The Company They Keep

Page 18 American Book Review The Company They Keep Jeanetta Calhoun Mish of constructing an anthology for use as a textbook in a course on Native literature or as one of several texts in a women’s literature course by choosing “depth over breadth,” including several stories by each of the fifteen writers, and by severing stories from novels so the instructor could squeeze them into an undergraduate course which could not possibly discharge Almanac of the Dead (1992) during a single semester. The weaknesses of the anthology are directly related to the compromises necessary to achieve the form of an undergraduate textbook. Several of the stories are frustratingly truncated and do not accurately represent their author’s storytelling abilities. The informational and definitional footnotes to the stories are vaguely irritating and repetitious. Also, if a regular reader of NativeAmerican literature opens this collection hoping for new stories from his or her favorite authors, he or she will be disappointed; with the exception of one story each by Paula Gunn Allen, Kimberly M. Blaeser, and Patricia Riley, all the works by established Native women writers are reprints or excerpts. The anthology does present previously unpublished stories by three emerging writers: Misha Nogha, Beth H. Piatote, and Reid Gómez. The most intriguing aspect of Reckonings is its meta-storytelling— most of the stories are stories about the power of stories. Despite the problems associated with its function as a textbook, the compelling and powerful stories in the collection make it worth reading and rereading . Paula GunnAllen’s previously unpublished story, “Burned Alive in the Blues,” is wryly magical and poignant. It captures the West Coast urban Indian experience in the 60s, and will surely find a home in collections of 60s stories and music tales. Beth E. Brant’s contributions, “Turtle Gal” and “Swimming Upstream,” and Patricia Riley’s rural character study, “Damping Down the Road,” reveal the difficulty of contemporary Native life, the torn and ragged fabric of almost-forgotten cultural traditions, and the possibilities inherent in the conscious reconstruction of family, tribe, and tradition. Janet Campbell Hale is not as well known as other Native women writers of her generation such as Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, and Leslie Marmon Silko—all of whom who also contributed to this volume—but Hale’s “Claire,” an emotionally satisfying and pitch perfect story of a wise grandmother who escapes from the confines of an “old people’s home” then finds her way back to her tribal homeland, will surely gain for the writer a renewed and expanded appreciation of her talents.Anita Endrezze contributes two entertaining, contemporary re-fashionings of tribal myths, and Kimberly M. Blaeser’s entry, “Growing Things,” would make an enchanting film treatment for a NativeAmerican romantic comedy . Anna Lee Walters muses on the importance of names in “Buffalo Wallow Woman” and “Las Vegas, New Mexico, July 1969” and the vulnerability of raced, gendered poverty in “Apparitions .” Linda Hogan’s “Descent” is a quietly transfixing and ultimately righteous story of a girl’s kinship to a panther. As most readers would expect, the stories by Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich are brilliantly conceived and masterfully wrought. However, the pieces by Silko and Erdrich suffer somewhat from the loss of their original context, but perhaps readers who have not encountered the authors’novels would not be aware of the diminution. Of the established writers’stories, only Diane Glancy’s selections fail to stand up to the company they keep; they are neither as fierce nor as mesmerizing as other stories in the collection. The three emerging authors, Gómez, Nogha, and Piatote, are fine writers. Nogha’s two stories display postmodern traits; they resist narrative, relying on imagery and inference to effect the experience of living in two oftentimes antagonistic worlds. Gómez’s terrific linked tales of Native women resisting Western psychiatric medicine’s mistreatment of cultural and spiritual sickness stay with the reader long after the book is closed, and Piatote’s “Life-Size Indian” honestly calculates the alienating effects of exoticism on Native Americans. In the end, the outstanding writing overcomes the irritations of the anthology’s weaknesses. For a seasoned reader of...