Page 14 - GALIET BEING´S FLEUR: Eldrich IV

to Whitman, we barely know our own depths, our own complex natures? Or are these Nanapush’s own tenacious ruminations relying on biased conjectures, assumptions and interpretations since Nanapush, the Patriarch, has been “spoken through and through” by his ancestors’ and his culture’s “tracks” 3⁄4 as when he tells Lulu that Margaret was fearful of words “...she didn’t want the tracks rubbing off on her skin...” (Erdrich 47) 3⁄4 cannot conceive of the “Other” or “Individualism:”
“Before the boundaries were set...an old man never had to live alone and cook for himself, never had to braid his own hair, or listen to his silence...” (Erdrich 32)
Perhaps it is not so much that, at the beginning, Nanapush introduces us to Fleur’s impermanent and invisible tracks when telling Lulu that “she [Lulu] is the child of the invisible, the ones who disappeared when, along with the first bitter punishments of early winter, a new sickness swept down” (Erdrich 1-2), but rather, and perhaps of far greater consideration, is how after Nanapush finds Fleur ill and heals her, he tells Lulu that Fleur, at that precise interval in evanescence, “is too young and has no stories or depth of life to rely upon, all she has is raw power, and the names of the dead that fill her” (Erdrich 7). Nanapush laments Fleur’s lack of stories because for him stories are essential for sustaining life, creating a fixed identity and leaving “tracks” throughout a community. Therefore, he is as incapable of conceiving a world with multiple representations as much as Fleur is incapable of conceiving a
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