Louise Erdrich is renowned for a group of novels that focus on a particular area of an Ojibwa Indian reservation in Eastern North Dakota and the nearby imaginary small town of Argus, that tell the story of four major mixed Indian families. The novel “Tracks”, which is one of them, was first published in New-York in 1988. It is set in the twelve-year period from 1912 to 1924, generally on the reservation but in part in fictional Argus. It illustrates the phenomenon of traditional Ojibwa culture’s and values’ degeneration caused by the growing domination of whites over the land and the lives of Erdrich’s Native American characters. The novel tells the story of the same families depicted in Erdrich’s previously written novel Love Medicine. The author illustrates how time-honoured Obijwa practices are disappearing, while tribal members are losing their land to commercial companies.

The novel focus on the story of Fleur Pillager, a strong and severe woman, who encounters fiercely the changes imposed on her native Ojibwa, and still is crushed at the end. Fleur has an unexplained ability to survive death while bringing others into fatal circumstances. She is a bright mysterious character, who attracts attention of each human being meeting her.  Her story is narrated by two other characters: Nanapush, a tribal elder and trickster figure, a pure blood Ojibwe who stayed alive despite the tuberculosis epidemic of 1912, and Pauline Puyat, a mix-blood young woman whose primary wish is to be white and who consequently abandons her Indian heritage. The two characters provide two radically different outlooks on racial identity. Their only common feature is belonging to Native American society. However, their attitude to own origins is totally unlike, and thus leads them to two diverse finales.

Nanapush, one of the narrators, is regarded as an elder in the tribe even though he is only 50 years old. His whole family has died out while the consumption epidemic in1912. He is the one to rescue a young woman Fleur Pillager, whom he discovers almost dead in her remote cabin in the woods where she as well is the lone enduring member of her family. Eventually, Fleur becomes a kind of adopted daughter to Nanapush. They both struggle, ineffectively as it turns out at the end, to hold on to their lands as the neighbouring territories are being sold out by other families to lumber and logging companies.

Pauline, the second narrator of the book, is a white-Indian girl. She abandons her family as a teenager to work in the basically white town of Argus. Lonely, friendless and embarrassed about her Indian heritage, she is fascinated by and envious of Fleur at the same time, whose physical fineness attracts much male attention. Being weak and unstable herself, she is attracted to Fleur’s strong personality. Pauline is somehow dark, she finds relief and pleasure in observing people pass away and dealing with their dead bodies. As the novel progresses, Pauline finally renounces her relation to Indian culture, turns to the convent and becomes a catholic nun. Whatever she does is devoted to Christian religion and what she is mostly thinking of are the new techniques of flagellation. She ultimately seems to go mad in her bizarre, mythical religious passion.

Nanapush is a generally honest storyteller. He is telling Lulu, Fleur’s daughter and now a young woman, the chronicle of her family background. His motives are to influence her treatment of her mother and to prove she should not detest Fleur for abandoning her as a child. Nanapush’s narration is both trustworthy and easy to read. The reader experiences a sense of identity with Nanapush since as the novel move forward we discover more and more about him. For instance, the readers eventually find out he knows many medicines