General Editors: Helen Jaskoski and Robert M. Nelson
Poetry/Fiction: Joseph W. Bruchac III
Bibliographer: Jack W. Marken
Editor Emeritus: Karl Kroeber
Assistant to the Editor: Lynn Poncin

SAIL - Studies in American Indian Literatures is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. The journal publishes reviews, interviews, bibliographies, creative work including transcriptions of performances, and scholarly and theoretical articles on any aspect of American Indian literature including traditional oral material in dual-language format or translation, written works, and live and media performances of verbal art.

SAIL is published quarterly by the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. Individual membership rates for 1992 are $25 (regular) and $16 (limited income); the institutional rate is $35. All payments must be in U.S. dollars. Limited quantities of SAIL volume 1 (1989) and volume 3 (1991) are available to individuals at $16 the volume and to institutions at $24 the volume.

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SAIL
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Production of this issue supported by the University of Richmond.

SAIL

Studies in American Indian Literatures
Series 2                         Volume 4, Number 1                       Spring 1992

CONTENTS

LOVE MEDICINE: A METAPHOR FOR FORGIVENESS
         Lissa Schneider          .                 .                 .                  .                 .      1

MISSHIPESHU THE WATER GOD
         Norval Morriseau       .                 .                 .                  .                 .      14

QUESTIONS OF THE SPIRIT: BLOODLINES IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S CHIPPEWA LANDSCAPE
         Annette Van Dyke      .                 .                 .                  .                 .      15

WHY BEARS ARE GOOD TO THINK AND THEORY DOESN'T HAVE TO BE MURDER: TRANSFORMATION AND ORAL TRADITION IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S TRACKS
         Joni Adamson Clarke  .                 .                 .                  .                 .     28

WOMAN LOOKING: REVIS(ION)ING PAULINE'S SUBJECT POSITION IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S TRACKS
         Daniel Cornell            .                 .                 .                  .                 .      49

COMMENTARY
         ASAIL at MLA 1991                   .                 .                  .                 .      65
         From the Editors        .                 .                 .                  .                 .      66
         New Editor Search     .                 .                 .                  .                 .      67
         Opportunity for Benefactors        .                 .                  .                 .      67
         Call for Papers: ASAIL at ALA                    .                  .                 .      68
         Call for Papers: ASAIL at MLA                    .                  .                 .      68
         Call for Papers on Critical Approaches         .                  .                 .      68
         Call for Papers on Feminist and Post-Colonial Approaches             .      69
         Call for Papers on Film, Drama and Theater                   .                 .      69
         Call for Papers: MLA Discussion Group       .                  .                 .      70
         New Anthology of Translations   .                 .                  .                 .      70
         The Rupert Costo Chair.              .                 .                  .                 .      71

{ii} REVIEWS
Raven Tells Stories: An Anthology of Alaskan Native Writing. Ed. Joseph Bruchac.
         Jeane Coburn Breinig                    .                 .                  .                 .      72

Keepers of the Earth: Native American Stories and Environmental Activities for Children. Michael J. Caduto and Joseph Bruchac
         Larry Abbott                .                 .                 .                  .                 .      73

The Lightning Within: An Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Fiction. Ed. Alan Velie
         Louis Owens                .                 .                 .                  .                 .      75

Our Bit of Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature. Ed. Agnes Grant.
         Jim Charles                  .                 .                 .                  .                 .      77

The Heirs of Columbus. Gerald Vizenor
         Helen Jaskoski             .                 .                 .                  .                 .      79

BRIEFLY NOTED                .                 .                 .                  .                 .      83
CONTRIBUTORS                .                 .                 .                  .                 .      85

*           *           *            *

Grateful acknowledgment is made to McGraw Hill-Ryerson LTD, and to Norval Morriseau for permission to reprint the drawing of the water serpent from Legends of My People the Great Ojibway, copyright © 1965 by Norval Morriseau.

LOVE MEDICINE: A METAPHOR FOR FORGIVENESS

Lissa Schneider

      Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine has been regarded as simply a collection of short stories, lacking in novelistic unity and overriding structure.¹ Yet despite shifts in narrative style and a virtual cacophony of often individually unreliable narrative voices, Erdrich successfully weds structure and theme, style and content. For the novel is as much about the act of storytelling as it is about the individual narratives and the symbols and interrelationships which weave them together thematically. In Love Medicine, storytelling constitutes both theme and style. Erdrich repeatedly shows how storytelling--characters sharing their troubles or their "stories" with one another--becomes a spiritual act, a means of achieving transformation, transcendence, forgiveness. And in this often comic novel, forgiveness is the true "love medicine," bringing a sense of wholeness, despite circumstances of loss or broken connections, to those who reach for it. Moreover, the novel is in itself the stylistic embodiment of Erdrich's theme; as a series of narratives or chapters/stories shared with the reader, the work as a whole becomes a kind of "love medicine" of forgiveness and healing in its own right.
      The storytelling in the novel thus functions on manifold levels. With revealing insight, Kathleen Sands has attributed the source of Erdrich's technique to "the secular anecdotal narrative process of community gossip" (14), and confirms that "ultimately it is a novel" (12), one that is "concerned as much with exploring the process of storytelling as with the story itself" (13). Sands, however, goes on to say that Erdrich's characters are unable "to give words to each other, except in rage or superficial dialogues that mask discomfort" (20), and focuses on the reader as the one who must "integrate the story into a coherent whole." She also suggests that such a reader must be "not some community member," but an "outsider" (15). This leads her to conclude that the novel "may not have the obvious spiritual power so often found in Indian fiction" (23), and in some respects underscores Nora Barry and Mary Prescott's critical assessment that "even sympathetic reviewers" tend to see Erdrich's characters as "doomed Chippewas" (123). In a more extreme vein, Louise Flavin submits that the novel's "diverse points of view" accentuate the "theme of the breakdown of relationships" and that it "suggests not tribal or family unity but separation and difference" (56), while Marvin Magalaner points to themes of "entrapment and enclosure" (105) and curiously describes the characters as "savages now forced into tameness by material progress . . ." (104). By contrast, Barry and Prescott, in a sentiment closely echoed by Elizabeth Hanson,² feel that Love Medicine "really celebrates Native {2} American survival and credits spiritual values with that survival" (123). They attribute this survival to "a character's ability to internalize both the masculine and the feminine, the past and the present" (124).
      I suggest that the means by which Erdrich's characters learn to internalize and integrate past with present is through the transformative power of storytelling. A non-Native reader, or any reader, is not the sole audience to these stories, for it is the characters themselves who, within the course of the narratives, begin this recovery of stories as they move beyond gossip to share with one another intimate revelations of highly personal desires, guilts, and troubles. It is in the personal stories that the characters tell each other that the real spiritual force of the novel can be felt.
      Stories as "love medicine," moreover, provide the alternative in the novel to the characters' struggles with experiences of alcohol abuse, religious fanaticism, or compulsive sex relations, as well as the spiritual havoc that these kinds of seductive but hollow "love medicines" wreak on human relations. But although Erdrich focuses on the Chippewa experience, the troubles her characters experience are not exclusively "Indian problems." Erdrich herself sees the novel in terms of its articulation of "the universal human struggle" (George 241), and her characters, as Bo Schöler has said of other Native literary depictions of alcohol-related themes, are motivated by "complex and ultimately profoundly human causes" (79). These are problems common to every society, and the solution she posits is relevant for both Native and non-Native cultures alike. Forgiveness in Love Medicine is thus of the everyday variety, that which is extended from a child to a parent, a wife to a husband, brother to brother. Moreover, for Erdrich, forgiveness is not explanation, not unconditional, not forgetting. It is the transformation that comes through the sharing and recovery of stories, and the giving up of the notion of oneself as victim.
      Some of Erdrich's comments in her foreword to The Broken Cord-- her collaborator/husband Michael Dorris's non-fictional book on their adopted child's fetal alcohol syndrome--show, moreover, that her interest in these themes is more than academic. She describes struggling with her own drinking, saying:

    I drank hard in my twenties, and eventually got hepatitis. I was lucky. Beyond an occasional glass of wine, I can't tolerate liquor anymore. But from those early days, I understand the urge for alcohol, its physical pull. I had formed an emotional bond with a special configuration of chemicals, and I realize to this day the attraction of the relationship and the immense difficulty in abandoning it. (xvi-xvii)

{3}
Such an awareness accounts for the tremendous sensitivity with which she handles the many vivid drinking scenes in Love Medicine. She recognizes that alcohol can fill a spiritual void, that it can become a substitute for emotionally bonding with other people. Alcohol is but one of the false "love medicines" that Erdrich deconstructs in her novel, but perhaps it is the most devastating. In her forward to The Broken Cord, a book which is itself an example of the healing power of storytelling,³ she continues:

Tribal communities, most notably the Alkali Lake Band in Canada, are coming together, rejecting alcohol, reembracing their own humanity, their own culture. These are tough people and they teach a valuable lesson: to whatever extent we can, we must take charge of our lives (xix).

Learning to "take charge" is the dominant message in Love Medicine. For her characters, it cannot be done while they continue to abuse alcohol or other substitutes for true sharing.
      The novel opens on Easter in 1981 with June Morrissey Kashpaw's thoughts and feelings, related in third person, as she commences upon the alcoholic binge which will lead to her death. June's death will affect all the other characters. In a radical revision of Christ's Easter resurrection, the death of this alcoholic Indian woman becomes the impetus which propels many of the other characters toward healing. In this scene, June is clearly reaching for something spiritual, something to hold on to in a life broken by divorce and disappointment. But she looks for her answers in a bar, and comes up empty. Intending to catch a noon bus for the reservation where she was raised, she stops at the invitation of a man to "tip down one or two" (1). When she enters the barroom, the narrator tells us, "What she walked toward more than anything else was that blue egg in the white hand, a beacon in the murky air" (2). Blue is the color of sky, of spirit and transcendence, signaling to her like a "beacon." But instead of the blue egg the man in the red vest peels her a pink one, thwarting her impulse and replacing it with the faded color of earth, of blood, of sexuality. When she drinks, it is "Blue Ribbon" beer and "Angel Wings" (2-3), again symbolizing a frustrated spiritual instinct, and she says to the man, "Ahhhhh, you got to be. You got to be different" (3). June seeks transformation through sex and alcohol, but the only metamorphosis they are able to bring is degradation and death.
      The balance of chapter one shifts to the first person narrative of June's niece, Albertine Kashpaw, who introduces the theme of the recovery and sharing of stories. Albertine has been attending nursing school off-reservation, but returns several months after June's demise {4} seeking a sense of completion with a death she cannot understand. She asks herself, "But what did I know, in fact, about the thing that happened?" (9). She denies her mother's blunt assessment of it, even though we know from June's narrative that Albertine's mother is correct:

    "Probably drank too much," Mama wrote. She naturally hadn't thought well of June. "Probably wandered off too intoxicated to realize about the storm."
    But June grew up on the plains. Even drunk she'd have known by the heaviness in the air, the smell in the clouds. She'd have gotten that animal sinking in her bones (9).

Erdrich subverts Albertine's romantic, mythic notions about the skills of a Native American woodsman or woman. Although June, as Marie's story tells us in Chapter four, had "sucked on pine sap and grazed grass and nipped buds like a deer" (65) to stay alive as a child, she is ultimately no match for the effects of alcohol; the liquor clouds her judgement and causes her death as surely as if she had suffered the irreversible effects of alcohol poisoning. June's chemically altered perceptions had told her that "The wind was mild and wet. A Chinook wind" (6)--harbinger of good weather, not storms--and she freezes to death.
      Albertine's denial of June's alcoholism may relate to her own psychic connection with June, a connection which becomes clearer in the central chapter entitled "A Bridge," where the narrative spins back to 1973. There we learn that Albertine takes a journey remarkably similar to June's own, one that, but for small differences, could have resulted in equally tragic consequences. The two journeys are contrasted in almost every detail. Albertine has taken the bus to run away from the reservation. It is another "harsh spring" (130), if not Easter then close to it, for we learn it is "not yet May" (137). Albertine also sees something which she compares to a "beacon," but unlike June, interprets this to be a "warning beacon" (130). Where the man June meets only looks familiar to her, the man Albertine sees in the bus station turns out to be Henry Lamartine Junior, another Chippewa whose family is known to her from the reservation. June wears white, the color of death in Chippewa culture, and Albertine wears black. June drinks "Angel Wings" with a man who doesn't listen to her, while Henry romantically whispers to Albertine, "Angel, where's your wings" (136). When June enters the ladies room, "All of a sudden she seemed to drift out of her clothes and skin with no help from anyone" (4); Albertine, on the other hand, feels her body "shrink and contract" while alone in the bathroom, and feels herself becoming "bitterly {5} small" (132). Perhaps the greatest difference between the two is that while June intends to stop drinking after "a few" but cannot, the younger Albertine still retains some control: "She had stopped after a few and let him go on drinking, talking, until he spilled too many and knew it was time to taper off" (136). Indeed it is Henry, Albertine's companion and a Vietnam vet, who dies soon after, his own drinking having crossed the line into alcoholism and self-destruction.
      But in the opening chapter, Albertine only alludes to these links. She says:

I had gone through a long phase of wickedness and run away. Yet now that I was on the straight and narrow, things were even worse between [my mother and me].
    After two months were gone and my classes were done, and although I still had not forgiven my mother, I decided to go home. (10)

What Erdrich shows here is that simply getting on "the straight and narrow" is not enough; that alone does not fill the spiritual void that leaves Albertine full of resentment. It is in fact only the beginning, just as Albertine's return to the reservation is only the beginning of the novel. And just as the car she drives has "a windshield wiper only on the passenger side" (10) and "the dust [hangs] thick" (11), her vision is still obscured. But once she arrives home, she initiates the recovery of stories that begins a transformation process, a process that includes those that are able to share with her.
      Some of the recovery comes out of her own buried memories, memories which begin to surface as soon as she arrives at home. Her recollections of June help her to understand June's son, King:

I had adored her into telling me everything she needed to tell, and it was true, I hadn't understood the words at the time. But she hadn't counted on my memory. Those words stayed with me.
    And even now, King was saying something to Lynette that had such an odd dreaming ring to it I almost heard it spoken out in June's voice.
    June had said, "He used the flat of his hand. He hit me good." And now I heard her son say, ". . . flat of my hand . . . but good . . ." (16)

It is hard not to forgive someone once it becomes clear that they, like King, are only repeating behavior that they have learned. And although Erdrich will show in later chapters that this does not relieve King of responsibility for his actions, Albertine is beginning to make connections for herself.
{6}
      She continues her search for the stories that are her heritage by questioning her grandfather, thinking, "I wanted him to tell me about things that happened before my time, things I'd been too young to understand. . . . What had gone on? . . . I wanted to know it all" (17-18). But her grandfather's mind "had left us, gone wary and wild" (17), so she turns to her grandmother, whom she sees as being "like an oracle on her tripod" (19), and encourages her, with her mother and her other aunt, to talk. The story of June's near-fatal childhood "hanging" comes up, now "the private trigger of special guilts" (19). But when the three older women, in a communal effort, tell the tale to Albertine, we see for the first time the healing properties of storytelling, as guilt is transformed to forgiveness and laughter: "Then they were laughing out loud in brays and whoops, sopping tears in their aprons and sleeves, waving their hands helplessly" (21). It is after these shared stories, moreover, that Zelda, Albertine's mother, affirms her daughter's membership in the community, something we sense Albertine, "a breed" (23), has long awaited: "`My girl's an Indian,' Zelda emphasized. `I raised her an Indian, and that's what she is'" (23).
      The remaining chapters continue this recovery of stories. Chapter two is Albertine's grandmother's girlhood story, a first person account relayed in past tense. And who, we should ask, comprises Marie's audience? If the chapter is only a vignette, and but loosely related to the novel as a whole, then the answer would be simply and solely "the reader." But we have already seen Albertine actively seeking answers, and Marie does speak in past tense; thus Marie seems to be speaking to her granddaughter. What is striking is the duality of Albertine as audience to these individual narratives, and the reader as audience to the novel as a larger, synergetic whole. Indeed, there is even the sense of the Chippewa community as audience, a sense that is further underscored toward the close of the novel when Lipsha tells his father, Gerry Nanapush, that both Marie and Lulu, Gerry's mother, have become valued in the community for their knowledge as "oldtime traditional[s]" (268) who are sought after for their stories.
      Within the individual narratives, moreover, Erdrich repeatedly subverts other kinds of "love medicines," the other common "cures" for the spiritual void that is so much a part of the human condition. Just as chapter one reveals the hollowness of both alcohol and sex as alternatives, in chapter two Marie tells the story of her experience with religion and revenge, and the emptiness of both. Of her religion she says:

I was like those bush Indians who stole the holy black hat {7} of a Jesuit and swallowed little scraps of it to cure their fevers. But the hat itself carried small pox and was killing them with belief. (42)

The Jesuit's hat is a metaphor for all the things we think will make us feel better about ourselves, the lack that Erdrich shows can only be filled by surrendering the notion of oneself as victim, and sharing on equal terms with other people. Even when Marie comically gets the better of her insane abuser, Sister Leopolda, Marie tells her audience that the victory was empty as dust:

    My heart had been about to surge from my chest with the blackness of my joyous heat. Now it dropped. I pitied her. I pitied her. Pity twisted in my stomach like that hook-pole was driven through me. I was caught. It was a feeling more terrible than any amount of boiling water and worse than being forked. Still, still, I could not help what I did. I had already smiled in a saint's mealy forgiveness. I heard myself speaking gently.
    "Receive the dispensation of my sacred blood," I whispered.
    But there was no heart in it. No joy when she bent to touch the floor. No dark leaping. I fell back into the white pillows. Blank dust was whirling through the light shafts. My skin was dust. Dust my lips. Dust the dirty spoons on the ends of my feet.
    Rise up! I thought. Rise up and walk! There is no limit to this dust! (56)

      It takes Marie over twenty years to reconcile this experience. In the chapter "Flesh and Blood" she describes taking one last trip up the convent hill, this time bringing her daughter Zelda. Still, she goes neither to forgive nor to share a story, but to brag (114), to prove to Leopolda that she has become "solid class" (113), not through any inner qualities of her own, but through what she has made of her husband and her children. Leopolda, unimpressed with this litany of accomplishments, cuts her to the quick with a reminder of her heritage as a "dirty Lazarre" (59), "the youngest daughter of a family of horse-thieving drunks" (58), a heritage Marie has spent her life trying to forget: "`So you've come up in the world,' she mocked, using my thoughts against me. `Or your husband has, it sounds like, not you, Marie Lazarre'" (118). Through this exchange, and their ensuing battle for the spoon, Marie comes to recognize Leopolda's dual role as "antagonist" and "spiritual guide" (Barry and Prescott 128), and both forgives her, and accepts--not blindly, not unconditionally, but without recriminations--her daughter's admission of a desire to join the {8} convent.
      This lesson prepares her, moreover, for the discovery that she could lose those very things she has just bragged of, and teaches her humility. After she finds Nector's note recounting his love for Lulu, she realizes: "I had been on my high horse. Now I was kneeling" (128). In this moment she finds the courage to accept her past, without explanation or further qualification, and she tells her listener, "I could leave off my fear of ever being a Lazarre. I could leave off my fear, even of losing Nector, since he was gone and I was able to scrub down the floor" (128). In sharing her story with her daughter and the nun, who hears and responds to her "thoughts," not her words, Marie also learns how to forgive Nector and help him home:

So I did for Nector Kashpaw what I learned from the nun. I put my hand through what scared him. I held it out there for him. And when he took it with all the strength of his arms, I pulled him in. (129)

Still, in keeping with the chapter's title, it is not the forgiveness of a "saint" as Louise Flavin suggests (64), but that of a "flesh and blood" human being; it is a forgiveness that comes, after all, with the comic and lasting reminder: "salt or sugar?" (129) The novel speaks for progress, never for spiritual perfection.
      Nector, Albertine's grandfather, speaks in chapter three. His passages are first person present tense, reflecting that his memory is in fact gone, so that when he speaks to Albertine, he forgets the passage of time and place, and relives it all again. In chapter one Albertine says, "Grandpa shook his head, remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time" (18).
      Nector's narratives continually underscore his inability to take charge of his own life. Nothing is ever his fault; nothing is ever of his own doing. He thinks of himself as swept along by the current, as "steering something out of control" (104). When he meets Marie on the convent hill and makes love to her, first he denies that he has done it, and then he blames Marie:

    "I never did!" I shout, breaking my voice. I whirl to her. She is looking at the geese I hold in front to hide my shame. I speak wildly.
   "You made me! You forced me!"
    "I made you!" She laughs and shakes her hand, letting the pillowcase drop clear so that I can see the ugly wound.
    "I didn't make you do anything," she says. (61-62)

And so goes his career, his affair with Lulu Lamartine, his destruction {9} of Lulu's house. He uses alcohol, sex, even sugar in comitragic efforts to transform himself: "I had to have relief," he says (93). When Nector burns Lulu's home with their son Lyman inside, all he can say is, "I have done nothing" (109). Erdrich makes a strong statement here about the high price of clinging to the role of victim, for she shows that it is at this moment that Nector's mind snaps. His daughter has followed him to Lulu's, and he mistakes her for his wife Marie, transformed into a blazing avenging angel. Although many critics seem to accept Lipsha's early assessment that Nector "put second childhood on himself" (191),⁴ Nector's own comments about his senility echo all his earlier statements: "I couldn't say no," he says (190). Nector never learns to confront his secrets.
      Like Marie's and Albertine's, Lipsha's experiences with learning to forgive and take charge are a process. Lipsha's narratives describe a gradual progression through several crisis points. At the beginning of the novel, when Albertine attempts to tell him the truth about his mother, he refuses to listen, saying: "No, Albertine, you don't know what you're talking about" (36). When he tells Albertine about flying to the moon in a dream, he admits to a fear that harkens back to Nector. Lipsha says, "once I stood [on the moon] at last, I didn't dare take a breath. . . . No, I was scared to breathe" (37). As a young man, Nector, too, describes learning to hold his breath: in response to the painting that depicts him plunging from a cliff into a rocky river, Nector tells himself, "I'd hold my breath when I hit and let the current pull me toward the surface, around jagged rocks. I wouldn't fight it, and in that way I'd get to shore" (91). Once a survival technique for living in a white world which has taught him it believes "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" (91), this behavior eventually destroys him; Lipsha must learn another way.
      Perhaps the first full breath Lipsha takes is the one just before he tells Marie the truth about his phony "love medicine" of frozen turkey hearts. Earlier he tries to tell Nector's ghost of his part in the affair, saying: "I could tell him it was all my fault for playing with power I did not understand. Maybe he'd forgive me and rest in peace" (212-13); but even in death Nector's character cannot listen to the stories people want to share with him. As Lipsha says, "He fooled me though. He knew what I was waiting for, and it wasn't what he was looking to hear" (213). But unlike Nector, Marie is able to hear, and in response to the story, affirms to the child that she used to call "the biggest waste on the reservation" (189): "Lipsha, you was always my favorite" (214). She gives him June's beads, and although he does not yet understand their significance, he feels his healing "touch" (215) return.
      Just as Marie's experience on the convent hill teaches her a lesson {10} which prepares her for what comes after, this experience, along with its accompanying recognition that "Forgiving somebody else made the whole thing easier to bear" (211), gives Lipsha the foundation which will reel him home from the skid row of the border town where he lands when he finally does learn the truth about his parentage. Lulu, at this point in the novel well established, along with Marie, as a storytelling matriarch, has told him he is the child of Gerry and June in the hope that it will "make or break" (245) him. And like so many of the characters in this novel--indeed, like so many of the characters throughout the entire body of twentieth-century American literature --Lipsha's first response to the shame and resentment he feels is to run off and drown his sorrows in drink. Lipsha, however, snaps out of it after a farcical "knock in the skull" (248) from his drinking buddy's "favorite brand" (248) of whisky: "Old Grand Dad" (247). Serving as a punning reminder⁵ of both the death of Grandpa Kashpaw and Lipsha's subsequent recognition of the true nature of "love medicine" that is "not no magic" (214), as well as the existence of his "famous politicking hero" (248) father, Lipsha sobers up and goes off in search of "Dad" (248). When he finds him, he recovers the comic truth that will save him from the army, and aids his father in his own bid for freedom.
      Lipsha and Albertine seem the most active seekers of stories, of their own heritage, yet the storytelling theme surfaces for almost all of the characters. At the close even King speaks when Lipsha asks him, although the story King tells is reminiscent of Nector's; King also sees himself as out of control, "stuck down at the bottom with the goddamn minnows" (252). But King is now drinking 7-UP instead of beer, and he adds, "I'm gonna rise. One day I'm gonna rise. They can't keep down the Indians. Right on brother, huh?" (252). Lipsha is surprised that King can "do much more than growl, whine, throw his weight around" and says, "I guess being on the wagon brought him out or something" (252). After these tentative steps toward sharing, Lipsha also notices that, however unconscious the usage, King has for the first time called him "brother."
      For King there is at least the sense of possibility, as there is for his father, Gordie, another alcoholic who, at the close, is recovering in detox. In Gordie's third person narrative, which takes place a month after June's death, he attempts to assuage his guilt and grief in the hollow "relief" (180) that comes in a bottle. That "the lack" (175) he feels is an innately spiritual one is emphasized when his "gold-colored" can of beer begins to look to him "as though the can were lit on a special altar" (140). Gordie, however, has "woven his own crown of thorns" (180), and it seems clear that only he can remove what he has {11}"jammed on his brow" (180). He has not caused June's death any more than Henry Junior, with his "Asian-looking eyes" (83), had created the war which placed him on opposite sides from the dying Vietnamese woman he was asked, not to share with, but to interrogate.
      Henry never finds a voice in which to speak of the dying woman's gesture--"You, me, same" (138)--and drowns himself first in liquor and finally, sadly, in the river. Gordie, on the other hand, in a jarring alcoholic delirium, imagines that the deer he has killed is his wife, and begs Sister Mary Martin for absolution from a death he could never have prevented. Still, "telling her had removed some of the burden" (185), and perhaps someday he will be able to confront and share his memories of a different and truer guilt: "His hands remembered things he forced his mind away from . . . what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June" (172-173). An echo of chapter one, it is the "flat of" Gordie's hand about which Albertine remembers June talking.
      While all of the narratives related in third person speak for characters who have lost, through trauma, the capacity to speak in their own voices and share their own stories, and although Henry Lamartine Junior and June Kashpaw are dead, there is still the possibility that Gordie, Beverly, and Howard will someday develop the ability to speak for themselves and take charge of their lives. After all, Albertine's 1973 third person narrative is superseded by her 1980 and 1981 first person narratives; if she can make the leap, so too, perhaps, can they. With the exception of Nector, the many first person narrators describe a movement toward forgiveness and transformation through the act of sharing their stories with one another, a movement that influences the entire community. When Lulu and Marie break a lifelong silent grudge over Nector and become "thick as thieves" (241), the combined power of their sharing gives them a special insight; moreover, the once "jabwa witch" (240) and "dirty Lazarre" start helping the reservation by testifying for Chippewa claims. Even the characters on the fringes of the others' narratives participate: Gerry Nanapush has been "on the wagon" for seventeen years, and although he will always be a fugitive from the law, he has become a folk hero who tells his story to the world in newspapers and on national television; he has taken hold of his life with both hands.
      Throughout the novel, the narratives balance and play off of one another, forming a crystalline structure with smoothly interwoven themes and symbols. And although each chapter is its own story, able to stand alone, taken all together the novel becomes a synergetic whole of chapters/stories about telling stories. The theme of storytelling as healing, as resolution, as spiritual, thus becomes incorporated into the {12} structure of the novel itself. In contrast to the dust that obscures vision, and the water that drowns, in the final chapter the characters are humorously drinking 7-Up, and Lipsha says, "The sun flared" (272); with many stories told, nothing is forgotten, yet there is the strong sense of forgiveness and transformation.

NOTES

      ¹This attitude was particularly common amongst the novel's early reviewers. See, for example, Karl Kroeber's review of Love Medicine in Studies in American Indian Literatures 9:1 (Winter 1985). However, Robert Silberman again raises the question in "Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman" (Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Silberman calls Albertine Johnson "a loose strand in the plot," and suggests that looseness is a result of "Erdrich's method, which brought together short stories as a basis for the novel" (116). He says that "she disappears from the action after her encounter with Henry Jr. in Fargo, though she is mentioned in a bit of conversation between Lipsha and Gerry, with Lipsha referring to her as `the one girl I ever trusted'" (116). The problem here is that Silberman has himself forgotten the tenth chapter, "Scales," in which Albertine again serves as narrator, as well as references to her in the twelfth chapter, "Love Medicine," where we learn about her decision to enter medical school.

      ²Although I disagree with Hanson's suggestion that "the key element of survival [in Love Medicine] is knowing when to keep silent" (93), I am in complete accord with her overall thesis, which says that "the Native American is alive and well in Erdrich's deft and expressive hands" (80), and that "Erdrich's characters know and express their capacity to transform and even influence the world around them" (87).

      ³In a moving account of his adopted son "Adam" (Dorris has changed his son's name to protect his privacy), an account which concludes with a personal narrative written by Adam himself, Michael Dorris has brought the problem of fetal alcohol syndrome to the forefront of the American consciousness. The Broken Cord turns statistics into reality, giving them a breadth and form impossible to read with indifference.

      ⁴Barry and Prescott say, "The novel strongly suggests that Nector's withdrawal from reality may in fact be one of the few choices that he makes for himself" (125), and Louise Flavin says, "Nector is not victimized by his indecisiveness; instead, he profits from the help of others" (58). Elizabeth Hanson says, "Nector, a man whose very name suggests the smooth liquidity of his nature, floats quite naturally to the top of things. His retreats are strategic ones, and his constant onslaughts, whether amorous or political, inevitably succeed" (86).
{13}
      ⁵Erdrich's repeated use of puns and word play in Love Medicine has yet to be fully explored. Many critics have remarked on Albertine's humorous musings about "Patient Abuse" (7) and the (purposeful?) misunderstanding by Old Rushes Bear, Nector's mother, of "the great white whale" (91). The puns are not always comic, however, as when June's apparel is described: "Her clothes were full of safety pins and hidden tears" (8). The import of those "hidden tears" may not fully register until Lulu's narrative titled "The Good Tears," and Lipsha's last narrative, "Crossing the Water," in which he describes letting "the tears fall" after his companion tells him it is all right, that "It cleans you out" (247).

WORKS CITED

Barry, Nora and Mary Prescott. "The Triumph of the Brave: Love Medicine's Holistic Vision." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 30 (1989): 123-138.

Erdrich, Louise. Foreword. The Broken Cord. By Michael Dorris. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.

----. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.

Flavin, Louise. "Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: Loving Over Time and Distance." Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 31 (1989): 55-64.

George, Jan. "Interview with Louise Erdrich." North Dakota Quarterly 53 (1985): 240-46.

Hanson, Elizabeth. Forever There: Race and Gender in Contemporary Native American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

Magalaner, Marvin. "Louise Erdrich: Of Cars, Time, and the River." American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. 95-108.

Sands, Kathleen. "Louise Erdrich: Love Medicine." Studies in American Indian Literatures 9 (1985): 12-24.

Schöler, Bo. "Young and Restless: The Treatment of a Statistical Phenomenon in Contemporary Native American Fiction." Native American Literatures. Ed. Laura Coltelli. Pisa: Servizio Editoriale Universitario, 1989.

QUESTIONS OF THE SPIRIT: BLOODLINES IN
LOUISE ERDRICH'S CHIPPEWA LANDSCAPE

Annette Van Dyke

      Louise Erdrich's first and third novels, Love Medicine and Tracks, are magical history lessons tracing spiritual legacies of a small Chippewa band's attempts to survive the encroachments of Euro-American society. Michael Dorris points out that Tracks, the third novel in the proposed four-novel sequence, "takes the older character in both Love Medicine and The Beet Queen back a generation into a traditional time" (Coltelli 43).¹ Read in the sequence of their story, rather than the sequence of publication, the novels give the reader a glimpse into a world in which women are a force with which to be reckoned. Lulu and Marie emerge in Love Medicine as respected elders and keepers of Chippewa ways even through debilitating change. This essay explores the spiritual legacies which begin with the water monster, Misshepeshu, through two sets of mothers and daughters: Pauline Puyat (Sister Leopolda) and her daughter, Marie Lazarre, and Fleur Pillager and her daughter, Lulu Nanapush.² Michael Dorris notes that the inspiration of the symbols of water and the water god shown in Love Medicine (and in Tracks) is one factor that distinguishes contemporary Chippewa from other rural North Dakota people (Coltelli 45).
      In Tracks, although the story centers on Fleur, Erdrich uses the device of having her story told to Fleur's daughter, Lulu, by Nanapush, an elderly male trickster character,³ and by Fleur's arch rival, the unreliable narrator, Pauline. The effect of Erdrich's style in Tracks and in Love Medicine, which also tells the story through multiple voices, is as if the reader is listening to gossip, "the means of exchanging information . . . and so consequently there is no single narrator . . . it is the entire community dealing with the upheavals that emerge from the book . . ." (Dorris quoted in Coltelli 44).
      Fleur Pillager is an exemplification of traditional Chippewa⁴ power, and she owes her power to her spirit guardian, Misshepeshu, the water spirit man. William Warren, of Chippewa and Euro-American heritage, identifies the Pillagers as having the "immense fish" as their family totem (45-6). He also refers to it as the "Merman or Water Spirit Totem" (165). Fleur inherits the powerful guardian spirit from her father, Old Man Pillager, who, according to Nanapush, brought the water monster with him when he moved into the area (T 175).⁵ Nanapush says the water spirit then took up residence in Matchimanito Lake near the family cabin; after the death of Fleur's family by {16} consumption the spirit became identified with Fleur, who kept the lake monster "controlled" when she was around (T 35). Both Nanapush and Pauline connect Fleur with the water man, Pauline negatively and Nanapush more positively.
      In Chippewa lore, the water spirits, who are also connected to fish, serpents or water-going snakes, water tigers, and lions, have a mixed reputation.⁶ They give power to control the waters and to net fish, but they are also seen as enemies to the prized bird spirits or Thunderbirds (Landes 24-25, 28, 31; Coleman, Frogner, and Eich 102-03; Barnouw 133).⁷ Connected to the danger of drowning and drawing storms over the water, they were given offerings of tobacco for safe passage (Morriseau 33).
      The idea of being mated to the water man, and the conflicting powers of the Thunderbirds and water spirits, appear in a story collected by Henry Schoolcraft and published in 1856. In this story, entitled, "Wa-wa-be-zo-win," a jealous mother-in-law tricks her daughter-in-law into falling far out into Lake Superior. "After the wife had plunged into the lake, she found herself taken hold of by a water-tiger, whose tail twisted itself around her body, and drew her to the bottom. There she found a fine lodge, and all things ready for her reception, and she became the wife of the water-tiger" (194). After going to the lake the husband "painted his face black, and placed his spear upside down in the earth, and requested the Great Spirit to send lightning, thunder, and rain, in the hope that the body of his wife might arise from the water" (194).
      In "The Underwater Lion," published by Victor Barnouw, two Chippewa women paddle their canoe across a large lake instead of around the edges, drawing the attention of "a bad manido":

As they got to the middle, they crossed mud, and in the center was a hole of clear water. The water was swirling around the hole, and as they started to cross it, a lion came out of the middle and switched his tail across the boat, trying to turn it over. The girl picked up her little paddle and hit the lion's tail with it, saying, "Thunder is striking you." The paddle cut off the lion's tail, and the end dropped into the boat. When they picked it up, it was a solid piece of copper about two inches thick. . . . When they got across, the girl gave the piece of copper to her father, and he got rich through having it. The copper had certain powers. People would give her father a blanket just for a tiny piece of that copper. They would take that bit for luck in hunting and fishing, and some just kept it in their homes to bring good luck. (132-33)

{17}
Besides showing how thunder is called upon to defeat the water spirit, this story also illustrates the connection of the water spirit with copper. Both copper and white metal or hard white substance (mica) figure in the depiction of the water man in Tracks. In the Schoolcraft story, the tiger's tail becomes a belt made of "white metal" worn around the wife's waist.
      Barnouw also comments that other stories associate the underwater horned serpent with an "erotic role . . . as a lover of girls" (137). In Tracks, Pauline describes the water spirit:

Our mothers warn us that we'll think he's handsome, for he appears with green eyes, copper skin, a mouth tender as a child's. But if you fall into his arms, he sprouts horns, fangs, claws, fins. His feet are joined as one and his skin, brass scales, rings to the touch. You're fascinated, cannot move. He casts a shell necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica on your breasts. He holds you under. Then he takes the body of a lion, a fat brown worm, or a familiar man. He's made of gold. He's made of beach moss. He's a thing of dry foam, a thing of death by drowning, the death a Chippewa cannot survive. (T 11)

Erdrich's portrayal of the water man combines many elements of the old stories--copper, a gleaming hard white substance, the erotic--as well as an antagonism between thunder and the water spirit.
      Pauline regards the water spirits as giving evil visions and making the recipient a sorcerer who will then use his or her powers for evil. She describes Fleur:

Fleur's shoulders were broad and curved as a yoke, her hips fishlike, slippery, narrow. An old green dress clung to her waist, worn thin where she sat. Her glossy braids were like the tails of animals, and swung against her when she moved, deliberately, slowly in her work, held in and half-tamed. But only half. I could tell, but the others never noticed. They never looked into her sly brown eyes or noticed her teeth, strong and sharp and very white. Her legs were bare, and since she padded in beadworked moccasins they never knew she'd drowned. They were blinded, they were stupid, they only saw her in the flesh. (T 18).

According to Pauline, Fleur serves the water spirit man by giving him people for his appetite. Pauline believes that Fleur is responsible for the deaths of the men who have saved Fleur from drowning or have looked upon her as she was reviving. In this respect, Fleur could also be identified with the powers of the funnel current. In Chippewa belief, a {18} person of great power could not only take on the characteristics of a spirit guardian, but could "become" that spirit. It assumed that any skillful visionary could do evil as well as good by virtue of the great power each held, and if enough evil deeds were traced to a particular visionary, he or she might be killed by others in the group. A humble attitude was to be presented to one's guardian at all times, but some visionaries--those who had overstepped their bounds--came to believe that they had the powers of all the supernaturals at their command (Landes 42-67). Pauline believes that Fleur exudes the water man's dangerous sexuality, and both she and Eli, Fleur's husband, believe that Fleur is mated to the water monster. Pauline speculates about the father of Fleur's child, Lulu. Pauline says that Lulu is "the child, whose green eyes and skin the color of an old penny have made more talk, as no one can decide if the child is mixed blood or what, fathered in a smokehouse, or by a man with brass scales, or by the lake" (T 31). Eli also believes Fleur is pregnant by the water spirit man, confessing to Nanapush about the baby: "I have dreamed how it will look, strange and fearful, bulging eyes, maybe with a split black tail" (108).
      The water monster was believed to lure people to their death by drowning. Even the name of the lake in Tracks in which the water spirit man is said to dwell, Matchimanito, means evil spirit, "maci manito" (Hilger 61). Those who drowned remained as spirits, bound to wander forever, and did not take the four-day death road of the Old Ones. Lulu explains this belief in Love Medicine: "By all accounts, the drowned weren't allowed into the next life but forced to wander forever, broken shoed, cold sore, and ragged. There was no place for the drowned in heaven or anywhere on earth" (LM 234. See Landes 198). Pauline's assertion that Fleur, taking on attributes of her spirit guardian, is responsible for several such deaths is a serious accusation.
      However, Tracks' other narrator, Nanapush, says that the water spirit man is "neither good nor bad but simply ha[s] an appetite" (139). Ojibwa artist Norval Morriseau says that his

ancestor . . . four generations ago . . . had a medicine dream concerning an offering rock where the water demigod Misshipeshu, in the form of a huge cat, spoke to him and advised him to put on the rock a sacred sign. . . . From then on until thirty years ago [when the water spirit moved away], Indians of that area offered gifts to Misshipeshu. . . . This huge cat is believed by the Ojibwa to be white in colour, with horns, and very powerful. . . . This big water god, or spirit, knew both good and evil. It all depended on what kind of nature an Indian had. If he were good then he would have the power to do good. If he were bad then he {19} was given power to do bad. But the true water god, the white one in colour, always brought good luck to all who respected him. (26-27).

Nanapush, drawing on this tradition, identifies Fleur as having a good nature and the water spirit as bringing her luck. He is upset when Fleur seems to lose her powers and will not go down to the lake and "cry out until your helpers listen" (T 177). He feels Fleur's problem is overestimating her powers and taking responsibility for her failures and triumphs alone.
      Traditionally, visions might come to young women when they were in seclusion at the onset of their first menses.⁸ At the time the story in Tracks begins, Fleur is seventeen and has been rescued from death by Nanapush. Her whole family has died from consumption. Fleur has apparently had a vision of great power connected with the water spirit man. In this desperate time, her near-death experience has simulated the circumstances such as fasting and seclusion which usually prepared young people for a vision. Nanapush says that Fleur "was too young and had no stories or depth of life to rely upon. All she had was raw power, and the names of the dead that filled her" (T 7). Because she leaves Nanapush immediately after she recovers, in order to raise money to pay the taxes on the land she has inherited from her family, and because there are so few of the Chippewa band left, she has no one to instruct her in handling the power from her vision. The fact that Fleur is also "filled" with the names of her dead family is not a good sign as it may mean dissatisfied spirits are clinging to her.⁹
      Despite Fleur's spiritual handicaps, her powers connected with the water spirit are numerous. Community gossip associates her with protecting her land from the Indian agent when he comes to collect the taxes. The agent ends up "living in the woods and eating roots, gambling with ghosts" (T 9) out "where the lake monster, Misshepeshu, hid himself and waited" (T 8). Others disappear and share the fate of the agent, "betting with sticks and dice out near Matchimanito" (T 9).
      Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor recalls a story about Naanabozho defeating the evil gambler in a context in which "the spirit of the tribal people would be consigned to the wiindigoo, the flesh eaters in the land of darkness" (5). Naanabozho is able to beat the gambler by making "a teasing sound on the wind" which fells the playing pieces (6). In Tracks, Fleur goes to a nearby town to earn money to pay the taxes on her land (a journey to save her land/spirit from the whites and herself from starvation). She gambles with the white men in the butcher shop, truly evil men who rape her when they realize they have been bested {20} by a woman. One of Pauline's versions of the story is that to avenge the rape, Fleur calls down the tornado during which the men are killed under suspicious circumstances. Because they are imprisoned in the meat locker and frozen during their last gambling game, the suggestion is that they have in fact been taken over by the windigo, the cannibalistic ice-monster. In Vizenor's version the evil gambler is described as "a curious being, a person who seemed almost round in shape, smooth and white" (5). Lily, one of the gambling men, is "fat, with a snake's pale eyes and precious skin, smooth and lily-white" (T 18). Fleur's significant skills at gambling allow her to return and pay the taxes on her land as well as buy supplies. However, despite her best efforts, she is unable to keep up the taxes year after year, and she forfeits her land to the loggers. She is able again to call on the funnel cloud to level trees she has sawed, crushing the loggers and their horses.
      The spiritual legacy of Fleur's power continues in Love Medicine with her daughter, Lulu, who is born in Tracks with the aid of a spirit bear (Fleur is also of the bear clan).¹⁰ Like her mother, Lulu has an exuberant animal-like sexuality and the white Pillager teeth. By the end of the book, Lulu has had eight children, all by different fathers--a sort of single-handed repopulating of the people. Nector had intended to marry her when Marie ensnared him in 1934, and in 1952 he realizes he still wants her. The ensuing affair ends with Lulu's house burned down and her hair burned off--continuing the baldness of the Pillager women which started in Tracks, when Fleur shaved her head in sympathy with Margaret, whose head was shaved by the Morrisseys as part of the feuding "that would divide our people down the middle through time" (T 109).¹¹
      Like her mother, Lulu has "wild and secret ways." She is seen by the rest of the group as operating outside the norm and is rejected for her unconventional and distinctly unchristian ways. She says she "was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms." She would "open . . . and let everything inside" so that after a while she "would be full" (LM 216). Like her mother, she feels no remorse for what she does, especially sleeping with other women's husbands. Her mother's land troubles also repeat with Lulu. As the Pillagers' land was betrayed by Margaret Kashpaw, who paid her taxes but not Fleur's, Nector Kashpaw as tribal chairman evicts Lulu from her home on tribal land to build a tomahawk factory.
      Lulu also has Fleur's gambling abilities. Lipsha, her grandson, says he learned to "crimp" in card games from Lulu, that she "was the meanest player of them all . . . I learned to crimp from her before I ever knew she was my grandmother, which might explain why I took to it with such enormous ease. The blood tells. I suppose there is a {21} gene for crimping in your strings of cells" (LM 255).
      Pauline Puyat, Fleur's powerful archrival, also embodies traditional Chippewa powers, but she is the character most troubled by being a mixed-blood. A Metis, a descendant of "skinners in the clan for which the name was lost," she sees "through the eyes of the world outside" (T 14). She is obsessed with the water monster, seeing him in Fleur, who both draws and repells her. Pauline enters the convent on her spiritual quest. Having decided that the Chippewa are doomed--"the whites . . . grew in number . . . some even owning automobiles, while the Indians receded and coughed to death and drank" (T 139)--she decides that she can make her mark by leading her people to Christ. While still believing in the water spirit man, she has a vision of Christ, who appears to her at night sitting on the stove at the convent. Instead of dismissing the idea of the power of the water spirit, she vows to fight him as Christ's representative, conflating Christ with a Chippewa bird or sky spirit which was believed to be in eternal conflict with the water spirits. By conflating the water spirit man with Satan, Pauline's beliefs contradict traditional Chippewa ideas about evil. As a Chippewa notes, "In the old days evil spirits were spoken of as doing harm, but no one ever spoke of a leader among them. The belief in the devil came with the Whites" (Hilger 61).
      Pauline is a powerful sorcerer who uses her powers for both good and evil. As one who aids the sick and dying in their transition, making their dying easier, she is at her best as the crow-like angel of death: "twirling dizzily, my wings raked the air and I rose in three powerful beats and saw what lay below. . . . I alone, watching, filled with breath, knew death as a form of grace" (T 68). She "entered each house where death was about to come, and then made death welcome" (T 69). However, even the good she does becomes perverted because Pauline "no longer bothered to bathe once . . . [she] left the [death] cabin but touched others with the same hands, passed death on" (T 69), and thereby spread disease. Pauline is at her worst when she is dealing with sexuality; it is then that she uses her considerable powers for evil. She forces Fleur's husband Eli and young Sophie to have intercourse in the slough in broad daylight with "love medicine" which she procures from Fleur's cousin, Moses: "And then, I turned my thoughts on the girl and entered her and made her do what she could never have dreamed of herself. I stood her in the broken straws and she stepped over Eli, one leg on either side of his chest. Standing there she slowly hiked her skirt" (T 83).¹²
      Pauline tries to separate Eli and Fleur because she is jealous and feels excluded from the clan which the others have formed "made up of bits of the old, some religious in the old way and some in the new"{22} (T 70). Much of Pauline's behavior also shows her conflict between her Chippewa heritage and the Euro-American heritage she attempts to claim. While wanting to be part of the Chippewas, she does everything she can to destroy them. In a strange way, she is actually waging a spiritual war of the thunderbird against the water spirit, but she has, as scholar Catherine Rainwater notes, "twisted and deformed [the Chippewa beliefs] away from their shamanic matrix, and grafted [them] into a Christian cosmology" (409).
      Pauline is actually received with a good deal of tolerance by the other Chippewas. They observe her to be following a strange spirit guardian who demands odd things from her like wearing her shoes on opposite feet and relieving herself only at "dawn and dusk" (T 147). Even though visionaries are supposed to follow the dictates of their spirit guardians, sometimes those around them try to dissuade them from harmful practices, as in the case of Nanapush's humorous tricking of Pauline into relieving herself in the middle of the day.¹³
      Pauline plays out her bizarre amalgamation of Chippewa belief and Catholicism by deciding literally to battle the water spirit man and Fleur's influence, which she sees as holding the Ojibway to the old ways. Pauline almost kills Fleur in her attempt to aid Fleur during the too-early birth of Fleur's stillborn son. Pauline also interferes in Nanapush's curing ceremony for Fleur, saying she has been "sent to prove Christ's ways" (T 190). After her failure to demonstrate Christ's powers at Fleur's ceremony, she believes that Christ has been overcome by the water man: "Christ had turned His face from me from other reasons than my insignificance. Christ had hidden out of frailty, overcome by the glitter of the copper scales, appalled at the creature's unwinding length and luxury . . ." (T 195). She believes that she will be Christ's "champion, His savior" against the water monster (T 195).
      Pauline takes to the lake in Nanapush's leaky boat to engage the water spirit while fighting off numerous rescue attempts by both the church people and the Chippewa: "I had determined to wait for my tempter, the one who enslaved the ignorant, who damned them with belief. My resolve was to transfix him with the cross" (T 200). As Rainwater says, "Pauline's distorted version of the lake monster is more horrible than either the Christian Satan, who is not appeasable but who cannot victimize the truly innocent, or the Chippewa monster, who can capture the innocent but who is appeasable" (409). Finally back on shore, she strangles him with her rosary, only to have the monster in the early dawn light take the form of her only lover and the father of her child, Marie. Nevertheless, she is convinced of her feat, for as she says, "How could I have known what body the devil would assume?" (T 203). Pauline, lying about her Indian heritage, now takes the veil {23} and becomes Sister Leopolda, a position denied by her convent to those with Indian blood.
      As Pauline comments, "power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth" (T 31), and some of her power passes to her daughter, Marie, whom she never acknowledges. Vision is also an important part of Marie's power. She is fourteen, close to the traditional time of visions for young women, when she enters the convent on her spiritual quest as her mother did before her. Marie has been adopted into a marginal family within the tribe--a status not unlike her mother's--a position which she wants to rectify by becoming a saint. She sees Leopolda (who she does not know is her biological mother) as both a rival for sainthood and her teacher. After she has her vision, partly a result of Leopolda's physical mistreatment of her, she sees that she and Leopolda are the same, both human and unlikely candidates for sainthood--both have the "devil" in them which for Leopolda connects to the Chippewa water monster and the windigo, the cannibalistic ice monster. Ice images abound in the section where Marie meets Sister Leopolda.¹⁴ Ironically, Leopolda's name recalls another name for the water spirit man: the Great Lion. In Marie's vision, her own body has characteristics of the water spirit man: "I was rippling gold . . . my nipples flashed and winked. Diamonds tipped them" (LM 50). In Tracks, the water monster "casts a shell necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica on your breasts . . . He's made of gold" (T 11). After her vision, Marie gives up her dream of sainthood, thereby defeating Leopolda, who wants to consume her as a windigo or the water spirit man would do.
      By the second half of the twentieth century, when Love Medicine takes place, the characters seldom display outright knowledge of the old ways as they do in Tracks, which spans 1912-1924. Traditional ways have become bound up with Catholicism and Euro-American ways. For instance, as an adult, Marie says that she does not pray, but she is still concerned about the community's view of her: "When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down" (LM 73). She has forgone both praying to the Christian God and beseeching the Chippewa spirits for favors, which the "begging" idea recalls, but there is a remnant of the water monster, the lure and the fight against the death by drowning mixed in with references to Catholicism and sorrow at the loss of Chippewa culture. As she touches the Cree beads left by June, which she sometimes calls a rosary, Marie says: "I touch them, and every time I do I think of small stones. At the bottom of the lake, rolled aimless by the waves. I think of them polished. To many people it would be a kindness. But I see no kindness {24} in how the waves are grinding them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear" (LM 73).
      Marie is a survivor, and as she descends from the convent after her encounter with her mother, she seizes her chance to improve herself by ensnaring Nector Kashpaw, who is from a well-thought-of family on the reservation. Nector thinks she is "a skinny white girl" (LM 58) making off with the nuns' valuables. At first angered by her audacity, he fights with her, only to end up having sex with her. Then ashamed at what he has done and seeing her wounds from her encounter with Leopolda, he takes her hand, thinking "I don't want her, but I want her, and I cannot let her go" (LM 62). Marie turns her ambition to making her husband Nector one of the most respected men on the reservation--the tribal chairman--and thereby elevating her status. She even monitors Nector so that he keeps his drinking under control. She uses her considerable mothering skills on her own children and those discarded by others, such as June and Lipsha, extending the Euro-American concept of the nuclear family to a more Native American idea of kinship. Marie becomes a positive force to hold her family together on the reservation; her binding of Nector to her holds even through his passionate relationship with Lulu, Fleur's daughter.
      Despite their antagonism over Nector, Lulu and Marie heal the long feud between the families. Lulu discovers in the 1980s that the now senile Nector's hankering after her is "just elusive dreams. . . . He had no true memory or mind" (LM 232). After Nector's death, Marie comes to aid Lulu after an operation--"to put tears" in her eyes (LM 235), and they grieve together over him, uniting in their womanness. Marie mothers Lulu, and the putting in of eyedrops becomes a rebirth ritual: "She swayed down like a dim mountain, huge and blurred, the way a mother must look to her just born child" (LM 236).
      Combining the power of the spiritual legacies from their maternal bloodlines, Marie who was by tribal standards "A skinny white girl . . . [from] a family of horse-thieving drunks" (LM 58) joins with Lulu from the feared Pillager band, and together they become respected elders on the reservation. Lulu testifies in court about Chippewa land claims, and people begin to credit her with "knowledge as an old-time traditional" (LM 268). Both have been able to use their inherited powers to ensure continuance of the nation, and for the moment, the battle has shifted from infighting among the people to fighting for the land and maintenance of the Chippewa way.

{25}

NOTES

      ¹Michael Dorris is Erdrich's husband and writing collaborator. They go over each other's work "until consensus on all words" is reached (Wong 201). He also says that "Tracks was the first one to have the finished draft, but it will be the third one to be published, and it's going to be thoroughly revised and changed in the light of the characters that we know from the other books," suggesting intentional legacies for the characters (Coltelli 51). From now on, I will use T for Tracks and LM for Love Medicine in the citations.

      ²Fleur and Pauline (Sister Leopolda) also appear in The Beet Queen, but this essay focuses primarily on spiritual legacies connected to the water spirit man and as such will not cover material in The Beet Queen.

      ³This character's name recalls the trickster figure of the Ojibwa whose foolishness brought death to the land, but who also restored the land after a flood. In the accounts of the origin stories, this trickster character has various spellings of his name: Vizenor uses Naanabozho (8-12); Landes uses Nehnehbush (92-93); James H. Howard uses Nanapus (93-94).

      ⁴Chippewa and Ojibwa(y) are often used interchangeably. Because Erdrich, who is from Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, uses Chippewa, I will use it in discussing her work. See discussion of tribal names in Vizenor 14-21.

      ⁵James G. E. Smith notes that the Pillagers were a powerful band of Chippewa who once resided in the area of Leech Lake, Minnesota, and who moved to the area, formerly occupied by the Sioux, in which Erdrich's story takes place.

      ⁶Information on the water spirit man can be found in Ruth Landes, Selwyn Dewdney, and Norval Morriseau. In addition to the stories which Erdrich grew up with (as discussed in Wong 204), it appears she has also read some of the ethnographies and other materials relating to the Chippewa, as she uses a quotation from R.W. Dunning's 1959 Social and Economic Change Among the Northern Ojibwa as an epigram to her poem, "Jacklight" (Jacklight, Poems 3).

      ⁷For instance, Norval Morriseau, Ojibway artist and writer, records several stories of Misshipeshu stealing babies who were left unattended by Lake Superior, and of the thunderbirds attacking and killing him for this evil deed (31-32).

      ⁸Young women did not usually prepare themselves for a vision as strenuously as did young men, who went without meals from an early age with their faces blackened with charcoal, a signal they were preparing for a vision. When the young men were ready, usually before puberty, they would go into the woods to await the arrival of a spirit guardian, fasting and thirsting from four to ten days. Information on the Ojibwa vision quest can be found in James H. Howard, The Plains-Ojibwa. See also Hilger 44-55. Ojibwa author George Copway relates a story about a young woman fasting for a vision (150-59).

      ⁹The spirit of a newly dead one was said to attempt to keep contact with kin {26} and others for the first four days after death, and food and tobacco offerings to aid them in their journey might be left in an especially constructed small wooden house over the grave used when the ground was not frozen.

      ¹⁰However, this may be a reference to her femaleness, as Barnouw says that "the Canadian Ojibwa associated bears with menstruating girls." Using R. W. Dunning's translations of Ojibwa (in single quotations), Barnouw says, "Approaching the time of a girl's first period, she is known as wemukowe-- literally, `going to be a bear'--and during her seclusion she is known as mukowe--`she is a bear.'" Further, he notes: "The same Chippewa term was used for both flirting and hunting game, while another Chippewa term `connotes both using force in intercourse and also killing a bear with one's bare hands'" (248). In Tracks, Nanapush's discussion with Eli about women, particularly Fleur, uses bear analogies. For instance, he says: "[I]t's like you're a log in a stream. Along comes this bear. She jumps on. Don't let her dig in her claws" (46).

      ¹¹According to Copway, cutting a woman's hair from "ear to ear . . . is a mark of disgrace" (140).

      ¹²There is another reference in this passage to women's sexuality depicted with bear-like qualities--"bear on a log." Pauline says, "She shivered and I dug my fingers through the tough claws of sumac, through the wood-sod, clutched bark, shrank backward into her pleasure" (83).

      ¹³For an example see Ruth Landes, who tells the anecdote of the warrior whose spirit guardian was Buffalo, who gave the warrior "immense strength but also immense size so that he was a clear target for the enemy and indeed the only one of his party to be seriously wounded" (29). His fellow warriors generally tried to dissuade him from accompanying them on raiding parties and felt a more appropriate guardian would have been Hummingbird, which gave the ability to slip in and out of warfare without being injured.

      ¹⁴See Helen Jaskoski (57-59) and Catherine Rainwater (404-22) for discussion of conflicts between Euro-American and Native American systems.

WORKS CITED

Barnouw, Victor. Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales and Their Relation to Chippewa Life. Madison: U of Wisconsin, 1977.

Coleman, Sister Bernard, Ellen Frogner, and Estelle Eich. Ojibwa Myths and Legends. Minneapolis: Ross and Haines, 1962.

Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 1990.

Copway, George. Indian Life and Indian History. Boston: Albert Col- by, 1860; rpt. New York: AMS, 1978.

Dewdney, Selwyn. The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway. Toronto: U of Toronto P 1975.

{27}
Erdrich, Louise. Jacklight, Poems. New York: Henry Holt, 1984.

----. The Beet Queen. New York: Henry Holt, 1986.

----. Love Medicine. New York: Henry Holt, 1984.

----. Tracks. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Hilger, Sister M. Inez. Chippewa Child Life and Its Cultural Back-ground. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 146. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1951.

Howard, James H. The Plains-Ojibwa or Bungi Hunters and Warriors of the Northern Prairies with Special Reference to the Turtle Mountain Band. Anthropological Papers, No. 1. Vermillion: South Dakota Museum, 1965.

Jaskoski, Helen. "From the Time Immemorial: Native American Traditions in Contemporary Short Fiction." Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Ed. Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb, IL: Western Illinois UP, 1987.

Landes, Ruth. The Ojibwa Religion and the Midewiwin. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1965.

Morriseau, Norval. The Legends of My People, The Great Ojibway. Ed. Selwyn Dewdney. Toronto: Ryerson P, 1965.

Rainwater, Catherine. "Reading Between the Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich." American Literature 62.3 (1990): 404-22.

Schoolcraft, Henry R. The Myth of Hiawatha and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric of the North American Indians. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1856; rpt. AuTrain, Michigan: Avery Color Studios, 1984.

Smith, James G.E. Leadership Among the Southwestern Ojibwa. Canadian Museum of Man Publications in Ethnology, No. 7. Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1973.

Vizenor, Gerald. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Stories. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Warren, William W. History of the Ojibway People. Intro. W. Roger Buffalohead. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society P, 1885; rpt. 1984.

Wong, Hertha D. "An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris." North Dakota Quarterly 55.1 (1987): 196-218.

WHY BEARS ARE GOOD TO THINK AND THEORY DOESN'T HAVE TO BE MURDER: TRANSFORMATION AND ORAL
TRADITION IN LOUISE ERDRICH'S TRACKS¹

Joni Adamson Clarke

Before one's eyes, Bear became Wolf, then Bear again.     
The image didn't change of course. What changed was the      
observer's organization of its parts. But the effect was one      
of transformation.                                                                         
--Edmund Carpenter, "Introduction: Collecting     
Northwest Coast Art"     

. . . any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any      
text is the absorption and transformation of another. The      
notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity,     
and poetic language is read as at least double.                         
--Julia Kristeva, "Word, Dialogue and Novel"   

I

      In Tracks, Louise Erdrich transforms her Chippewa oral traditions to create a transformational female character with a "white wolf grin,"² "hips fishlike, slippery, narrow" (T 18), no fifth toes on her feet (T 18) and the "talons of a heavy bear" (T 157). Fleur Pillager is human; yet, at times, she is wolf, water-monster and bear. Indeed, she could be described as a visual pun who disorders the boundaries between human and animal. Even more disturbing, however, Fleur is suspected of transforming her private hairs, smoky powders, crushed snakeroot and Eli Kashpaw's fingernails into a love medicine, "a doll to wear between her legs" (T 49). Readers familiar with Lipsha, the lovable yet bumbling medicine man of Love Medicine, will recognize the threat posed by Fleur's possible sorcery.
      Asked by Grandma Kashpaw to create a love medicine that will squelch Grandpa Kashpaw's hankering after Lulu Lamartine, Lipsha listens to stories and remembers things he'd "heard gossiped over."³ "These love medicines," he asserts,

is something of an old Chippewa specialty. No other tribe has got them down so well. But love medicine is not for the layman to handle. You don't just go out and get one without paying for it. Before you get one, even, you should go through one hell of a lot of mental condensation. You got to think it over. Choose the right one. You could really mess up your life grinding up the wrong little thing. (LM 199)

This is such terrifyingly serious business that Lipsha steers clear of Old {29} Man Pillager and does not ask for a proper love medicine. Rather, he grinds frozen turkey hearts--instead of goose hearts--into a concoction on which Grandpaw Kashpaw chokes and dies. Lipsha learns that the "the actual power" of love medicine may be faith but faith is not enough (LM 203); one must evoke the power of the gods by knowing how to ask "in the right way" (LM 195). Fleur's association with love medicine, then, links her to the transformative power and potential danger of language.
      Other Native American novelists also transform their oral traditions into the transformational characters that people their works, a process which N. Scott Momaday, in "The Man Made of Words," calls the "transformation of the tribal mind" or "myths, legends, and lore" into that "mature condition which we call literature" (107, 105). In Leslie Silko's Ceremony, for example, a young boy wanders into "the place which belonged to the bears" (129) and begins to be transformed. A medicine man must call him back gently with "mother bear sounds" or he could "be in between forever / and probably he would die" (129, 130). And in The Ancient Child, Momaday transforms traditional Kiowa stories of a mythical boy who becomes a bear into the novel's main protagonist, Locke Setman, called Set. Set has lost his sense of identity and comes to feel more and more like the bear boy whose people were no longer able, after his transformation, to understand his language. Set teeters on the edge of madness, and speech begins to seem "the most important and necessary thing in his life," but "he did not even know what he wanted to say, had to say, if only he could say it" (73-74).
      These transformational characters depend upon language: the Bear Boy will return but only if he is called back gently, Set will be healed but only if he discovers what he must say, and the power of Fleur's love medicine, as Lipsha's experience implies, will be efficacious only if she knows "how to ask in the right way" (LM 195). Transformational characters suggest, then, that Native American novelists are doing some serious--yet playful--theorizing about both the compelling power and menacing danger of language. By focusing on the perilously composite Fleur, I would like to examine how Louise Erdrich is transforming the novel into a site of imaginative theoretical discourse which challenges the notion that theory can only exist in language that is heavy, abstract, prescriptive, monotonous and accessible only to the few who are academically trained to understand "high discourse."

II

      While a parallel could be drawn between Lipsha's discussion of love medicine and Derrida's discussion of the remedy and poison of the {30} "pharmakon," some scholars would be loath to call fictions about bears and love medicines "theory" in the sense that Derrida's works on speech and writing are deemed "theory." Theory, as Trinh T. Minh-ha has observed in Woman, Native, Other, is often thought to be written by men, and it is a commonplace to say that theory "usually refers to inaccessible texts that are addressed to a privileged, predominantly male social group" (41). She adds that theory has come to be "synonomous with `profound,' `serious,' `substantial,' `scientific,' `consequential'" (41). Fiction, on the other hand, is often written by women and frequently described by adjectives that are the antithesis of those used to describe theory--"playful," "imaginative," "non-serious." Fictional or imaginative works, therefore, are often not perceived as "theory."
      In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White trace how certain "high" discourses came to be valorized over those considered "low." The ancient taxation categories of "classici" and "proletarius," they write, subsequently led to distinctions between what was to be considered high and low discourse. This development in the generic terminology of antiquity "had an enduring influence on the European system of hierarchizing authors and works . . . [,] separated out a distinct elite set (the classici) from the commonality (the proletarius) and used this as a model for literary discriminations" (1). The result, Stallybrass and White maintain, was that any utterance became "legitimated or disregarded according to its place of [either high or low] production" (80). Only certain kinds of technical and philosophical writing, usually "constructed" as "high discourse" by those "normally associated with the most powerful socioeconomic groups" and connected to church, state or academy (4) came to be valued and accepted as high discourse in Western literary traditions. This helps explain why the producers of "high" theoretical discourse, who have usually been men, generally have a prestige which gives them the authority "to designate what is to be taken as high and low in the society" (Stallybrass and White 4).
      In the contemporary literary world, as Barbara Christian affirms in "The Race for Theory," works which are designated "theory" and produced by the academic elite have become a "commodity which helps determine whether we are hired or promoted in academic institutions--worse, whether we are heard at all" (335). The result, Christian asserts, is that "critics are no longer concerned with literature, but with other critics, texts" (335). Contemporary fiction, often written by women and "bursting with originality, passion, insight and beauty" is subordinated to "one primary thrust, that moment when one creates a theory" (335). Moreover, the philosophical language of "high" theoretical discourse often "mystifies rather than clarifies," making it {31} possible "for a few people who know that particular language to control the critical scene" (Christian 338).
      But as Stallybrass and White point out, the view of discourse from "above" and the view of discourse from "below" are necessarily different (4). From the perspective of those who often do not have access to the power of the elite, or more specifically, as Gloria Anzaldua asserts in her Introduction to Making Face, Making Soul, from the perspective of women-of-color, the problem with contemporary literary theory is that it "does not translate well when one's intention is to communicate to masses of people made up of different audiences"; so, what is considered "theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts for theory for women-of-color" (xxv). The theorizing of women-of-color, writes Christian, "(and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, . . . in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking" (336).
      Originally "theory" meant a mental viewing, contemplation, speculation, spectacle, a conception or mental scheme of something to be done.⁴ Indeed, as Trinh asserts,

theory is no longer . . . theoretical when it loses sight of its own conditional nature, takes no risk in speculation, and circulates as a form of administrative inquisition. Theory oppresses, when it wills or perpetuates existing power relations, when it presents itself as a means to exert author-ity--the Voice of Knowledge. (42)

When viewed from this perspective, Trinh adds, the "borderline between theoretical and non-theoretical writings is blurred and questioned, so that theory and poetry necessarily mesh" (42). Derrida's works, which are themselves very playful, become not just theory but imaginative fiction, and Louise Erdrich's novels can be seen not just as poetical fiction but also as theory. Once we "give up the notion that there is a `correct' way to write theory," Anzaldua writes, we can learn to appreciate and understand "other modes of consciousness," other ways of doing theory (xxvi, 333). A novel which is dynamic, imaginative and speculative becomes a likely site for theoretical discourse. It becomes possible to appreciate how contemporary Native American novels, and in particular Tracks, expose "one of the most powerful ruses of the dominant" which is to pretend that theoretical discourse "can only exist in the language of `reason,' `pure knowledge,' and `seriousness'" (Stallybrass and White 43).

{32}

III

      In Tracks, Nanapush, Fleur's trickster-like grandfather, makes the observation that there is a design to the stories (T 34), that they are "all attached, and once I start there is no end to telling because they're hooked from one side to the other, mouth to tail" (T 46). Dreaming and talking, he muses,

I liked to set out there and watch the road to see the design of people on their errands, to church and town, the eager step of courting boys, the secretive slide of lovers, the loads of hay that our best farmers, the Lamartines and Morrisseys, drove back and forth in poplar racks, the girls walking to the mercantile by twos, bearing cans of precious cream between them. (T 37)

From this carnival of images, Nanapush creates a new story or text, a new "pattern,"⁵ to use his own word, which is so powerful that he specifically credits it with the power to heal. "During the year of sickness," he remembers, "when I was the last one left, I saved myself by starting a story" (T 46).
      Here, Nanapush is making an observation similar to one made by Julia Kristeva about how texts are produced. Indeed, he could be describing the process by which Erdrich herself creates both Fleur and her novel, Tracks. Any text, Kristeva asserts in "Word, Dialogue and Novel," "is the absorption and transformation of another" (37), a kind of "destructive genesis" (47) where "texts meet, contradict and relativize each other" (49). By absorbing and transforming traditional Chippewa stories of Wolf, Water-Monster and Bear and then re-embodying them in a new pattern to create Fleur, Erdrich generates a new pattern, a new text. Within the space of her novel, she allows traditional Chippewa myths of transformation to meet, contradict and relativize each other.
      Nanapush's description of his new pattern as "hooked one side to the other, mouth to tail" aptly describes the myths which Erdrich transforms to create her text. According to A. Irving Hallowell, myths of transformation occur frequently among the Chippewa and illustrate a world view in which no sharp lines can be drawn dividing living beings. What "looks like a bear may sometimes be an animal" and on other occasions may be a "transformed person with evil intent" (Hallowell 158-59, 163-64). In Erdrich's novel, several Chippewa myths of transformation meet, contradict and become "hooked mouth to tail" in the ambiguous character of Fleur. At times, Fleur, with her "teeth, strong and sharp and very white" (T 18), clearly embodies the traits of the mythic Wolf of traditional Chippewa lore. In the old {33} stories, Wolf is sometimes the grandson and sometimes the underworld brother of Nanabozho (Dewdney 127), whom Gerald Vizenor describes as the compassionate woodland trickster (3). Similarly, Fleur, whose family is decimated by the spotted sickness, becomes the adopted grandchild of Nanapush, who is a trickster/healer like Nanabozho and who brings Fleur back from the underworld with words and songs (T 4).
      Yet on other occasions, with her "skin of lakeweed" (T 22), thin, green dress and damp, tail-like braids (T 18), Fleur seems to be Misshepesshu, the water monster, who was said by traditional Chippewa to be the underworld protector of Wolf and to cause death by drowning (Dewdney 128-129, 39). In this form, Fleur embodies the characteristics of a snake, who appears and disappears rapidly and who by sloughing off its skin seems to be immortal.⁶ Fleur's two near drownings as a young girl give the impression that she has been afforded more than one life, and when Jean Hat and George Many drown in Matchimanito Lake, she is suspected as the cause (T 11).
      By disordering traditional Chippewa oral narratives of Wolf and Water-Monster and then re-embodying them in a new pattern, Erdrich creates a character who is slippery, changeable and mysterious. She further underscores Fleur's bodily ambiguity and affords her great powers by strongly associating her with bears. Fleur belongs to the Pillager family, members of the bear clan who were possessors of both the power which "travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth" (T 31) and the knowledge of "secret ways to cure and kill" (T 2). That Fleur is a powerful medicine woman whose bear power enables her to effect wonderful cures is evidenced when, in a brief and again mysterious appearance as an older woman in The Beet Queen, she repairs Karl Adare's broken ankles and heals his pneumonia. Waking just before dawn, breathing more freely, Karl recalls his cure: "A bear rose between the fire and the reeds. In the deepest part of the night, the biggest animal of all came through in a crash of sparks and wheels" (51).
      Bears, according to anthropologist Ruth Landes, were highly respected among traditional Chippewa for their mysterious qualities. Bears were considered "quasi-human, in anatomy, erect carriage, cradling of young with the forearms, enjoyment of sweets and liquors, manner of drinking liquid, shows of intelligence, [and] inclination to moderate behavior despite great physical strength" (27). Accordingly, they were often greeted as "honored guests" and treated to special foods known to suit their appetites, such as tobacco and berries (Landes 35). Moreover, a bear's life cycle, moving from hibernation in winter to reemergence in the spring, made him seem at once a symbol of both {34} death and life. As Victor Turner, in his discussion of snakes and bears, so aptly puts it, "This coincidence of opposite processes and notions in a single representation characterizes the peculiar unity of the liminal: that which is neither this nor that and yet both" ("Betwixt" 99).⁷
      That bears are often thought of as "betwixt and between" helps to explain why they are credited with such great powers. In tribal societies, symbolic or totemic creatures are singled out, as Barbara Babcock astutely observes, "not because they were `good to eat' or `good to prohibit' but because they were `good to think'" (167). In other words, by thinking or "playing" with the bear's human-like qualities and seasonal cycle, formerly sharp borders--like those between animal and human, death and life--fade and "novelty emerges from unprecedented combinations of familiar elements" (Turner, "Liminal" 160). The seeming ambivalence of bears, then, is precisely what makes them "good to think." Similarly, Erdrich portrays Fleur as physically ambiguous, and this makes her a character that is "good to think" because, as Judith Butler points out in her discussion of the subversion of gendered identity, "perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization" (138).
      This openness to resignification, however, makes Fleur, like all liminally ambiguous creatures, dangerous, because she embodies what Julia Kristeva calls "the abject," or in other words, that which "disturbs identity, system, order" (Powers 4). Fleur disturbs order when, after losing her family, she leaves the traditional Chippewa world seeking a way to save the Pillager land from the tax collector. When she returns from the marginal town of Argus to live alone at Machimanito Lake tongues fly, for "a young girl had never done such a thing before" (T 8). Her anomalous actions are interpreted as a dangerous questioning of accepted social order because they de-form the continuously repeated traditions which have established what is considered normal or natural in her community; by failing to repeat those traditions, Fleur, like the "liminal monsters" which Turner discusses in "Process, System, and Symbol," reveals the "freedom, the interdeterminacy underlying all culturally constructed worlds" (161). And since a given society may see anything that is not "subject to its laws" as "potentially against it" (Douglas 4), Fleur becomes, in the eyes of her people, abnormal and unnatural and therefore dangerous.
      Both her inherited bear power and her anomalous actions lead Fleur's community to credit her with the malign powers of a bearwalking sorcerer, or in other words, one who transforms herself into a bear in order to use her power for self-aggrandizement. Bearwalkers manifest their evil power by appearing as bright lights at night, stealing {35} the fingers and tongues of the dead, and causing the dreaded "twisted mouth" (Dorson 27; Landes 65). Fleur, it is rumored, has gotten herself into some "half-forgotten medicine" which causes her to cross boundaries and mess with evil, laugh at the old women's advice and dress like a man (T 12). She is thought to be the reason that the Agent spends the whole night "following the moving lights and lamps of people who would never answer him" and eventually ends up "gambling with ghosts" (T 9). She is suspected of performing such nefarious work as laying the "heart of an owl on her tongue," keeping "the finger of a child in her pocket" (T 12), stalking the Morrissey who caused "the Pillager baldness," then clipping his hair and paring his nails in order to afflict him with "twisted mouth" (T 122). Ironically, the men who rape Fleur in Argus freeze in a meat locker though wrapped in the skins of bears (T 30). And predictably, it is Fleur who is suspected of causing the tornado that turns everything in Argus "upside down" (T 28).
      Like Fleur, Tracks is a transformational text which cavorts in the margins and flirts with danger because it plays with different parts of traditional myths, pulls stories this way and that and threatens to alter the shape of the oral tradition by bringing it into a new, written, pattern. But as the following scene implies, Erdrich is not unmindful of the destruction or danger inherent in what Kristeva has called the "generative process" ("Word" 47). As Nanapush sits reading his newspaper from Grand Rapids, his wife, Margaret, wishes to speak with him. But "there was bad news from overseas and I wasn't about to let Margaret spoil my concentration or get past my hiding place" (T 47). In anger, Margaret swipes

at the sheets with her hand, grazed the print, but never quite dared to flip it aside. This was not for any fear of me, however. She didn't want the tracks rubbing off on her skin. She never learned to read, and the mystery troubled her. (T 47)

Margaret's revulsion to the written word or "tracks," and Nanapush's frank admission that he sometimes hides behind his newspaper from the humanizing influence of voice and dialogue, imply that Erdrich is aware of the potential danger of setting oral stories into writing. An oral story, as Bernard Hirsch points out, once fixed on the page and removed from its "immediate context, from the place and people who nourished it in the telling" could be robbed of its meaning (1).
      However, all transformational art, writes Levi-Strauss in his discussion of Northwest Coast Mask art, questions and answers other past or present myths and must be considered in relation to the art {36} which it absorbs and transforms; it cannot be "considered in isolation" ("Masks" 93). In her analysis of Laguna witch woman stories, T.C.S Langen makes a similar observation about oral storytelling. Each telling or version of a story, she writes, is a "realization of possibilities provided by the collection" of renditions or versions of that story, and "no one version is an isolate, either for the storyteller or the audience, but resounds against the knowledge of the collection held by each person present at the performance" (6). In the Chippewa community, Ruth Landes has observed, variant versions of myths and stories have always "shifted with the personalities speaking, perhaps with the occasions, and with the localities" (199). A storyteller, notes Landes, would revise and retell a story while the audience, already familiar with the stories as traditionally told, understood that the teller's version was an interpretation of the "fixed" text. In other words, a new telling or version of a story can at once be a criticism and commentary on the tale as previously told. "What we hear" from the storyteller, Dennis Tedlock asserts, "is simultaneously something new and a comment on [the] relic, both a restoration and a further possibility" (236).⁸
      Tracks, then, though set in print, does not rob the tales it transforms of their meaning, because it resounds against all past and present tellings of the tales and realizes their potential. The novel enters into an ongoing critical conversation, if you will, with past and present tellers of traditional Chippewa myths; however, Erdrich's "interpretation" of traditional tales does disorder the order of the oral tradition and threaten to alter its shape. But this is precisely where the potential power of this boundary-transgressing text lies. As Mary Douglas explains in Purity and Danger, the "danger which is risked by boundary transgression is power" (161). Order, Douglas observes,

implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. (94)

By playing with the myths of Wolf, Missepeshu, and Bear, Erdrich opens these transformational myths to the power and potential of resignification and recontextualization and in them finds the materials for new pattern. In a sense, she is doing what a sorcerer or bearwalker does when creating a love medicine. By bringing together the "marginal stuff" which traverses the outer limits of the body and represents the vulnerability of all boundaries--nail and hair clippings, spittle, milk, blood and tears--the sorcerer symbolically invokes those powers which are constantly menacing order, threatening to disorder previously {37} established limits (Douglas 121). Using words, the sorcerer then attempts to control this power and "transform the path of events by symbolic enactment" (Douglas 86). But this is very dangerous, for "words correctly said are essential to the efficacy of an action" (Douglas 86); if words are not correctly said, powers might shoot out uncontrollably, menacingly. This potential for both power and danger explains why traditional Chippewa were often horrified by the thought of love medicine (Landes 62).
      Like her character Lipsha, author Erdrich listens to the stories and finds the powerfully energized "marginal stuff" from which to create a liminal monster, an ambiguously transformational text which is "good to think" because it disorders the problematic boundaries between the oral and the written and reveals the potential for new pattern. Erdrich's challenge, however, is to repattern the stories with words that will be "correctly said," to create a love medicine that will be able to control the very real power and danger of her disordered materials. Depending on how they are recontextualized, the power of the traditional stories can be transformed for good or for ill. If Erdrich's "version" fails to preserve the voices and variant tellings of the oral tradition, it can, like Derrida's pharmakon, be poison; if the narrative is composed in such a way that it perpetuates what Nanapush calls the "design of the people" and the "stories" (T 37, 34), then it can be cure.

IV

      Though Tracks is unavoidably cut off from the breath of the storyteller, Erdrich demonstrates the dialogic nature of the oral tradition and shows, to use the words of Arnold Krupat, "a reluctance to give up the voice in favor of the text" (Voice 20). Erdrich invokes the "feel" of an oral performance and emphasizes the novel as a form of discourse by narrating the novel from two points of view. Both narrators--one a neurotic nun and the other a trickster grandfather--tell Fleur's story in the first person, as if their audience were present and engaged in the act of judging which narrator's version--Pauline's or Nanapush's--is more credible. This storytelling strategy creates distance from certainty and asserts that there is never "one true telling" of a story, but only differing versions. In this way, Erdrich narrates her novel through "play" and undercuts any monologic position she might take as a storyteller.
      Pauline's interpretation or theory of Fleur differs dramatically from Nanapush's. A mixed-blood Catholic, Pauline characterizes herself as "devious and holy" (T 69), but she is characterized by Nanapush as "a born liar" (T 53), one given to using words to tell "odd tales that created damage" (T 39). Pauline is always associated with death, and {38} at the death bed of a dying girl sees herself as a hovering scavenger; "twirling dizzily, my wings raked the air, and I rose in three powerful beats and saw what lay below" (T 68). Her employment of washing and laying out the dead is appropriate, for as Nanapush observes, she is "afraid of life" but "good at easing souls into death" (T 57). Because she is so tall and skinny that men look past her without even seeing her, because she is so greedy that she can eat Fleur's food even when Fleur is pregnant and malnourished (T 145), and because she seems "afflicted, touched in the mind" (T 39), Erdrich implies Pauline is "windigo." Helen Jaskoski explains that in traditional Chippewa tales,

Windigo is a giant, a skeleton of ice, the embodiment of winter starvation, a cannibal who can devour whole villages. Windigo sickness occurs when this dangerous spirit takes possession of a human soul, causing an irresistible desire to consume human flesh. Individuals subject to such possession show signs of their vulnerability in greedy gluttony, especially an insatiable appetite for fat and grease. . . . Sometimes the monster itself is not killed but returns to natural human life after being relieved of its icy carapace; in the same way, a person afflicted with windigo psychosis might return to normal after melting or losing the heart of ice. (57)

      Pauline's cold "cannibalism" manifests itself when she closes the door to the meat locker in Argus, causing two men to freeze to death and another, as a result of his ordeal, to lose his rotting flesh, little by little. Later, she strangles her abandoned child's father, Napoleon Morrissey, with a rosary (T 27, 62, 202). "I stuffed the end of the blanket in his mouth," she remembers, "pushed him down into the sand and then fell upon him and devoured him, scattered myself in all directions, stupefied my own brain in the process so thoroughly that the only things left of intelligence were my doubled-over hands" (T 202). To atone for her sins, she enters a Catholic convent with a vengeance, but even in her new vocation her greed is insatiable. Seeking to hoard spiritual knowledge, she miswears her shoes for mortification, wears undergarments made of potato sacks and never pays an extra visit to the privy.⁹ Despite these outward shows of pious humility, however, Pauline's icy, windigo heart does not melt. "All winter," she admits, "my blood never thawed" (T 136).
      Though Pauline scorns Chippewa belief in the power of bears and the evil of the water monster, she thinks of Satan as Missepeshu and sees both Fleur and Nanapush as Satan's agents.¹⁰ Like the feared Chippewa sorcerers who were linked to the "lion" in the lake and who "did not use their knowledge for the good of the tribe . . . but merely {39} for personal aggrandizement" (Dewdney 120), Pauline piously determines that she will use "the net of my knowledge" (T 140) to "guide [the people], to purify their minds, to mold them in my own image" (T 205). Sometimes telling the truth, sometimes--according to Nanapush--lying, but always molding and purifying her story to fit her single-minded vision of theological certainty, Pauline, as Kristeva might say, "kills substance to signify" (Revolution 75). Even after the murder of Napoleon Morrissey, for example, she can say, "I felt a growing horror and trembled all through my limbs until it suddenly was revealed to me that I had commited no sin. There was no guilt in this matter, no fault" (T 203). Assuring herself that she could not have known what shape the devil would take, she molds her interpretation of events to fit her high and holy purpose.
      Pauline's twisted, self-inflicted penance determines the way she shapes her interpretation of Fleur. She comes to believe that her people, the Chippewa, are like the buffalo--unavoidably dying out (T 140); so, she gives herself a "mission" to "name and baptize" her people and lead them away from the traditional four day road to the "new road" of Christ (T 140). Since Fleur is linked to the traditional ways--dances, love medicines, ceremonies and cures--Pauline decides Fleur is a "hinge" that can "close the door or [swing] it open" (T 139) and keep the people from entering upon Christ's road. As she seeks to "close this door" just as she closed the door of the meat locker, words become Pauline's weapons and Fleur the target of vicious rumors. Fleur, Pauline lets it be known, is most probably a bearwalker (T 12) and her baby almost certainly the progeny of the watermonster (T 31). Significantly, Pauline, who is "afraid of life, . . . afraid of birth, afraid of Fleur Pillager" (T 57), kills the last bear on the reservation (T 58).
      Nanapush tells his version of Fleur very differently from the way Pauline renders hers. Since Nanapush knows of secret medicines, "plants to spread so that I could plunge my arms into a boiling stew kettle, pull meat from the bottom, or reach into the body itself and remove . . . the sickness" (T 188), the text implies that he, like the trickster Nanabozho, is a healer. Unlike Pauline, he is always associated with life and prevents death with words. "During the year of sickness, when I was the last one left, I saved myself by starting a story. . . . I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on" (T 46). However, Nanapush also understands the danger of words. He "spoke aloud the words of a government treaty and refused to sign the settlement papers that would take away our woods and lake" (T 2), so he had witnessed first hand the role that language can play in the systematic oppression of a people. As "for government promises," he notes, "the wind is {40} steadier" (T 33).
      Unlike Pauline, Nanabush does not believe his people are a noble but dying race. "We Indians are like a forest," he asserts: "The trees left standing get more sun, grow thick" (T 184). Consequently, in Fleur, "the lone survivor of t