Louise Erdrich's Comparison Indigenous Religion and Catholicism in Tracks Anonymous 11th Grade

In Keystones of Thought, Austin O’Malley said “We use religion as a trolley car - we ride it only while it is going our way.” In Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks, similarly to how O’Malley stated, Erdrich creates characters who use religion selectively to illustrate the contretemps between the Catholic religion and the mystical Native American spiritual beliefs which act as the impetus for much of the plot. As the story unfolds, many of the momentous and often destructive actions one of the narrators, Pauline, are rooted in religious motivations; however, the actions of the novel’s other narrator, Nanapush and his daughter Fleur are motivated by their wariness of Catholicism. Erdrich’s Tracks uses a caricature of theology as a tool to demonstrate the harm that relations between Catholicism and Native tradition bred, making the reader wonder if Erdrich’s display of religion is an exaggeration at all.

Erdrich constructs one of Track’s two narrators, Pauline, a young Indian girl who renounces the idea that she is Indian and turns to the Catholic church when it arrives with the white men who arrive on the reservation, in order to show the potency of the folly of religion has in certain contexts. Early in the novel, Fleur brings a...