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  • That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America by David L. Moore
  • O. Alan Weltzien
David L. Moore, That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013. 465 pp. $45.00.

David Moore has spent his career studying Native American literature; That Dream Shall Have a Name distills many years of teaching, reading, and thinking. A signal contribution to Native American scholarship, it shines with wisdom, poignancy, and hope. Moore [End Page 294] takes his cue (and title) from Simon Ortiz’s extraordinary from Sand Creek (1981), a profound reimagining of American identity that enfolds rather than marginalizes First American voices. From his first to his final page Moore argues for an inclusive pluralism, a “unity in diversity” that standard American history and many Americans have ignored. That pluralism depends upon dialogic rather than dialectical thinking, and his chapters remind us of these contrasting definitions and traditions even as he persuasively advocates the former.

Moore explains that this book constitutes “an attempt to reenvision what Euro-Americans might become if they learn to listen to Native American approaches to America” (xv). To make the case, it continually weaves among five deeply interrelated concepts: authenticity, identity, community, sovereignty, and humor (or irony). Moore wants to “complicate the definitions of these key terms in Indian studies, and thereby in American studies” (14), and to illumine the circular dance among these concepts he draws upon the work of five writers: William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, D’Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie. As Moore argues, these terms together “constitut[e] a nation,” and these writers “rewrite the American nation” (xiii). Ambitious claims undergird this ambitious study, and I believe Moore richly achieves his goals.

In the lengthy introduction one navigates thickets of theory as Moore lays out the wide-ranging intellectual base of his argument. The range of quotation and the length of the notes and bibliography attest to a breadth of study and reference from which Moore recasts Native American literature. In each of the five large chapters he discusses one of his five terms, then focuses on one writer, beginning with Apess. Thus the book proceeds chronologically, yet each chapter includes sections on the other writers. So chronology is infused with recursive treatment, and the effect resembles an artful simultaneity as the reader repeatedly returns to each writer from slightly different vantages and emphases. Moore courts the risk of conceptual repetition, and in the final chapter and conclusion, for instance, one encounters quotations or phrases heard earlier. Yet the overall effect feels richly dialogic, as though Apess in the 1830s and Alexie most recently speak the same yearnings. That Dream’s structure and form happily imitate Moore’s intention, and [End Page 295] the reader, privy to a polyvocal tutorial, emerges at the end with a deeply nuanced understanding of a past-present unity of sensibility and desire.

Moore’s masterful study challenges a range of assumptions and preconceptions and sometimes makes us squirm, but Moore frequently inflects his wisdom with wit and shows himself fond of the occasional pun. His dialogic advocacy and carefully distinguished readings provide, ultimately, an extremely convincing and moving “rewrite,” one written, like Ortiz’s closing verse from which Moore takes his title, “with love / and compassion / and knowledge.” It encourages all of us, as teachers and writers and citizens, to help realize “that dream” in our own lives.

O. Alan Weltzien
University of Montana Western
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