Mark Schauer

Abuses and Allotments. The setting of Louise Erdrich's Tracks and its importance Mark Schauer

Scholarly Essay from the year 2011 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: A, Northern Arizona University, language: English, abstract: The preponderance of evidence shows that the setting of Louise Erdrich's Tracks, as well as its chronological sequels Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and The Bingo Palace strongly resembles the Turtle Mountain Reservation in the north central part of the state and Erdrich's hometown of Wahpeton, in the southeast on the Minnesota border. Nonetheless, much has been made of the similarity of the fate of the Ojibwe characters in Tracks with the historical outrage perpetrated against the White Earth Anishinaabeg from the signing of the Dawes Act in 1887 to the nadir of Native American wellbeing in the early 1920s. In 1988, the same year Tracks was published, Erdrich co-wrote with her then-husband Michael Dorris an expose of this travesty that was published in The New York Times Magazine, which added to speculation that the politicized novel was a thinly veiled account of White Earth. Lost in the rush to place Tracks in Minnesota, however, was the fact that the historical Turtle Mountain Ojibwe in North Dakota experienced just as egregious a theft of timber-rich tribal land, both prior and subsequent to the Dawes Act, and in some ways served as the textbook example for the fraud committed at White Earth.