Tracks

The Year of the Sickness

Tracks opens in 1912 with Nanapush rescuing the young Fleur Pillager from a cabin full of smallpox dead. The allotment era — when federal policy was dividing reservation land into individual parcels and selling off what was designated surplus — is already underway. The Kashpaw and Pillager families are in the midst of it.

Nanapush, one of the last elders who remembers the old ways, narrates to his granddaughter Lulu — the same Lulu Lamartine who appears decades later in Love Medicine. His voice is sardonic, political, and deeply mourning: he is telling a history of loss to someone who is part of it. Pauline Puyat, the novel’s other narrator, is a mixed-blood woman converting to Catholicism with increasing fanaticism, whose account of the same events is filtered through her self-hatred and religious distortion.

Fleur

Fleur Pillager — who is held to have survived drowning twice, who is said to bring luck to card games and death to those who take advantage of her — is the novel’s magnetic centre without ever being a narrator. What she is, in Nanapush’s account, is the last full-blood Pillager and a figure of Ojibwe power that the allotment system is specifically designed to extinguish. The land she holds — and eventually loses — is the novel’s subject as much as any character.

Tracks is the chronologically earliest novel in Erdrich’s North Dakota sequence, though it was published third. Reading it alongside Love Medicine fills the historical background that the later novels assume.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Tracks apart: The dual narrator structure is formally brilliant — Nanapush and Pauline see the same events in incompatible ways; The land allotment policy and its mechanisms are explained with precision that reads as political as much as historical; and Fleur Pillager is one of the great figures in Erdrich’s universe — mythic and entirely real simultaneously. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Tracks give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The allotment policies of the early 20th century were designed to destroy tribal land ownership and succeeded in large measure. Memory and narrative are political — who tells the story of dispossession, and from what position, shapes what is legible as loss. Fleur Pillager represents a form of Ojibwe power that the novel both celebrates and places in historical context — it cannot hold. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Louise Erdrich’s prose in Tracks is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The chronology and character relationships assume familiarity with the Love Medicine universe. Pauline’s religious mania in the later sections is difficult for some readers. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of Erdrich who want to extend into her earlier work and the historical roots of the Love Medicine universe.

Two Voices, Two Truths

The formal heart of Tracks, and its most daring achievement, is the decision to tell the story through two radically incompatible narrators whose accounts of the same events cannot be reconciled. Nanapush, one of the last elders who remembers the old ways, narrates with a sardonic, political, grieving voice, addressing his granddaughter Lulu and recounting a history of dispossession to someone who is herself part of it; his perspective is communal, rooted in Ojibwe tradition, and clear-eyed about the forces destroying his world. Pauline Puyat, by contrast, is a mixed-blood woman whose increasingly fanatical conversion to Catholicism warps her account through self-hatred, sexual repression, and religious distortion, so that her version of events is unreliable in ways the reader must continually work to see past. By setting these two voices against each other, Erdrich refuses to grant the reader a single authoritative truth, forcing an active reckoning with how memory, position, and belief shape what can even be perceived as real. The technique is more than a formal flourish; it dramatizes the novel’s deepest concern, that the telling of history, especially a history of loss, is itself a contested act of power. Neither narrator is fully reliable, and the gap between them becomes the space in which the reader must locate meaning, making Tracks one of Erdrich’s most formally ambitious and intellectually demanding novels.

The Mechanics of Dispossession

What gives Tracks its devastating specificity is the precision with which it renders the actual mechanisms of land loss under the federal allotment policies of the early twentieth century, transforming abstract historical injury into concrete, intimate catastrophe. The novel is set during the allotment era, when government policy divided communally held reservation land into individual parcels and sold off what was designated as surplus, a system explicitly designed to dismantle tribal landholding and assimilate Native people, and which succeeded in stripping away vast portions of the Ojibwe land base. Erdrich does not treat this as background; she makes its workings, the fees, the taxes, the paperwork, the impossible financial demands placed on families with no means to meet them, the engine of the plot, showing exactly how legal and bureaucratic processes accomplished the theft of a people’s foundation. The land that the Pillagers and Kashpaws hold, and ultimately lose, is as central to the novel as any human character, and its loss is rendered with a grief that is at once personal and collective. This documentary precision lends the novel a political force that reads as history as much as fiction, and it ensures that the dispossession at its center is felt not as a distant policy abstraction but as an intimate, irreversible wound inflicted on specific, fully realized human lives.

Fleur and the Roots of a Saga

At the magnetic center of Tracks, though never herself a narrator, stands Fleur Pillager, one of the great figures in Erdrich’s entire body of work, a woman who is simultaneously mythic and entirely real. Said to have survived drowning more than once, to bring luck to card games and death to those who wrong her, Fleur embodies a form of Ojibwe power, spiritual, sexual, and elemental, that the allotment system is specifically designed to extinguish, and the novel both celebrates this power and places it within the tragic historical context that ensures it cannot ultimately hold. Her presence anchors the book’s exploration of what is being lost as traditional ways and the land that sustains them are stripped away. Tracks also occupies a special place within Erdrich’s interconnected North Dakota cycle: though published third, it is the chronologically earliest of the novels, supplying the historical roots and family origins that the later books, including Love Medicine, assume. Reading it alongside that masterwork enriches both, illuminating the deep background of dispossession against which the later, more contemporary stories of the same families unfold. For readers willing to meet its formal demands and its assumed familiarity with Erdrich’s wider universe, Tracks offers a powerful, formally brilliant, and historically essential foundation to one of the major achievements in contemporary American fiction.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — One of Erdrich’s most formally daring novels — the dual-narrator structure forces the reader to choose which account to believe, and neither is fully reliable. The land loss is rendered with devastating specificity.