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Resurrection of the Windigo: Pauline Puyat’s Mythic Monstrosity in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks Samantha Watson, College of Charleston
Ojibwe lore and legend serve a complex, multifaceted purpose in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, a novel that
adapts and reinterprets traditional folkloric entities in order to convey meaning to a contemporary audience. The figure of the windigo, in particular, is one such being that simultaneously enriches and complicates Erdrich’s narrative. Described as a starving, wintry cannibal of gargantuan stature, the windigo is a creature present in the mythos of many Algonquian-speaking indigenous peoples, including but not limited to the Ojibwe. Windigo lore is incorporated at various points in the novel to embody concepts of loss, grief, and death, but specifically through the character of Pauline—one of the novel’s dual-narrators—Erdrich resurrects the windigo as a monstrous subject who cannibalizes her own people and culture. Pauline’s peripheral existence, in accordance with her trauma-induced psychosis and predatory voyeurism akin to that of an owl, equate her to the windigo’s mythic monstrosity.
Erdrich depicts the windigo condition as a liminal state of being precipitated by the overlapping of the
realm of the dead into the realm of the living—as a result, the affected individual possesses or ingests the spirits of the dead, effectively allowing the individual to inhabit both realms simultaneously. This idea is exhibited when Nanapush and Fleur go “half windigo” after the bodies of the deceased Pillagers are buried but their spirits linger behind (Erdrich 5). Nanapush recounts his and Fleur’s deterioration into the windigo state: “Their names grew within us, swelled to the brink of our lips, forced our eyes open in the middle of the night. [...] Within us, like ice shards, their names bobbed and shifted” (6). Additionally, he remarks that they “needed no food” and that others who had succumbed to the same condition “could not swallow another bite of food because the names of their dead anchored their tongues” (6). Nanapush and Fleur—starving and stuck somewhere between alive and dead—symbolically consume the dead, demonstrating the way Erdrich characterizes the windigo as a marginal being that exists within the meeting of two realms.
This combined duality within one being is what links Pauline to the windigo figure. Because of her
