Erdrich had great difficulty writing Tracks. She let the 400-page manuscript sit for ten years, publishing Love Medicine and The Beet Queen first, before she returned to the novel. What was probably difficult for her was that in Tracks she was establishing the origin or beginning of the dissolution of the tribe, the atomizing of its life. Since the novel explores how and why this happened, small wonder that Erdrich had such difficulty with the book. Politics and history compose the action of the novel; artistry sees that these are given imaginative human representation. A good discussion needs to examine the causes of trouble the Chippewa experience and how Erdrich presents them.

1. While Native Americans participate in their own undoing in Tracks, whites are the originating cause. What acts by whites, either by contact or law, seem most pernicious in the imagined world of this novel...