Indian Country by Peter Matthiessen (review)

Reviews 59 eries of the party were presented in a unified picture. The final map in the Atlas, labelled “Lewis and Clark Map of 1814,” makes impressively clear what they had accomplished. Indeed, the contrast between this map, revealing the courses of unknown rivers and the hitherto unguessed-at complexity of the Rocky Mountain system, and the preliminary maps with their great unfilled spaces, may be the most vivid possible testimony to the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. REX E. ROBINSON, Logan, Utah Indian Country. By Peter Matthiessen. (New York: Viking, 1983. 320 pages, $16.95.) In Indian Country, Peter Matthiessen uses the skills of a polished fiction writer to present the saga of the present-day Indian Wars. We are introduced to “traditional” Indians who are quiet, humble men, more truly in the spirit of Crazy Horse as he is consistently remembered than the urbanized militants of Matthiessen’s preceding book. The spiritual life of these Indian people continues to be assaulted by aggressive missionaries as well as by purveyors of various kinds of junk, new and old — television, pollution, drugs, booze, etc. Traditional Indians are desperately fighting for their lands, and for the Indian identity which is inseparable from that land, in their own communities, in their schools, and in the federal courts. Many Americans will be shocked to learn about the ruthless policies which their government continues to force on Indian people, but Matthiessen’s selection of urgent and little-known environ­ mental batttles will alarm the majority of readers (and voters) into complete attention. In Northern Arizona and New Mexico the Navajo people and their land have been criminally battered by Kerr-McGee, who, “attracted by cheap, defenseless labor” and inadequate safety regulations, employed Indian miners who “perhaps because they had no concept of radiation” were given neither masks nor drinking water. They often drank from the puddles of “hot” water on the mine floor. A few years after the mine closed, more than half of these had died or were dying of lung cancer, dust poisoning, pulmonary fibrosis and other “ravages.” Kerr-McGee left behind seventy-one acres of “spent uran­ ium that is estimated to retain up to eighty-five percent of the original radiation.” Throughout the western states the piles of “tailings” have been washed or may still be washed into rivers used for drinking water. The ash from the tailings also travels by wind and in towns like Durango, Colorado it has affected many children with severe respiratory ailments. On July 16, 1979, a dam at a United Nuclear Corporation tailings mill near Church Rock broke, “releasing ninety-five million gallons of radioactive water” into the Rio Puerco River. Several of these Three Mile Island-like episodes have not been publicized because “most of the victims have been Indians,” because about seventy-five percent of known uranium reserves in the United States 60 Western American Literature is controlled by the seven major oil corporations, and because the “great energy consortiums are looting the Southwest (and the Great Plains) under the red-white-and-blue banner of ‘energy independence’ for America.” But if the monster can be identified, he can be stopped. Recently, after many legal setbacks, Indian and non-Indian environmentalists prevented the U.S. Forest Service from turning a sacred mountain of the Karuk and Yurok people of Oregon into “Doctor Rock Recreation Area, Zone 7-11A Recreation Area, Primitive Experience.” Matthiessen realizes that the beast’s language radi­ ates his essence, and he has put him squarely in our sights. JULIAN C. RICE Florida Atlantic University California Writers. By Stoddard Martin. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. 224 pages, $20.00.) The subtitle, “Jack London John Steinbeck The Tough Guys,” is not intended to label London and Steinbeck. Dashiell Hammett, James N. Cain, and Raymond Chandler share (with references to Upton Sinclair and B. Traven) the longest chapter in the book. London and Steinbeck are treated in separate chapters; an “Introduction” and a concluding chapter, “The Sixties and After,” make up the remainder. We also find 17 pages of “Notes,” as the book has the look of a scholarly treatise. The Steinbeck chapter alone has 101 footnotes...