American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION William Bevis has argued that, whereas the classic American novel tells a story of “leaving,” in which characters find growth and fulfillment away from the homes they grew up in, the typical Native American novel is based around “homing.” In homing stories, the characters do not “find themselves” through independence but rather discover value and meaning by returning to their homes, pasts, and people. Although Bevis’s notion provides insight into many Native American works, one novel calling for a somewhat different approach is Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. Although notions of “leaving” and “homing” are central to Tracks, they operate in ways far more complex than Bevis’s view suggests. Since the novel’s 1988 publication, scholars have probed its depictions of characters losing, reclaiming, searching for, and finding home. Most have focused on the displacement and marginality the characters experience. Tracks has been described as “a novel entirely haunted by historical dispossession” in which the characters experience “dislocation from their heritage, their environment, and themselves.” A number of scholars have argued that displacement is manifested in the novel thematically and in the disparate voices and multiple perspectives it employs as narrative strategies. This concern with displacement obscures the fact that the novel is about losing home and about finding it. As Tom Berninghausen has pointed out, Erdrich’s characters are working toward “coming home in a social sense, being at home in the tribe’s history, and returning to the particular landscape that is home.” Lydia A. Schultz and E. Shelley Reid have disputed the suggestion that the novel’s narrative discontinuities reflect chaos and dispossession in the lives of the Anishinaabe, arguing instead that they represent the multivocalic strategies of traditional Anishinaabe storytelling—that is, they reflect continuity rather than disruption of Anishinaabe culture. Gloria Bird has pointed out that, although many of Erdrich’s characters live on the margins of society, they are people for whom those margins are home. Similarly, Pauline Woodward writes that Erdrich “offers a new rendering of community” concentrating on the endurance of the Anishinaabe even through the discontinuity they experience. Forces for and movements toward homing are intricately interwoven with energies and actions toward displacement throughout Tracks.