Tracks

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

Tracks is exactly my favourite kind of book: a fresh viewpoint on history that blends fact with poetic language, imprinting both my mind and heart with an author's voice and vision. In this case, the time is early 20th century, the place is the Anishinabe Reservation in North Dakota, and author Louise Erdrich uses a blend of magical realism, Catholic mysticism, and Native mythology to reinterpret the accepted narrative of western expansionism.

As Tracks opens, the year is 1912, and after surviving the genocide that forced the Anishinabe onto a reservation that represented a fraction of their former traditional lands, those who also survived the "pox and fever" were now succumbing to consumption in unbelievable numbers.

By then, we thought disaster must surely have spent its force, that disease must have claimed all of the Anishinabe that the earth could hold and bury. But the earth is limitless and so is luck and so were our people once.

This speaker is Nanapush, an Anishinabe who, at 50 in 1912, is considered an elder of the decimated tribe. He is speaking to his granddaughter many years after the events of the book; attempting to explain the actions of her mother (Fleur Pillager) that led to their alienation. The chapters alternate between his point-of-view and that of Pauline Puyat; an orphan of mixed blood who has her own opinion of Fleur and who makes very different choices about how to survive in their changing world. Fleur, the last living member of her own family, could be considered the main character of Tracks, and it's interesting that her actions are only described in the third-person; interpreted by two such different characters. As consumption gives way to famine and influenza -- and as pressure is put on the remaining Anishinabe to sell off their land to logging companies -- this era is truly post-apocalyptic to the tribe; a people who must decide if survival means clinging to traditional ways or assimilating into the culture of their overlords. (And "post-apocalyptic" isn't hyperbole: if an alien invading force did to all of humanity what white settlers did to the Anishinabe tribe, the term "post-apocalyptic" would probably be considered a mild term.)

That is, broadly, the plot but it's the writing that had me hooked throughout this book. The book is set on the shores of Lake Matchimanito and here is a description of the water monster who lives in its depths; a creature that all Anishinabe mothers warn their daughters against:

(Misshepeshu) appears with green eyes, copper skin, a mouth tender as a child's. But if you fell into his arms, he sprouts horns, fangs, claws, fins. His feet are joined as one and his skin, brass scales, rings to the touch. You're fascinated, cannot move. He casts a shell necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica on your breasts. He holds you under. Then he takes the body of a lion, a fat brown worm, or a familiar man. He's made of gold. He's made of beach moss. He's a thing of dry foam, a thing of death by drowning, the death a Chippewa cannot survive.

Fleur Pillager, who takes up solitary residence on a remote shoreline of this lake, is a fascination to her tribe because she seems to have tamed Misshepeshu and assumed some of his powers:

She messed with evil, laughed at the old women's advice and dressed like a man. She got herself into some half-forgotten medicine, studied ways we shouldn't talk about. Some say she kept the finger of a child in her pocket and a powder of unborn rabbits in a leather thong around her neck. She laid the heart of an owl on her tongue so she could see at night, and went out, hunting, not even in her own body. We know for sure because the next morning, in the snow or dust, we followed the tracks of her bare feet and saw where they changed, where the claws sprang out, the pad broadened and pressed into the dirt.

In contrast, Pauline enters the white man's world, and as an end-of-life caregiver, has her first ecstatic experience when she witnesses her first death:

I stood when she was gone and called the others into the room, surprised at how light I felt, as though I'd been cut free as well. I hooked my hands on a chair, just to hold steady. If I took off my shoes I would rise into the air. If I took my hands away from my face I would smile. A cool blackness lifted me, out of the room and through the door. I leapt, spun, landing along the edge of the clearing. My body rippled. I tore leaves off a branch and stuffed them into my mouth to smother laughter. The wind shook in the trees. The sky hardened to light. And that is when, twirling dizzily, my wings raked the air, and I rose in three powerful beats and saw what lay below…I alone, watching, filled with breath, knew death as a form of grace.

I'm not usually a fan of magical realism -- where there are no natural laws, there's very little at stake -- but using Native mythology and Catholic mysticism (saints were always levitating and Pauline surrenders to the church more and more as time goes by) as both contrasting belief systems and as established belief systems (millions of believers agree to the facts of each system: that people can fly when in communion with their gods) removes the actions from the realm of magic and makes them perfectly logical (in the context of the story). While Tracks could have had a bitter or hectoring tone, it's playful from Nanapush's point-of-view, and Pauline's story is one of a descent into madness -- it's a story of survival that gives equal value to the different choices that the people felt they had to make.

Tracks was interesting to me on so many different levels and, as it's apparently a part of a cycle of books by Erdrich, I'll be revisiting these characters as soon as I can.

I had read one book by Louise Erdrich before (The Master Butcher's Singing Club) and it was so mundane to me that it took me a long time to pick her up again -- and I am so glad that I did; Tracks dovetails nicely into my reading interests and extends my knowledge in an area that is of great importance to me -- Native History. After reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and thinking that I understood how the Indian treaties in the U.S. were finally settled, it was shocking to me that the Anishinabe -- after all of the health and space pressures they had survived -- were expected to pay a yearly tax on their allotments, and as a result, white men were taking over the land that they couldn't help but default on. It's a wonder they have survived at all.

A concept that I couldn't fit into my review was how the character of Nanapush (as well as the unmentioned Margaret) was a classic trickster of Native mythology, and I actually didn't mention it because I didn't pick up on it until I read this essay on Tracks. I'm happy to end my thoughts with that author's conclusion about this book:

 One aspect of the trickster is that he lives by his wits. While other people were losing their wits, such as Fleur to anger, Pauline to Christ, Eli to love medicine, and other Indians to alcohol, Nanapush and Margaret remained clear-minded. It was their comfortability with chaos and their ability to access it to create new ways of being in the world that allowed Nanapush and Margaret to not only survive, but to thrive.

Speaking as an Anishinaabe, I see this as a very positive statement. The comic vision of the Anishinaabe still survives to this day; it is one of the hallmarks of the culture. Erdrich falls squarely within this tradition. Writing from within the culture, Erdrich demonstrates how, living with the comic vision, the Anishinaabe cannot only survive but thrive in chaos, and so build a new world, based on the old but responsive to the new. Far from being alienated, I see Tracks as a realistic portrayal of the Anishinaabe apocalypse and statement of hope for the future survival of our people.