The ultimately devastating effect of the Dawes Act upon Native American tribal culture is dramatized in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks (1988), the third novel in the tetralogy that includes Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1987), and The Bingo Palace (1994). Tracks is a “historical novel” in the conventional sense of the term: the dated chapters carefully establish the time of the novel as the years 1912–1924 and the events of the novel correspond to documented historical occurrences: the outbreaks of tuberculosis that afflicted North Dakota from 1891 to 1901 and the battles over Native American land rights that erupted after the implementation of the Dawes Severalty Act. Unlike Kingston, Erdrich never names the pieces of legislation that set in motion the events of the novel. In China Men, Kingston discusses legislation explicitly in order to get across the idea that standard national history and ethnic self-history tell very different stories, and the book throws its weight behind ethnic self-history, by relegating its overtly historical material to a single interchapter. Tracks emphasizes ethnic self-history even further by suppressing standard national history, including it only by implication.
Like many novels written by Native American writers, Tracks dramatizes the collision of two different ways of understanding the nature of history and time. The dating of its chapter by season and year juxtaposes the Western linear sense of time that assigns sequential numbers to each year with the cyclical conception of time identified with the changes of season and stressed in many Native American cultures. In addition, the time period covered in each chapter is also described by its specific Native American name. Thus, the first chapter is called “Winter 1912: Manitou-geezisohns: Little Spirit Sun.” The opening paragraph also dramatizes the collision of these two conceptions of time and history:
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die. For those who survived the spotted sickness from the south, our long fight west to Nadouissioux land where we signed the treaty, and then a wind from the east, bringing exile in a storm of government papers, what descended form the north in 1912 seemed impossible.30
Erdrich’s narrator, Nanapush, links each of the events he describes to traditional Native American creation myths, which stress the role played by the four directions, a link that proves ironic because what he is describing is the destruction of his tribe. The paragraph’s description of written materials such as “the treaty”’ and the “storm of government papers” points to another distinction between native and Western modes of historiography: Native self-history is transmitted orally through storytelling, while Western history is transmitted through written accounts. Moreover, Western history is to a large extent a history of the written word and of the ways in which writing has been used to effect cultural change. Tracks dramatizes the defeat of the native culture of storytelling by a Western culture of documents. Native historiography must give way to Western historiography, a pattern embodied by the use of the date “1912” at the end of the novel’s first paragraph to puncture the sense of mythical time with which the paragraph begins. Erdrich shares this understanding of the difference between Native American culture and U.S. culture with a great many other Native American authors. For example, Paula Gunn Allen argues that “there is some sort of connection between colonization and chronological time. There is a connection between factories and clocks, and there is a connection between colonial imperialism and factories. There is also a connection between telling Indian tales in chronological sequences and the American tendency to fit Indians into the slots they have prepared for us.” And she notes that she had difficulty with publishers because she “chose Indian time over industrial time as a structuring device” in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), her first novel.31
It is no accident that Tracks begins in 1912, twenty-five years after the Dawes Act, for though the novel does not mention the act by name, its plot revolves around the struggles of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa to maintain a sense of tribal identity and to keep their allotments from falling into the hands of timber companies. Tracks focuses particularly on the plight of Nanapush’s adopted daughter, Fleur Pillager, whose choice allotment on the banks of Lake Matchimanito is ultimately lost, in part through the connivance of “government Indians” like Bernadette Morissey who are eager to assimilate and to profit from the misfortunes of fellow tribe-members. Intended to bolster Native American land ownership, the Dawes Act ended up sabotaging it, inadvertently opening up areas previously reserved for Native Americans to white settlement. Many Native Americans, like Fleur Pillager, lost their allotments because they could not pay their taxes; others lost their allotments after pledging them as security for loans to buy goods, while others were conned into selling their allotments well below fair market value. The U.S. government abetted the erosion of Native American ownership with the 1906 Burke Act, which shortened the twenty-five-year trust period for Native Americans deemed “competent,” enabling them to sell (or lose) their lands that much more quickly, and in 1917 the ironically named Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Cato Sells, issued a “Declaration of Policy” stipulating that all Native Americans with more than one-half white blood would be automatically defined as competent, given U.S. citizenship, and required to pay taxes on their allotments. Linda Hogan’s first novel, Mean Spirit (1990), dramatizes the aftermath of the Dawes Act in Oklahoma, where white oilmen, acting in tandem with government agents, cheat and if necessary murder Native Americans whose allotments happen to have become valuable due to the discovery of oil. “They had ideas about the Indians,” Hogan writes about the government clerks distributing land royalty checks, “that they were unschooled, ignorant people who knew nothing about life or money.” The U.S. government has imposed the lessons of individualism and capitalism upon Native culture, but whites resent it when the Native Americans are not only willing but able to implement those lessons: “In the background, a surly clerk in a white shirt piped up and said to another one, out loud, ‘Hell, some of them buy three cars. We don’t have that kind of money, and we’re Americans.’” Hogan uses moments of magical realism to embody the wonder and power of Native culture, but these moments are no match for the realism that embodies the hypocrisy of white culture, whose mean spirit reduces the culture and life of Native America—quite literally—to “nothing more than a distant burning.”32
It is estimated that between 1887 and 1934, when the Wheeler-Howard Indian Reorganization Act ended the policy of allotment and once