Realistic Tale of Magical Survival and Resistance

¶ … narrators in Tracks shows that there is no unified Indian experience. Indian wise men like Nanapush can love their tribes and Indian identities give spiritual significance to their hardship and endure much and learn much from whatever life offers them. Other Indians, like Pauline, are torn asunder by the low value placed on Indian culture by Americans and feel jealous even of their own people, like Fleur, whom Nanapush valorizes as much as Pauline's voice despises this alternative female figure. While Nanapush tells Pauline "the earth is" as "limitless as luck," she resists his message. Pauline is divided between her mixed blood and her inability to fit into white or Indian society. (14) The two narrators of Pauline and Nanapush symbolize not simply the young woman's divided consciousness, white and Indian, but a divided America and a divided way of viewing hard times and the complex figure of Fleur.

The author deploys a kind of magical realism, as well as a realistic style in her text to depict Indian individuals who survived what amounts to an American Holocaust of people and culture. The Indians who survived and retained their identities, despite persecution, were involved in a kind of magical act, for to survive this historical event that took the lives of so many people was indeed miraculous. "We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall," mourns Nanapush. (1). In this individual's lyrical, as opposed to self-hating (like Pauline's) voice, even the dying of the Ojibwa tribe is given dignity.