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

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Anthony Piccolo It Comes Up Different Every Time: Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks 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 - 121 -
Anthony Piccolo It Comes Up Different Every Time: Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich‟s Tracks 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 - 122 -
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Narrative Point of View in Louise Erdrich's Tracks - MIUSE

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