Within the saga, Tracks is earliest chronologically, providing the back-story of several characters such as Lulu Lamartine and Marie Kashpaw who become prominent in the other novels.

As in many of her other novels, Erdrich employs the use of multiple first-person narratives to relate the events of the plot, alternating between Nanapush, a tribal patriarch, and Pauline, a young girl of mixed heritage.

Nanapush first meets Fleur in 1912 when he rescues her in the middle of winter and nurses her back to health from consumption – a recent epidemic among the Anishinaabe.

The next year, Fleur goes to the nearby town of Argus and takes a job at a butcher's shop, where she meets Pauline Puyat – the novel's second narrator.

Mysteriously, no one in town is harmed in the storm with the exception of the men who raped her – whose bodies are found locked in the freezer of the butcher shop, where they had taken refuge.

She becomes increasingly jealous of Fleur and her relationship, and in an attempt to break them up, feeds a sort of love potion to Eli and a younger girl named Sophie, inducing them to copulate passionately in the forest.

One major theme in Tracks is the tension between traditional Anishinaabe culture and beliefs and the Westernizing influence of white, Christian America.

As the plot unfolds, the narrator Nanapush is able to use his gift of speech to negotiate with government representatives on behalf of his people, but he often tells contradictory stories and even outright lies.

"[3] Literary critic Sheila Hassel Hughes further expands on this notion by commenting on Nanapush's duplicitous speech, which, "like that of the prophet or the trickster, works simultaneously to undermine the power of the privileged oppressor and to appeal for his or her re-alignment on the side of the oppressed.

Fleur must battle two fronts - not only the external conflict of white America that threatens to take away her ancestral land, but also internal betrayals from her own people – but her story is told at a distance by Nanapush and Pauline, both of whom are unreliable narrators.

Several of its chapters had been published previously as short stories, including: Tracks received mixed reviews at the time of its publication, with most critics identifying Erdrich's vivid language and narrative structure as either effective or not.

"[11] Similarly, The New Statesman and Society criticized the novel for being too vivid and heavy-handed with language, writing, "[Erdrich's] linguistic profusion veers toward sentimentalizing a people and their history.

"[12] In The New York Times Book Review, Jean Strouse found Tracks to be "a bit more didactic and wrought" than Erdrich's previous novels, and more political as well.

[13] Other reviewers responded positively to the novel, including Barbara Hoffert, who called it "splendid", and wrote that Erdrich's prose is "as sharp, glittering, and to the point as cut glass.