Study Questions for Erdrich's Tracks
Thad Curtz (for Politics of Identity)

1. The fundamental question, as always - What can this book contribute to deepening your understanding of the program's theme, the politics of identity, or to raising new questions for you about the issues we are working on...

2. The Title

Tracks is clearly another one of these titles with a range of possible meanings - animal footprints and wagon ruts are the two most obvious ones. On page 47, Nanapush calls the print in a newspaper "tracks". Presumably, Erdrich picked this title because she thought it would point to something central about the whole book, more central than the fact that there are some animal footprints and some wagon ruts in it. There isn't a moment where the author makes a statement about the relation of the title to the book, like the one at the end of Girl, Interrupted or the one at the beginning of The Floating World. It's worth thinking about this as you read along. Why is this book called Tracks? What does that have to do with what it is about, or with how it's written?

3. Who's telling the story? And when? And why?

This book has two narrators, who take turns telling their stories, chapter by chapter. They are both explicitly characters in the story. Each says that the other one is a liar.

Nanapush describes Pauline:

... she was given to improving truth....schemed to gain attention by telling odd tales that created damage. There was some question if she wasn't afflicted, touched in the mind. Her Aunt Regina, who was married to a Dutchman, sent the girl back here when she got peculiar, blacked out and couldn't sleep, saw things that weren't in the room. That is all to say that the only people who believed Pauline's stories were the ones who loved the dirt. (p. 39)

Pauline describes Nanapush:

... the smooth-tongued artificer.... He had manufactured humiliations, traps. He was ... the arranger of secrets. Not one flare of belief lit his mind... (p. 196)

Just in case you're inclined to trust Nanapush more, because he's so smooth tongued, perhaps we should point out that he admits he's a liar, on several occasions (p. 61, for example), and that his fundamental advice about dealing successfully with women is that, "...you must use every instinct to confuse." (p. 46)

He is also telling his stories to someone, Lulu. Why exactly is he telling her these stories? How effective do you imagine they are in getting her to change her mind, her stance, or her plans?

You might try to imagine this novel told from some other point of view... Could one tell it from Fleur's? What would it be like if one of the minor characters told it, someone like Nector Kashpaw, say?

4. Names

As in The Lost Steps, you might consider the resonances of a number of the names in this novel.
What do their names have to do with what they are like? For example:

Fleur Pillager
Pauline Puyat (who becomes Sister Leopolda) - Knowing a little about St. Paul's career might help here.
Nanapush (He tells you about this himself.)
Nector Kashpaw

5. Nanapush and Pauline -

Like Papa LaBas and Hinkle Von Vampton, Nanapush and Pauline have a good deal in common with each other, although they appear in the novel as opposed and bitter enemies. (If you don't believe this, you might start by comparing what Pauline does with Sophie and Eli in Chapter 4 and what Nanapush does with Eli in Chapter 5.) Make a list of everything you can think of that they have in common. Then think some more about the differences in those things...

6.
As with The Lost Steps, in reading this book, many of you may experience considerable gaps between each of these two narrators' cultures and values and your own. As a student, working on educating yourself, what do you think are the most useful ways to deal with such gaps?

Perhaps you don't feel those gaps in reading Nanapush's stories? If not, why not? How do your responses emerge from how he tells his stories? (You might try asking yourself why you think what he plans to do to Clarence Morrisey is justifiable - not what he ends up doing, but what he plans to do, and only doesn't do by accident. How about what Fleur does to the men who happen to be working as loggers at the end of the story?)

7. "The story comes up different every time and has no ending..."

Several important things at the end of this story echo events in the first couple of chapters - Fleur's summoning of the winds, her walking away, the moments at which she says "... take my place" (pp. 11 and 213). What do you make of these repetitions?

8. Figurative networks -

You might pay attention to the ways in which certain things keep surfacing in the book's events and in its language. Pick one or two of these things from the following list (or some other items like them that interest you) to track. What sorts of meaning or feeling do you think their recurrences generate?

1. Not eating

9. Themes

What is this book about, anyway? Here are a few ideas that you might pay some attention to...

1. Pride
2. Saving lives (other people's and one's own).
Jesus says "You must lose your life to save it." Pauline says, "...to hang back is to perish." (p. 14)
3. Guilt and innocence
St. Paul says, "...if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin."(Romans 7, 7)
4. The cycle of revenge
5. Ways of coping with suffering
6. The fascination of power, and ways of exercising it
7. Storytelling and belief