Discoveries: Short Stories of the San Juan Mountains by Kent Nelson (review)

Book reviews 325 Indian Quarterly. This is not a sweeping condemnation of Cook-Lynn’s work, however; he agrees with some of her thoughts on the representation of reservations in “Through an Amber Glass: Chief Doom and the Native American Novel Today.” He does take issue with her inconsistent criticism of Vizenor, King, his own, and others’ “mixedblood messages” while she praises Momaday and Silko for their representations of reservation life, seemingly missing both of these superb authors’ “mixedblood messages.” Readers of Owens’s fiction will find some of the backgrounding to his novels in his “Autobiographical Reflections, Or Mixed Blood and Mixed Messages,” as well as through the interesting collection of family photos contained here, many newly discovered by his older sister only a few months prior to the writing of this book. The trunk containing these family trea­ sures had been stored since his mother’s death in 1991; Owens’s pleasure in discovering the faces that are linked to a lifetime of family stories is clear in these chapters. Owens’s concluding chapters raise issues of the Native American rela­ tionship to the environment. Knowingly contradicting himself, he notes, for example, that while he is opposed to the possibility of an open pit cop­ per mine in the middle of the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area of the North Cascades, as a Forest Service employee, he “had participated in the mining company’s ultimate goal: to exploit the wilderness” (210). Owens also chal­ lenges the idea of Indians as “genetically predetermined environmentalists” and suggests the Iron Eyes Cody anti-litter campaign helped set this iconographic hook. Yet he argues with those who claim that Indians essentially lived in balance with nature by accident, that there was no plan or ritualis­ tic world view; he concludes that Native Americans are very much “inher­ ent conservationists” because of their traditional beliefs (223). Much of the power of Mixedblood Messages is due to the free-standing nature of these essays, but it does result in occasional repetition of material. However, when considering how this text will most likely be used, in the classroom and as a source of critical theory, the continuity of each segment will make this book invaluable to instructors looking for completely formed ideas and arguments in each chapter. Discoveries: Short Stories of the San Juan Mountains. By Kent Nelson. Ouray, Col.: Western Reflections, 1998. 160 pages, $24-95/$15.95. Reviewed by Diane Quantic Wichita State University Kent Nelson sets Discoveries in the San Juan Mountains, where he makes his home in Ouray. These stories make it obvious that he does not merely reside there, but that he knows this place intimately. A winner of the 326 WAL 33(3) Fa l l 1998 Edward Abbey Prize for Ecofiction for his novel Language in the Blood, Nelson paints intense word landscapes that can obscure or accent intimate human emotions: “The sky without distance stretched beyond his vision, and timeless . The colors and shapes— mountains, cliffs, foothills, mesas, valleys— were disguises for what was hidden deeper” (118). Whether he is describing a road trip into the region, an excursion into the backcountry, or human encounters in Ouray or Telluride, Nelson is adept at melding the natural and human landscapes to reveal deeply hidden dilemmas under the disguises. I would be hard-pressed to judge one story or another as best in this col­ lection, but I do have a favorite. “A Way of Dying” is the story of William Bryce Talbot, who has lived so long alone in the mountains that “he no longer thought of himself with a name” (83). He came (a century late) to search for gold, but what he has found is natural abundance, a perfect bal­ ance in life and death: “In the mountains, there was no distance except through air. He rested in the natural changes” (88). In other stories, Nelson’s characters seek to achieve or maintain a similar kind of natural balance. In “Toward the Sun,” Niemann, obsessed with running in the mountains, follows a herd of elk into the wild while in “The Spirit of Animals,” Cacky, an Indian woman, thwarts the men’s hunt for elk. Nelson’s...