Nanapush recalls how he and a member of the tribal police “found her on a 

cold afternoon in late winter, out in [the] family‟s cabin near Matchimanito Lake” (T 3 

2). February would not be an unreasonable possibility for “late winter” and I like to 

think that Nanapush rescues Fleur twenty-five years to the date of the passage of the 

Dawes Act in 1887. Again, Erdrich does not specify and there is certainly no solid 

evidence to be this precise, but it would be symbolically fitting. 

Fleur is now the last of the Pillagers and her rescue by Nanapush sets the plot of 

the novel in motion which is driven by the impending loss of land and Fleur‟s attempt 

to keep it. Once her health is fully recovered, Fleur (a young girl of about 

seventeen at this point) moves to the fictional town of Argus with the intention of 

finding work and making money to pay the now-due property tax and save the Pillager 

land. 

3. Nanapush and Pauline 

When the story moves from the reservation to the town of Argus, the narrative 

point of view switches from Nanapush to Pauline. The novel, as mentioned above, is 

divided into alternating chapters between these two narrators. It is not, however, an 

equal division. As a narrator, Nanapush is privileged over Pauline. Of the nine 

chapters of the novel, five are allotted to Nanapush and four to Pauline. In addition, 

Nanapush narrates the odd-numbered chapters, whereas Pauline narrates the even- 

numbered ones. In effect, Nanapush opens and closes the novel. It is Nanapush‟s 

voice that we hear first and it is Nanapush who has the final word. Nanapush‟s 

chapters are structurally more intricate and he has an advantage of perspective that 

Pauline lacks. Nanapush‟s narrative is a “frame tale”; he tells the story of the events 

that take place between the winter of 1912 and the spring of 1924. However, he is 

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narrating from a point at least ten years after these events take place (I will discuss the 

nature of Nanapush‟s “framed” narrative in more depth below). Pauline, on the other 

hand, is limited to a first-person perspective within the 1912-1924 chronological scope 

of the novel. In fact, Pauline‟s point of view is further limited in that the last chapter 

she narrates (chapter eight) ends in the spring of 1919. Therefore, Nanapush has the 

advantage of speaking from a position of greater perspective and knowledge both 

within and without the frame of his narration. 

Furthermore, Nanapush is the more attractive and sympathetic character. 

Nanapush, like Fleur, is the last surviving member of his family. He stands for the 

relevance of the “old ways” and the importance of family over money. He resists 

mindless assimilation and in the face of an endless onslaught of government 

regulations and encroaching white society he, like Fleur, resists. For Nanapush, land 

is not real estate, it is cultural continuity: “Land is the only thing that lasts life to life,” 

he says. “Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government 

promises the wind is steadier. I am a holdout, like the Pillagers” (T 33). 

Pauline (approximately fifteen years old as the story begins), on the other hand, is 

the daughter of half-white mother and a mixed-blood father. The racist attitudes of 

the surrounding white society have become internalized and expressed in Pauline as 

neurotic self-hatred. She desires to be like her all-white Canadian grandfather; she 

persuades her father to let her move to Argus and attend the Catholic missionary 

school; eventually, she joins the convent herself (bypassing the “no Indians allowed” 

clause by persuading herself and the church authorities that she is actually “adopted” 

and not Indian at all). Her loathing of the Ojibwe (and Nanapush in particular) 

becomes more extreme than that of any white character we meet in the novel. 

Connie A. Jacobs refers to Pauline as “the character you love to hate” (213). Our 

sympathy with Nanapush and our revulsion towards Pauline make it easy to 

unequivocally accept Nanapush as a trustworthy narrator and Pauline as untrustworthy. 

As we discover in the novel, however, it is not quite as simple as this. 

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Pauline‟s narrations, though, are generally more problematic (or, as I prefer, more 

ambiguous) for the reader. Take, for example, Pauline‟s account of the events in 

Argus. Fleur arrives in Argus and finds a job at Kozska‟s Meats, a butcher shop. 

Since wages alone will not be enough to earn the money for the tax payment on her 

land, Fleur involves herself in the nightly poker games with the three butchers: Lily, 

Tor, and Dutch. Fleur, the better card player, slowly lures the men in over a number 

of weeks until one night she wins big and takes them for all their money. In a 

drunken fury, the men take their revenge by attacking and (maybe) raping Fleur. 

Pauline‟s account leaves room for doubt. Pauline also works at the butcher shop with 

her younger cousin, Russell, doing odd jobs. As such, she can provide first-person, 

eyewitness account of what transpires. The men pursue and catch Fleur in the 

smokehouse, at which point Pauline tells us: 

I closed my eyes and put my hands on my ears, so there is nothing more to describe 

but what I couldn‟t block out: those yells from Russell, Fleur‟s hoarse breath, so 

loud it filled me, her cry in the old language and our names repeated over and over 

among the words. (T 26) 

Although, earlier, Pauline has said that she “knew everything [that happened in 

Argus] . . . what they did to Fleur” (T 16), her eyewitness account becomes closer to 

circumstantial evidence. Her eyes are “closed” and she covers her ears with her hands; 

yet, we are told, she “couldn‟t block out” the yells and cries. Russell, the other 

possible witness, has been struck by Dutch and left “shouting and bawling in the sticky 

weeds” (T 26). What he sees or hears afterwards we are not told. Pauline holds 

back on exactly what she sees or hears; her account is, at best, ambiguous. The 

events of the following day, though, would seem to indicate actions motivated by 

knowledge that Fleur has indeed been raped by the men. On the morning after the 

attack on Fleur, Argus is struck by a tornado. The butcher shop and much of the 

town are destroyed. The men have taken shelter in the thick-walled, ice-filled meat 

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storage locker. The thick door of the locker has been locked from the outside with an 

iron bolt. Days pass before the men are discovered; by which time Lily and Tor are 

dead, frozen to death. Dutch survives but is grotesquely maimed. The obvious 

question is who locked the door? Both Pauline and Russell may have motive for 

revenge. Pauline‟s account, again, is less than conclusive: 

It was Russell, I am sure, who first put his arms on the bar, thick iron that was 

made to slide along the wall and fall across the hasp and lock. He strained and 

shoved, too slight to move it into place, but he did not look to me for help. 

Sometimes, thinking back, I see my arms lift, my hands grasp, see myself dropping 

the beam into the metal grip. At other times, the moment is erased. But always 

I see Russell‟s face the moment after, as he turned, as he ran for the door--a 

peaceful look of complicit satisfaction. (T 27-28) 

Pauline‟s state of mind is so complex, contradictory, and delusional that it is quite 

possible that she herself is unable to decipher the truth. To begin with, Pauline‟s 

relation with Fleur is anything but clear. Slightly older than Pauline, Fleur is 

everything that Pauline is not: attractive, charismatic, confident, aware of who she is 

and proud of her Indian heritage. Pauline is, subsequently, caught between wanting 

to be Fleur and wishing to destroy Fleur. Does she not warn Fleur, as Russell wished 

to do, because she is afraid or because she wishes the attack to continue? I am not 

sure Pauline knows the answer. If she could have prevented the rape (if it did 

happen) and did nothing, then trapping Fleur‟s attackers in the locker might 

compensate for her guilt. On the other hand, if it were Pauline who did “lift,” 

“grasp,” and “drop” the bolt in place, then Pauline is complicit in the murder of two 

men. Thus, her account is tempered with “sometimes” and “at other times.” 

Readers, again presented with an ambiguous account of events, are left to parse 

out the truth on their own, if possible. What we do know is that what has happened 

to Fleur, the deaths of Lily and Tor, and her own involvement (whatever it may have 

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been) have become a central, inescapable event in Pauline‟s life. “I left Argus,” 

Pauline says, “because I couldn‟t get rid of the men. They walked nightlong through 

my dreams, looking for whom to blame” (T 62). Years later, shortly before Pauline 

takes her final vows and enters the convent, we are told (in the final chapter narrated 

by Pauline): “I was cleft down the middle by my sin of those days in Argus, scored 

like a lightning-struck tree” (T 195). By entering the convent, she will be “purged . . . 

of Russell Kashpaw‟s hot and futile wonder, down in Argus, of the spikes of frost, the 

snow ferns that grew in Dutch James‟s hair” (T 196). 

4. Lulu 

After Fleur returns to the reservation from Argus, she and a young man named Eli, 

a member of the Kashpaw clan, become lovers and he goes to live with her at her 

cabin on Matchimanito Lake. Shortly afterwards, people notice that Fleur is pregnant. 

The question on everyone‟s mind is the identity of the father. Possible candidates 

include Eli, one of the men from Argus, or, as many believe, Misshepeshu, the lake 

man (or monster) of Machimanito 4 . Nanapush tells Fleur at one point: “Pauline 

Puyat‟s home again. . . . She tells a story” (T 38). To which Fleur replies: “Uncle, the 

Puyat lies” (T 38). Margaret Kashpaw, Eli‟s mother, of course wants to know more 

and eventually gets the story out of Pauline. As Nanapush relates it: 

Pauline pursed her mouth and frowned, then continued. There was the butcher 

shop, the cards, what happened in the smokehouse. In describing things she had 

not seen her fingers wandered in the air, her voice screeched.” (T 52-53) 

Nanapush underscores that Pauline‟s testimony regards things which, by her own 

earlier admission, “she had not seen.” Furthermore, Nanapush calls into doubt 

Pauline‟s ability to ever be truthful: “As I have said, she was born a liar, and sure to 

die one. The practice of deception was so constant with her that it got to be a kind of 

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truth” (T 53). Nanapush contrasts himself with Pauline: “For while I was careful 

with my known facts, she was given to improving the truth. . . . Pauline schemed to 

gain attention by telling odd tales that created damage” (T 39). Even Pauline refers 

to her account of the Argus events as “the truth or some version of it” pulled out of her 

by Margaret (T 65). Nanapush, though, admits: “No one who saw Pauline afterwards 

could doubt the good it did her to be set free of the tale. . . . For now the burden of her 

secret was passed to Margaret” (T 54). Again, we the readers, are no closer to 

knowing the truth about what happened in Argus, but the effect of the guilt that 

Pauline has incurred (regardless of what a true account of the events may be) has been 

reconfirmed. 

Robert A. Morace refers to Pauline‟s account of the Argus events when pointing 

out the essential difference between Nanapush‟s and Pauline‟s forms of narrative. He 

refers to Pauline‟s narrations as diatribes--conversations addressed to no particular 

listener. “Pauline‟s self-imposed isolation,” he argues, “necessitates her playing the 

parts of both addresser and addressee” (52). When she tells of the events in Argus 

directly to Nanapush and Margaret, it stands out because it is such an exception to her 

usual mode of narration. Nanapush, on the other hand, is narrating directly to one 

specific and present listener; we, the readers, are in effect overhearing this entirely 

one-sided conversation. Nanapush‟s direct audience is, of course, Lulu, Fleur‟s child. 

For all five chapters that Nanapush narrates, from the first word of the novel to the 

last, we need to picture Lulu as a young woman sitting in Nanapush‟s cabin across the 

table from him and listening (impatiently) as he tells her the story of her mother: 

“Fleur, the one you will not call mother” (T 2). It is not until the final chapter that we 

learn why Lulu refuses to acknowledge Fleur as her mother. Despite her best efforts, 

Fleur is ultimately unable to maintain possession of her land. Having failed to 

protect those she loves and faced with an uncertain and possibly dangerous future, 

Fleur has done what previously would have been unthinkable; she has sent Lulu away 

as a child to the government school in Argus. If Tracks is the story of Fleur Pillager, 

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Nanapush‟s chapters are his attempt to help Lulu comprehend and forgive what Fleur 

has done. Nanapush‟s narration is a dialogue (albeit a one-sided one) rather than a 

diatribe. Much of the power of Nanapush‟s chapters come from our awareness of the 

silent yet ever-present Lulu. Writing about the oral, “pure” storytelling aspirations of 

Love Medicine, Robert Silberman‟s observations are equally valid for Tracks: “This 

goal would make the literary text appear to be a transcription of a speaker talking in 

the first-person present tense, addressing a clearly defined listener” (146). Erdrich 

keeps us aware of Lulu‟s presence by having Nanapush address Lulu directly 

throughout his narration. He regularly addresses her directly and directs her to pay 

attention (and thus directs us to pay attention to her). For example: 

“Granddaughter, . . .” (T 1) 

“My girl, listen well.” (T 32) 

“You smile!” (T 40) 

“This is where you come in, my girl, so listen.” (T 57) 

“And now you ask how you got to be a Nanapush.” (T 60) 

“You stood before me, proud, anxious. . . .” (T 128). 

“People get the grandchildren they deserve: I got you.” (T 180) 

At no point in any of Nanapush‟s direct addresses to Lulu would a reader be confused 

and mistakenly assume that he or she is being addressed. However, as Catherine 

Rainwater notes regarding the “oral storytelling strategies” of Tracks, Erdrich employs 

a “self-conscious accommodation of cultural „outsiders‟ in the audience, and thus 

converts „reader‟ to „listener‟” (145). One effect of Nanapush‟s “dialogue” with Lulu 

rather than a generic “diatribe” and of our “overhearing” of this dialogue is that 

Nanapush acquires much more of our sympathy as a narrator. He is literally less 

distant and seemingly more trustworthy than Pauline. If, as Jeanne Rosier Smith puts 

it, “Tracks presents the competing voices of only two characters, the consummate 

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trickster old man Nanapush and the unreliable, undesirable Pauline Puyat” (94), we 

easily choose to side with Nanapush. 

5. Pauline: An Alternative View 

Overall, critics have not been especially sympathetic towards Pauline. 

Nanapush‟s influence is positive, whereas Pauline‟s is negative: “Just as Nanapush 

strives through stories and trickery to hold people together, Pauline imagines stories 

that separate them” (Owens 217). In Pauline‟s own words: “I see farther, anticipate 

more than I‟ve heard. The land will be sold and divided . . .” (T 204-205). She is 

untrustworthy and “because of the increasingly bizarre nature of her accounts and the 

fact that she herself reports her lies, the reader doubts her reliability as a narrator” 

(Beidler 185). Or, simply, she is an “earnestly obsessive and humorless young 

woman [who] is portrayed as lacking an ability to ever draw upon laughter‟s saving 

grace” (Stookey 83), as opposed to Nanapush, an archetypal trickster. As the novel 

progresses, Pauline becomes increasingly focused on division rather than communion 

with society. After her religious “conversion,” she emotionally and psychologically 

distances herself from the Ojibwe reservation community: “„The Indians,‟ I said now, 

„them.‟ Never neenawind or us. And I soon found it was good that I did” (T 138). 

Yet, it is not as simple as saying that Nanapush is a reliable narrator who can be 

trusted and Pauline is not. Pauline refers to Nanapush as “the smooth-tongued 

artificer” (T 196). In The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Father 

Damien, now in his nineties, responding to questions regarding Pauline (now Sister 

Leopolda), answers: “I should tell you [Nanapush] was not entirely to be trusted where 

the Puyats were concerned. He had his motives for spinning a tale to his own ends-- 

he loved to torment Pauline” (148). Connie A. Jacobs, furthermore, points out that 

Nanapush and Pauline each “accurately characterize the other, Pauline stressing how 

much Nanapush loves to talk while Nanapush proclaims that once Pauline opens her 

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mouth, she cannot contain her words” (118). What they say, the purpose, and the 

effect may be diametrically opposed, but there is a similarity in the proclivity for 

talking. Remarkably and ironically, Nanapush and Pauline occasionally seem to be 

expressing the same sentiment. John Purdy writes about Pauline‟s “profound 

revelation” that “[p]ower travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth” (31). 

Although Pauline is far from a reliable narrator, Purdy rightly claims that “her insight 

here is reiterated by other characters, including Nanapush and the community at large, 

for which the fear and respect for Fleur is ubiquitous” (21). In fact, in what I would 

deem a relevant mistake, Louis Owens in his book on the American Indian novel, 

Other Destinies, attributes the line to Nanapush rather than Pauline (215). The 

statement about power and bloodlines sounds so much like Nanapush that one can 

hardly blame him for the error. Finally, referring to the rumors and gossip 

concerning Lulu‟s paternity, “the old men talk[ing], turning the story over,” it is 

Pauline who proclaims: “It comes up different every time, and has no ending, no 

beginning. They get the middle wrong too. They only know they don‟t know 

anything” (T 31). Compare this with Nanapush‟s comment three pages later on how 

Lulu came to be a Nanapush: “There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, 

never visible while it is happening” (T 34). 

6. Conclusion 

As we can see from the examples of Nanapush and Pauline, one of the hallmarks 

of Louise Erdrich‟s writing is a reluctance to provide her readers with pat answers and 

definitive truths. Nanapush and Pauline‟s values, personalities, and experience of the 

world may be antithetical; Pauline may be, indeed, the “character we love to hate”; yet, 

she surprises us at times by speaking what feels to us (and must also to Nanapush) to 

be true: “power travels in the bloodlines” and those speculating about Lulu “only 

know they don‟t know anything.” If Erdrich appears purposefully ambiguous on 

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matters such as Lulu‟s parentage or precisely what we are to make of someone like 

Pauline, that is exactly the point. The “polyvocal” aspect of Erdrich‟s fiction is one 

way by which she involves the reader in creating the story. To quote Jeanne Rosier 

Smith again on the structure of Erdrich‟s novels, the multiple perspectives of Erdrich‟s 

narratives “draw in the reader as one of the community of listeners” (91). To read a 

novel such as Tracks or Love Medicine is to become out of necessity an active 

participant in the tale. It is always going to be up to us, the readers, to negotiate our 

way through the texts of the novels and ferret out what may be the truth and be 

satisfied that, at times, the truth will continue to elude us. 

One of the most representative (and moving) scenes in Tracks comes at the end of 

chapter three shortly after the birth of Lulu. Father Damien arrives to complete the 

birth registration for the church records. He needs the father‟s name. Margaret and 

Fleur are unavailable, so it is up to Nanapush. Before he speaks, though, he reflects 

on his position as an old man, the last of his clan, with no descendants; he remembers 

his wives and children who have died from disease and starvation; he tells himself that 

Eli is still young; he considers the fact that Lulu‟s paternity is already uncertain: 

There were so many tales, so many possibilities, so many lies. The waters were 

so muddy. I thought I‟d give them another stir. “Nanapush,” I said. “And her 

name is Lulu.” (T 61) 

Nanapush‟s answer is a lie, of course, but it is a fabrication intended to “hold people 

together” rather than “separate them.” Nanapush feels he has “the opportunity to 

speak now and the right” (T 61) and his own personal motives (“Lulu” was the 

nickname given to his youngest daughter, now dead). However, Nanapush‟s lie 

(which fools no one) also serves the purpose of ensuring that the past connects with 

the present (and future) by connecting Lulu officially to the tribe and giving her an 

identity. For the record, she is a Nanapush. 

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In her essay, “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks,” Nancy J. 

Peterson writes: 

Both Nanapush‟s and Pauline‟s narratives suggest that history is not objective and 

impartial, as traditional documentary historians assert. It is always constructed in 

the interests of a particular party or ideology. (991) 

Erdrich‟s use in Tracks of two narrators with competing views, her insistence on the 

value of ambiguity in the text, and her refusal to tell the “truth” foregrounds the 

subjective and partial nature of the telling of events. Pauline‟s versions of what 

happened in Argus are colored by her own involvement and sense of responsibility and 

subsequent guilt. Fleur knows but isn‟t saying. The identity of Lulu‟s father is 

“officially” Nanapush. Given the choice between the two narrators, most readers will 

side with Nanapush. In the end we accept that Nanapush, as well as Pauline, has a 

particular agenda behind the stories he tells; it‟s just that most readers prefer 

Nanapush‟s agenda over Pauline‟s. Tracks shows us that the tale does, indeed, 

depend on the teller. For Native Americans, even more than most, the knowledge 

that the narrating of events is not objective and impartial continues to be especially 

relevant. 

Notes 

1. Those novels generally considered part of Erdrich‟s interrelated “North Dakota” novels 

are indicated here with an *. 

Shadow Tag (2010) 

The Red Convertible: Collected and New Stories 1978-2008 (2009) 

*The Plague of Doves (2008) 

The Painted Drum (2005) 

*Four Souls (2004) 

The Master Butchers Singing Club (2003) 

*The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001) 

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The Antelope Wife (1998) 

*Tales of Burning Love (1996) 

*The Bingo Palace (1994) 



*Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version (1993) 

The Crown of Columbus (with Michael Dorris) (1991) 

*Tracks (1988) 

*The Beet Queen (1986) 

*Love Medicine (1984) 

In addition, Erdrich has also written young adult and children‟s literature, nonfiction, and 

three volumes of poetry. 

2. The appropriate choice of terminology can be confusing. Chippewa, Chippewe, 

Chippeway, Ojibwa, Ojibwe, and Ojibway are all acceptable Anglicized versions of the 

name used to refer to the various bands of Native peoples living throughout the northern 

United States (primarily Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Montana) 

and southern Canada (primarily Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan), with Ojibwa 

used more in Canada and Chippewa more in the United States. The word used by 

Ojibwe people to refer to themselves, though, is the autonym Anishinabe (plural 

Anishinabeg) or, roughly, “First People.” However, for the sake of clarity and 

consistency and because it is the term that Erdrich herself seems to prefer most often in 

her fiction (although she refers to herself as Chippewa), I will refer to the people and their 

language as Ojibwe throughout this paper. 

3. References to Tracks will be cited throughout this paper as: T. 

4. Although Eli will be generally acknowledged and accepted as Lulu‟s father, we never 

know for sure who her father is. In Tracks, Pauline offers contradictory testimony. On 

one hand, she relates that Lulu‟s “green eyes and skin the color of an old penny have 

made more talk, as no one can decide if the child is mixed blood or what . . .” (31). Yet, 

on the other hand, she tells us that “[Lulu] had the Kashpaw‟s unmistakeable nose, too 

wide and squashed on the tip” (70). When Lulu reappears as an old woman in The 

Bingo Palace and her grandson, Lipsha, asks her directly who her father was, she “turns, 

arches her thin black eyebrows, and gives the pan [of simmering berries] a sudden, 

annoyed shake” (129). She refuses to say. Lipsha never finds out and neither do we. 

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Works Cited 

Beidler, Peter G. and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. 

Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1999. Print. 

Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: U of 

Alabama P, 1999. Print. 

Erdrich, Louise. The Bingo Palace. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 1994. Print. 

---. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: Perennial- 

HarperCollins, 2001. Print. 

---. Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version. New York: Perennial, 1993. Print. 

---. Tracks. New York: Perennial-HarperCollins, 1988. Print. 

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print. 

Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. New York: Peter 

Lang, 2001. Print. 

Morace, Robert A. “From Sacred Hoops to Bingo Palaces: Louise Erdrich‟s Carnivalesque 

Fiction.” Chavkin 36-66. 

Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: U of 

Oklahoma P, 1992. Print. 

Peterson, Nancy J. “History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks.” PMLA 109.5 

(1994): 982-994. JSTOR. Web. 8 Feb. 2011. 

Purdy, John. “Against All Odds: Games of Chance in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” 

Chavkin 8-35. 

Rainwater, Catherine. “Ethnic Signs in Erdrich‟s Tracks and The Bingo Palace.” Chavkin 

144-160. 

Silberman, Robert. “Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native 

American Woman.” Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine: A Casebook. Ed. Hertha D. 

Sweet Wong. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 136-154. Print. 

Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. 

Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print. 

Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 

Print. 

Treuer, David. Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2006. 

Print. 

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Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich's Tracks - MIUSE

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