EARTH SONG, SKY SPIRIT

Trafzer (Native American Studies/Univ. of California/Riverside) compiles an unusually interesting mix: 30 stories (and novel excerpts)—most never before published and many by unknowns—that range from amateurish to extremely literary, historical to futuristic. As for big names: M. Scott Momaday is represented by a previously uncollected story; Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch by novel excerpts (Welch's, unfortunately, so poorly chosen as to seem a book condensation parody); while Gerald Vizenor, Joseph Bruchac, and Paula Gunn Allen look to tradition and myth. At the same time, new work includes a top-notch story from Sherman Alexie (in a world where ``making fry bread and helping people die are the last two things Indians are good at,'' a cancer patient drives his wife away by making jokes about his terminal condition); Duane Niatum is poetic and intense about an adulterous Indian-Jewish affair; Diane Glancy is at her difficult poetic best; LeAnne Howe goes vividly back to an 18th- century Choctaw burial ceremony; Gordon Henry writes of a man robbed of his mother tongue for whom arson becomes protest and performance art and who eventually finds a language in haiku. Some less successful stories are interesting in putting Indian protagonists in situations familiar to non-Indian counterparts (a young woman doesn't want to resemble her mother; a 50-year-old yearns for adventure, then recognizes the value of her marriage; a woman remembers child sexual abuse). Stylistic and structural traits emerge: ironic linguistic playfulness with the ``enemy's'' (English) language; storytelling that resists exclusive focus on the individual, preferring multiple shifts and viewpoints to emphasize the community. An uneven collection, but valuable nonetheless for its range of Native American sensibilities—some deeply rooted in tradition, some very much in the American mainstream.