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Essay on "Tracks" by Louise Erdrich
A novel that looks at the workings of internalized racism's effect on the body and mind as well as the power and health inherent in resistance, Tracks raises questions about the helping professions' ability (and will) to help those who do not fit the dominant model. It also looks at healing, not as a problem-solving act (amputation would have solved the frostbite), but as a process involving people and time and imagination.
Ms. Erdrich's characters tell their stories in the first-person singular, and out of these shifting points of view a larger tale takes shape and organically grows. As the saga goes on over many generations and from one novel to the next, chronologic matters less than the integrity of the voices: an ancillary character in ''Love Medicine'' comes up at the center of ''The Beet Queen'' (1986) - and now ''Tracks'' gives the cycle another deft turn, going way back to the parents and grandparents of people in the first two books. (There is a fourth to come.) You could probably read them in any order, but I'd recommend following the sequence of publication since it enhances the pleasure of what you find out. One of the finest characters in ''Love Medicine'' is a woman named Lulu Lamartine who has eight sons by eight different men; partway through ''Tracks'' I heard myself think, ''Yikes! That's Lulu's mother?'' (Towers, 99-115)
The novel opens in the bitter winter of 1912: the Chippewa, their ranks already diminished by smallpox, fevers, forced migration and exile, now get nearly wiped out by a raging TB epidemic. ''Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us was taken,'' says a foxy old survivor named Nanapush (Towers, 99-115).
Nanapush is one of two storytellers who narrate and play key roles in what follows....
