Native American Renaissance by Kenneth Lincoln (review)

158 Western American Literature that are vast and very disparate and upon which enormous amounts have been written, but little synthesized. Perhaps we should be grateful for the generali­ zations which they do provide. The other essays on Indians (early and recent), Spanish Borderlands, fur trade and exploration, manifest destiny, nineteenth-century politics, violence, and urbanism seem more manageable and are models of their genre. Each is written by an acknowledged specialist in his field and all are characterized by the unfailing virtue of analyzing hundreds of books and articles on their subjects without degenerating into mere catalogues. All of the authors are adept at pointing out the deficiencies of existing research in their fields as well as their colleagues’ attainments. The most common complaints are overreliance on Turner, failure to use modern methodologies and insights from other disciplines, and failure to come to grips with twentieth-century events. The book provides no panacea for these ills, but it makes us understand them better, and for that alone we can be thankful for this timely and important work. JACKSON K. PUTNAM California State University, Fullerton Native American Renaissance. By Kenneth Lincoln. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1983. 313 pages, $22.50.) The “Native American Renaissance” which Kenneth Lincoln describes translates ancient tribal perceptions into contemporary voices of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Much of this expression is “sent” by the voices of Native American writers themselves, including N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, and James Welch. But Lincoln also describes the effect of Native American symbolism and expression on non-native writers from Mary Austin to Jerome Rothenberg. Although the range of his selection is broad, the arrangements of his analyses are as meticulous as the ceremonial performances he describes. Sometimes Lincoln’s reponse to Native writers is so dazzling that it eclipses the subjects of discussion. But this is ultimately an illuminating phenomenon, part of a powerful new form of academic writing in which the critic’s relation to the voices he interprets is cooperative rather than servile or pedantically reductive. Lincoln’s style translates the feeling of other translators, such as Howard A. Norman (Swampy Cree Trickster Tales), or a trickster-teller-of-thepresent , poet Simon Ortiz. Like Ortiz, Lincoln centers on “continuance” in a “journey toward being.” He traverses vast areas of culture and time with nomadic ease, sustaining us in each genre or writer by means of deftly deliv­ ered perceptions. He often makes the overbred language of criticism wheel, slow, and then accelerate like a buffalo runner. In the following tour de force, Lincoln describes the intangible feeling of a good translation: Reviews 159 A translated poem may hang mobile in space like the leaves on a tree. It may serpentine through a Hopi rain dance in stately choral strophes, arrange itself in a Navajo origin myth as patiently as strata in a canyon wall, or burst freely around Plains drumming and chant­ ing. A translation may lap quietly as lake ripples beaching on a Chippewa shore, or stalk powerfully through darkness over a broken Iroquois terrain. It may soar with the Trickster Raven over the Pacific Northwest, or descend into itself, as kachina gods disappear­ ing into a kiva. Lincoln describes translation as the fundamental vehicle of spiritual transmission. Rather than the blurred “oneness” stressed by well-meaning observers whose vision has not come clear, Lincoln’s interpretive rite unwraps the complementarity between unity and relationship: “Controversies over breed and blood, urban and ‘res,’conservation and progress, ‘going back’ and coming forward, your tribe and mine, set up the dynamics of being who we are in the world. In Indian thought, we are native to ourselves, tribal to our given peoples, relative to all life forms, ritual to powers that spirit us. The original ‘What-Moves-moves’ in the world renews all of us continually, con­ stantly, at our best without fear of change, trusting in seasonal continuities. The renaissance or rebirth of all cultures, alive in spoken, sung, and signed literature, lies here in acts of translation” (p. 40). Native American Renaissance may well precipitate the emergence of more voices than the ones it translates. Lincoln manifests a literary event by...