Review

Author(s): Hertha Dawn Wong

Review by: Hertha Dawn Wong
Source: American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 4, Special Issue: Shamans and Preachers, Color
Symbolism and Commercial Evangelism: Reflections on Early Mid-Atlantic Religious Encounter
in Light of the Columbian Quincentennial (Autumn, 1992), pp. 594-596
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185334
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594 AMERICANINDIAN QUARTERLY,FALL 1992

tions differed from those experienced by Hopewell and the Northern

Iroquoians).
The text does give the reader detail, but it is useful detail, tersely present-
ed, and well integrated into the overall narrative, which is remarkably smooth
considering the amount of technical material that had to be processed for the
non-specialist reader. In the section on the peopling of the New World, for
example, the debate over the possibility of pre-Clovis occupation is very clearly
summarized without it appearing that the focus has shifted from prehistory to
prehistorians. This reader-a sociocultural anthropologist-found that the
book came in extremely handy in preparing for classroom lectures on North
American prehistory.
The text is not without its shortcomings. Its strength-the ecological-evo-
lutionary focus-is also its bias. For example, the reader is told that the
Iroquois adaptive system was "insufficient when faced with the competition of
transplanted European agriculturalists," and that "Europeans had an adaptive
advantage that would have been irresistible even had European epidemics not
paved the way for colonization" (p. 62). The reader is also told that the contact
between Europeans and Indians was a "clash of cultures," cultures based on
"very different and often conflicting principles." It was "inevitable that the
Europeans would seek to acquire and settle Indian lands" (p. 208). This kind of
discourse, in which the domination and incorporation of two New World con-
tinents by a North Atlantic capitalism is construed as matters of adaptive
advantage, the class of superorganic cultures, and inevitability will seem naive-
ly unhistorical and distorting to most scholars of American Indian studies.
One does not have to be a post-processual archaeologist or a world-system the-
orist, or to have even read Eric Wolf to recognize that there are available
(archaeological) paradigms for describing contact in more realistic terms,
terms in which the historically particular dynamics of metropolitan capitalism
are shown to have had consequences for the peripheries not captured by the
concepts of adaptive advantage and evolutionary selection pressures.
But the book, after all, is an atlas of "prehistory," not a study of the post-
Columbian New World, and the ecological-evolutionary framework serves well
generally. All in all, this is a beautiful, informative book that will be interesting
and useful to teachers and scholars.

Portland State University Thomas Biolsi

Velie, Alan R., ed. The Lightning Within: An Anthology of Contem-

porary American Indian Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press. 1991. x + 161 pp. $19.95 cloth.
Although there are no surprises in this anthology, no new and dazzling
Native American voices introduced, The Lightning Within will be a welcome
addition to readers and teachers of American and Native American literature.
Indeed, Velie's purpose is to acquaint a larger group of readers with "some of
the best pieces of contemporary Indian fiction [and] to serve as an introduc-
tion to the principal Indian novelists and short-story writers of the past twenty
years" (p. x). Based on Velie's assessment of what represents the "best" Native
American literature, this anthology consists of nine pieces of short fiction writ-

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[xvi:4] BOOK REVIEWS 595

ten by seven Native American writers who have come to be considered "canon-
ical" (that is, those who have gained substantial "critical attention"): Michael
Dorris, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko,
Gerald Vizenor, and James Welch. All of the stories have been published previ-
ously. Four of them are excerpted from novels (e.g., "Tosamah's Story" from
Momaday's House Made of Dawn; Welch's "The Marriage of White Man's Dog"
from Fool's Crow; Erdrich's "Love Medicine" from her novel of the same title;
and Dorris' "Rayona's Seduction" from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water); the
remaining five have been published in collections (e.g., Silko's "The Man to
Send Rain Clouds" and "Geronimo" from Storyteller; Ortiz's "Crossing" and
"Men on the Moon" from Fightin'), or journals (e.g., Vizenor's "Luminous
Thighs" from Genre).
Velie does not burden the reader with a lengthy scholarly preface or
numerous footnotes, but he does provide two types of general background
information. In his brief introduction to the book, Velie suggests the historical
range of Native American literature and encourages readers to enjoy "some of
the best writing in America today" (p. x). In addition, he provides concise
introductions to each author, regularly including biographical information
and a list of each writer's publications, and occasionally noting key themes. In
this anthology, Velie continues the message he articulated in his study of
Native American literature (Four American Indian Literary Masters [1982])
almost ten years ago. In short, Native American literature should be read as
literature, not anthropology. In fact, the four "American Indian masters" of
his earlier book are represented in this anthology. From a young girl who
experiences a priest-induced "occasion of sin" to an Indian elder watching the
first moon landing on television, from an urban Kiowa preacher to a ram-
bunctious postmodern trickster in Europe, these stories are lively and engag-
ing. Reading them for the first time is like hiking in a new and breathtaking
country; rereading the stories is like strolling through a familiar and much-
loved territory.
Anthologies, of course, are always constructed from precise principles of
inclusion and exclusion. Velie's selection process contributes to establishing
and perpetuating a canon of Native American literature. To gain a sense of the
variety of styles and voices in Native American literature, selecting a compan-
ion volume to The Lightning Within would be a good idea. Another Velie
anthology would be a good place to begin since it offers a historical range of
indigenous voices. A revised edition of his American Indian Literature: An
Anthology, originally published in 1979, was published in 1991. Included are
Native American tales, songs, oratory, memories, and poetry, as well as a brief
section of short fiction. Several genre-specific anthologies stand out also. For
poetry and personal narratives, Duane Niatum's Harper's Anthology of 20th-
Century Native American Poetry (1988) and I Tell You Now: Autobiographical
Essays by Native American Writers (1987), edited by Brian Swann and Arnold
Krupat, are excellent. Most recently, Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native
American Short Stories (1991), edited by Craig Lesley, presents a tantalizing
variety of short fiction by thirty-five writers, some well known, some new.
Andrea Lerner's Dancing on the Rim of the World: An Anthology of
Contemporary Northwest Native American Writing (1990) is one of the only
anthologies to offer a clear regional focus: the Pacific Northwest. In addition,
Lerner includes a variety of literary forms and, in a refreshing move, intro-

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596 AMERICAN
INDIANQUARTERLY,
FALL1992

duces many emergent writers. Paula Gunn Allen's Spider Woman's Grand-
daughters: Traditional Tales and ContemporaryWriting by Native American
Women (1989) and Will Roscoe's Living in the Spirit:A Gay AmericanIndian
Anthology (1989) make accessible a selection of works by often overlooked
native writers. Each of these anthologies, then, illuminates Native American
literature from its own angle of vision. TheLightningWithin is one bright star
in a new and brilliant constellation of recently published anthologies of Native
Americanliterature.

University of California at Berkeley Hertha Dawn Wong

Austin, Mary. The Land of Journey's Ending. Introductory essay by

Larry Evers. Illustrations by John Edwin Jackson. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1983 (1924). xxix + 459 pp. $24.50
cloth; $12.50 paper.

Stineman, Esther Lanigan. Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. xvi + 269 pp. Illustrations,
notes, bibliography, index. $25.00 cloth.
Mary Austin more than deserves all the biographical attention presently
awarded her. She merits it as a woman, as a writer, and as a regionalist-that
is, a writer of the far west of California and the southwest of New Mexico.
Centralto her voice and her message is her interest in the Native Americansin
these regions and the cultural and geographical interactions and processes, the
histories of "place,"to which they contributedand reacted.
In large part, her "maverick"song, albeit Anglo and ethnocentric, like her
own spirit's intuitive singing, depended for its harmonies on American Indian
tales, stories, and oral rhythms. Taken individuallyand in their countless rela-
tionships, these identities-compounded by Austin's own inherited and culti-
vated personae and by varying attitudes of biographers to Austin and to her
work-make for a fascinating mix of issues about literature and life, history
and story;issues, most pointedly, about gender, regionalism, and race.
What surfaces from a contemporary rereading of The Land of Journey's
Ending (1924) and a reading of Stineman's appraisal of Austin'slife is the cer-
tainty that the ways of biography and literary history are as multitudinous as
they are fickle. Assumptions and facts, the attitudes and values that underlie a
biographer's questions (such as how Austin in a work like The Land of
Journey'sEnding perceived the figures in a landscape and her relationship to
both people and place) are as crucial to understanding the design of a life as
the assumptions and values of the subject of study, the life lived and the life
retold. Only when both sets of assumptions-biographer's and subject's-are
considered do the real "figuresin the carpet"begin to emerge, and then only
dimly.
No doubt, women will regard Austin one way; Native Americanswill per-
ceive her another; Native American women yet another way, and so on. Few
will find her irrelevant in attempting to rethink and understand Anglo-
European responses to Native Americans in Austin'sown day, or in these days
of the ColumbianQuincentenary.

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