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.