American Indian Literature and the Southwest by Eric Gary Anderson (review)

4 6 8 WAL 34.4 WINTER 2 0 0 0 is inappropriate for the 1950s setting of Crabb’s narration. Also, from time to time, Crabb falls almost completely into catalogue or travelogue , particularly as he describes Paris or the Chicago Columbia Exhibition, or other marvels of the nineteenth century. Even so, there are some wonderful moments in this highly read­ able and entertaining novel; once more Berger’s research of histor­ ical fact is impeccable and accurate. Additionally, it is hardly the last we shall hear of or from Jack Crabb, for the open-ended con­ clusion promises further adventures in the life of Little Big Man as the new century dawns. Am erican Indian Literature and the Southwest. By Eric Gary Anderson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. 225 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by Linda Lizut H elstern Southern Illinois University, Carbondale While its introduction suggests that American Indian Literature and the Southwest will be a study of comparative cultural geographies, specifically white Euro-American and Native, Eric Anderson is ulti­ mately more concerned with the construction of Indian identity than with the construction of region. This should come as no surprise, per­ haps, for over the past decade, borderlands have become the single metaphor for identity theorists who disavow essentialist notions of race and gender. Anderson draws on James Clifford’s paradoxical “roots-routes” pun to define the dynamic way tribal peoples have traditionally constructed their own identity in relation to the land. This Anderson calls his “mobile home” theory, for the habit of regular tribal migrations does not detract from a centered sense of tribal identity. Accepting Turner’s frontier hypothesis, he suggests that the Euro-American desire to impose borders after the close of the frontier brought a concomitant desire to “fix” the idea of Indianness in a way of life seen as inevitably doomed in a rapidly industrializing world. Before Anderson shows Indian identity in the process of being fixed, however, a strategy that would effectively privilege the alien white construct, he considers the pattern of resistance among Southwest Native writers to any static notion of Indianness. In the first third of the book, he considers journey motifs in the poetry of Wendy Rose and Apache strategic mobility in the autobiographies of Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, but Anderson’s demonstration rests heavily upon Leslie Silko’s politically charged Almanac of the Dead with its transgressive sex and violence and frequent border crossings. b o o k R e v ie w s 469 In the middle third of the study, Anderson examines America’s tum-of-the-century preservationist mentality, linking railroad tourism and Indian “artifactualization,” to borrow a term from Louis Owens. From the emptiness of the desert in Frank Norris’s McTeague, Anderson traces its peopling in Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain, with an important aside on the nineteenth-century Paiute autobiography of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, and then moves to the silenced tribal voice of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House. Throughout this study, Anderson draws upon American popular culture to emphasize his most important points. He concludes with a valorization of mixedblood crosses of pop culture, high culture, and Southwest Native culture, specifically in George Herriman’s modern era comic strip “Krazy Kat” and A. A. Carr’s contemporary Navajo vampire novel Eye Killers. While highly suggestive, Anderson’s study is hardly a definitive work of scholarship. One is reminded of the Native critical explication “Our songs are short because we know so much.” Most problematic here is the isolation of the Southwest from the broader contexts of Native and American literary history. While Native/American rela­ tions in the region are unique for reasons not clearly delineated by Anderson, they are also in important ways paradigmatic. Indeed, the two elements at the heart of Anderson’s argument, which Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance” and “Native transmotion,” are widely iden­ tified as the hallmarks of contemporary Native literature, cutting, like Trickster, across all tribal boundaries. It is especially disappointing that Anderson’s methodology puts important contemporary Native critical/ theoretical voices under erasure. The Night H as a N aked Soul: W itchcraft and Sorcery among the W estern...