FOOLS CROW
James Welch
New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1986
391 pp., $18.95
RED EARTH, WHITE EARTH
Will Weaver
New York: Simon and Schuster
383 pp., $17.95
The Indian has been no stranger in American literature. He began as Noble Savage, endowed with all the primitive virtues imagined and admired by Romantic philosophers, degenerated into a bloodthirsty tomahawker of women and children when he took the warpath against our invasions, and was sentimentalized into a tragic dignity and eloquence as the spokesman of a vanishing race, as soon as we could be certain that he was indeed vanishing.
Like savages ourselves, gaining virtue by eating the hearts of our enemies, we have come to take a possessive pride in his courage against great odds, and to regret that his destiny was to get in our road. Our pantheon is full of heroes we borrowed from him--Chief Logan, Billy Bowlegs, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Sequoia, Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Geronimo. It stirs us to read that General Howard, who finally ran down the Nez perces in the Bearpaw Mountains, called them "the bravest men and the best marksmen" he ever knew. Contemporary audiences viewing the movie Little Big Man cheer not the Seventh Cavalry but the Sioux and Cheyennes who annihilated it. We accept a comfortable guilt for our complicity in, or at least our benefiting from, the long record bad faith, broken promises, aggression, and outright genocide that Helen Jackson summarized in 1881, when Indian resistance was almost over, in A Century of Dishonor.
Along with the literary treatments of the Indian that cast him either as a retaliator for intolerable wrongs or as a demoralized, drunken, gut-eating vagabond living in faith at the fringes of white settlement, there was from early on--but not early enough--a persistent scholarly interest in Indian cultures. That produced the invaluable writings of Schoolcraft, Morgan, Powell, Bandelier and others, and preserved some dying or endangered tribal cultures at least as museum pieces. Later anthropologists, especially those associated with the Bureau of Ethnology, have continued that sympathetic investigation of native cultures and assured that at least their surviving remnants will not be lost.
But we have heard little from the Indian himself. Without the help of his literate conquerors, he could not even leave a lament for his own fate. Apart from the mournful, defeated eloquence of leaders such as Chief Joseph and the reports of wars and councils taken down on the spot by white reporters, the life and death of whole tribes was written in wind. We have few records either of their activities or their feelings during the wars of suppression, and almost all of the studies of Indian cultures have been made by non-Indians. During the hundred years and more since the last hostiles were penned up in their reservation poor-farms, demoralization and poverty have prevented the rise, until lately, of Indians who could speak for themselves and their tribes.
Only in the last twenty years have we had Indian novels written by Indians, but already that
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