Airlift to Wounded Knee by Bill Zimmerman (review)

160 Western American Literature Yet just about everything interesting which is pertinent and which can be factually ascertained has been included; and there are clear indications of disputed or conflicting views on various points, with the author’s judgment clear as to which view he accepts as most likely. You get the feeling that Roy Appleman and his helpers in the Park Service have been over almost every mile of the ground traversed (where the actual route is identifiable today) and have brought to you in one volume all you would need to know to start your own great Lewis and Clark trip. STARR JENKINS California Polytechnic State University Airlift to Wounded Knee. By Bill Zimmerman. (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1976. 348 pages, $10.00.) This is an urgent and rather brave book, written from “the other side” — that is, from the point of view of one who no longer believes in the automatic goodness of the United States. I should narrow that down and say, one who no longer believes in the automatic goodness of the U.S. Gov­ ernment, as represented in this book by the FBI and the BIA. Zimmerman, who worked in the civil-rights movement and took an active part in the anti-Vietnam-War movement, eventually founding Medical Aid to IndoChina , came to see the American Indian Movement struggle at Wounded Knee as another result of world-pervasive oppression and racism. It is all the same struggle, but here the victims are native Americans surrounded by snipers and Armored Personnel Carriers, and in order to help them, one must speak from untapped pay phones, fly in the night like a spy, and time one’s food drop so that the planes come in low (to avoid radar), appear suddenly at dawn before the FBI agents are fully awake, drop the food, and then fly off swiftly, hugging the ground as protection against the threat of automatic weapons fire. Zimmerman’s technique is to alternate chapters describing his sus­ penseful mercy flight with chapters of historical background and interpreta­ tion concerning the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973. The interpretation is sympathetic to AIM, as might be guessed from a man in Zimmerman’s position, but his expectable criticism of the arrogant, unfeeling, hugely blundering U.S. Government is informed with a certain innocence and wistfulness, as if Zimmerman still very much wants to believe that American citizens, once they are in possession of the facts, could get together in a rational, community-minded way and turn the whole thing around. Prob­ ably the best part of the book, literarily, is the description of the flight — Reviews 161 Zimmerman has a gift for narrative. But what sticks in the mind afterward is the author’s radical, almost 18th-century, assumption that the average American, i.e., his reader, is a right-minded creature. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University ARCHETYPE WEST: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region. By William Everson. (Berkeley: Oyez, 1976. xiv + 181 pages, $8.95 cloth, $3.95 paper.) William Everson returns literature to its religious roots in Archetype West, a powerful, sometimes troubling, certainly stimulating book. Working organically from western American literature’s deepest points, he ignores traditional scholarly and critical categories to produce a book that is as much a Vision as a study. And he makes it work, for Everson’s is a poet’s grasp of language. Only a very few scholars have probed the core of western life and its literary expression to comparable depth. The doubtfulness of established critics in their assessments of “the entire Western movement” prompted Everson’s examination, which origi­ nally began as an article for an American Library Association book on American literary regions. Working from aboriginal literature to contemporary writers, Everson has sought recurrent patterns of symbol and myth until he has discovered what he believes is the underlying archetype from which all truly western literature has evolved. Call it pantheism or vitalism or animism, it is the great arational force of nature itself, that force of which all humans are a part, though buzzing consciousness may hide such deeper, inevitable realities. In the west, Everson tells us, “newcomers experienced Nature...