Louise Erdrich positions herself as a contemporary tribal storyteller with her interlocking tales of her Chippewa people and her German-American ancestors. From the tribe's struggle to survive (
Tracks
), to the Depression (
The Beet Queen
), to the mid-twentieth century (
Love Medicine
), to contemporary times (
The Bingo Palace, Tales of Burning Love,
and
The Antelope Wise
), Erdrich sympathetically, compassionately, and realistically renders a portrait of people striving to survive governmental bureaucracy, Catholic Church intrusion, and climatic severity