Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives by Ray A. Young Bear (review)

Reviews 161 JMack Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives. By Ray A. Young Bear. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. 261 pages, $24.95.) Part poetry, part community history, part social commentary and part fictionalized autobiography, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives offers, according to the author, “a collage done over a lifetime via the tedious layering upon layering of images by an artist who didn’t believe in endings, for the sweeping visions he wanted to capture were constant and forever changing.” Its value comes from these layers of images, including the tragi-comic jailing of Claude Youthman for terrorizing white commissioners with thrown cantaloupes; a peyote gathering at the Well-Off Man Church, complete with a lovingly detailed description of the small cast iron kettle water drum used; and Carson Two Red Foot’s story of how his mother helped the family survive the winter after his father deserted them for a younger woman. The author’s afterword reveals that although one of the book’s main voices, Edgar Bearchild, is a barely fictionalized Ray Young Bear, many of the other characters are composites drawn from Young Bear’s life in the central Iowa M esquakie Settlem ent. One of the more engaging characters, besides Bearchild, the scholarship Indian who wins grants to write in white academia before returning to the settlement, is Facepaint himself. Ted Facepaint refuses to accept both Bearchild’s way and the settlement’s cycle of poverty, alcoholism and commodity handouts, even though he finds he can’t escape it in spite of trying. Like Bearchild, he leaves the settlement, but not for formal study. Like Bearchild, he returns, perhaps wiser but no better off for having left. Equally as important as the layers of images and stories is the author’svoice. Unlike Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman or Neihardt’s BlackElk Speaks, BlackEagle Child is one of the few autobiographies of Native Americans written without the help of a white auditor. This in no way lessens those books, but adds to the weight of this one. As Bearchild (and perhaps Young Bear) writes in one of his successful fellowship applications, “because no other voice should ever/can ever replace the original voice of the American Indian poet, especially one who resides at the place of his birth and not in the city or academia, I merely seek to compose meaningful narratives as experienced within the Black Eagle Child Nation.” Ray Young Bear has certainly done so with this book. TIM THOMAS Fort Collins, Colorado TfltfBusiness ofFancydancing. By Sherman Alexie. (Brooklyn, New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1992. 100 pages, $18.00/$10.00.) Sherman Alexie’s remarkable debut, The Business of Fancydancing, is an outstanding collection of poetry, prose, vignettes and epigrams that will surely launch him firmly into the Native American literature scene. ...