Books

The following are but a few books that our committee feels are beneficial, educational, and well written.

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Live Heroically
Analyzes American Indian education in the last century and compares the tribal, mission, and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools.
To Live Heroically examines American Indian education during the last century, comparing the tribal, mission, and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools and curriculums and the assumptions that each system made about the role that Indians should assume in society.  This significant book analyzes the relationship between the rise of institutional racism and the fall of public education in the United States using the history of American Indian education as a model. The author asserts that had the federal government really wanted an educated, self-sufficient Indian population, it would have selected the successful nineteenth-century tribal models of Indian education rather than the mission or BIA schools.  And her description of the reservation and bordering white community demonstrates the depth of institutional racism and its impact on local politics, economics, and education.  Huff wants the reader to see how policy is made about Indian education and to recognize the complex issues that Indian (and other minority) families and educators deal with in real communities.

 
Chainbreaker: The Revolutionary War Memoirs of Governor Blacksnake as told to Benjamin Williams
By Thomas S. Abler
One of the earliest memoirs by an American Indian, Chainbreaker presents the recollections of a Seneca chief, also known as Governor Blacksnake.  A fighter in the American Revolution who lived more than a century, Chainbreaker told his story as an old man in the 1840s to a fellow Seneca, Benjamin Williams, who translated it and committed it to paper.  Epic in scale and yet intensely personal, Chainbreaker's story provides a rare Native view of warfare and diplomacy during a crucial period in American history.  His account is only fully available in this edition, featuring extensive commentary by Thomas S. Abler.

No One Ever Asked Me
By Hollis D. Stabler, Victoria Smith (Editor)
"As a young adolescent, Hollis Dorion Stabler underwent a Native ceremony in which he was given the new name Na-zhin-thia, Slow to Rise.  It was a name that no white person asked to know during Hollis's tour of duty in Anzio, his unacknowledged difference as an Omaha Indian adding to the poignancy of his uneasy fellowship with foreign and American soldiers alike.  Stabler's story--coming of age on the American plains, going to war, facing new estrangement upon coming home--is a universal one, rendered wonderfully strange and personal by Stabler's uncommon perspective, which embraces two worlds, and by his unique voice.”  "Stabler's experiences during World War II--tours of duty in Tunisia and Morocco as well as Italy and France, and the loss of his brother in battle--are at the center of this powerful memoir, which tells of growing up as an Omaha Indian in the small-town Midwest of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma in the 1920s and 1930s.  A descendant of the Indians who negotiated with Lewis and Clark on the Missouri River, Stabler describes a childhood that was a curious mixture of progressivism and Indian tradition, and that culminated in his enlisting in the old horse cavalry when war broke out--a path not so very different from that walked by his ancestors.” "Victoria Smith, of Cherokee-Delaware descent, interweaves historical insight with Stabler's vivid reminiscences, providing a rich context for this singular life."

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer
By Allison Hedge Coke
This is a harrowing book.  Statistics about alcoholism and family violence among dispossessed American Indians fail to show the sheer human suffering it causes and the personal heroism of those who struggle through to an integrated life.  Hedge Coke was endowed by her Cherokee father with insights into the Indian way of life, but the pressures of prejudice and her mother's insanity drove her into years of drug and alcohol abuse as well as into abusive relationships.  She writes in a stately, unashamed manner of beatings and binges, always connecting her personal sufferings to the larger questions of how Indian people can reclaim their cultural and personal pride and authority.  A tragic loss ends the book's story, but far from making it a tale of failure, this final death confirms, through Hedge Coke's presentation, her growth into a profound witness to Indian culture and its deep-rooted spiritual and philosophical values.  - Patricia Monaghan, Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

Turtle Lung Womans Granddaughter
By Delphine Red Shirt
2002 "Best of the Best" selected by the American Library Association
Told in their own words, Turtle Lung Woman’s Granddaughter is the unforgettable story of several generations of Lakota women who grew up on the open plains of northern Nebraska and southern South Dakota.  Delphine Red Shirt has delicately woven the life stories of her mother, Lone Woman, and Red Shirt’s great-grandmother, Turtle Lung Woman, into a continuous narrative that succeeds triumphantly as a moving, epic saga of Lakota women from traditional times in the mid–nineteenth century to the present.  Especially revealing are Turtle Lung Woman’s relationship with her husband, Paints His Face with Clay, her healing practice as a medicine woman, Lone Woman’s hardships and celebrations growing up in the early twentieth century, and many wonderful details of their domestic lives before and during the early reservation years.

 Sarah Winnemucca
By Sally Zanjani
Here, the prolific Zanjani (A Mine of Her Own) chronicles the life and times of one of the most significant Native American women of the 19th century.  Sarah Winnemucca (1844-91) was the daughter and granddaughter, respectively, of Paiute chiefs Winnemucca and Truckee.  Her course in life followed these two leaders closely in attempting to help the Paiute adapt to increasing influence and pressure from Anglo expansion.  With authority, Zanjani details the progressive effects of the settlers on the Paiute through Sarah's eyes and life experiences.  Sharing her father and grandfather's belief that to survive the Paiute must peacefully coexist with the white man, she became a Bureau of Indian Affairs interpreter at Camp McDermitt in Oregon.  She also dedicated her life to pursuing fair and just treatment for the Paiute people by the U.S. government.  To this end, Sarah journeyed to Washington, DC, and other major Eastern cities, speaking publicly of the injustices against the Paiute people, and wrote her autobiography, Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883).  Zanjani's excellent history of this remarkable woman is recommended for all public and academic libraries.  - John E. Dockall, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Telling a Good One
By Theodore Rios & Kathleen Mullen Sands
Telling a Good One is the first comprehensive examination of the collaborative process that creates a Native American life story.  Kathleen Mullen Sands draws on her partnership with the late Theodore Rios, a Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) narrator, to address crucial issues surrounding the inscribing of a life story. Sands examines the creative, critical, and cultural processes behind this increasingly popular mode of self-expression.  The impetus, initial negotiations, interview process, narrative content and style, and the editing and interpretation phases of a Native American life story are all given equal scrutiny.  Of particular interest are Sands's successes and failings as a collaborator and the influence of Tohono O'odham culture and its tradition of storytelling on Rios's actions and words.  Sands examines the effects of her personal background and academic training on her actions and decisions, how her experiences compare with other collaborative autobiographies and biographies, and the role of academia and publishers in shaping expectations about the content and format of Native American biographies and autobiographies.

LaDonna Harris
By Ladonna Harris, H. Henrietta Stoekel (Editor)
With grace and quiet dignity, Native American activist LaDonna Harris recounts the highlights of her remarkable life.  Born on a Comanche allotment in southern Oklahoma at the onset of the Depression, she defied convention by marrying Fred Harris, an ambitious white law student with a promising political future.  Later, as the wife of a U.S. senator, she utilized her considerable people and campaigning skills to forge her own extraordinary career as an advocate for American Indian causes.  Insisting that her own personal success has its roots in the life-sustaining Comanche values taught to her by her revered grandparents, LaDonna extols the virtues of family loyalty, communal responsibility, and respect for all persons.  This brief, unpretentious autobiography provides a rare insider's glimpse into Native American culture and politics.

Postindian Conversations
By Gerald Vizenor & A. Robert Lee
Post Indian Conversations is the first collection of in-depth interviews with Gerald Vizenor, one of the most powerful and provocative voices in the Native world today.  These lively conversations with the preeminent novelist and cultural critic reveal much about the man, his literary creations, and his critical perspectives on important issues affecting Native peoples at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  The book also casts new light on his sometimes controversial ideas about contemporary Native identity, politics, economics, scholarship, and literature.

Essie’s Story
By Esther Burnett Horne & Sally McBeth
This collaboration between a Shoshone teacher and a white anthropologist presents the classic tensions inherent in European and Native American views of culture.  And Horne's story materializes as one of a lifetime spent educating--not acculturating--young Native Americans.  A descendent of Sacajawea, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition from Missouri to the Pacific coast, Horne spent her formative years in boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  The schools were designed to convert Indians to white American culture.  But Horne notes that the very act of bringing together so many tribes ended in strengthening their sense of commonality and creating a pan-Indian identity that foreshadowed the Native American movement.  In this fascinating life story, Horne sees Sacajawea as a personal metaphor, by which she makes sense of her own life as a Native American in a nation that reveres the written word over oral tradition.  That reverence highlights a dispute as to how long Sacajawea lived.  Horne recalls stories told of Sacajawea's living to old age versus the official recorded version that has her dying as a young woman.

Life, Letters, and Speeches
By George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh)
George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh, 1818-69), a Canadian Ojibwe writer and lecturer, rose to prominence in American literary, political, and social circles during the mid-nineteenth century.  His colorful, kaleidoscopic life took him from the tiny Ojibwe village of his youth to the halls of state legislatures throughout the eastern United States and eventually overseas.  Copway converted to Methodism as a teenager and traveled throughout the Midwest as a missionary.  He became a forceful and energetic spokesman for temperance and the rights and sovereignty of Indians, lecturing to large crowds in the United States and Europe and founding a newspaper devoted to native issues.  Published originally in 1847, this edition of Life, Letters and Speeches marks the 150th anniversary of its first appearance.  One of the first Native American autobiographies, it chronicles Copway's unique and often difficult cultural journey.  Copway vividly captures the freedom of his early childhood, the dramatic moment of his spiritual awakening to Methodism, the rewards and frustrations of missionary work, a desperate race home to warn of a pending Sioux attack, and the harrowing rescue of his son from drowning.

Catch Colt
By Sidner Larson
A “catch colt,” in the words of the Gros Ventre Indians, is an illegitimate child, and Larson, son of a Gros Ventre mother and a white man, considers his life--including his pursuit of  “a life of the mind”--full of illegitimacies.  Unfortunately, this diffuse collection of autobiographical reminiscences contains too much awkward prose, hampering the narrative.  Larson, who teaches English at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho, does capture some scenes well, limning teenage rebellion (“the light and space of Montana had zapped me in certain ways”), a time spent running a rugged bar in a Montana town that historically “treated Indians like dirt” and his awkward meeting, at the age of 32, with the father he never knew.  The author outgrew a career as a lawyer and left a marriage before specializing in Native American literature and concluding that people must return to their “place of origin.” Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Standing in the Light
By Severt Young Bear and R.D. Theisz
Young Bear, a Lakota elder who died as this book went to press, was a prominent teacher and traditional singer; educator Theisz, his white adoptive brother, was a member of Young Bear's Porcupine Singers.  They collaborated in an unusual way.  To be in keeping with his people's oral traditions, Young Bear, though highly literate, chose to record his ideas on tape; Theisz then organized the comments and edited the transcripts into conversational prose.  Young Bear related the myths and history of his people and reflected on the spiritual meanings inherent to their traditions.  He also vividly described events in which he had participated--notably, the 1972 occupation of Wounded Knee.  He especially hoped that his words would reach those who stood in the farthest circle at powwows, beyond the reach of the light surrounding the inner circle of drummers and singers, for they, connected but distant from their heritage, were most in need of the information he remembered and recorded.  Still, non-Native American readers will find much to inspire and delight them here, too.

Alex Posey: Creek Poet, Journalist, and Humorist
By Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.
Most of Alexander Posey's short and remarkable life was devoted to literary pursuits.  Through a widely circulated satirical column published under the pseudonym Fus Fixico, he did much to document and draw attention to conditions in Indian Territory.  He rose to prominence among the Creeks and played a leading role as spokesman on a number of serious political issues.  Daniel E Littlefield Jr. has written the first full biography of Alexander Posey, a pioneer of American Indian literature and a shaper of public opinion.

Mourning Dove
Jay Miller (Editor)
Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) spent her adult years justifying the ways of Native Americans to whites.  Born into Colville Confederated Tribes in 1885 or 1888, she became an ethnographer, orator, pamphleteer, teacher, and novelist, believing that her description and analysis of Native American ways would ensure better treatment for her people.  In the scholarly introduction to her unfinished autobiography, editor Miller describes his work with the Colvilles and his acquisition of Mourning Dove's manuscripts and notes, which he arranges according to important customs and cyclical/seasonal activities.  Mourning Dove's evocation of the complexities of tribal life is irresistible, full of acutely remembered conversations, ceremonies, and events.  "What kept us going," she says, "was the knowledge that everything on earth has its purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. That is the Indian theory of existence."  Notes, references, and photographs provide additional perspectives. - Rhoda Carroll, Vermont Coll., Montpelier, Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Winged Words
By Laura Coltelli
Interviewed in 1985 by Coltelli, professor of American literature at the University of Pisa, Italy, 11 Native American novelists and poets articulately and feelingly here talk about their development as individuals and as writers, their relationships with the landscape and with tribal culture, and the importance of oral tradition.  Despite their differences, all--including M. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich--focus on peculiarities inherent in their literature and its multiethnic nature, the centrality of mixed-blood Indian characters in their works, and the interpretation of Native American culture by anthropologists and non-Indian critics.  Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

 John Rollin Ridge
By James Parins
Ridge (1827-67) was a man of contradictions, and Parins (professor of English and director of American Native Press Archives at the Univ. of Arkansas at Little Rock) makes a valiant effort to sort him out.  Son and grandson of Cherokee leaders, Ridge continued his forebears' philosophy of assimilation; for him, success lay in making the transition from "a primitive aboriginal existence to a modern civilized one," as his family had done.  Extremely well educated for his time and place, Ridge used the pen as his weapon.  Parins analyzes his journalism, his poetry, and his best-known work--a novel about the California bandit Joaquin Murieta, with whom Ridge identified.  Parins does a better job with the literary criticism than with the biography. It's only in the epilogue that he begins to offer some insights into this complex man. - Debbie Tucker, Cincinnati Technical College, Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Alanis Obomsawin: The Vision of a Native Filmmaker
By Randolph Lewis
“Most Americans probably do not know that Canada has an oft-distinguished film industry…Here Lewis goes some way toward redressing this oversight by discussing the career of a documentary filmmaker who is a double rarity: a member of a First Nations tribe (one of the Canadian indigenous peoples) and a woman….Lewis relates the story of this remarkable woman in conventional chronological order, with ample biographical data and a detailed analysis of her oeuvre and its impact on Canadian society….[This is a welcome addition to a long-neglected part of cinema literature.” - Library Journal.

Elias Cornelius Boudinot: A Life on the Cherokee Border
By James W. Parins
Elias Cornelius Boudinot provides the first full account of a man who was intimately and prominently involved in the life of the Cherokee Nation in the second half of the nineteenth century and was highly influential in the opening of the former Indian Territory to white settlement and the eventual formation of the state of Oklahoma.  Involved in nearly every aspect of social, economic, and political life in Indian Territory, he was ostracized by many Cherokees, some of whom also threatened his life. Born into the influential Ridge-Boudinot-Watie family, Boudinot was raised in the East after the assassination of his father, who helped found the first newspaper published by an Indian nation.  He returned to the Cherokee Nation, affiliating with his uncle Stand Watie and serving in the Confederate Army and as a representative of the Cherokees in the Confederate Congress.  He was involved with treaty negotiations after the war, helped open the railroads into the Indian Territory, and founded the city of Vinita in Oklahoma.  He also became a political figure in Washington, DC, a newspaper editor and publisher, and a prominent orator.

I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays By Native American Writers
By Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Editors)
“I do not know of any book quite like this one.  Not only does it gather eighteen eloquent autobiographical essays in one place—a rarity in itself—but they are the life stories of some very significant Native American writers.  The combination is unique. . . . On many levels, then, this is a book both enlightening and necessary.” - Washington Post Book World. I Tell You Now is an anthology of autobiographical accounts by eighteen notable Native writers of different ages, tribes, and areas.  This second edition features a new introduction by the editors and updated biographical sketches for each writer.

 
Viet Cong at Wounded Knee: The Trail of a Blackfeet Activist
By Woody Kipp
Kipp's odyssey takes him from Montana's Blackfeet reservation to Vietnam, the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee, and back to Montana as a reservation teacher.  Born in 1945, Kipp was adopted into a family with one foot in Blackfeet tradition and the other in white American culture.  When the family moved to a small town just off the reservation, Woody's basketball skills shielded him from the most overt racism, but after he was mysteriously found one-half unit short of graduation, he joined the Marines, signing on for a sure trip to Vietnam.  Haunted by witnessing the racial hatred directed by American soldiers toward the Vietnamese, Kipp feels the same hatred directed toward him as he hunkers down in his bunker at Wounded Knee.  Fewer details of his drinking bouts and extramarital dalliances and more on his introduction to the American Indian Movement and its leaders would have better illuminated his concerns, but all in all Kipp's brutally honest story is a thought-provoking chronicle of an underdog finally making good. - Deborah Donovan, Copyright © American Library Association.  All rights reserved.

First to Fight
By Henry Mihesuah.  Devon Abbott Mihesuah (Editor)
In 1945 Henry Mihesuah, a Comanche from Duncan, Oklahoma, joined the Marines at the urging of a friend.  Not someone to tolerate those who "ran Indians down," Henry Mihesuah decided to confront his Gunnery Sergeant one morning after he trashed Henry's personal belongings (p. 32). "What's the idea of kicking our cots over?" Henry asked Gunny (p. 39).  In a contemptuous tone the sergeant asked him if he was a "spic," and Henry said "No, I'm an Indian." "Oh, you're one of them blanket-ass Indians," the sergeant retorted.  Recalling the situation, Henry Mihesuah says, "I didn't give it a second thought.  I just knocked him down [... and] the sergeant bounced off the floor" (p. 39).  For this challenge to military authority, Henry Mihesuah received a thirty-day penalty that the Marines surprisingly did not enforce, perhaps because they felt that the sergeant deserved what he got.  Although few would consider Henry Mihesuah a hostile person, the story encapsulated the strength and fortitude that marked the entire life of this very interesting Comanche man.

I’ll Go and Do More
By Carolyn Niethammer
A pioneering and forceful activist who achieved national recognition and was known to the Navaho nation as Our Legendary Mother, Wauneka (1910-1997) was the daughter of the wealthy and charismatic Navaho leader Chee Dodge and his temporary wife, Kee'hanabah.  Growing up, Wauneka didn't receive all the advantages that her older half-siblings did, which may account for her lifetime effort to walk in her father's footsteps, suggests Niethammer (Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women).  While the other children were sent to boarding schools, Annie stayed home, herding the family's livestock.  She had periods of schooling, but her real education happened late at night, watching her father's political machinations.  Yet it wasn't until the early 1940s, after she was married and a mother, that she chose to become involved in tribal politics herself.  Health and child welfare became her main concerns, as she created major campaigns against tuberculosis, trachoma, bad sanitation, alcoholism and peyote use.  Since this meant working with (white) government officials, she created "cultural bridges," such as a Navaho-English dictionary for interpreting medical terms, and incorporating medicine men into public health initiatives.  Perhaps because Niethammer is not herself Indian, she focuses on Wauneka's political experiences rather than her personal life.  In any case, author and subject never had a personal interview in which more intimate questions might have been raised (about Wauneka's curiously distant marriage or her disabled children, for example).  Scholarly but accessible, this latest entry in Nebraska's American Indian Lives series should appeal to students of modern Native American history.  Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Grandmother's Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life
By Alma Hogan Snell, Becky Matthews (Editor)
"This autobiographical work is at heart the story of a special relationship that existed between the author and her grandmother, Crow medicine woman Pretty Shield.  The older woman…raised her granddaughter to appreciate the traditions and values of a vanishing culture.  In adulthood, Snell would become a preservationist of the Crow philosophy of life and a healer who combined basic Christian teachings with native respect for and understanding of the power of nature.  She writes with disarming honesty about the obstacles she encountered, including poverty, illness…and unwed motherhood." -Library Journal.

 Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees
By John Sugden
Sugden, author of both Tecumseh: A Life and Tecumseh's Last Stand, goes back one generation in the leadership of the Shawnee to examine the life of Blue Jacket.  Dispelling the notion that Blue Jacket was a white pawn, Sugden shows that he was in reality the leader of a Native American confederacy that scored great victories against the United States until his ultimate defeat by Maj. Gen. Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.  He also mentored Tecumseh and influenced many of the ideas that would eventually be put into action by Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, also known as the Shawnee Prophet.  Libraries interested in this highly recommended title should also consider Gregory E. Dowd's A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (John Hopkins Univ., 1991), which will help put both Blue Jacket's and Tecumseh's confederacies into context.  D John R. Burch Jr., Campbellsville University Library, KY, Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Dreaming the Dawn: Conversations with Native Artists and Activists
By E.K. Caldwell
The voices are eloquent, urgent, humorous, and brutally honest.  They belong to a dozen Native Americans who have, in their art, in their song, and in their passionate activism, helped to forge the renaissance in Indian culture that is one of the unanticipated delights of the late twentieth century.  There are 13 voices, as the late Caldwell, a respected Native poet and musician in her own right, leads her interview subjects to open and honest revelation about subjects of intense personal interest.  Topics range from singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie's consideration of the uses of computer technology for tribal people, to activist Dino Butler's reflections on his personal and political evolution from hatred toward healing.  These are Native voices with shared inflections and recurrent subjects: the appropriation of spiritual objects and beliefs by New Age practitioners and the question of blood quantum as centers of controversy in Indian country.  This work affirms the enduring potency of Native oral traditions as it hints that our salvation may lie in that traditional wisdom.

Authentic Alaska: Voices of Its Native Writers
By Susan B. Andrews & John Creed (Editors)
These remarkable essays by contemporary native Alaskans preserve traditional ways and offer a vision of a sustainable life that encompasses both the old and the new.  Mostly Inupiat (northern Eskimo) living near Kotzebue in far northwest Alaska, the writers live off of the grid and off of the highway system in villages accessible only by air and water or, seasonally, by snowmobile.  In fresh and unassuming prose, they describe such subsistence traditions as digging roots from mouse caches, fishing for sea mammals, gathering wild greens, and making seal oil.  The culture, from potlatch dancing to blanket toss, that sustained and was sustained by these food-gathering activities is also brought vividly to life.  Far from purveying a romanticized vision of native life, these essays include chilling memoirs of near-death on frozen trails, drunken life on urban streets, and abusive educational experiences.  But contemporary modern life has its pleasures, too, including Internet cruising and university studies.  An enlightening and lively exploration of native Alaskan life.

Song of Rita Joe
By Rita Joe
In what might very well be the year of the memoir, it often seems that every literate Baby Boomer is putting his or her reminiscences on paper.  Joe is quite another memoirist altogether: poet, educator, and ambassador for Native people, she here recounts in both poetry and prose her struggles with racism, sexism, and poverty as well as her search for identity.  Since the Native and non-Native worlds make such different demands, the quest for personal understanding is no easy one; addressing her non-Native audience, Joe says, "It is hard for you to see our face, and sometimes it is hard for us to see ourselves."  In late life Joe finds solace in religion, but her continuing search for her true self still shows in the writing, which is quiet, almost dreamy on first reading, yet edgy beneath its surface calm.  - David Kirby, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

I Stand in the Center of the Good: Interviews With Contemporary Native American Artists
By Lawrence Abbott (Editor)
What is Indian art?  There have been many attempts to define it, but the so-called Santa Fe style of the 1930s - placid, two dimensional depictions of traditional scenes - set the standard by which subsequent art by Native Americans would be judged.  Art that radically challenged the stereotype - the work of Joe Herrera, Fritz Scholder, and T.C. Cannon, for example - met with resistance; questions were raised about its authenticity as Indian art.  Today's Indian art has resoundingly overturned old preconceptions: here are cartoon figures in throbbing neon colors, "decorated" grocery bags, messages to America on the Spectator billboard in Times Square, delicate abstractions and cubist images, work that ranges from monotype and photography to mixed media and clay, from humor and biting commentary to quiet introspection.  I Stand in the Center of Good, the first book of its kind, offers a forum for seventeen contemporary Native American artists to speak about the development of their art, their creative processes, how they define their art, and how it relates to their Indianness.  The interviews are handsomely illustrated with works by the artists.

Chief: The Life Story of Eugene Delorme, Imprisoned Santee Sioux
By Inez Cardozo-Freeman (Editor)
An affecting story of one man's life of crime, Cardozo-Freeman lets the man, Eugene Delorme, tell it in his own words.  His voice is at once contemplative, childlike, and angry. His childhood is nothing short of horrendous, as he and his family are ravaged by racism, poverty, and an alcoholic father.  By the age of 10, Delorme is living the life of a criminal.  His shoplifting and joyriding quickly escalate to breaking and entering and armed robbery.  Prison is not simply in Delorme's future, after about the age of 13, it's essentially his life.  As soon as he's released from one term, he does the very things to guarantee his return.  But the book does more than recount Delorme's history.  It tries to understand the central questions of recidivism: Is criminal behavior caused from within or without? Can the career criminal ever change?  What responsibilities does the criminal have to himself?  His society?  In Delorme's case, the answers are not so clear-cut as the questions might presuppose, but they are present, in authentic and disturbing detail.

Singing an Indian Song: A Biography of D'Arcy McNickle
By Dorothy R. Parker
Historian Parker has written a well-documented account of the life of D'Arcy McNickle (1904-77), an enrolled member of the Montana Flathead tribe, an anthropologist, teacher, novelist (Runner in the Sun, 1954; Univ. of New Mexico Pr, 1987. reprint); The Surrounded, 1936; Univ. of New Mexico, 1978. reprint); Wind from an Enemy Sky, 1978; Univ. of New Mexico, 1988. reprint), and founding member of the National Congress of American Indians.  The biography, depicting a life in two cultures, begins with a family history and look at reservation life.  Next emerges McNickle's career from the 1920s to the 1970s.  Sections on his association with the "Indian New Deal" and the Bureau of Indian Affairs under John Collier are especially interesting.  McNickle set precedents in whatever he touched: as an early Pan-Indianist and, in 1971, when he became the first director of the Newberry Library's Center for the History of the American Indian.  His literary works, once ignored, are now considered seminal Native American novels.  This is an account of a unique American whose contributions were many and varied. - Margaret W. Norton, Hoffman Estates H.S., Hoffman Estates, Il.  Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.