Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in North American Indian Texts by David Murray (review)

Reviews 135 reliance, and individualism,”as these are symbolized in the “westering”experi­ ence. He approaches this goal through separate selective chapters on the major groups of “visionaries” who settled and lived in the West: Indians, mountain men, miners, farmers, missionaries, and so forth. He does not gain our confi­ dence, however, by suggesting that “the people who stayed in the East did so in order to do, and those who went West did so in order to be." Kreyche, a professor of philosophy (at DePaul University) and frequent visitor to the West, wants to fill a gap, to write about the West “from the perspective of a philosopher”—thus leading readers to anticipate a thoughtful study of urgent ethical, ecological, and environmental issues recently suggested by western studies. Instead, alas, his book dwells nostalgically on that tired old West of myth and romance, often taking solace in tourist clichés. The book has good intentions, but Kreyche does not effectively engage important issues—indeed he seems unaware of many of them. He urges respect for what used to be—or for what might have been—but supporting references to Michener’s Centennialand to Edgar Guest, and assertions such as that “Zane Gray, Karl May, and Louis L’Amour . . . have instructed millions” are not necessarily reassuring. It is true that Wallace Stegner, Willa Cather, Ansel Adams, and Georgia O’Keeffe each get mentioned once, but omitted are Vardis Fisher, N. Scott Momaday, Harvey Fergusson, Mary Austin, Frank Waters, Wright Morris, Ivan Doig,James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Edward Abbey. . . and so forth. The point is that a “philosophy of the West” can hardly be developed by emphasizing a superficial popular culture. I take this book so seriously because of the fresh evidence it offers of a desperate American hunger for heroic visions which require a tangible and imaginatively persistent location, a setting for hope in the recovery of lost values. As Kreyche writes, “In our age of mediocrity and half effort, it is important to see that America was not always so and need not continue to be so.” The solution, however, is hardly more nostalgia, but rather some effective thought which takes the real West seriously. (One might start, for example, with Patricia Limerick’s TheLegacy ofConquest, or the growing research and scholarly writing on western environmentalism, or with novelists and poets and essayists of real western experience.) This is a book of missed opportunities which woefully trivializes its subject. JOSEPH J.WYDEVEN Bellevue College Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in NorthAmerican Indian Texts. By David Murray. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. 181 pages, $14.50.) It is a pleasure to recommend with wholehearted enthusiasm David Murray’s Forked Tongues. Murray takes on the ambitious project of presenting, 136 WesternAmerican Literature probing, and providing crystalline insights about “speech, writing, and repre­ sentation in North American Indian texts,” and his pages are dense with academic discourse economically and judiciously chosen which should spark discussion without rancor among intelligent scholars in this already controver­ sial field. One of the main aims of his book is “to demonstrate the complex and various ways in which the process of translation, cultural as well as linguistic, is obscured or effaced in a wide variety of texts which claim to be representing or describing Indians, and what cultural and ideological assumptions underlie such effacement.” Always we are urged to pay attention to the “mediator or interpreter rather than to what he is pointing to”and “to the various forms of cultural and linguistic mediation which are always taking place.” Murray tran­ scends cliched debates about translation by discussing “culturaltranslation”and by pointing out that it was always the natives who were forced to do such translating. He looks at “Indian” speech and speeches and reminds us that “subjectivity may also be subjection”; therefore a work authored by a Native American is not necessarily an “authentic voice.” In looking at specific Native American myths, he asks the astute question: Would our enjoyment be in­ creased by knowledge of the literary devices of another culture which would allow us to integrate them with our own literary codes and make them less exotic, or would knowledge...