The June Rise: The Apocryphal Letters of Joseph Antoine Janis by William Tremblay (review)

Reviews 305 On Indians, Lipsha declares, “We’re born heavier, but scales don’tweigh us. From day one, we’re loaded down. History, personal politics, tangled bloodlines. We’re too preoccupied with setting things rightaround us to get rich.”On bingo, he states, “It’snot completely one way or another, traditional against the bingo. You have to stay alive to keep your tradition alive and working.”In Erdrich’sfiction the personal and the political are completely intertwined. Gaining a measure of autonomy over both one’s individual life and the collective livelihood of the Native community means entreating with chance, fate, luck (both good and bad), and the often bewildering cruelty of the past. MARTIN PADGET University ofCalifornia, SanDiego TheJune Rise: TheApocryphalLetters offoseph AntoineJanis. By William Tremblay. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. 233 pages, $19.95.) Froman incident in the sketchy biography ofafrontiersman namedjoseph Antoine Janis (b. 1824), William Tremblay has written a haunting epistolary novel about Native American dispossession. In 1883, poor health preventedJanisfrom fulfilling ahistorian’s request for information on western “settlement.”Imaginingjanis’response, Tremblay’s apocryphal letters present a character with the buckskin eloquence of his western precursors, such as NattyBumppo. Although the first three letters include his violent initiation into manhood, the fictionalJanis resembles the elder Leatherstocking more than the young Deerslayer. In the remaining fourteen letters, he ventures into territorywhere many other Westerners, like Wister’s Virginian, dare not tread: the conquest of Native Americans, the compro­ mises of fatherhood, and the closing of the frontier. Through his marriage to First ElkWoman,Janis becomes a “squawman”for whom “Pagan and Christian touch on [his] map.”From this uncommon orientation, he surveys the settlers’ Edenic dreams (“acting out Adam and Eve’sonly story again, spoiling every paradise”), the development of towns (where “men walk the weary path of daily wages . . . under a foreman’s yoke”), and his own crosscultural predicament (“the loneliest, most dangerous place for an individual ... is in the middle”). Even more disturbing is Janis’s embodiment of postmodern skepticism towards individual agency. Through the cultural interdependence of the fur trade, this frontiers­ man cannot avoid aiding the economic advance of a civilization he questions. Janis concedes his complicity in ending the Ogalas’“free-roaming life”and rues that their fate “bespeaks [his] own.”When the federal government forces Janis to forsake either his homestead or his family, hejoins the latter on a reservation. In his apocryphal letters, the elderJanis yearns forwhen he “could feel the spirits in the trees and not be blinded by the crosswinds ofhuman dreams.”He recounts not only his youthful travels but also his mature travails, such as the suicide of a daughter who bears “the cross . . . in her blood.” In this poetic and provocative narrative, the full rendering of his life makes his request for the historian “not to tally [only the] white blood”shed in the name of “progress”all the more compelling. DONALD C.JONES UniversityofNewHampshire ...