Culture Clash: Ojibwe Identity in Erdrich’s Tracks

Imagine the struggle within one Anishinaabe forced onto reservation land, living in some sort of strange, undefined limbo, dancing back and forth over the line separating two vastly differing cultures. Such has been the case of the Ojibwe, a subdivision of the Anishinaabeg, so poignantly portrayed by Louise Erdrich in her novel Tracks. A deeply spiritual and traditional people, the Ojibwe, like other Native Peoples in the United States, faced more than the loss of land when forced onto reservations in the nineteenth century. The structuring of reservation land became the physical representation of the cultural boundries created by European Americans. With first contact, so began the progression towards cultural domination that culminated in the creation and implementation of the United States ’ assimilation policy—a process of physical displacement and cultural genocide that solidified a dualistic state of being among Native Peoples in North America. The loss of culture took place at varying degrees on the macro and micro level. At the macro level is the destruction of the tribal social structure; at the micro level is a declassification of identity within the individual. Tracks problematizes the inner workings of the Ojibwe as a duality of identity forced upon them through Europea