1Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, is celebrated as a writer of place.1 Due to the centrality of place in her writing, critics have repeatedly compared Erdrich with such writers as William Faulkner, noting the vivid particularity of their respective fictional, intertextual worlds as well as the broader national and transnational issues at play in highly localised settings. Tim Cresswell defines place as “a meaningful location” and sense of place as “a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world” (2015, 12, 18). This definition is crucial to the role that sense of place plays in both Erdrich and Faulkner’s work. More specifically, Erdrich’s Ojibwe heritage is fundamental to her presentation of the relationships between her characters and the land they inhabit. By centring a traditional Anishinaabe relationship with land in her writing, Erdrich produces a radically subversive engagement with the themes of landscape, maps and borders which, I argue in this chapter, invokes decolonial resistance.

2This chapter analyses connections between these themes in the 1988 novel Tracks, in which Erdrich explores the role played by maps in the literal and representational erasure of Indigenous presence in the United States by setting an Anishinaabe-centred vernacular landscape in contradistinction to non-Native interpretations and representations of land. I argue that Erdrich’s novel challenges the hegemony of the cartographer and revises “official” narratives of Native American relationships with land. I begin with an outline of the novel, the importance of land in the text, and the significance of the term “landscape” in a Native literary context. I then examine Erdrich’s engagement with vernacular landscape in Tracks, employing the term as it has been defined by Rob Nixon: “A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features” (2011, 17). Like vernacular language, this traditional conception of land is rooted in local, shared experience and communal assent. This emphatically land- and community-centred perspective minimises official, impersonal ascriptions of the land to a level of negligible detail. I suggest, therefore, that Erdrich uses vernacular landscape in order to assert the sustained traditional relationship between the Ojibwe and the land in defiance of settler colonial authority. In the next section, I contrast Erdrich’s use of vernacular landscape with her critique of cartography as a settler colonial practice which is harmful to Anishinaabe senses of place and identity, and consider the ways in which Erdrich invokes resistance to the borders imposed through this practice. Following this is a discussion of Louis Owens’ (Choctaw/Cherokee) revision of the concept of the frontier in relation to the novel’s central character, Fleur Pillager, as a figure of decolonial resistance.

I. Landscape and Sense of Place in Tracks

3Set in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Tracks establishes the senses of place, history and identity underpinning Erdrich’s fictional world. The novel follows the central, non-narrating character Fleur Pillager as she struggles to defend her ancestral lands, of weighty Anishinaabe cultural significance, from colonial encroachment and exploitation. The sale of Fleur’s land out of tribal ownership constitutes a crisis for the Ojibwe as a whole, as the protection of tribally-held land is vital to the physical and cultural survival of the Ojibwe as a community. Fleur is known as the last surviving member of the Pillager clan (a reclusive cousin notwithstanding); as such she is deeply spiritual, traditional and devoted to the protection of the land and the survival of the tribe. Uniquely powerful, Fleur can both metamorphose and survive what should be death by drowning. Fleur’s profound spirituality, her relationship with the land and her formidability position her as a sacred archetypal figure.

4The novel is co-narrated by Nanapush, an Ojibwe elder and classic trickster figure who, while influential, navigates the margins of both Ojibwe and non-Native society, and Pauline, an unpopular mixedblood girl who displays signs of internalised racism and denies her Native heritage in favour of becoming a nun. According to Armand Garnet Ruffo (Ojibwe):

What is most obvious to those familiar with Anishinawbe culture is Erdrich’s variation on the name Nanabush […] Erdrich playfully changes the name of Nanabush to Nanapush (in good old trickster fashion) and injects her story with another layer of meaning. Perhaps the most significant fact is that in his (or her) role as ‘trickster’ he is both a cultural hero and a teacher of human nature—and existence in general—among the Anishinawbe people. (1993, 166)

5The trickster helps inform and guide the tribe, and accordingly Nanapush frequently helps the community to maintain an awareness of and connection with Anishinaabe tradition. The trickster figure has additional significance, as Chris LaLonde explains: “The figure of the trickster introduces chance and possibility, upsets binaries, counters terminal creeds, and establishes the primacy of humor over tragedy […] Active and subversive, trickster shimmers at the treelines, cavorts and beckons from the limen, and shocks, tricks, and teases us into an(other) awareness of the Native” (2002, 19). LaLonde here emphasises that the trickster inhabits the limen and functions as a conduit between the immediate, physical world and the spirit world. Nanapush fulfils this function by allowing other characters to engage with history, tradition and identity through his stories, encouraging them to maintain a strong sense of place and to protect the land. Indeed, throughout the novel, the inextricable connection between the Ojibwe and the land is shown to be vital to the tribe’s survival. Fleur leaves in order to earn enough money to settle outstanding fees and secure her land, and by the end of the novel she is forced to do so again, this time leaving behind her young daughter Lulu. One of Erdrich’s earliest-set novels, Tracks is also heavily interconnected with Erdrich’s other texts. The novel is therefore indicative of a concern with decolonial resistance throughout Erdrich’s work.

6Tracks is one of many novels set on Erdrich’s habitual fictive Little No Horse Ojibwe Reservation, situated in North Dakota. The reservation, Erdrich states, evokes “landscapes and features similar to many Ojibwe reservations. It is an emotional collection of places dear to me, as is the town called Argus. It is not the Turtle Mountain Reservation, of course” (2003a, 357). Erdrich’s use of the word “landscapes” is intriguing as depictions of landscape in the conventional sense are not prominent in her writing. Erdrich’s designation of the Little No Horse Reservation as a specifically “emotional” assemblage of places of personal and cultural significance to her alerts us to the fact that, in her work, landscape functions not as a way to convey geographical context or the appearance of the environment, but as an evocation of the ways in which the Ojibwe relate to and live within the land.

7Although Indigenous spiritual and cultural beliefs and traditions differ by nation and must be considered in tribal specificity, several Indigenous writers from various nations have expressed their respective senses of place in ways that resemble Erdrich’s. N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) writes, “All things are alive in this profound unity in which are all elements, all animals, all things” (1997, 51–2). Leslie Marmon Silko’s perspective on land, informed by her Laguna Pueblo heritage, also closely reflects Erdrich’s approach to landscape. Silko writes, “The land, the sky, and all that is within them—the landscape—includes human beings” (1999, 33). For Silko, the Pueblo relationship with land is characterised by motion, interconnection and proximity. Elaborating, Silko describes the natural world as a living system undergoing constant and infinite cycles of transference and renewal on varying scales: “You see that after a thing is dead, it dries up. It might take weeks or years, but eventually if you touch the thing, it crumbles under your fingers. It goes back to dust. The soul of the thing […] may have already been borne back into bones and blood or thick green stalk and leaves” (1999, 30). This image expresses a perception of energy even in death by virtue of the kinship between human, animal, plant and other forms of life. The alliterative association between the object’s crumbling “back to dust” and its soul being “borne back into bones and blood” implies not simply a routine passage between life and death, but rather constant cycles of energy moving between living and dead things, creating a fluid and expansive sense of temporality. The equivalence of “bones and blood” with “thick green stalk and leaves” suggests a radical sense of equality across the human and natural worlds. According to this relationship, people and the land are interdependent and develop a mutual sense of identity. From this perspective, any sense of personal identity is inalienable from one’s sense of place and community. The Pueblo relationship with land for Silko, then, is constant, intimate and interactive. Although Silko’s conception of landscape is specific to her Laguna Pueblo heritage, as is Momaday’s to his Kiowa identity, elements of their respective presentations of landscape echo both each other’s and Erdrich’s. Thus, while I do not wish to present any writer’s view of land or landscape as representative or normative, it is useful to note the centrality of these writers’ respective senses of Indigenous identity and experience to their representations of place and landscape.

8Such understandings of land are fundamentally incongruous with the conventional western understanding of landscape. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “landscape,” derived from technical painting terminology, as a “view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view” (OED, “ landscape”). In this sense, landscape is concerned with a single gaze and a viewer’s representation of the land. In contrast, Silko argues, “This assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory he or she surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on” (1999, 32; emphasis in original). From a traditional Native American perspective, the stance assumed by the viewer of land as landscape is essentially illusory because it denies the location of human consciousness within the land. The intimacy of the relationship between land and Native people described here by Silko is evident both throughout Tracks and in the concept of vernacular landscape.

9Preceding the period in which the novel is set, the U.S. government pursued Indian removal policy, devised to clear land for settlers by displacing tribes from their homelands and relocating them further west. A key feature of removal was the creation of the Indian reservation system, which gathered these tribal communities—already severely depleted by violence, disease, exposure and poverty—onto relatively small expanses of land with inadequate resources (Wunder 1994, 24–5). As a result, Native communities faced further insecurity and deprivation, as Geoff King summarises: “The remnants of Native American groups were remapped onto the landscape within the confines of officially sanctioned reservations. They were often subjected to further removals, erasures from the map and reinscriptions elsewhere as former reservation land was sought by white settlers” (1996, 147). King’s reference to “reinscriptions” draws a sinister link between Indian removal and Silko’s remark that “Pueblo potters, the creators of petroglyphs and oral narratives, never conceived of removing themselves from the earth and sky” (1999, 32). The sense of separation and pretence of objective, omniscient vision implied by the concept of “landscape” facilitate the imposition of maps and borders upon Native lands. The conventional western conception of landscape thus creates the conditions for colonial reassessments and modifications of land. This invariably entails the literal removal of Native peoples not only from their ancestral lands, but also and thereby from their traditional senses of place within “the earth and sky.” Erdrich’s engagement with borders in relation to landscape and maps in this novel exposes and challenges the validity of these “erasures” and “reinscriptions” of Native peoples, invoking decolonial resistance.

II. Vernacular Landscape in Tracks

10Tracks opens with a charting of the Ojibwe’s geographical movements and recent history from Nanapush’s perspective. Nanapush’s language reflects oral storytelling tradition and Anishinaabe epistemology, characterised, according to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Nishinaabeg), by the central importance of “family, community and relations,” an understanding of land as “both context and process,” and an absence of “overt coercion and authority” (2014, 7). Nanapush’s presentation of the reservation environment and history is thus clearly evocative of the concept of vernacular landscape. A respected tribal elder, Nanapush is one of the few remaining members of his generation of the Ojibwe, having survived the removal period during which so many of his friends and family died. His account of the tribe’s harrowing experiences of migration, poverty and disease therefore positions him as a surviving witness, endowing his narrative with further significance as the story not only of one person, but of the Ojibwe as a whole.

11Nanapush’s story, addressed to his adoptive granddaughter Lulu, firmly roots their respective senses of identity in the environment of the reservation. His statement, “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall” indicates the time of year and relates his people’s desperate struggles to the natural world, in keeping with traditional Anishinaabe epistemology (Erdrich 2006, 1). This alignment of temporal context with the natural world builds upon Nanapush’s status as one of the last survivors of a past generation to evoke a traditional sense of temporality, reminding us that, from traditional Native American perspectives, the past is ever-present in the land. Nanapush further demonstrates his Anishinaabe epistemology by describing the devastation caused to the Ojibwe by smallpox, forced migration and destructive government policies in relation to the cardinal directions and a traditional Native sense of spatiality: he has “survived the spotted sickness from the south, our long fight west to Nadouissioux land where we signed the treaty, and then a wind from the east, bringing exile in a storm of government papers” (Erdrich 2006, 1). He goes on to demonstrate the respect accorded to natural forces in Anishinaabe tradition, lamenting, “we thought disaster must surely have spent its force,” and acquiescing to “limitless” luck as an unpredictable and uncontrollable natural power. Playing on the idea of the border as a corruption of balance, Nanapush suggests that the world has breached natural boundaries and entered a new era: “we thought […] disease must have claimed all of the Anishinaabe that the earth could hold and bury. But the earth is limitless and so is luck and so were our people once” (Erdrich 2006, 1). The image of the earth as an inexhaustible grave perverts the idea of “limitless” land, in relation to both traditional Anishinaabe ideas about interconnection and balance and colonial narratives of “virgin” land. Colonial settlers’ conceptualisation of the “new world” as “limitless” in terms of property and resources undermines Anishinaabe spatiality, before literally bringing an end to this limitlessness from Nanapush’s perspective through the imposition of spatial boundaries and colonial epistemology. Anishinaabe tradition teaches Nanapush to accept the outcome of natural forces, but disease and migration cause such devastation to the Ojibwe that Nanapush is ultimately forced to reassess his understanding of the Ojibwe’s place in the world.

12Accordingly, Nanapush supplements his Anishinaabe epistemology with a non-Native understanding of temporality, telling us, “what descended from the north in 1912 seemed impossible” (Erdrich 2006, 1). Michael D. McNally points out that the north is associated with aging and winter in Anishinaabe tradition, framing Nanapush’s identification of the winter of 1912 as the beginning of the tuberculosis outbreak on the reservation within Anishinaabe epistemology (2009, 56). The year 1912 is crucial to the narrative of Tracks on a much broader scale, however, as it marks twenty-five years since the passing of the 1887 General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act. This Act was intended “to provide for the allotment of lands in severalty to Indians on the various reservations, and to extend the protection of the laws of the United States and the Territories over the Indians” (Otis 1973, 177). The two principle aims of the Act were to divide tribal lands held in common into individually owned tracts, and to cement the authority of the U.S. government over tribal groups and lands. The Act did not grant ownership of these lands to tribal members in perpetuity; allotment simply decreed that “the United States does and will hold the land thus allotted, for the period of twenty-five years, in trust for the sole use and benefit of the Indian to whom such allotment shall have been made … and at the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or his heirs as aforesaid, in fee” (Otis 1973, 180). After twenty-five years—in 1912, the year specified and repeated by Nanapush in his opening words—the land could be sold out of tribal ownership. This approach aimed to instil a sense of individualism among members of traditionally community-orientated tribes, ensuring the continual fragmentation and reduction of tribally-held land. By explicitly situating Nanapush’s charting of the history of the reservation with reference to this pivotal year, Erdrich emphasises the Dawes Act as a critical moment in Ojibwe history and indicates a correlation between events local to the reservation and colonial strategy on a national scale. Nanapush is thus forced to take account of colonial epistemology and how it affects his traditional Anishinaabe epistemology, including his relationship with land.

13Throughout Tracks, Nanapush is wary of the individualism introduced by allotment as a destructive influence on Anishinaabe senses of identity and place. Erdrich presents individualism as a negative force through Nanapush’s isolation; he moves from the first person plural at the beginning of his narrative—“We started dying before the snow”; “On the reservation, where we were forced close together”—to the first person singular: “My own family was wiped out one by one, leaving only Nanapush. And after, although I had lived no more than fifty winters, I was considered an old man” (Erdrich 2006, 1–2). Having been brought up as a member of a clan, Nanapush is left to continue his life as an individual due to the loss of his family and friends. Nanapush reinforces the pain of his loss later, when Fleur’s daughter Lulu is being baptised: “I thought about my wives, especially White Beads and our daughter” (Erdrich 2006, 61). The early death of Nanapush’s daughter is disturbing, and makes his relatively long life all the lonelier. Similarly, allotment has served to separate Nanapush’s wife, Margaret, from her family: “Since her older children were all gone, moved to their allotment land in Montana, she wanted a place right here that she could trust for her old age” (Erdrich 2006, 57). Erdrich’s use of the word “trust” subverts the government’s claim to hold land “in trust” for the benefit of Native individuals, belying allotment as a manipulation and betrayal of Native peoples. Ultimately, the fragmentation of her family leaves Margaret more isolated and vulnerable in her old age, making the precariousness of allotment all the more urgent.

14Nanapush strives to combat his isolation, however, by acting as a father figure to Fleur Pillager, and later to Fleur’s lover and Margaret Kashpaw’s son Eli, as well as giving Lulu his own name to confirm her status as his adoptive granddaughter and thereby re-establish his lineage. In this way, Nanapush resists the individualism that allotment aims to establish among the Ojibwe. By presenting the history of the reservation in these terms, Nanapush demonstrates that, from his perspective, the reservation is still a living environment defined by familial and communal relationships and interactions between the Ojibwe and the physical environment. Nonetheless, Nanapush is aware and deeply apprehensive of the severe impact of government policies upon Native peoples and their relationships with land, signified by his epistemologically hybridised vernacular landscape. By aligning colonial Euro-American epistemological approaches to land with human and environmental loss and destruction, then, Erdrich positions borders as emblems of colonial authority, and the challenging of borders as a stance of decolonial resistance.

III. Erdrich’s Cartographical Map

15Nixon’s description of vernacular landscape as a “historically textured” and “alive” map suggests a greater degree of mutability, multiplicity and subjectivity in the design and interpretation of maps than would normally be recognised in conventional western cartography. Nixon’s evoked map emphasises personal relations and narratives, challenging the hegemony of western cartography in defining and representing land. However, Erdrich contrasts this Indigeno-centric approach to mapping with a cartographical map in Tracks, demonstrating the destructive consequences of eliding traditional relationships with land.

16Throughout the era of colonisation, European and Euro-American cartography sought not only to record and represent the world according to European conceptions of space, but also to facilitate colonial projects. Peta Mitchell explains, “The concept of space that emerged in the Enlightenment is a global and passive one of pure extension. The formalization of this spatial practice, moreover, fed neatly into the expansionist drive to conquer land—conceived of as empty,’ ‘unclaimed,’ or ‘unknown’ extensive space—in the Age of Empire” (2013, 28). The concept of space as passive and subject to ownership both aligns with the conventional western concept of landscape and contradicts traditional Native American senses of place. It also posits land as moldable through mapping. Both the conventional western understanding of landscape and colonial cartography have been normative and dominant conceptions of land in the United States since colonisation, facilitating strategies to organise and control land. This hegemony necessarily and deliberately disrupts and curtails traditional Indigenous relationships with land, both physically—through the imposition of borders where none previously existed—and epistemologically—by overwriting long-held and important cultural narratives inextricably situated within the land.

17Moreover, in contrast with traditional Native American societies, the rights and duties of the individual and the nature of private property were important concerns during the Enlightenment in Europe, concurrent with the early period of settlement in what would become the United States. Consequently, the rise of early capitalism shaped and propelled the colonisation of the Americas. John Locke, in his highly influential Second Treatise, argues that an individual man has the right to “appropriate” land and resources for his personal benefit, and further that he must do so because natural resources cannot be “beneficial” without a man’s individual intervention and personal claim (1988, 287; emphasis in original). Locke thus implicitly dismisses any notion of communitarian society and the validity of communitarian relationships with land.

18In this sense, colonial maps, seeking to impose authority and fixity through private property, depend entirely on the concept of borders not only to physically demarcate spatial limits, but also and especially to reproduce what Eric Cheyfitz terms the “perceived settling, or cultivation” of the Americas in humanised, localised contexts (1997, 55; emphasis in original). This emphasis on perception highlights the importance of borders and maps to the production of international colonial narratives, and is reflected by the development of the word “landscape” as a verb in the twentieth century, meaning to “conceal or embellish” features of an expanse of land in order to create a more “continuous and harmonious landscape” (OED, “landscape”). Mark Warhus’s comment that “Western maps describe land as an object” neatly expresses the incongruity of this approach to land with Indigenous senses of place (1997, 139). Thus the contrast between Native senses of place and vernacular landscape on one hand, and conquest-driven settler colonial conceptions of land on the other, posits borders as a crucial, epistemological difference between Native and colonial approaches to and understandings of landscape and mapping. Erdrich’s vernacular landscape, privileging the subjective, oral storyteller’s perspective with minimal regard to borders, therefore constitutes decolonial resistance.

19Erdrich emphasises the disparity between the Ojibwe relationship with the land of the Little No Horse Reservation and non-Native representations of the land through the image of a cartographical map, the ultimate product of allotment and surveys. Nanapush is presented with the map toward the end of Tracks, when the Catholic priest Father Damien visits Nanapush and his clan to warn them about developments in land ownership on the reservation. Father Damien’s map depicts every allotment on the reservation and its official status, illustrating “how some had lost their allotments” (Erdrich 2006, 172). The clan studies “the lines and circles of the homesteads paid up—Morrissey, Pukwan, Hat, Lazarres everywhere. They were colored green. The lands that were gone out of the tribe—to deaths with no heirs, to sales, to the lumber company—were painted a pale and rotten pink. Those in question, a sharper yellow” (Erdrich 2006, 172–3). The map is not just an image representing colonial cartography in general, but a chillingly physical manifestation of the conceptualisation of Ojibwe land as real estate, and thus of the realisation of Locke’s view of private property. Whereas earlier colonial maps represent the American continents as empty and ready for settlement on a large, abstract scale, Erdrich shows through this map that removal, allotment and the fragmentation of tribally-held land operate on a distressingly local level. Father Damien’s map effectively functions as a guide for those interested in selling or buying land, as the areas without a sanctioned proprietor, instead of being left blank, are distinctly coded, as are allotments whose owners are vulnerable. The dramatic contrast between Erdrich’s sensorial description of the starving family’s first meal in days—with “the dizzy smell of coffee roasting, of bannock cooking” (Erdrich 2006, 173)—and the inanimate paper map draws a link between borders, dispossession and bureaucracy: Father Damien arrives at Margaret’s request, having “signed a paper” to help her access the family’s food rations (Erdrich 2006, 173). This development suggests that bureaucratic, property-driven colonial epistemology, having reshaped representations of and relationships with the land, has now permeated the daily lives of the Ojibwe.

20In addition to the deeply local, immediate and visceral implications of the map from the family’s perspective, Erdrich uses the map to situate the challenges faced by the Nanapush clan in relation to wider contexts: “My concern was the lapping pink, the color of the skin of lumberjacks and bankers, the land we would never walk or hunt, from which our children would be barred” (Erdrich 2006, 173). Nanapush’s experience and awareness of political developments make him deeply apprehensive of the situation illustrated by the map, and with good reason. The coding of land traditionally held by the Ojibwe—vital not only to their way of life but to the very survival of the tribe—in the colour of white skin forges a sinister association with racial segregation. The “lapping” pink suggests the expanse of land lost to the tribe, overtaking the other colours on the map. It also reminds us that the reservation is a human network and a living environment: we can imagine the water at Lake Matchimanito “lapping” the shore. The proximity of the word “lapping” to the words “blood” and “skin” further emphasises the living world of the reservation, while another meaning of “lapping,” compounded with the colour pink, calls to mind a tongue, accentuating the preceding passage in which the clan eats bread after days of starvation. The “pale and rotten” shade signifies the dishonest dealings that have created these circumstances. Nanapush is correct to be wary of the expanding pink sections, understanding that the borders on the map denote colonial dominance.

21While Father Damien’s map details localised space, the powers and structures at work have global reach. In terms of cartography, the British Empire has traditionally been signified by the colour pink on world maps (Klinghoffer 2006, 79). The implication of British imperialism staking a claim to specific tracts of Ojibwe land exposes the predication of colonialism on the idea of private property and the impact of global structures on local environments and living communities. From a decolonial standpoint, then, the map conveys the extreme power imbalance between settler colonial authority and Indigenous peoples, signified and enforced by colonial borders. Nanapush’s continued evocation of vernacular landscape through his decoding of the map to reveal its human and familial impacts, however, illustrates his rejection of its superficial colonial borders and his commitment to decolonial resistance.

IV. Borders in Tracks and the Decolonial Frontier

22Nanapush’s role as a liminal, anti-authoritarian trickster figure, and his expression of decolonial resistance through vernacular landscape in Tracks, form a link between Erdrich’s challenging of the colonial landscape and Owens’ radical reimagining of the concept of the frontier from a Native epistemological perspective. Owens sets the idea of the frontier:

in neat opposition to the concept of ‘territory’ as territory is imagined and given form by the colonial enterprise in America. Whereas frontier is always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate, territory is clearly mapped, fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to control and subdue the dangerous potentialities of imagined Indians. (Owens 1998, 26)

23Due to its connotations of European conquest and colonial historical narratives, the term “frontier” is clearly and deeply problematic in relation to Native American literature, but Owens’ interpretation emphasises the fluid and uncontrollable nature of the frontier, in contrast with the fixed borders that attend territory. According to Owens’ understanding of frontier, the concept can be reclaimed to express the movement, subjectivity and interrelation that characterise traditional Indigenous relationships with land. This reappraisal neatly challenges the perception that the frontier definitively closed in 1890, as Frederick Jackson Turner famously declared, and, by extension, colonial narratives of American landscape and history more generally (Turner 2010, 9).

24Patrick Wolfe points out that the conventional narrative of the frontier, when examined in relation to the development of Native American reservations, effectively situates the end of the frontier at the foot of tribal reservations: the result of Indian removal was that “the western frontier met the one moving back in from the Pacific, and there was simply no space left for removal. The frontier had become coterminal with reservation boundaries” (Wolfe 2006, 399). While Wolfe’s summary is sobering, Owens raises the possibility of a frontier which does not terminate at reservation boundaries, but rather meets and interacts with them. This premise converts these boundaries from fixed borders back into a frontier; a transition from stasis and structure to flux and movement. On a more local level, the reinterpretation of the frontier confers a radically subversive power onto liminal figures like Nanapush, whose ability to transcend spatial and metaphysical boundaries through the vernacular landscape of his stories makes a mockery of colonial spatial markers like allotment borders.

25In Tracks, Erdrich also conveys this challenging of colonial borders through Fleur Pillager and her important relationship with the land and, especially, the water of the reservation. Lake Matchimanito, a key feature of the Pillager lands, is of great importance to the Ojibwe of Little No Horse. Members of the tribe fish its waters and hunt in the surrounding forest, but the lake has additional, powerful associations with Anishinaabe spirituality through the water spirit or manitou, Misshepeshu, who inhabits the lake. Melissa K. Nelson (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) describes an Anishinaabe water manitou called “Mizhi-Bezheu, the ‘Great Lynx’, who lives at the bottom of the sea and any water body. It is thought that this spirit causes drownings and other water accidents” (2014, 71). Closely resembling “Mizhi-Bezheu,” in addition to being deadly, Misshepeshu is unknowable; he changes form and behaves unpredictably. The co-narrator of Tracks, Pauline, tells us that Fleur has a special connection with the formidable Misshepeshu. His power and perceived hostility frighten other members of the tribe, contributing to the isolation of Matchimanito and making Fleur’s relationship with Misshepeshu all the more unusual. As Pauline tells us, “She was the one who closed the door or swung it open. Between the people and the gold-eyed creature in the lake, the spirit which they said was neither good nor bad but simply had an appetite, Fleur was the hinge” (Erdrich 2006, 139). This impression of a degree of control over the natural and spirit worlds suggests that Fleur’s mission to reclaim her land is of much broader significance than any personal vendetta; Fleur’s unfailing allegiance to the Ojibwe community as a whole reverses the individualisation evoked by Nanapush’s increasing isolation at the beginning of the novel. Thus, Erdrich’s depiction of Fleur as a powerful survivor with substantial authority over the land can be read as a direct critique of settler colonial conceptions and (ab)uses of Native lands and identities.

26Fleur’s connection with Misshepeshu grants her access to a realm that most can only enter once, without return; having survived drowning three times, Fleur seems to be able to cross into the spirit world, or afterlife, and back into the world of the living. Thus, Fleur’s profoundly important relationship with the spirit world at Matchimanito endows her with a uniquely powerful mobility, superseding any imposed colonial spatial structures and, indeed, Eurocentric, Christian-informed understandings of land generally, as illustrated in the concepts of landscape and cartography. In stark contrast with the prescription, fixity and commodification associated with allotment, then, Fleur’s connection with the lake illustrates the inherent, fluid and uncontainable power of the natural world, and the traditional Anishinaabe sense of place; her movements between life and death, as between land and water, constitute a literal realisation of Owens’ re-envisioned frontier.

27This dynamic draws on Erdrich’s own conceptions of the link between people and place in Anishinaabe culture. In her non-fictional work Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Erdrich relates an encounter with a traditional Anishinaabe healer whose senses of heritage and personal identity are defined by his relationship with the lake by which he lives: his “people were the lake, and the lake was them. At one time, everyone who lived near the lake was essentially made of the lake. As the people lived off fish, animals, the lake’s water and water plants for medicine, they were literally cell by cell made of the lake” (2003b, 34). Such a profound relationship with the natural world reinforces the indivisibility of the Ojibwe people from their surroundings, as expressed by vernacular landscape. Indeed, when Fleur recognises that in order to reclaim the land she must leave it, she takes with her “weed-wrapped stones from the lake-bottom, bundles of roots, a coil of rags, and the umbrella that had shaded her baby. The grave markers [Nanapush] had scratched, four crosshatched bears and a marten, were fastened on the side of the cart” (Erdrich 2006, 224). Tokens from the lake and land are as important as familial objects of remembrance, and each gains significance in relation to the other. While the imposition of borders around and through Pillager lands seeks to disrupt the Ojibwe relationship with the land and their ancestors, through her continued devotion to Matchimanito and her uniquely powerful, radically Anishinaabe-centred mobility, Fleur resists colonial attempts to claim authority over the land and exposes imposed borders as arbitrary, fictional projections. Erdrich thus implies that decolonial resistance can be asserted and fostered through a rejection of borders and the continuation of a traditional Anishinaabe relationship with land.

Conclusion

28In spite of the explicit framework of settler colonial history and geography that Erdrich builds around the narrative of Tracks, Nanapush and Fleur demonstrate a defiant fidelity to traditional Anishinaabe epistemology and anchor their respective senses of place and identity within this epistemology. The Little No Horse Reservation as a spatial and social construct represents Euro-American colonial principles of territory, property, individualism and demarcated borders; in subversive contrast, Erdrich’s vernacular landscape emphasises human and environmental interconnection, intergenerational temporality, tribally-specific subjectivity and flux.

29According to Owens’ reconceptualised frontier, by locating their narratives at these reservation boundaries, and indeed at other colonially-imposed borders, Native American writers like Erdrich can claim a position of power, enacting revisions of history, place and identity through narratives—like vernacular landscapes—which refute colonial structures. As Erdrich’s engagements with landscape and cartography reflect and challenge settler colonial culture on a transnational scale, so Erdrich presents the Ojibwe relationship with the land of the Little No Horse Reservation as testament to the ongoing presence, agency and resistance of Native peoples. In this way, reflecting Owens’ frontier as an assertion of the potency of ideological decolonialism, Erdrich’s evocation of vernacular landscape and concomitant critique of borders in Tracks should be read as an assertion of literary decolonial resistance.