There is a story to it the way there is a story to all, never visible while it is happening. Only after, when an old man sits dreaming and talking in his chair, the design springs clear. There was so much we never saw and never knew.
             "We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall." So begins Nanapush, as he recalls the winter of 1912, when consumption, the last in a line of diseases brought by the Europeans, wiped out whole families of Ojibwa, unraveling tribes "like a coarse rope." By bearing witness to the story of his family's and people's disintegration, Nanapush, a tribal elder and sole survivor of his family, is intent on resisting death, on leaving tracks in the snow for those who come after to follow. Exemplifying one of the novel's central themes--that storytelling is one way Native Americans have fended off cultural and historical extinction--Nanapush presses a sense of the past upon his young listener, his adopted granddaughter, Lulu, who herself is a remnant of a remnant--the only child of another sole survivor of a family destroyed by consumption, the fierce and unassimilated Fleur Pillager. But Nanapush has more immediate goals as well: to try to save Fleur's land from the U.S government's claims, and to save the tribe from being destroyed by the battles over land tenure between the tribe and white settlers. For the survival of the traditional world that sustains Nanpush and Fleur is threatened by corrosive forces that have taken root within the community, as well as by the venality of the whites without. Pauline, the novel's second narrator, a half-breed from a mixed-blood tribe "for which the name is lost," is representative of the self-division that erodes the Chippewa community from within. It is Pauline who, out of jealousy and hurt pride, magically causes Eli Kashpaw, Fleur's unfortunate lover, to betray Fleur with the young Sophie Morrisey;this sets into motion t
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