Artificer and bearer of the tradition: Louise Erdrich's mythopoeic quartet from the North Dakota plains

Louise Erdrich's quartet, Tracks, The Beet Queen, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace, stands as one of the most moving, humorous, and compassionate accounts of 20th century Native American life. While other prominent Indian authors have focused their work on the displacement resulting when an Indian tries to function in the Anglo society, Erdrich eschews such topics and concentrates solely on her Indian community, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas. Her novels combine the mixed voices of five generations of families who tell the stories of their lives during this century. From near decimation as a people around the turn of the century due to disease, erosion of tribal lands, and loss of hope, this Chippewa band emerges as a strong, compassionate, often raucous group of people whose stories Erdrich tells with compassion and love.; Erdrich's focus is not on any individual but rather on the community, a new focus in Native American fiction. She relates the stories of Chippewa families who fight alcohol, the BIA, the Catholic church and especially themselves in their struggle to retain their distinctive cultural heritage. Her story is that of a group of Indian people and their Anglo counterparts on the harsh North Dakota Plains who struggle against the physical and psychological ties to this particular place they hold sacred. Through the voices of individuals, of their families, of their community, and of their tribe, a story emerges of a group of Indian people who endure. Erdrich positions herself as the tribal storyteller relating the history of various tribal families, and their voices and histories mingle and blend to form a composite of a group of people whose will to survive is stronger than the forces that seek their demise. Underpinning all their stories is the powerful medicine woman, Fleur, sole representative of the old ways throughout the novels whose presence binds the people together. Erdrich's quartet is not an elegy to a way of life that has died; rather, it is a loving tribute to the endurance of her people who continue to evolve and thrive into the 21st century.