Eng 242 essay on novel "Tracks"

1. Treyanna Spivey
ENG 242: Adam Mitts
9/22/19
From the beginning to the end of “Tracks”, written by Louise Erdrich, the four
Anishinabe families known as Pillager, Kashpaw, Puyat and Nanapush attempt to balance the
traditional ways of their people and the intrusive influence of white culture. Each character
demonstrates some correspondence of these two completely opposite ways of life, however the
Native American culture is endangered of the Europeans because their traditions are intimately
tied to their landscape. Europeans are in competition with Nature whereas the Natives are in
harmony with it. Natives believe their dreams of culture and society in Nature and are not
opposed to it while the whites try to control Nature but only end up destroying it. Essentially,
Nature plays a significant role in the novel “Tracks” because for the Native Americans Nature is
considered to be an actual being, as living as those themselves.
Native American attitude towards nature is to come in harmony with Nature, not in
competition with or control over it. They respect it as much as they value their own lives.
Nanapush is one of the elderly is who is able to remember a reservation that was highly spirited
and lively with the herd of wild buffalo that supported well for the tribe prior to the arrival of
European acculturation he says “I guided the last buffalo hunt. I saw the last bear shot. I trapped
the last beaver with a pelt of more than two years growth. I spoke aloud the words of the
government treaty, and refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and
lake. I axed the last birch that was older than I, and I saved the last Pillager” (2). As the buffalo
have been slaughtered off, their last remains exterminated by a single hunting expedition of
white men who took only the buffalo’s hides and tongues, leaving the rest of the pieces to rot.

2. The intensity towards the limits of the natural resources shows an imperative negligence for how
much the tribes rely on the natural world for their survival. By what Nanapush is explaining to
his granddaughter it seems like all of those animals went into extension due to natural
environment causes but as he gets to the end it is explained that the government tactic was to
wipe out the Native’s food source and then wipe out the people of the settlements next. The only
animals left behind were moose and deer, and even those were very difficult to find in the
shrinking forest. In order to survive off the settlement the Natives treat their animals with respect
because it is their source of food.
Since Native American valued Nature as one of them they believed the plants have a
leader amongst them just as human groups have leaders. Their notion reflects their tribal mode of
life presence in which individual is inferior to the unified identity of the tribe. Nanapush
verbalizes about the consequentiality of the reservation land as the regime and lumber companies
threaten to clear-cut it and tax it so steeply that the Native Americans will not be able to afford to
retain it. “Land is the only thing that lasts life to life. Money burns like tinder, flows off like
water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier” (33). Nanapush kens that the land
is of the utmost paramountcy not only because it provides a disenfranchised people a place to
subsist tranquilly, but because of its past. He kens that, when looked after and reverenced, the
land can provide all you require. The things being granted in exchange for the land here do not
constitute a fair deal. Money will run out and regime promises change all the time, but land is a
tangible thing that unlike money and words can’t be famished or confuted.
Pauline is a character who does not accept her Native American heritage she is converted
into a Catholic. Her narrative can be views as a white man’s representative because of her
disharmony between man and nature. She explains how her father tried to persuade her into

3. participating in native customs she says “but he scorned me when I would not bead, when I
refused to prick my fingers with quills, or hid rather than rub brains on the stiff skins of animals.
I was made for better, I told him. “Send me down to your sister” (14). She relented. Her father’s
vow to his Native customs was one of the reasons she wanted to move away from him to live
with her aunt in Argus. This proves to show that Pauline believes that the Native ways were
inferior to the European civilization but later on in chapter 4 it is can be used as a contradiction.
Pauline visits Matchimanito customarily perhaps because she is so intrigued with the vigorous
bond between Fleur and Eli, “In the morning, before they washed in Matchimanito, they smelled
like animals, wild and heady, and sometimes in the dusk their fingers left tracks like snails,
glistening and wet. They made my head hurt. A heaviness spread between my legs and ached.
The tips of my breasts chafed and wore themselves to points and a yawning eagerness gripped
me” (72). There is conspicuous sexual tension between them, and Pauline is fascinated by two
beings who are so proximately connected to their bodies, while she is thoroughly detached from
her bodily needs because of the profound shame she has internalized as a result of her exposure
to Catholicism. She describes her physical reaction to this magnetization as though it is peregrine
and unexplainable, rather than openly acknowledging her desire. All the comparisons Pauline
makes are to animal nature, something that she digresses from in her shift from the traditions of
the tribe to those of white American culture. It is seen that even though she is trying to be like
the Europeans it is already in her roots to connect to nature because she is from an Indigenous
decent.
Towards the end of the novel Nanapush visits Fleur’s cabin the moment he entered the
cabin, he heard “the hum of a thousand conversations. Not only the birds and small animals, but
the spirits in the western stands had been forced together. The shadows of the trees were

4. crowded with their forms. The twigs spin independently of wind, vibrating like small voices. I
stopped, stood among these trees whose flesh was so much older than ours, and it was then that
my relatives and friends took final leave, abandoned me to the living” (220). Endrich choice of
words for this quote indicate that the Natives really did view nature as a living-being because she
personifies the twigs spinning which sounded like words to Nanapush, the trees having flesh like
human flesh and blood. Nanapush points out that the trees were much older than them which
signifies having respect for your elders. He has compared his own life within the tribe to that of
the trees that are being cut down piecemeal. The trees stand to the west, the direction of death in
tribal notion. Though Nanapush, old and debilitated, aurally perceives the call of his tribe, he
decides against following their voices so that he may perpetuate to live and stand for what he
believes in, compromised as those credence might be. The quieting of the voices is the spirits
acknowledging that Nanapush has recommitted to his life.
At the end of the story Nanapush and Margaret try to get Lulu back from the boarding
school that her mother Fleur sent her but they struggle at government barriers “Margaret and
Father Damien begged and threatened the government, but once the bureaucrats sink their barbed
pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by
the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That’s when I began to see what
we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a
tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-
scratch that can be scattered by the wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match” (225).
Nanapush resisted giving them either his tribal name or his white man’s name in the beginning of
the story, he knows that once someone is being controlled by the government, there is no
reversing that course. He grieves the fact that the tribe, which was once linked to living, growing

5. trees, is now tied more closely to the paper that has been made out of them. His belief that land is
power is again brought up in the quick destruction that could be made of all these policies and
agreements with a tiny amount of fire. Their connection to the nature of their land is something
that they aren’t willing to give up without a fight, however they have no choice but to because
there isn’t much of them left.
As expressed, one major difference between the European Americans and the Native
Americans is the rooted history and the latter, in land. The Native posture towards nature is at
horizontal level defined by harmony rather than competition. The Native American writers are
concentrating on Nature not merely for their love for Nature; they are reconstructing the history
that has been obliterated and blurred by the White civilization. Instauration and assertion of the
Native conception of Nature is a rebuttal against the white discourse of deformation of the
Native culture and philosophy. From where I grew up in Brooklyn, New York gentrification is
being taken place during my lifetime and essentially, I get a connection to the characters in the
novel such as, Nanapush because I watched the last homes and my cultural restaurants in my
neighborhood be brought over by white people and it makes me just as frustrated that we are
being pushed out our district so that it can “conform to middle-class taste”.

6. Worked Cited
1. Erdrich, Louise. “ Tracks”. 1988