...From this oppressed and tragic history and the struggle of adopting and refusing the European American culture, unintentionally a new culture of duality prevailed. In the start of the novel, both Nanapush and Pauline’s narrations are set on one way of life, either the Native American storytelling, deerskin cloths, and open wigwams, or the European American way of modernization, westernization, and civilization. Yet, by conclusion they both discern the partial assimilation and that a balance of both cultures is the only way the tribe will remain. This solution- or rather subconscious necessity- of cultural duality is exhibited in Nanapush, Pauline, and Fleur. Their journeys in this time of disjointed identity and threat to what is known highlights...
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...shown by the troubles of Chippewa Tribe. The novel ‘Tracks’ dramatically presents the struggle and survival of the Native Americans due to historical injustice, dispossession, and deprivation through colonization. In her novel, Tracks, Erdrich deals not only with individual American Indian lives but the loss of a tribe's land and identity during a crucial period from 1912 to 1924. The book begins at a point when many of the Anishinabe people have died, and Nanapush saves the life of Fleur Pillager. Nanapush, the old wise man, knows how the new settlers will eventually destroy the culture and heritage of the Natives and possess their land. At the beginning of Tracks, the physical and spiritual loss of the tribe is directly displayed when Nanapush stated the “Disaster must surely have spent its force, that disease must have claimed all the Anishinaabe that the earth could hold and bury. But the earth is limitless and so is luck and so were [the Ojibwa] people once” (Erdrich 1). Nanapush recognizes the intrusion of the European settlers who brought with them the invisible army of disease that infiltrated and claimed the many lives of Native Indians but Nanapush kept trying to hold on to his heritage through using his language, making the offering and markers, and lamenting about the destruction of the land. The white Americans believed that they cannot live in peace with Native Americans, whom they viewed as "savages" and "illiterate." Subsequently, the government made the reservation...
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