Tracks Fleur Character Analysis

The novel Tracks provides a unique source to learn and understand some of the Native American culture. A track can have multiple definitions. One of them is, a path made by or as if by repeated steps. In this case Fleur, one of the main characters in the book is someone who has trauma from many negative events that she has experienced. Throughout the book, we can see that these repeated traumatic events are some that have shaped Fleur into the character that she is now. Nanapush, one of the narrators in the book, tells us about what takes place when he finds and rescues Fleur from a cabin near Machimanito Lake as a young girl. He says, “Then something in the corner knocked. I flung the door open wide. It was the eldest daughter, Fleur, about seventeen old then. She was so feverish that she’d thrown off her covers, and now she huddled against the cold wood range, staring and shaking.” Nanapush found Fleur without family, because her family died from the epidemic going around the town. This was such a traumatic experience for Fleur because she was sick. Usually when we are sick as children, we first look to our families for comfort and a method to make us feel better. However in Fleur’s case she was found alone in her family’s home but

You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That’s how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and believed, since they heard it from their own ears, from their own lips each word.” Many people in the town believed this about Fleur because Nanapush had begged Fleur to stay with him, however Fleur was so centered on going back to the house that her family lived in. After being found in the cabin near Machimanito Lake and being washed up on shore, they found her to be different from many of the others mostly because of her shady personality. For Fleur to repeatedly hear stories about herself that she knew weren't true eventually drove her