Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak by Laura Coltelli (review)

Reviews 145 Black Elk: The Sacred Ways of aLakota. By Wallace Black Elk and William S. Lyon. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. 193 pages, $16.95.) Wallace Black Elk tells us that when he was five he participated in a cere­ mony in which he “sailed . . . right out into the solar system” where the stars showed him “the powers of the universe.” The book which he has prepared with William S. Lyon isa record ofhis many such experiences since. Black Elk says that Nicholas Black Elk, the subject of Black Elk Speaks, was one of his eleven spiritual advisors, but he never tells us what he means by this influence. Lyon’s assertion in his introduction that “Nick,” as he always irritatingly calls him, practiced shamanism long after he was converted to Catholicism is apparently only an attempt to justify Wallace Black Elk’s claim that he was influenced by Nicholas. Of course, we are never right to demand of a book that it be more like some other book, but comparisons with Neihardt’smasterpiece are inevitable. Lyon has avoided ths complaints of those who question Neihardt’s handling of his materials by using word-for-word transcriptions of the tapes of what Black Elk told him in English. This is both the principal strength of the book and its principal weakness. Black Elk seems often to be rambling, his repeti­ tions are tiring, and the book’slack ofany apparent sense of organization would be easier to ignore if it gave us any coherent sense of what it means to be a Lakota shaman. Lyon says that “shamans are master technicians at altered states of con­ sciousness,” and presumably that is how we are to take, for example, Black Elk’s account of being released by a “spirit” from a padded cell. But the lack of any editorial direction makes it impossible for us to distinguish between his adventures in the spirit world and his life in the world the rest of us inhabit. On the other hand, the book provides substantial evidence of continuity in the development of Lakota spirituality. Black Elk’sdefinition of the symbol­ ism of the sacred pipe and the four directions and his emphasis on the number four suggest that his vision has developed from Nicholas Black Elk and from traditional Lakota religion generally. In spite of missionaries and bureaucrats, much of the Lakota vision has survived, and this book is worth reading for that news. ROBERT L. BERNER University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. ByLaura Coltelli. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1990. 213 pages, $22.50.) In Winged Words Laura Coltelli presents transcriptions of what appear to be taped interviews (although we are never told her method) conducted in 1985 with the eleven contemporary Native American writers who are by now best-known to most readers: Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich and Michael 146 Western American Literature Dorris, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and James Welch. There is a strong sense of the graciousness and gentle willingness, even enthusiasm, of these writers to be collected, interviewed, and presented yet again in conversational format. In the interest of scholarship it ought to be made immediately apparent in the introduction how Winged Words makes a significant contribution beyond already existing collections of interviews such as, for instance, Joseph Bruchac’s Survival This Way or Brian Swann/Arnold Krupat’s I Tell You Now. Coltelli seems oblivious to these works, to the history of Native American tribes, and to the current debates over defining “tribal identity” or “ethnic voice and author­ ity.” From such oversights come assertions such as only “Southwest, Northwest, Plains, and Midwest [tribes] stand for the history of the Indian in the United States” and “Indian novelists [have] no parallel in world literature” without her stating her criteria. Coltelli does tell us that the “aim ofmost of the questions was ... to elicit from [the writers] their sense of displacement.” To conduct ten interviews armed with such questions could only structure a different project than that, say, of Bruchac, who found his authors’ strategies to be “primarily those of celebration...