Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work (review)

The late Louis Owens left behind a tremendous amount of work, both creative and critical, that will occupy scholars in the field of Native American literature for a long time to come. In fact, a substantial amount of critical attention has been given to that work already. The collection entitled Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work is an invaluable addition to that body of scholarship. Most of the volume addresses his fiction and autobiographical writing, although nearly every essay considers those contributions in the context of the critical work, framing each as inseparable from the others.

In her introduction, editor Jacquelyn Kilpatrick observes that Louis Owens "spent much of his life teasing apart the meanings that surrounded him, separating the real from the imposed or supposed and putting it all back together in works of literary complexity" (4). She appropriately notes that these works "have changed the way readers interpret Native American Literature" (4).

The body of the text is framed by the hunting metaphor Owens expresses in his essay "The Hunter's Dance," found in I Hear the Train. The first entry is a poem by Neil Harrison which evokes hunting, and the book ends with a personal essay by Jesse Peters referencing the same metaphor. In between, we find that metaphor elaborated upon as we see the complex mind of Louis Owens carefully and deliberately tracking the insights that made him justifiably famous in his field.

Chapter 1 is an interview that A. Robert Lee conducted with Owens in 2001, the last interview the writer gave before his death. Those who knew Louis Owens will hear his voice in those pages, and it is sad indeed that the proposed book of interviews, Outside Shadow, would never be completed.

The second chapter consists of the editor's essay, "Taking Back the Bones: Louis Owens's 'Post'-Colonial Fiction." Here we find Kilpatrick noting that "Owens and other Native writers must tell a story, but they must also un-tell a story" since what "most of Euramerica knows about Native Americans has much to do with stereotypes developed politically, cinematically, or in literature and little to do with the actual people" (54). The author quotes Owens's observation that readers of Native American literature are expected to appreciate not only the "western tradition," but also the mythologies of the indigenous peoples evoked in "Native American" Wction and poetry. Concluding her examination of The Sharpest Sight, Kilpatrick says of Owens, "quietly, Wrmly, and with a loaded pen, he writes back to the center and takes back the cultural bones" (77).

Elvira Pulitano's essay, "Crossreading Texts, Crossreading Identity: Hybridity, Diaspora, and Transculturation in Louis Owens's Mixedblood Messages" is chapter 3. Pulitano examines Owens's use of postcolonial theory, claiming, "Owens situates the experience of Native American people within a postcolonial discursive mode, anticipating the rather complicated issue of how appropriate or even legitimate it is to use the category 'postcolonial' in relation to the Native American condition" (83).

Chapter 4, Susan Bernardin's "Moving in Place: Dark River and the New Indian Novel," effectively examines Owens's final novel as another sophisticated investigation of his characters' relationships with the complex idea of wilderness. Bernardin points to the image of a Hamm's beer sign migrating from one Owens novel to the next, symbol of "the long-cherished notion of finding oneself in the 'wilderness' [. . .] suitably emptied of indigenous people save for the moving 'sign' of their appropriation," seen in the Ojibway canoe forever "moving" in place in the beer advertisement (107).

In chapter 5, Linda Lizut Helstern's "Re-storying the West: Race, Gender, and Genre in Nightland," we learn that "Nightland is the Cherokee ritual term for West, home of the Thunders and home of the dead." Helstern sees Owens to be engaged in "reconfigur[ing] the mythic West of cowboys, Indians, and frontier justice as postcontact Indian...