In Search of Authenticity: Arbitrating the Politics of Narration in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks

Using poststructuralism, this essay argues that Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) dismantles the hierarchical relationship between mainstream authoritative discourse and Native American narratives regarding cultural authenticity and legitimacy. Employing interlaced narrative layers and making mainstream discourse itself an object of storytelling, Tracks allows oral and communal accounts to emerge as vehicles of co-writing, writing back, and un-writing dominant discourses about Native American culture. For centuries, official and scientific discourses monopolized the production of the public image of the Native American experience, often favoring textuality as an authentic medium of historical narratives. Acting as agents of empirical discourse, natural scientists produced a “credible” textual history for institutions and made artifacts out of excavated Native American “objects.” However, because Native American stories were considered incompliant with the epistemological conventions of history writing, they only functioned as a source material of mythological patterns for academic study by sociologists and structural anthropologists. Challenging this trend, Erdrich’s novel reconsiders “cultural authenticity” and its relationship to the medium of narration.