Review of \u3ci\u3eA Reader\u27s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich\u3c/i\u3e By Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton & \u3ci\u3eThe Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Allan Chavkin

Both of these recent publications support Professor A. LaVonne Brown Ruoffs observation that Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is the author most studied in recent literary criticism of American Indian literatures (Chavkin 182). While Erdrich may be the object of much study and discussion, the accuracy and usefulness vary widely. The stronger of the two books, Peter Beidler and Gay Barton\u27s A Reader\u27s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, carefully presents time lines, genealogies, geographic identifications, and character definitions. As a study guide, the approach thoroughly clarifies, delineates, and cross-references the complicated relationships among Erdrich\u27s characters, places, and times. This meticulousness, however, is also the book\u27s weakness; the authors have imposed a linear and categorical template on Erdrich\u27s nonlinear tales and tribal and communal relationships. By fixing interpretations, kinships, and places, this encyclopedic critical approach loses the essence of Erdrich\u27s narrative enchantments and suggestive ambiguities. The collection of essays, The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, edited by Allan Chavkin, is disappointing. Although published in 1999, the essayists seem caught off guard by the 1996 publication of Erdrich\u27s novel, Tales of Burning Love. Several of the essays erroneously refer to The Bingo Palace (1994) as her most recent novel and then tack on undeveloped references to Tales of Burning Love. Most glaringly, Catherine Rainwater\u27s essay on ethnic semiotics wrongly concludes Lipsha freezes to death in the end of The Bingo Palace when Tales of Burning Love affirms his survival. Other essays have inexplicable omissions: William J. Scheick\u27s analysis of A Wedge of Shade does not consider how Erdrich reworks the short story for a chapter bearing the same title in Tales of Burning Love. Robert F. Gish similarly fails to regard Erdrich\u27s poem Jacklight in his discussion of hunting as metaphor in Love Medicine, even though Annette Van Dyke explains the Jacklight/ hunting sexual metaphor in her essay on Female Power in the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Van Dyke suggestively refers to a Chippewa feminine vision quest, but does not support the idea or consider earlier studies by Patricia Albers and Bea Medicine on female power in gender complementary relationships. Likewise, Nancy J. Peterson\u27s essay on Indi\u27n Humor and Trickster Justice in The Bingo Palace provides an inadequate cultural context for the Chippewa trickster or trickster in general, although the discussion does offer details of American Indian gaming legal decisions. And while Chavkin evaluates the political implications of the revised and expanded text of Love Medicine, he does not place the modifications within the tribal context of oral tradition of telling and retelling narratives

Review of \u3ci\u3eAmerica\u27s Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860- 1900\u3c/i\u3e By Ruth Spack

Ruth Spack\u27s thoroughly researched study of English education in Indian boarding schools goes beyond historical investigation. Spack shows how the methodology of teaching English imposed American ideologies in Native students. Then she closely examines the primary writings of Indian students and teachers who had learned English in the boarding school system. The result is a fine linguistic and cultural analysis of the complicated transitions from Native languages to the second language of the book\u27s title, English. Much has been written about the assimilative mission of boarding schools. Their purpose, as stated by Richard H. Pratt, was to Kill the Indian; save the man. Spack considers how language played a role in that process of conquest: Given that English functioned as a conduit of American institutions and laws, Americanization through English-language teaching was designed to end tribal sovereignty. Given that tribal sovereignty was tied to the land, Americanization signified a loss of territory. Spack is sensitive to tribal identities and tribal voices. After discussing the pedagogy of English, she turns to the experiences ofIndian teachers Lilah Denton Lindsey (Creek), Thomas Wildcat Alford (Absentee Shawnee), Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota). She then draws on narratives from students Don Talayesva (Hopi), Charles Eastman (Dakota), and others. Her most intense scrutiny is reserved for the writings of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux), as both a student and a teacher. Spack has excavated previously unpublished details about Bonnin\u27s life, placing many of these details in tribal contexts. Spack\u27s suggestion that Zitkala-Sa\u27s memoir essays are more fictive than autobiographical, however, needs further consideration in regard to the construction of self in autobiography and the nature of tribal storytelling. The brief epilogue looks beyond the limits set out in this study to discuss contemporary education and language issues. Students of the Great Plains, boarding schools, and American Indian literatures will find this volume engaging and persuasive through its lucid arguments, cogent writing, and new assessments

Review of \u3ci\u3eDimensions of Native America: The Contact Zone\u3c/i\u3e An Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University

The purpose of the Florida State University art exhibit and its accompanying catalogue is to offer an examination of acculturated art forms made by both Native Americans and Euroamericans that deliberately converge with and often appropriate each other\u27s cultural properties. This ambitious project was launched in Florida in the spring of 1998 with an amazing spectrum of representative works from pre-Columbian contact to the present. The listing of displayed works is a mere appendix to a broad range of essays that explore issues of Artification of the Indigenous Artifact, Blurred Boundaries, Misconceptions, Photographs, and Contemporary Native and Non-Native Artists. Co-curator and editor Teilhet-Fisk indicates that the exhibit was designed by a class of combined graduate and undergraduate students, implying that the accompanying essays come from the class as well; but apart from the curators and three Native consultants, the backgrounds of fifteen authors are not identified. Indeed, several of the essays read like student research papers by depending heavily on secondary sources and restating fundamental knowledge. For example, the essay on silversmithing simplifies and geographically misstates: The Dine, more commonly known as the Navajo, are located in northeastern Arizona, while the Zuni are located in northwestern New Mexico. Some of the essays have inexplicable omissions as well. Marie Watkins\u27s otherwise fine essay on painter Joseph Henry Sharp examines his crusade to depict authentic Indians of the Plains, but fails to mention Sharp\u27s well-documented association with the Taos Society of Artists. Co-curator Nigh\u27s otherwise perceptive evaluation of contemporary American Indian artists overlooks the wry wit in many of the works. Teilhet-Fisk\u27s discussion of Star Quilts does not consider either Beatrice Medicine and Patricia Albers\u27s excellent discussion of Plains Star Quilts or Roberta Hill Whiteman\u27s (Oneida) acclaimed poem, Star Quilt. On the whole, however, the essays-illustrated with black-and-white photos-sensitively and smartly assess complicated issues of cultural contact and mediation, artistic representation and transformation, commodity and aesthetics. The authors expand their discussions beyond the pieces in the exhibit to consider how specific works epitomize historical and contemporary topics of race relations and identity. Studies on Seminole Patchwork, Native Captives\u27 depictions of St. Augustine, the duality of portrayals of Osceola, photography of non-Native Kasebier and Native Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole, Creek, and Dine) all contribute to a critical contact zone. This broad range of artistic examples and thoughtful discussion is an admirable overview of Native American artistic representations

Review of \u3ci\u3eA Reader\u27s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich\u3c/i\u3e By Peter G. Beidler and Gay Barton & \u3ci\u3eThe Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Allan Chavkin

Both of these recent publications support Professor A. LaVonne Brown Ruoffs observation that Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is the author most studied in recent literary criticism of American Indian literatures (Chavkin 182). While Erdrich may be the object of much study and discussion, the accuracy and usefulness vary widely. The stronger of the two books, Peter Beidler and Gay Barton\u27s A Reader\u27s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, carefully presents time lines, genealogies, geographic identifications, and character definitions. As a study guide, the approach thoroughly clarifies, delineates, and cross-references the complicated relationships among Erdrich\u27s characters, places, and times. This meticulousness, however, is also the book\u27s weakness; the authors have imposed a linear and categorical template on Erdrich\u27s nonlinear tales and tribal and communal relationships. By fixing interpretations, kinships, and places, this encyclopedic critical approach loses the essence of Erdrich\u27s narrative enchantments and suggestive ambiguities. The collection of essays, The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich, edited by Allan Chavkin, is disappointing. Although published in 1999, the essayists seem caught off guard by the 1996 publication of Erdrich\u27s novel, Tales of Burning Love. Several of the essays erroneously refer to The Bingo Palace (1994) as her most recent novel and then tack on undeveloped references to Tales of Burning Love. Most glaringly, Catherine Rainwater\u27s essay on ethnic semiotics wrongly concludes Lipsha freezes to death in the end of The Bingo Palace when Tales of Burning Love affirms his survival. Other essays have inexplicable omissions: William J. Scheick\u27s analysis of A Wedge of Shade does not consider how Erdrich reworks the short story for a chapter bearing the same title in Tales of Burning Love. Robert F. Gish similarly fails to regard Erdrich\u27s poem Jacklight in his discussion of hunting as metaphor in Love Medicine, even though Annette Van Dyke explains the Jacklight/ hunting sexual metaphor in her essay on Female Power in the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Van Dyke suggestively refers to a Chippewa feminine vision quest, but does not support the idea or consider earlier studies by Patricia Albers and Bea Medicine on female power in gender complementary relationships. Likewise, Nancy J. Peterson\u27s essay on Indi\u27n Humor and Trickster Justice in The Bingo Palace provides an inadequate cultural context for the Chippewa trickster or trickster in general, although the discussion does offer details of American Indian gaming legal decisions. And while Chavkin evaluates the political implications of the revised and expanded text of Love Medicine, he does not place the modifications within the tribal context of oral tradition of telling and retelling narratives

The complicated web: Mediating cultures in the works of Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is a mixed blood Turtle Mountain Chippewa, educated in the dominant culture. Her volumes of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, express a personal and narrative voice that reflects her tribal, European, Catholic, and educational heritage. Her well received novels, co-authored with her husband, Michael Dorris, are poetic in their language. Love Medicine and Tracks abound in myth, irony, humor, and contemporary Chippewa issues. The Beet Queen and The Crown of Columbus, incorporate Euroamerican settings and characters while disclosing Native American characteristics of oral rhetoric and tribal community. The trickster archetype in Erdrich\u27s works incorporates survival humor, moral indicators, and cultural mediation. The conflation of narrative voices, cultural pluralism, indistinguishable genres, and interdisciplinary criticism interweave a complexity that celebrates diversity in a toleration of paradox and harmonizes the human community

Review of \u3ci\u3eNative American Perspectives on Literature and History\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Alan R. Velie

In the introduction to this volume, Alan Velie and Gerald Vizenor claim that these essays, by both native and non-native authors, represent American Indian perspectives. By making this claim they indicate that particular American Indian perspectives exist while acknowledging that they are not limited to tribal members. The volume brings together articles previously published in the journal Genre and Volume 19 of the University of Oklahoma\u27s American Indian Literature and Critical Studies. This fine collection of essays presents scholarship that is sympathetic to Native experiences and foregrounds problems of American identity. The essays cover a range of contemporary Native American issues and literature and also represent recent important works in Native American studies. Robert Allen Warrior\u27s analysis of Vine Deloria Jr.\u27s work in \u27Temporary Visibility\u27: Deloria on Sovereignty and AIM presents one aspect of the larger argument he makes in his recent book Tribal Secrets. James Ruppert\u27s Mediation in Contemporary Native American Writing is similar to the theoretical introductory chapter of his survey, Mediation in Native American Fiction. Kimberly M. Blaeser\u27s analysis of Gerald Vizenor\u27s work in The New \u27Frontier\u27 of Native American Literature: Dis-Arming History with Tribal Humor is a good introduction to her recent literary biography, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in Oral Tradition. Vizenor\u27s writings and his shadow plays are also discussed by Juana Marie Rodriguez. Additionally, the collection includes a pair of essays by well-established critics of Native American Literature, Helen Jaskoski and Alan Velie. Velie offers an historical analysis of James Welch\u27s Fools Crow and Vizenor\u27s The Heirs of Columbus while Jaskoski discusses autoethnography in Andrew Blackbird\u27s Smallpox Story. Kurt Peters offers an oral history discussion of Lagunas working for the Santa Fe railroad. Perhaps the weakest essay in the collection is Robert Berner\u27s American Myth: Old, New, Yet Untold. By suggesting that Native Americans have appropriated language of genocide and holocaust, Berner dismisses much of contemporary criticism that uses such language to explain the enormity of destruction that has occurred to native peoples on this continent. The final and provocative essay, Native American Indian Identities: Autoinscriptions and the Cultures of Names, is by Vizenor. Here he unmasks post Indian pretenders like Jamake Highwater who have appropriated Indianness into literatures of dominance. This concluding essay reaffirms the central importance of American Indian perspectives. Vizenor advocates the literature of survivance. The selected essays in this volume likewise reject literatures of dominance while demonstrating Native American survivance

SACRAMENTAL LANGUAGE RITUAL IN THE POETRY OF LOUISE ERDRICH

As an intensely personal genre, poetry intimately reveals Louise Erdrich\u27s voice as her well-known fiction does not. Evident in that voice are elements of the mosaic of cultural experiences that comprise Erdrich\u27s life: Catholicism, German ancestry, working class, university education, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa. Erdrich\u27s poetry is her first published work, her own writing without the collaborative effort and editing of her husband, Michael Dorris (Modoc). While some of Erdrich\u27s poems garner their cultural rhetoric from differing points of view and values, most exhibit the variety of experiences that result from marginalization inherent in the omnipresence of race in North American society

A Cultural Duet Zitkala Ša And \u3ci\u3eThe Sun Dance Opera\u3c/i\u3e

In 1913 Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala Ša, 1876-1938) collaborated with local Duchesne, Utah, music teacher William F. Hanson to produce and stage a spectacle that combined the musical style of operetta, a melodramatic love triangle, and traditional Plains Indian ritual. In regional performances, The Sun Dance Opera provided a stage for Bonnin and other Native American singers and dancers to participate in rituals whose practice was forbidden by the United States government. Twenty-five years later, just months after Bonnin\u27s death in 1938, the opera was selected and presented by the New York Opera Guild as opera of the year. The composition of the opera presents the challenges of forging distinct and disparate cultures by harmonizing traditional Native melodies and perspectives into the pinnacle of artistic expression in western civilization: grand opera. Opera, literally the plural of opus or works of artistic expression, provides a holistic context that represents varied and complex manifestations of culture. Visual presentation and costuming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and even incorporation of a trickster- like heyoka depict aspects of Plains culture in The Sun Dance Opera. At the same time, an orchestral accompaniment and dramatic plot infuse elements of western civilization. As a classically trained musician, Bonnin used her skills to affirm her Sioux cultural identity and to engage the conventions of popular culture.1 Hanson used his fondness for Indian peoples and his association with them in what critics would now recognize as an artistic colonialism. The result is an uneasy duet of two cultures. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin had emerged from an obscure, reservation childhood, through the Indian boarding school system, to become a public figure. She compiled and published a book of traditional stories, Old Indian Legends.2 She also had written compelling articles about her childhood and life experiences for Harper\u27s Weekly and the Atlantic Monthly. She compiled and published those stories in 1921 in American Indian Stories.3 In 1902 when she married Raymond Bonnin, also a Yankton Sioux, she temporarily abandoned her public career. Although she would later emerge in the national arena of pan-Indian politics, her years in Utah (ca. 1904-16) were spent in relative obscurity. The local attention given The Sun Dance Opera reintroduced Gertrude to the popular stage. A challenge in studying the opera is the lack of Gertrude\u27s own voice while William F. Hanson\u27s participation is well documented. The whole score is archived at Brigham Young University where Hanson (1887-1969) had a lengthy career as a professor of music education. Fifty-four years after the debut of the opera, Hanson published a memoir that loosely recounted an Indian history in Utah, his association with Gertrude and her husband, Raymond, and the composing and staging of the opera.4 However, Gertrude left no documentation of her involvement with Hanson and the performances. During this period, even her regular letters to the Catholic Indian Missions have no mention of the opera.5 Likewise, her diaries of the last years of her life focus on her family and her political concerns and do not mention the N ew York restaging of the opera

We Anishinaabeg Are The Keepers Of The Names Of The Earth Louise Erdrich\u27s Great Plains

With these words, Louise Erdrich sets forth her own manifesto for writing about her place. A Native of the Northern Plains, Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa nation. In a stunning production of seven novels, six with interwoven tales and characters, two poetry collections, a memoir, and two coauthored books, Erdrich has created a vision of the Great Plains that spans the horizon of time and space and ontologically defines the people of her heritage. ERDRICH\u27S NORTH DAKOTA The literary impact is remarkable. Louise Erdrich\u27s North Dakota cycle of novels includes the award-winning Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love (1996), and most recently The Last Report on the Miracle at Little No Horse (2001).2 In an audacious move, Erdrich took the acclaimed Love Medicine, edited it, added to it, and reissued it in 1993, thus demonstrating that the vital, living nature of indigenous storytelling exists not only in oral traditions but in fixed print as well.3 Additionally, The Antelope Wife (1998) blends Ojibwe traditions with the challenges and humor of urban natives in Minneapolis, Erdrich\u27s current residence. Earlier, relocated by career and family obligations, Erdrich describes her memoir of early motherhood, The Blue Jay\u27s Dance (1995), as having some desperation in the writing ... a longing for my home ground. New Hampshire depleted me-the isolation from family, from other people of Ojibwe mixed background, the absence of sky and horizon. 4 Karen Louise Erdrich was raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota, on land that once belonged to the Wahpeton-Sisseton Dakota and was home to a Bureau of Indians Affairs boarding school, where her parents taught and her Ojibwe grandfather attended.5 She describes Wahpeton as really half a town, the other half being Breckenridge, Minnesota and desperate to be something. 6 Although the Red River is a natural geological divider, the political boundaries between the states of North Dakota and Minnesota, of course, meant nothing to Erdrich\u27s Ojibwe ancestors. The Ojibwe people, historically referring to themselves as Anishinabe, ranged through the Great Lakes region and the Northern Plains. The English speakers of the United States mangled their name into Chippewa, and that is the legal designation of the federal government. The Ojibwe trace their origin to Mantoulin Island, Ontario, the largest island anywhere in fresh water, an expanse of rolling hills and deep azure lakes, suffused with highly differentiated vegetation, animal life, and geological oddities. 7 Here the mystical manitous coordinated the world into existence. Here on the island, Moses Pillager and Lulu Nanapush in Love Medicine, heirs of the Bear clan and the Nanabozho trickster legacy,8 give life to a new generation of contemporary Ojibwe survivors, starting with their son, Gerry Nanapush. Although the Ojibwe consist of about a hundred bands and reservation communities in what is now Canada and the United States, there are commonalities among traditions, histories, and, most importantly, geographical place. Imposition of political divisions after European contact and conflicts with traditional enemies, the Dakotas and the Sac and Fox, forced the Ojibwe into discrete communities and diminished their collective power but did not reduce a general communal sense of identity. Western bands of the Ojibwe settled in the Pembina area and the Turtle Mountains of present day North Dakota\u27s border region. 9 Consequently, these bands, including Erdrich\u27s home tribe, adopted Northern Plains traditions into their Woodland cultural way of life