N. Scott Momaday 1934-2024

 N. Scott Momaday, poet, novelist, playwright, artist, essayist, scholar and teacher, died in January.  He is best known for his first novel, House Made of Dawn, which won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  His father was Kiowa, as a child he was given a Kiowa name and identified as Kiowa, although he lived among and studied other American Indian peoples.

House Made of Dawn concerns a mixed blood Indian returning from the multiple traumas of World War II to the pueblo, trying to find his place in the modern and traditional worlds.  In telling this journey, Momaday uses both his knowledge of the written literary tradition and the traditional ways and stories of an oral culture. 

With this novel, Momaday revealed and defined a central dilemma of contemporary Native people: how to make a life in the often contradictory "two worlds" of modernity and their traditions.  This would become the model and inspiration for a slightly younger generation of Native writers who burst on the scene in the late 1970s through the early 1990s.  Each in their own way would also employ this dynamic of modern literary approaches and traditional storytelling and beliefs, in part to explore and honor traditional Native cultures and its point of view, particularly towards the natural world. 

  Leslie Marmon Silko is the most obvious heir: her debut novel Ceremony also follows an Indian soldier, this time a Vietnam vet, coping with the difficulties of returning home and finding himself. Others were direct and indirect beneficiaries of Momaday's example and success, including novelists Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, James Welch and Michael Dorris, as well as poets and storytellers Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Paula Gunn Allen, and many others.

These explorations are multiple: using literary form and traditional content, expanding literary forms to include traditional forms--all sorts of combinations beyond categories to create new stories that honor and expand the old.  The past is never left out, it is (as Faulkner articulated) always present.  The Native tradition is particularly important for its living attitudes towards the natural world and its relationships to human beings and culture.  Those attitudes and beliefs can be adapted and absorbed in our contemporary world--in fact, they must be, if the past and the present and the eternal itself are to have a future.

Momaday was a champion of the Native oral tradition, and he taught the subject for many years at various universities.  But he was also steeped in written literature, particularly American fiction and poetry of the 19th and 20th centuries.  His detailed descriptions of the landscape use literature (including modern) in expressing and interpreting what the indigenous senses observe.   

Momaday believed in the spoken word today as well, and he read several times at the Humboldt State University near me.  I've seen the tape of one such reading and attended another one.  He had a bearing of great dignity, a precise pronunciation and an uninflected voice of great depth and power.

  The reading I attended was in one of the larger venues on campus, with Momaday at a lectern on a stage. He had hardly begun when the power suddenly went out.  He paused, calmed the crowd and continued anyway, so that deep, deliberate voice came out of the semi-darkness with no need for amplification, and with dramatic effect.  

Afterwards he signed my copies of The Names, (A Memoir) and The Man Made of Words, a collection of essays, stories and poems.  The essays touched upon the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Emily Dickinson (he studied her poems for a year, in manuscript), Teilhard de Chardin and Lewis Thomas, Georgia O'Keefe and Jay Silverheels, as well as his grandmother's stories.  He included observations from his travels in Russia and Germany as well as the American West.  

I think my favorite of his books that I've read is his second novel, The Ancient Child.  It uses his lifelong fascination with the legends of Billy the Kid to explore planes of myth of the past and the contemporary world.  It is at once a traditional novel with contemporary and semi-historical characters, a kind of personal anthology and an exploration of storytelling itself.  It has humor, too.  Momaday identified with the bear, saying he had bear power and occasionally turned into a bear.  But there was some Coyote in him, too.

R.I.P. Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen was a friend and contemporary of Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron, but his writing career was amazingly different and very individual to him. His career began as an expatriate writer and part-time spy in Paris (where he helped found The Paris Review) and ended as a Zen Monk in upstate New York.  In between it took him to Africa, the high Himalayas, the Pine Ridge reservation and Antarctica.

 He became most noted for writing nonfiction about nature and travel, but at considerable personal cost (financial and otherwise) he wrote about the plight of Native Americans (and specifically what could well be the most conspicuous injustice of 20th century America, the continuing incarceration of Leonard Peltier), and then about his Buddhist practice.

He also wrote novels, the form of writing that was most important to him.  More than 30 books all told, in a long, rich and singular life that ended at the age of 86.

He left behind books that will be important for whatever uncertain future books may have.  Personally I revere his The Snow Leopard (and its companion Nine-Headed Dragon River), In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (and its companion Indian Country.)  He writes beautifully of North American shorebirds in The Wind Birds and of Antarctica in End of the Earth.  And the list goes on.  I first became aware of him in college when I read parts of The Tree Where Man Was Born in the New Yorker.  It was a daunting yet inspiring and instructive work in certain ways for a fledgling writer to read.

But he is such a unique writer that even the most ardent readers of some of his books may well be immune to others.  Of his novels, I've read and admired Raditzer and especially At Play in the Fields of the Lord.  But I have yet to yield to the charms of the Watson series of fictions he worked and reworked in recent years, including his National Book Award winning Shadow Country (which made him the only writing to win this award in both fiction and non-fiction.)

The official publication date of his latest and now last novel is this coming Tuesday.  It's called In Paradise.  

Here's his New York Times obituary. And here is a New York Times Magazine article with interviews during his last days. May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism
by Bradley G. Shreve
University of Oklahoma Press

The usual narrative of Native American activism begins with Alcatraz and the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s. But scholar Bradley Shreve makes a persuasive case that activism was rooted in earlier decades, and specifically that much of its character was established through an organization founded in the early 1960s: the National Indian Youth Council. Moreover, the NIYC persists to this day, advocating principles that have become central to Native activism of all kinds: “treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, self-determination and cultural preservation.”

Shreve’s thorough account is enlivened by great personalities, from the legendary Darcy McNickle (who spanned the New Deal and the New Frontier) and Sol Tax (creator of “action anthropology”) to NIYC stalwarts Clyde Warrior, Bill and Karen Rickard, Shirley Hill Witt, Mel Thom, Gerald Wilkerson and others.

NIYC came of age in the Civil Rights and antiwar era. “Like other student activists of the time,” Shreve writes, “they steadfastly believed in the possibility of a moral universe and that it was their duty to make it a reality.” But they were also notably different. Unlike many Civil Rights youth groups, NIYC was started and run by students, and women were among its early leaders. Unlike some other prominent Native groups, its members were rooted in reservation and rural communities (mostly in the West) rather than cities, but it pioneered intertribal activism. It suffered all the convulsions and confusions of other activist groups that eventually fell apart, but NIYC managed to change and survive as a useful and innovative organization.

Though it was formed in a rebellious and youth-oriented spirit, NIYC kept faith with tribal elders, and made reviving traditional knowledge a key goal from the beginning. There were non-Natives elders, too, who were convinced that Native knowledge could benefit society as a whole, and they became part of the mutual education of decades.

It made its first big splash with the “fish-ins” in Washington State, primarily organized by Bruce Wilkie (Makah) and Hank Adams (Assiniboine), protesting the arrests of tribal members exercising their rights to traditional and subsistence fishing as guaranteed by treaties. But in its half-century or so, the organization also pioneered Native education, job training and placement, and defense of sacred sites.

Shreve’s chapters are skillfully crafted to tell an absorbing story, as individuals grapple with issues reflecting the unique history and circumstances of American Indians, from the Teddy Roosevelt and FDR eras through the tumultuous 60s and 70s. This book is informative and judicious (with good notes and sources) but enlivened by detail and reminiscence as well as point of view. It’s a deft and highly readable survey of an important but neglected slice of history, clarifying important connections to the present.

A Guide to the Indian Tribes of the Pacific Northwest
By Robert H. Ruby, John A. Brown and Cary C. Collins
University of Oklahoma Press

This is also an important reference work that includes up-to-date information that changes the story it tells.  Part of the invaluable Civilization of the American Indian Series at University of Oklahoma Press, this third edition is substantially different from the 1992 second edition, with references as recent as 2010.  It is still organized as descriptions of all known tribes of the present states of Oregon and Washington, plus some with origins partly or wholly in British Columbia, and partly in other states such as California.

The history sections were drawn from oral accounts by elders of the tribes involved (where possible) as well as standard sources.  These have been refined for this edition, as there is more to say in the contemporary life and culture section for many tribes.  While some of these sections sound as if they were pasted in from tribal publicity, it's undeniable that both contemporary cultural awareness--grown over the past generation especially--plus the financial resources from gaming have made substantial differences.

 For example, after a complex and often dismal post-contact history, the reconstituted Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde became the wealthiest tribe in Oregon, with a net worth of $100 million in 1998, due to the most successful casino in the region.  This has enabled not only employment for some 1700 people, but a number of other companies such as Spirit Mountain Environmental Services, as well as a health and wellness center, tribal archives and library, language classes, active attempts to reclaim cultural objects, and millions of dollars in charitable donations.

The Kalispel Tribe of Indians of Washington State and northern Idaho have established the Indigenous Learning Company, the first Native-owned Internet publishing company that published web-based educational materials--just some of what gaming has helped finance.  But even those tribes without their own casinos have established thriving cultural and environmental programs, and nurtured college graduates and professionals in many fields.  The persistent problems on Indian reservations in every part of the country are well known, but this part of the story isn't often told, especially in a total context of tribal history (which includes summaries of relevant treaties, court cases and government activities.)

In the late 90s I spent several days at a Seventh Generation Fund conference in Seattle, in the company of representatives of some of these tribes (as well as from elsewhere.)   It was an amazing experience for me, so naturally I looked up the tribes of the people I remembered most, such as the Makah and the host tribe, the Skokomish--in their section I saw a photo of the flamboyant Bruce Miller and reference to the comparatively low-key Vi Hilbert, both cultural leaders who were major figures in that conference.  Vi Hilbert was one of the most impressive people I've ever met.  It was like meeting the Dalai Lama.

But while I missed hearing more of the voices of such leaders and elders in this book, surely the book's value is a great deal in bringing together in one volume these succinct summaries of all these tribes, including the many that no longer exist as tribal entities.  Just to sense the scope of Native life in this region is a major effect, and now to see the stories move into the twenty-first century.

I think perhaps the cover is a little deceptive, though.  A number of the tribes most associated with this style of carving--the Haida, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, Coast Salish, Westcoast, etc.--are outside the scope of this book, being located farther north in Canada and associated islands.  This also makes the title a little deceptive, although these tribes are often referred to as Northwest Coast.

Otherwise, the accounts in this book are individually and cumulatively powerful.  It is an outstanding reference book, that builds upon the impressive achievements of the first edition and is inspiring not only for the stories it tells, but for the dedicated scholarship and years of effort that went into making it.

The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Viking

If somehow this civilization survives much longer, I expect that Leslie Marmon Silko will be judged a major American writer--especially because in order to survive, it’s likely this civilization will need to pay attention to her perspective. While Ceremony, her first novel, is her most familiar (partly because its handy brevity makes it teachable), her most important work is probably her powerful epic novel, Almanac of the Dead. Twenty years after it was published, it still has a lot of truth to tell about America today.

From her short stories and poems to her 1999 novel, Garden of the Dunes, Silko has been a stubbornly original voice. One of the baby boomer generation of Native novelists and poets that broke into the American mainstream, she is now an Elder. So this book is called a memoir, and though it is revelatory, it’s not like any memoir you’ve read before.

Though observations about her mixed-ancestry past float through the narrative, it is focused on the present, and her home at the edge of the desert outside Tucson. Its major characters are rattlesnakes, rainclouds, Star Beings, macaws, grasshoppers and rocks—particularly those flecked with turquoise. Her references include tribal wisdom and old stories, and the language of various sciences and metaphysical systems. She comes across evidence of generations of Native settlement every day, while the 21st century is present in plastic garbage and the steady intrusion of McMansions. She realizes that her old house will be overrun soon after she’s gone.

She sometimes seems to stretch into eccentricity, yet some strange stories--that snake oil works, that bees recognize people—come from history and science. There are sentences that shine like turquoise in the sun, but much of the value here is cumulative.

Those mining this memoir for specific secrets of her writing will probably be disappointed (though she does write while listening to Santana, sometimes through earphones.) "I make myself a fictional character so I can write about myself,” Silko says in the preface. And so we see her nearly always in solitude, though also nearly always in motion. People in her daily life are barely mentioned except in relationship to the world within walking distance of her house, and within the house and its perimeter. Here is the center of memory, history, family, geology, spirituality, coincidence, causality, the laws and mysteries of the cosmos, time itself. Because here is where it is being lived, where she is living it, and it is living her.

Everything returns to the dailiness of her relationship with the life of the natural world around her. It is the ground of her being, and the ground of all being on this Earth. That to me is what this book is all about.

Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary Mystic
By Michael F. Steltenkamp
University of Oklahoma Press

Thanks to Black Elk Speaks by poet John Neihardt, and to a lesser extent, The Sacred Pipe by professor Joseph Epes Brown, Black Elk has become one of the most famous American Indians in history. He was not a chief or a great warrior. The books are about his spiritual visions and beliefs. Like many, Michael Steltenkamp became fascinated with Native American spirituality and the figure of Black Elk. Like only a few, he studied with Joseph Epes Brown in college, and afterwards journeyed to Black Elk's native grounds, becoming a teacher in the Pine Ridge Reservation. Eventually he met Black Elk's surviving children, and claims to have become a confidant of his daughter in her old age. He learned of Black Elk's life after the period that Neihardt wrote about, when Nicholas Black Elk was known as Nick, a Jesuit-trained Catholic catechist or teacher who served as a kind of lay priest and missionary in Indian communities. Learning about Black Elk's work influenced Steltekamp to himself become a Jesuit priest.

Steltekamp wrote a book about Black Elk's later period as a Catholic cathecist (at the behest of Black Elk's daughter and others, he asserts) and with this new book he attempts a more comprehensive chronicle of Nicholas Black Elk's entire life. It is cast less as a biography than a scholarly work, in which he uses his sources and research to test the validity of what other books say--primarily Neihardt's. The impression is of fairness and care, though the Jesuits almost always come out the better. His prose becomes emotional, even scornful, when correcting misimpressions of Jesuits and Black Elk's Catholicism, and there are other passages that are at best passive-aggressive. His facts in these instances might be correct. But these sections and passages support strong skepticism that he has escaped bias. This then seems less definitive than a modern Jesuit brief on the outstanding questions about Black Elk.

Scholars I've read do agree that Black Elk, like the prophet of the Ghost Dance known as Wovoka who for most of his life was called Jack Wilson, was a proselytizing Christian, paid for that work. Both were obviously influenced by Christian doctrines and imagery. The argument seems to be whether Black Elk (or Wilson) repudiated his Native religious beliefs in favor of Christianity, or became disenchanted with Christianity and returned to earlier Native beliefs. This plays out in the argument over whether Black Elk primarily used the imagery and stories of Native traditions to explain Christianity to other Indians (as Steltekamp seems to say) or uses the imagery of Christianity to help explain the Native beliefs that were fast dying at the time (as scholar Alice Beck Kehoe suggests in her study, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization, Holt 1989.)

But in a more general way I don't think that Steltekamp or Kehoe would dispute that Black Elk (and Wovoka) wove together elements of both, finding the commonalities, creating a synthesis of imagery and even practice. What made Black Elk Speaks so significant was the revival of disappearing Native beliefs about the relationship of humans to the rest of nature and to existence that were lacking in industrial culture, and in the prevailing versions of Christianity. Whatever the intentions of Black Elk or Neihardt, what resulted was perhaps overly romanticized, but it was the foundation of a new Native spirituality (as Vine Deloria, Jr. writes) as well as an alternative religious approach that both Native and non-Native Americans can consider and adopt or adapt. Deloria acknowledged the uncertainty of how much Neihardt there was in Black Elk Speaks, but found the question in the end to be unimportant in view of its effects.

So I would prefer to leave this book for scholars to test. As prose about the times and places of Nicholas Black Elk's life it can provide moments of interesting reading. But it just doesn't seem to me to be definitive even as history, without other scholarly reassurance that it isn't tainted by special pleading. In particular, I find troubling the differences in this account and the few pages in Kehoe about this period in Black Elk's life. They bear in particular on his relationship to the Jesuits, and their attitudes towards him.

I'd be more interested in a book that uses Nicholas Black Elk to discuss the issues of spiritual traditions within the Native community as well as the synthesis of Native and non-Native beliefs in our common community. While aspects of this book inevitably bear upon those questions, that daunting task was not its focus.

These provocative essays by Paul Chaat Smith on American Indians in contemporary culture, reviewed below.

Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong
Paul Chaat Smith
University of Minnesota Press 189 pages

Paul Chaat Smith is an enrolled Comanche, veteran of the American Indian Movement in the 60s and 70s, and now an associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. His main interest is contemporary artists, and many of the essays in this volume were originally linked to particular exhibitions—though the subjects range well beyond art. As for what the title means, “it’s a book title, folks, not to be taken literally,” he writes. “Of course I don’t mean everything. Just Most Things. And the You really means We, as in all of Us.” So this book should be of interest to Native readers as well as non-Natives.

Smith has a fluid style, contemporary and anecdotal as well as incisive, so these pieces are easy to read. He’s big on irony (“Alas, it’s practically the only thing I know”) so there’s edgy humor. This is a collection, so his opinions, observations and bits of autobiography are repeated, though in different ways. That works pretty well: you won’t forget what he really thinks about Dances With Wolves or his AIM experiences. Among the fascinating topics he takes on several times is the late 19th and early 20th century transition, when American Natives lost the last of their land, with some joining the Wild West show and all becoming defined by the movies, including a very early epic about the massacre at Wounded Knee, starring actual participants on both sides. (The soldiers were a little worried that the Indians were going to show up for the battle scene with loaded rifles.)

He can be provocative: “Generally speaking, white people who are interested in Indians are not very bright.” He worries that Indians have bought into a limiting self-image. He’s more interested in conceptual art and the installation art of James Luna, for example, who plays with traditional forms and the contemporary world, to interrogate common images and self-images of Indians today. Although Smith writes with intimate honesty about the National Museum of the American Indian, he wonders when contemporary Indian artists will see their work exhibited alongside other contemporary art.

He’s not advocating assimilation either. He argues that Indian peoples have always absorbed change into their cultures. His basic message for all might be this: “Good intentions aren’t enough; our circumstances require more critical thinking and less passion, guilt and victimization.”

Even with my limited experience, I am still often surprised at the simplistic views many otherwise intelligent non-Natives have of Native peoples. Non-Native readers who've had some authentic acquaintance with Native neighbors are more likely to appreciate this sophisticated treatment. Probably Native readers will find it intriguing. Not everyone is going to agree with Smith’s views, but they should start some interesting arguments.

"Conservation Refugees" highlights a conflict and a situation that may be surprising: efforts to save wilderness by evicting the Indigenous peoples who live there. This informative and provocative book is reviewed below.

Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples
by Mark Dowie
The MIT Press

It's become common to think of Indigenous peoples as the first environmentalists, but while the reality is more complex, the basic link between the land and the people who have long been part of its ecologies is strong and true. In the late 1980s, when the South American rainforests were a global environmental concern, one of the celebrities making the case--Sting, who started the Rainforest Foundation--made common cause with Indigenous tribes, particularly the Kayapo of Brazil, and stated the principle: the way to save the rainforests is to save the Indigenous peoples who live in them.

Some twenty years later, this is still something of a radical principle, according to the history that journalist Mark Dowie relates in this book. Citing situations in Africa and Asia as well as South and North America, large environmental organizations in league with international development powerhouses have too often attempted to save wilderness areas by moving Indigenous peoples out. The repeated result has been to impoverish and destroy these peoples (with countless individual tragedies) while often enough also failing to really preserve a healthy ecology.

Dowie doesn't dismiss the problems. He acknowledges harmful practices of some Indigenous groups, but argues that it is better to negotiate changes in these practices than to arrogantly dispossess entire peoples, creating these "conservation refugees." It is that arrogance--including that of a largely white environmentalist establishment--that contributes to the misunderstanding and suspicion that has divided two groups that should be natural allies: Native peoples and environmentalists. Dowie argues as well that the idea of wilderness as meaning human-free is another cause of these conservation tragedies.

"One can only wonder what Yosemite would look like today were the descendants of Tenaya still thriving in the valley, sharing the native wisdom accumulated over 4,000 years in the ecosystem, and sharing, as equal partners in the stewardship and management of the park," he writes. "What would be the state of its biotic wealth? Would the grizzly bear and bighorn sheep still roam its meadows and canyons?"

Such observations are backed by reporting in that difficult midrange between the specifically descriptive and the generally conclusive. Readers have to be willing to navigate the acronyms and statistics, but the cumulative effect is a compelling history of global failures and successes in saving the last natural ecosystems, and saving the last Indigenous peoples. The stories are complex as reality, and as human.

Economic development, national and international politics all come into play. But for all the tragedy there is also growing awareness, and sophistication in finding common ground and developing partnerships. There is also the assertion of principle, such as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the text of which is included in this book.

Conservation Refugees is informative, enlightening and provocative, highlighting a key but neglected feature of a crucial set of problems of planetary significance.

Review: The Truth About Stories by Thomas King

The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative
By Thomas King
University of Minnesota Press

Thomas King is a Native writer who teaches in Canada and published most of his fiction while living there, including his novels, Medicine River (made into an obscure but amusing movie starring—who else—Graham Greene), Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, all of which are, among other things, pretty funny.

But he was born in Sacramento of Cherokee parentage and he’s best known locally as the author of a short story first published in the 1980s called “Joe Painter and the Deer Island Massacre,” only around here we know it as the Indian Island Massacre. This infamous moment in North Coast history was mostly only whispered about then.

As a university teacher and scholar, King is fully capable of presenting facts and analyzes in non-fictional form. But in this book he simultaneously demonstrates that the story form not only communicates fact and analysis with different subtlety and depth, but can be an essential part of the meaning itself.

“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are,” he writes. That we learn primarily by stories is widely asserted these days, but King is very skilled at telling stories, and his adaptations of a Native storytelling style helps this book treat some old subjects in a different way, producing some “aha” moments for both those familiar with these issues and those new to them.

He contrasts a Native creation story in which animals cooperate in contributing elements of a new world with the Biblical version of authoritarian hierarchies, and shows how these myths are supported by how they’re told. He explores the complexities of identity and societal expectations, and narrative strategies in some contemporary Native literature that adapt traditional honor songs. He does all this and more with a deceptively light touch.

“You know what’s wrong with this world?” asks a character in Truth and Bright Water. “Nobody has a sense of humour.” “Humour” is Canadian for “funny,” and it’s essential to King’s method and point of view. Though a number of Native writers employ humor—including irony, satire and paradox-- (some conspicuously, like Sherman Alexie) it’s been King’s trademark. He happily mentions Will Rogers, the great American humorist of the 1930s, who (like King) was born Cherokee.

But King’s main source of humor is the trickster figure of Coyote, who makes several direct appearances here, as well as inspiring a lot of his tone and narrative moves. But he leaves out my favorite of the Coyote stories he tells, in a poem called “Coyote Learns to Whistle.” Weasel tells Coyote he can whistle if he ties his tail in a tight knot, and Coyote ties his so tight the tail breaks off. The poem ends: “Elwood told that STORY to the Rotary Club/in town/ and everyone laughed and says what/a STUPID Coyote./ And that’s the problem, you know,/seeing the DIFFERENCE between stupidity/and greed.”

King also writes about his project to photograph American Indian writers, contrasting it with 19th century photos of the Vanishing Indian. It probably would complicate his point--those romantic old photos had to falsify the imagery to comport with expectations of what Indians look like, but those images have lasted, versus photographing Indian writers today, when they look pretty much like everybody else--if he noted that part of his project was photographing these writers wearing Lone Ranger masks. (Still, the Lone Ranger appears on the cover.)

With a little autobiography and some sharp observations, “The Truth About Stories” is seductive, entertaining and sneakily profound. Also a nice size—under 200 pages, in an easy-to-hold paperback.

The American Discovery of Europe
By Jack D. Forbes
Illinois University Press

Did Columbus discover America, or did America discover Columbus? Did Columbus meet Native Americans for the first time in 1492 when he sailed the ocean blue—an event marked today by Columbus Day—or did he meet two American Indians 15 years earlier, in Ireland? And did that meeting inspire him to make his voyages?

That’s one of the contentions and suggestions that run counter to the history we think we know in this book by Jack D. Forbes, professor emeritis of Native American Studies and Anthropology at UC Davis. How did these Indians get to Galway Bay? Forbes marshals evidence to show that Natives of the North and South Americas had impressive maritime traditions and skills, and knowledge of the strong ocean currents that led to Ireland, among other places. They may have been following migrating American sea turtles there for centuries. Forbes mentions in particular the Red Paint People from Maine who left evidence of their sea travels and culture in Norway and elsewhere.

Native seafarers from the Caribbean and the East Coast of North America are most likely to have made it to Europe, by design or stormy accident, though Inuits probably got to Scandinavia and perhaps the British Isles. Forbes believes that tales of mermaids, mer-men and of “fin-folk” in Scotland and Ireland could be based on Inuits who wore the same skins as covered their kayaks, and seemed to be one with them. He cites evidence of Arctic culture in early England.

Later on, before slaves were brought to America, Native Americans were taken to Europe as slaves. For a century or so after Columbus, there may have been more Indians in Europe and Africa than Europeans over here. Forbes suggests that over the centuries Native genes became part of the pool in Africa and all over western and eastern Europe.

This book is not the only one that calls into question much conventional wisdom, from the actual age of humanity and the theory of migration from Asia to America across the Bering land bridge, to the idea that Native Americans were isolated, didn’t have seaworthy boats, including sails. Vine Deloria, Jr. is especially caustic on several of these topics in Red Earth, White Lies, for example. While Forbes is not as entertaining a writer as Deloria, he engages in careful and original scholarship, and brings a Native eye to what non-Natives miss in the available evidence. (There’s ethnicity in science, too, Deloria points out.)

Much of the relevant evidence for any theory on these topics is often pretty scanty, and as I know from previous reading (like The First Americans by Adovasio and Page) the state of actual knowledge about pre-history and early migration, as well as these aspects of history, is precarious and messy. And “established” conclusions are jealously guarded, not to be confused by new facts. So the best message from Forbes’ book for non-scholars may be: don’t be too sure you know what you think you know.

No, it's not Egyptian or Mayan. This ancient magical cat effigy was found in southern Florida. From 'Hero, Hawk and Open Hand" 

HERO, HAWK AND OPEN HAND: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South
edited by Richard F. Townsend. Yale University Press, in Association with the Art Institute of Chicago. 288 pages, 9x12. cloth $60, paper $34.95.

The sheer number of gorgeous images in this book is breathtaking. But for many readers I suspect the most astonishing image might be a fairly simple one on page 17: a rendering of a orderly semicircle of structures facing a river, it is a city in Louisiana----in 1500 B.C. This book reveals Native American civilizations rivaling what we know of the Maya and Inca, but in the heartland of North America.

In the south and Midwest a series of sophisticated cultures left behind artifacts and even structures that we are just now beginning to study and understand. For example, the Hopewell site in Ohio, where "the most dramatic" sacred structures were "geometric in form and combined circular, oval, square, octagonal, or other elements in compositions covering hundreds of acres."

The artistry of the artifacts presented here is amazing, and this book has a generous selection of large, excellent photographs. But the prose is equally good: intelligent but intelligible, often with an interesting narrative. Even the occasional semiotic language is used as vocabulary rather than jargon. (In addition to editor Townsend, there are essays by 18 other scholars.)

Not only does this book explore so much about these next-to-unknown cultures, but it provides an exemplary context of explaining a worldview shared by many Native cultures and peoples. So it is a terrific introduction to Native cultures of the past and the present, and why these cultures are particularly important to explore now.

Although this is a scholarly presentation based on a traveling art exhibit, it is pretty graceful about integrating contemporary Native views and information. It's only in recent years that scholars have taken the testimony of contemporary Native Americans about their own culture as seriously as they take their own theories about old artifacts that survived.

For all of these reasons I count this book as instantly one of my most treasured.

Native Universe: Voices of Indian America
Edited by Gerald McMaster and Clifford Trafzer
National Museum of the American Indian/National Geographic
320 pages;$40

In 2002, when Chickasaw astronaut John Herrington became the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to orbit the earth, he carried aboard the shuttle Endeavour a Hopi ceramic pot with a traditional corn motif. It was made by a contemporary Hopi artist and mechanical engineer, Al Qoyawayma, who has also patented internal guidance systems.

This is the new American Indian reality that this book portrays. It's the inaugural volume celebrating the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington this fall, and its themes corresponds to the those of the first exhibition: "Our Universes," "Our Peoples," "Our Lives." Essays and poems by John Mohawk, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Wilma Mankiller, Linda Hogan, Victor Montejo, Sherman Alexie and others, plus historical photos and documents, provide context for lavish and evocative photographs of ancient and contemporary art and artifacts.

The presence of the past and the power of the timeless in the world of time that characterize Indian America are illustrated here in many ways. So essays on the political and cultural importance of the Alcatraz occupation coexist with a description of the Navajo First Laugh Ceremony. Yet this volume reminds us that the oldest cultures on the continent are still the least understood.

Perhaps the new National Museum, largely designed and administered by American Indians, will play a leading role in changing that. Then perhaps Allan Houser, for example, will finally be considered a great American sculptor, instead of solely a prominent Indian sculptor. And the important American tribal stories, so different in important ways from European myth, may be absorbed into our common cultural cornucopia, equal to the tales of Greece and Iceland. If so, this volume may also contribute, by attracting attention to the Museum, and enlarging upon the experience of travelers when they return home. It is also ably edited to perform that role on its own.

Notes on a couple of recent books I enjoyed...

The Pueblo Imagination: Landscape and Memory in the Photography of Lee Marmon
Beacon Press. 157 pages, $35.


Lee Marmon is a Laguna Pueblo Indian who has been taking photographs of Laguna with professional cameras since 1946. If you've seen the poster of the elderly Indian man wearing Converse All Stars (“White Man’s Moccasins”,the image on this book's cover), you've seen Marmon's work.

This collection of his work since 1946 would be worthwhile if it simply documented the ceremonies, buildings, landscapes, faces and figures-what had changed and what did not---over more than a half century. But this volume is so much more. These are dazzling, beautiful photographs, mostly in black and white. The stark magic of the Southwestern landscape was captured in the abstract paintings of artists like Georgia O'Keefe and Max Ernst. But black and white photos are inherently abstract, since they turn the world of color into shades and grains. Put a master photographer who knows his subject so intimately together with this landscape and you get one astonishing image after another.

Every page is a different experience. There are wonderful faces, dramatic landscapes, close-ups that let you feel the grain of old wood. There's a different feeling in every photo,and the feelings can be surprising, like the strange joy in "Girls at a clothesline," with white clothes flying against a wisp of cloud, yet in the foreground is a harsh and radiant edge of stone. Or the strange sinister appearance of black clad priests against the whitened adobe geometry.

There are a smaller number of color photos, just as accomplished and evocative. There's some prose by Marmon's daughter, writer Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as by writers Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz. But it's the photographs that are important here. They draw you in, and your eyes and heart expand. If you know someone who loves the mystery and arid majesty of the Southwest, or relishes authentic and beautiful images of American Indian life, this book makes an elegant gift for Christmas or any other occasion. If that person is you, do yourself a favor. You won't have any trouble entering these images, and you can stay in them for a long time. The secrets are there.


Writing on Air
by David Rothenberg (Editor), Wandee J. Pryor (Editor)
MIT Press

I love looking at clouds. But I don't often get the chance to read about them. "The sun, too, is a burning cloud..." writes John P. O'Grady in his essay in this collection. The theme of air includes atmospheres of various kinds, breathing (and not being able to), flying through the air (and what flight has and hasn't meant versus human dreams about it), wind, song and sound carried by air...all kinds of neat stuff.

There are a few fairly well known bloomers in this florilegium but most of the writers are probably unfamiliar. There's verse by Lori Anderson, but no Laurie Anderson (though her "From the Air" riff would be perfect for this volume.) But mostly that only adds to the feeling of discovery. Unlike some anthologies, the selections don't seem like parts of something else; each is intriguing and usually satisfying. Just the right length to read easily one at a time and let them fill your sense of wonder with oxygen. It's playfully serious, thoughtful fun. This is a book that opens your mind and lets some fresh air in.


...and one I sort of enjoyed but didn't like...

Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid
edited by Robert J. Sternberg
Yale University Press 272 pages, $18

When you think about it, the topic of why smart people can be so stupid---or at least how they can---is a central motif in a whole lot of storytelling, from Greek tragedy through grand opera to slapstick comedy: from Oedipus to "The Blue Angel" and the Marx Brothers running a college. It is also a central problem addressed by various forms of psychology applied to people who are not mentally ill---neurotics, say, rather than schizophrenics. You might even say it's a major moral concern of many religions.

Literature's answers include hubris, obsession, weakness, social arrogance and people who love too much. Psychology talks variously about complexes (including one that takes its name from Oedipus), inflation, projection, displacement, even group and self-hypnosis. Religion posits sin, including the seven deadlies.

So what's remarkable about this new anthology is that virtually none of these things are even mentioned. It's emotionless in more than one sense of the word. For a book put together by a psychologist, it seems striking to me that Freud is referenced once, for a study on childhood development (though "Forrest Gump" gets four citations for an analysis extending through some 13 pages) and Jung not at all. But then, the kind of contemporary psychology that is used in some of these essays is not to my taste. It's mainly the reductive, mechanistic, classify this, apply that drug school.

Instead, the useful parts apply logical analysis in the old ordinary language philosophy way to the terms (although I'm sure the authors would prefer to call it deconstruction. Ordinary language philosophy no longer gets tenure). What do we mean by "smart people"? What do we mean by "stupid?" Do we mean smart people who do unintelligent things, or smart people who act foolishly? (Sometimes one, sometimes the other.)

There are some wonderful examples of smart people being stupid and/or foolish, especially applied to scientific howlers, like Jean Joseph Leverrier, a mid-19th century mathematician who dazzled the world by applying strict Newtonian physics to perturbations in the orbit of Uranus to correctly predict the existence of Neptune, and its precise location (although he got a little lucky with that.) Suffused with the fame he accrued, he then went on to apply the same kind of calculations to the wobbly orbit of Mercury to predict the existence and location closer to the sun of the planet Vulcan. Despite failing to find it for some 17 years, Leverrier never conceded error.

It took Einstein to explain Mercury's orbit with a new non-Newtonian theory of relativity. And of course, it took Gene Roddenberry to eventually discover the planet Vulcan in a completely different part of the universe, and impishly populated it with a race that stuck to logic and suppressed any idea that emotion---like pride, or a taste for the warm sun of fame--could influence them: a whole planet of smart beings who could be so stupid.

One answer to the title question that emerges is that smart people are often "domain-dependent," that is, mostly smart about one thing, and mostly stupid about others. This, along with the other explanations offered, don't explain very much. Even domain dependence is given a more sophisticated explanation by Jung's theories of types, and how the inferior functions work. The unconscious, the shadow, even the seven deadly sins, offer richer grounds for explanations or at least discussion than the mechanistic mumblings in this volume. By my lights then, a whole bunch of sometimes entertaining smart people have collaborated on an essentially stupid book.

Three New Good Books Nobody in Manhattan Will Notice

Saul Steinberg did a famous drawing, reproduced in posters that hung on many walls, of America as seen from Manhattan. It was about perspective: Manhattan districts, "midtown," "downtown," "upper east side" with separate characteristics and well-known metaphorical meaning were large and foregrounded, while the rest of the country was remote, tiny and broadly clichéd.

I don't know how many such drawings Steinberg himself did, but it seemed in subsequent years that every city had its own poster version: the country seen from Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Atlanta... Our near environs absorb us, everything about them is important, while the significance of events elsewhere lack relevance and especially, interest.

Which is a long way of saying that I've got three books here of some importance but little specific interest in San Francisco, which is where the audience for most of my published book reviews reside. Nor are they likely to interest the buzz mavens of Manhattan.

Fortunately, with my huge international web log audience here, I can recommend these new books without fear of being Steinbergered.

Two involve national phenomena as manifested in the American Midwest, where I spent some years as a student and "what's it all about?" wanderer.

DISSENT IN THE HEARTLAND: THE SIXTIES AT INDIANA UNIVERSITY by Mary Ann Wyncoff (Indiana University Press) is a thorough and well-written account of this complex and volatile period that changed the country, as well as its universities, including Indiana.

Most accounts of the anti-war movement, the student movement and all the other political, social and cultural movements of those years are by the major players, or those who experienced them at well-known universities or power centers. But all this didn't happen just in Cambridge, Berkeley, New York, Washington and Ann Arbor. In fact it had even greater and more revolutionary effects in places like Indiana.

These were places, as Wyncoff shows, where communities were very conservative and students were mostly apolitical. Yet the 60s fostered dramas just as important to the people they affected here as the more thoroughly reported happenings in the aforementioned places. Wyncoff's book is better written with more historical and social context than many of these other accounts, most of which have been pretty much forgotten anyway.

This book conveys the flavor as well as the substance of those days, while remaining restrained enough for contemporary audiences. If you're looking for thought-provoking perspective as well as a readable return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, DISSENT IN THE HEARTLAND is an excellent choice.

James B. LaGrand's INDIAN METROPOLIS: NATIVE AMERICANS IN CHICAGO 1945-75 from neighboring University of Illinois Press is a history of a specific instance of another kind of national phenomenon, this one occurring in slow motion and largely unseen. It was the migration of American Indians to cities. Though they've become a significant presence in a number of cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Minneapolis as well as Chicago, this apparently is one of the first systematic chronicles of the causes and effects, and the human stories within this story.

Non-Natives seem to like to think of Indians as phantom stereotypes, still living in vanished wilderness and hunting non-existent buffalo. Indians are the last ethnic group to be treated as objects and symbols. Not that the traditional Indian way of life or the relations between non-Natives and Natives doesn't yield rich symbolism, touching otherwise hidden regions of common psyche and collective unconscious.

But Indians are also among the smallest "minority groups." Put that together with the deep symbolic power attached to their image with no thought at all to their current reality, and you get the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves tomahawk chop and the grinning logo of the Cleveland Indians, where you would never get away with the Washington Niggers or Atlanta Wetbacks or the grinning pop-eyed logo of the Cleveland Watermellon Eaters.

But if memory serves, something like half of the Indian population now resides in cities. Smack in the middle of this period of migration, the Indian revival of traditional culture and identity began. Assimilation while rediscovering and recreating identity outside this same mainstream, and you wind up with the common expression of "walking in two worlds." Although it often turns out to be more than two.

No other ethnic or cultural group in the Americas finds itself living in its indigenous homeland, where the oblivious descendants of the destroyers and usurpers and in some cases Indian slave owners are dominant. There's so much complex drama in this ongoing and evolving situation, and much of it takes place in big cities. Indians experienced prejudice and isolation there as well as the poverty they tried to escape by leaving the reservation, but some also found meaning in the trans-tribal or pan-Indian culture that is largely an urban product, as well as in aspects of other cultures.

This book doesn't dwell on that big picture but tells a lot of interesting stories. Some involve historical sweep and time, and many are individual, about people of importance and ordinary people in the context of their times and place. The style is pretty straightforward. This book reads remarkably well-the scholarly footnotes and sources are a plus.

I'm interested in the subject, and since I spent some time in Chicago and nearby communities, there's information and resonance of particular interest to me. I was fascinated to learn for example that Carlos Montezuma, a famous Yavapai doctor, speaker and writer in the late 19th century spent his childhood and much of his youth in Galesburg, Illinois, the downstate town where I went to college. Though I knew of other ethnic communities in Galesburg because of the railroads and related jobs that were unusual in other Midwest farm towns, I wasn't aware of American Indians there. But that's typical in that Indians have often been invisible in American towns and cities, to everyone except themselves.

Another Road Home

When he was a young man, the Haida artist Robert Davidson worked on a project at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, a wonderful place largely devoted to local Native cultures. He came upon some professional anthropologists there who were puzzling over an ancient Native artifact, trying to figure out its use. Davidson took the tool from them, held it right-side up for their inspection, and told them what it was still used for in the Haida island community where he grew up. "Why don't you ask one of us once in awhile?" he inquired.

In Jim Harrison's novel The Road Home, an anthropology professor insists that a student rewrite his thesis on Native coyote stories because it relied too much on conversations with local Indians and not enough on established scholarly sources. The professor accused him of being a "romantic humanist" who sullied science with emotion, whereupon the student turned over the professor's desk and left school a thesis short of his degree.

These two anecdotes illustrate the difference and the distance between some of the anthropological information Thomas Buckley evaluates and his own descriptions of contemporary Yurok culture in STANDING GROUND: YUROK SPIRITUALITY, 1850-1990 (University of California Press.) Buckley shows how unstated and usually unconscious assumptions and prejudices colored the work of supposedly scientific anthropologists, causing them to describe what they thought they saw in inappropriate context and therefore drawing inaccurate conclusions. While he acknowledges the contributions and information these anthropologists nevertheless made, Buckley works hard to understand and state his own assumptions and limits of his observations.

Yurok country is in my current neck of the woods, though much of the non-urban Yurok community is some distance from where I live. I know several of the people Buckley names as sources. The actual subject of his book, Yurok spiritual belief in its cultural and historical context, is too complex to describe in a few sentences here, even if I felt confident I knew enough to do so. The issues involved in gathering and printing this information are also complex, with many differing views.

Some five years ago, not long after I arrived here, I heard Chris Peters speak to a mostly non-Native audience. He is the executive director of the Seventh Generation Fund, one of the few Native run organizations involved in issues of importance to grassroots Native communities. Buckley quotes him early in his book, when he was beginning his anthropological studies locally and Peters was running a local community organization. Peters said he wouldn't hinder him but he wouldn't help him, because it was time for Native scholars to do their own anthropology.

But when I heard him speak, Chris Peters' message was that the Native American really was vanishing, and that non-Natives had better learn what they can from Native cultures and begin to take responsibility for the land beneath their feet. (Although I don't think "feet" was the part of the anatomy he referred to.) He wasn't giving up on sustainable Native communities, or on Native peoples in the present who are building a better future, but there is a sense in which the numbers are troubling, and anyway, he was making a point about what all of us need to do today.

What I learned from this and subsequent work I did for the Seventh Generation Fund was that while many Native cultures locally and across the continent are being revived and renewed and reinvigorated, there is also a need to use traditional knowledge in the shared world. We who do not come from Native cultures but who live here and are therefore among the caretakers of this land and certainly this planet, need to understand as much as we can from the knowledge accumulated over so many generations, and its context as derived from a particular relationship to the natural world. Because this basic relationship is also part of our human heritage, from the often forgotten past of other places and peoples, hidden deep in the cultures of our specific ancestors . While these living indigenous cultures are here, perhaps hanging by a thread, preserving, resurrecting, interpreting and applying traditional knowledge in the contemporary world, we'd best take advantage of the opportunity to learn and participate as best we can.

This process takes a lot of tact, respect, patience, openness, self-knowledge and courage. This book is a great gift for me, because Thomas Buckley knows and tells so much more of local history than I know, and has experienced more of indigenous cultures than I have. I'm sure some of what he writes will be challenged. But I admire how he's gone about accomplishing this book, over such a long time-some forty years all told, including a decade of focused work---and I admire his courage.

Readers whose poster maps don't foreground Eureka and the Yurok and Hupa reservations, the Wiyot and Karuk rancherias, with San Francisco in the foggy distance, will learn about these local instances of larger and even universal subjects: the interplay of politics, environmental concerns and Native cultural and religious revivals and battles, as well as relevant aspects of traditional knowledge and what we call religious beliefs. And you don't even have to be a romantic humanist to enjoy reading it.

A final note: you may have noticed that I capitalize the word Native. This is contrary to most style manuals (publications are always changing it back to a small "n".) I learned to do this writing for the Seventh Generation Fund, but it makes perfect sense to me. For there is a problem in nomenclature. For awhile the term "Indians" was replaced by "Native Americans." Most American Indians call themselves Indians, and the Indian people. But there are several problems, one of which is called India. There are people from that country, or with that ancestry, all over North America. Not to mention by the millions in India. When most people mention Indian food even here in Humboldt County, they aren't talking about frybread.

And there's the problem of "American." There are Native tribes all over North and South America; some tribal homelands are divided by the borders between the U.S. and Canada, or the U.S. and Mexico, as well as between other nations. Though both continents are called Americas, the term American usually means the United States, and so Native American doesn't go over well in Canada. There, the term First Peoples or First Nations has gotten some play, along with Native Indians and even Native Canadians.

I think all these problems can be avoided by the simple adoption of Native with a capital N. The small n is not a name but a description. I am a native-born American. But I am not Native. It's true that neither black nor white is capitalized when referring to race, and when Negro was a current usage, it was capitalized. But we aren't talking about race as much as cultures and ethnicities.

But small-n native is often inspecific even in context, and given the history, it seems literally belittling. Maybe it would be better to be more specific, naming Zuni and Yurok, but that's not always or even frequently possible due to multiple ancestries, and by now the Native population has common interests and some common culture .

I just think capitalizing Native is clearer, less awkward, more accurate, and shows some proper respect. Others took away their country, right down to the name, and substituted a name that already belongs to another country. (Peter Matthiessen makes an historical argument that Native peoples weren't named Indians because Columbus thought he was in India, but as a variation on "una gente in Dios" or a people of God, which is what Columbus called them shortly before he started enslaving and killing them. At the time what we call India was referred to as Hindustan. But that was then, and this is now.)

So far the only non-Native writer I've noticed who capitalizes Native is the aforementioned Jim Harrison. I wonder how he gets away with it.

THE DIRT IS RED HERE

The following review appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Books section on Sunday, November 10, 2002, in a slightly edited version. That version is available on the Chronicle website (www.sfgate.com) at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/10/RV6748.DTL
This is the full version of that review.

by William Severini Kowinski

The Dirt Is Red Here
Art and Poetry From Native California
edited by Margaret Dubin
HEYDAY BOOKS; 96 PAGES, 50 ILLUSTRATIONS; $19.95


The revival of California Indian cultures from close to the vanishing point to today's energetic resurgence is a profound and largely untold story, but now all of us can enjoy this anthology of art and poetry as a vibrant and revelatory expression of its success.

Quite simply, this is a beautiful book. Color reproductions are appropriately brilliant (Judith Lowry's "The Rescue," Henry Fonseca's "Creation 2001" for example) or delicate (Kathleen Smith's "My People's Home"), and two facing black and white photographs ("Lucy Lowry" and "Tuolumne MeWuk Rancheria Roundhouse") by Dugan Aguilar are alone worth the price of admission.

Editor Margaret Dubin (managing editor of the magazine, "News from Native California", which printed many of these writers and artists) has arranged texts and illustrations both for visual appeal and as delightful and sometimes subtle comments on one another. Printed on sturdy, glossy paper, this softcover book leaves more expensive coffee table tomes in the dust. This is a book to keep and revisit.

There's a dazzling variety of art, from work linked closely to ceremonial origins (the basketry of Linda Augilar and Linda Yamane, Bradley Marshall's regalia) to the abstract canvases of Fritz Scholder and Parris Butler, the sculpture and installation art of George Blake and James Luna, and the mixed media of Jean Lamarr, Brian Tripp and Frank Tuttle. The poetry (and two short prose pieces by Greg Sarris and Darryl Wilson) also demonstrates an impressive range of styles, from the heartfelt narratives of Sylvia Ross to the ritual rhythms of Frank LaPena and Stephen Meadows, and Richard Stewart's haiku inflections. There's a multiplicity of moods even within the work of a single artist or writer, evoking laughter, pain, meditation, mystery, sensuousness and wonder, and together comprising an eye-opening journey of rare quality and resonance.

I experienced one unifying thread in how this work illustrates and embodies the often-used but still indicative expression, "walking in two worlds." Grounded in cultures that grew here for thousands of years, these artists are also participants---often as far-flung students and teachers---in a demanding world dominated by very different premises and attitudes.

The clash is the occasion for the witty commentaries of James Luna's "High-Tech Peace Pipe" and L. Frank Manriquez painting of a pajama-clad Coyote in van Gogh's bedroom. But the complexities of this daily doubleness are also embedded in Janice Gould's meditations on family and being Lesbian, and in Wendy Rose's description of a "Literary Luncheon: Iowa City" where "I maintain/without willing it/an Indian invisibility."

It's there in Shaunna Oteka McCovey's satire on a huckster shaman who gives out a "Friends Drum Free" coupon, and her contrapuntal dialogue on creation stories-and in nearly every other poem and image in this collection. Even an evocation of nature suggests an aspect, like Deborah Miranda's "The Language of the Prophets" which ends: "Green pines take/what fog lets go."

"Indians evolve like everyone else," Deborah Miranda writes in another poem here. "Times change. We grow into/what comes next." As scholar and novelist Michael Dorris noted elsewhere, there emerged in the 1960s and 1970s a sizeable "new and maturing generation" of American Indian writers whose "primary language of expression is English, but an English accommodated to the special needs of their individual tribal histories and realities." Their work, Dorris wrote, both expands "the scope of English language composition and criticism" in form, and in content dispelled stereotypes by exhibiting qualities rarely found in Indians depicted by non-Indians: "humor, irony, intelligence, and stamina."

In 1994, Greg Sarris edited "The Sounds of Rattles and Clappers" (University of Arizona Press), the first major collection of poems and short fiction by writers with ancestry in indigenous California tribes. The distinction of ancestry, also followed in this anthology, is important, for California is host to more Native Americans than any other state, but most come from elsewhere. The immensely various California landscape fostered a hundred or more small tribes that developed complex cultures based on intimate relationship to their particular place, and its river or mountain, desert or forest. In this recurrently meaningful sense, their cultures are California.

This new book includes a succinct introduction providing historical context, and biographical notes on the artists that tell more of the story. Although they may live in distant cities for a time, many of these artists return to participate in traditional ceremony as singers, dancers, weavers and regalia-makers, activities which integrate artistic expression with utilitarian and religious purposes.

I would describe this work as contemporary art and poetry with extra dimensions: enlivening and enlightening differences from the mainstream drawn from not only complex personal experiences but from traditional cultures that evolved in close affiliation with the land and waters, flora and fauna of the places where we live. Those differences-subtle or bold, candid and ironic, found in form and content--- combine with familiar elements of shared culture to offer us the opportunity of insight into both another point of view and our common humanity. This book is itself a kind of ceremony and celebration. It belongs in the homes and hearts of every Californian.



FACT CHECK NOTE:
quotes from Michael Dorris: PAPER TRAIL by Michael Dorris, HarperPerennial 1995, pp 250,-1.