Tips for reading Tracks:
• Remember that the narrators Nanapush and Pauline alternate, and each has a different perspective/voice.
• Louise Erdrich is drawing on the style of oral traditions, so the reading experience may be culturally different from other books you’ve read, intentionally so.
• Erdrich can be seen as creating writing that is “decolonized” from traditional European forms.
• Uses some surrealistic or “magic-realistic” imagery.

Some themes in Tracks:
• Historical and cultural context of early reservation life
• Disease, poverty, and the destruction of the fabric of Native American social and cultural forms
• Love, spirituality, and magic
• Culture clashes
• Survival through humor, old traditions and subverting the “new” American cultures
• Missionary activity as a way to “get rid of the Indian while saving the man”
• Formation of identity in bicultural environments
• The mixing of Chippewa mythology with Catholicism
• Connections between destruction and survival