Maya Angelou made the statement, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” This quote makes note of one of the most basic human desires to find a space where they belong, a place to call home. When a person works hard to chase their dreams, it is often with the underlying goal to get to a place in their life where they truly feel they have made a home for themselves. This longing is only more intense among people who have lost their home, or have had it taken away from them. A prime example of this is the Native American people whose land was sacrificed by the people who invaded it. This is an experience that many colonized people are familiar, as most invaded people can connect …show more content…
The motif is present in Tracks with the effort of Pauline to find her place in the world, specifically in the Catholic Church, as well as with with Nanapush trying to make a home with his family despite the fact that the governments attempts to take his home, land, and family; in addition to this, Love Medicine presents the reader with many characters who suffered from this same affliction of lack-of-home such as the characters of King, who feel out-of-place with his family and in his home in the city, Nector, who mad a home with his wife but is constantly drawn to his old lover, Lulu, and even Lulu herself, who is uprooted throughout the course of the novel (Erdrich, Tracks 2, 137. Love Medicine 42, 136, 278.) In addition to these examples from Louise Erdrich, looking at the struggles of different characters in Green Grass, Running Water written by Thomas King will prove that this theme of unhomliness isn’t just present in one author’s works, but the genre as a