Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World by Gerald Vizenor (review)

Reviews 361 on to England and France, back to the eastern half of the United States, and west, where McNickle worked for the Bureau ofIndian Affairs. D’ArcyMcNickle was bornJanuary 18, 1904, on the Flathead Indian Reser­ vation in Montana, ofFrench, Cree, and Irish ancestry. Attending manyschools, he never received a college degree. Calling himselfa “breed,”he showed that it was possible to have an Indian identity in twentieth-century America. He ac­ cepted his sociocultural position oftwoworlds, believing that the Indian culture could survive in a world dominated by modern technology by selective adapta­ tion and education. He recognized the inevitability of change in all tribes and races. He was sensitive to the differences of all Indian tribes and understood their resistance to change as ordered by whites. He became one of the first Native American historians to interpret the Indians’ point of view in their encounter with whites. Dorothy Parker has given a comprehensive chronology ofMcNickle’swork for the BIA. Students and historians have soughtasimilar chronologyofthe BIA from its creation in 1924. This biography does much to help fill the void. The index is also adequate, enabling the researcher to find such little-known sub­ jects as theJapanese Relocation Poston Project. The forty-nine pages ofsources include genealogy, primary sources, unpublished works, interviews, BIA records, books, newspapers and periodicals. I recommend this book to all interested in the continuing saga of the American Indian. HAZEL McKIM Central Valley, California Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. By Gerald Vizenor. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 144 pages, $17.95.) LikeVizenor’searlierwork, Dead Voicesdramatizes the complex “wordwars” waged between tribal peoples and mainstream culture. Indeed, this strange “novel”creates a living trickstervoice—at once profane, lyrical and wondrously bizarre—through which to dramatize a radical perspective on the Western tradition ofwritten culture, embodying “dead voices”that suppress the “natural agonies”oftribal peoples and the naturalworld. Bygivingwritten “voice”to the internal narrator Bageese, a reclusive tribal woman who is at once a bear and the vehicle through whichwe hear the agonies ofanimal beings surviving in the urban landscape, Vizenor paradoxically translates unspeakable realities into a written medium that historically has obliterated them in wars ofwords. Because the veryvoice ofthe novel embodies a paradox ofarticulation, this is a difficult book to read, one in which meaning and narrative alike seem to hover just 562 WesternAmerican Literature beyond the reach ofwritten language. Like the mirrors in Bageese’shome that provide glimpses of her bear identity, the language here presents tantalizing refractions from realms ofexperience that never entirely come into focus. But this effect ofsuspension between worlds ofdiscourse creates a curious poetry as well, in which conventional images of tribal cultures, nature, and reality itself are radically transposed. The novel’s messages are implicit in its paradoxical point of view, which integrates “voices” that are inherently untranslatable, so that decoding the perspectives of the various voices telling the narrative becomes part of the process of “reading.”The three major categories of “voice”are suggested in the opening chapter, “Shadows,”which serves as a fictional author’s preface to the tales thatfollow. Here the tribal storyteller Bageesewarns the scholarly narrator of the dangers of translating her stories into the “dead voices”of lectures and printed words. This introductorywarning about the difficultyoftranslating oral into written “hearing” is later compounded by the nature of the stories them­ selves, which originate in the tribal “wanaki game,”and which must be experi­ enced and told from a first person plural point of view, in which the human narrator’svoice is fused with those of the beings whose stories are being told. Bageese’s education of the narrator also prepares the reader for the uniquely conceived voice of the stories that follow: ‘The secret, she told me, was not to pretend, but to see and hear the real stories behind the words, the voices ofthe animals in me, not the definitions ofthe words alone.”Thus we are introduced to the wanaki game, in which the “we”ofthe stories become, in turn, the beings designated in the story titles. Despite the difficulties it presents to readers—or perhaps partially because ofthem—Dead Voicesis a humorous, original, and curiously eloquent...