The Business of Fancydancing by Sherman Alexie (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. 162 Western American Literature A spontaneous combustion propels the reader into the complex density of the modern Indian world, on and off the reservation, at once painful and compelling yet somehow balanced with humor and hope. Alexie’s razor-sharp irony races toward unexpected twists and turns. His stark portraits are vivid and disturbing: house fires, sin and forgiveness, Crazy Horse dreams (the kind that don’t come true), Buffalo Bill opening a pawn shop, powwows and fancydancers like Vernon WildShoe (Elvis in braids), Crazy Horse just back from Vietnam in the Breakaway Bar, Lester FallsApart translating the directions on a commodity can of soup, Chief Victor, two hundred winter beers wide, still sinkingjum p shots from thirty feet and beyond. Alexie grew up in Wellpinit on the Spokane Indian reservation. He speaks of his connections to and isolation within, not only white America, but his own tribe. His writing hits hard because it comes directly out of his own experiences. Comic relief provides an element of surprise. And throughout we encounter the theme of forgiveness. In “Pow Wow”we read of the usual hustle and bustle, humorous incidents and the inevitable encounters with whites, all taking place in the present and past. The poem ends: still, Indians have a way of forgiving anything a little but more and more it’s memory lasting longer and longer like uranium...