Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction by James Ruppert (review)

172 Western American Literature felt as a child when white tourists, gathered at the playground of her grade school to take snapshots o f Indian children, would motion her to step aside, out of the picture, because her skin was too light. Always it is the land which soothes this sorrow. For Silko, peace conies in the form of the relationship she establishes with the rocks and rattlesnakes outside her home in the Tucson Mountains. For the Yaquis, driven from their Sonoran homelands, it is “this shared consciousness of being part of a living community that continues . . . beyond the death of one or even of many, that continues on the riverbanks of the Santa Cruz after the mountains have been left behind.” SARA L. SPURGEON U niversity of A rizona M ediation in Contem porary N ative American Fiction. By James Ruppert. (Norman: University o f Oklahoma Press, 1995. 174 pages, $29.95.) Based on his experience teaching both Alaskan Native and non-Native stu­ dents, Ruppert theoretically frames his concept of m ediation and then uses it to analyze six novels: M omaday’s House M ade o f D awn, W elch’s Winter in the Blood, Silko’s Ceremony, V izenor’s Bearheart: The H eirship Chronicles, M cN ickle’s Wind from an Enemy Sky, and Erdrich’s Love M edicine. By m edia­ tion, Ruppert means “an artistic and conceptual standpoint, constantly flexible, which uses the epistem ological frameworks of Native American and Western cultural traditions to illum inate and enrich each other.” Overlapping these frameworks, each novelist creates fou r stories: m ythological and communal stories are created from a Native American world-view for the “im plied Native reader,” w hile psychological and sociological stories are created from a EuroAmerican world-view for the “im plied non-Native reader.” Initially self-con­ tained, the four narrative levels becom e conflated so that both im plied readers com e eventually “to question the way they form knowledge and meaning” and ultimately to “understand two codes, two traditions o f discourse.” Ruppert’s analysis of Love M edicine exem plifies both the book’s strengths and its w eaknesses. (Readers may have to overcome their irritation with the sloppy editing and proofreading— typographical errors and m issing words abound.) Accounts of how N atives and non-Natives may differently interpret particular scenes are often engaging and perceptive, as when Ruppert interprets the scene when Lyman drives Henry’s car into the river in order to convince others that a suicide is really an accident both psychologically— as an attempt to salvage his brother’s reputation— and m ythologically— as his follow ing of Chippewa custom in burying the dead’s possessions with the body. However, the over-arching claim — that both interpretations are made available to both sets of im plied readers— fails to explain satisfactorily how the im plied nonNative reader has access to the cultural knowledge that informs the “N ative” Reviews 173 reading, and likew ise, how Native readers from unrelated cultures make sense of such scenes. Finally, the phenomenon of an author using different codes for dual audiences, thus hoping to expose both to each other’s cultural perspective, strikes me as neither uniquely contemporary nor exclusive to Native American writers. N evertheless, Ruppert’s overview of the culturally-determined ways in which these novels may be interpreted w ill make M ediation a valuable resource for many— in particular, perhaps, for those teaching these novels either for the first time or in the context of American literature surveys and multi-ethnic lit­ erature courses. MARK T. HOYER U niversity o f California, D avis The Am erican West. By Dee Brown. (New York: Scribners, 1994. 461 pages, $25.00.) Dee Brown’s book is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans (to be expected from the author of Bury My H eart at Wounded K nee), and its excellent archival photographs. Indeed, Brown’s historical tech­ nique is like a snapshot: a story or character shown briefly and meant to be rep­ resentative. Yet often the use of a verbal image is merely illustrative— sound­ bite history— and this...