Western American Literature

324 WAL 33(3) FALL 1998 readers to question the assumptions underlying their own work and perhaps to envision fresh interpretive approaches to the study of women’s narratives of the West. Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. By Louis Owens. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. 263 pages, $28.00. Reviewed by Margaret Dwyer University of Texas at Arlington Bookstores have had difficulties placing Louis Owens’s latest book in their literature sections, despite its name. Amazon.com put it in with “his­ tory.” This isn’t surprising, however. With Mixedblood Messages, Owens offers his readers a cornucopia of free-standing critical literary essays, film criticism, short stories, personal history, and environmental observations. And in taking a step past his highly regarded Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, Owens shifts his gaze, looking not only at texts this time but also at the reader. Are consumers of American Indian litera­ ture looking for a tour of the exotic; are they literary tourists out to take a spin around Indian territory? Owens contends that some American Indian writers are writing to meet the expectations of mainstream readers, present­ ing the ubiquitous stereotypical Indian protagonists, settings, behaviors and outcomes. Perhaps this is because they themselves have accepted the dom­ inant culture’s metanarrative on what an Indian is: a historic artifact, whether dysfunctional or noble. Owens cites Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich as examples. Despite their very well-received early works, Owens sees “literary tourism” affecting their later novels. Other writers, however, are appropriating the “enemy’s language” in order to present works that are fresh and disturbing, shaking up their readers and making them question the status quo. It will be no surprise that mixedblood writer Gerald Vizenor tops this list, which isn’t limited to only late-twentieth-century writers. In the chapter “Mapping the Mixedblood: Frontier and Territory in Native America,” Owens provides a fine close reading of C ogewea by Mourning Dove, representing her complex understanding of the frontier that mixedbloods inhabit. For scholars who have looked to Owens for a steady supply of thought­ ful criticism, this book is going to become the companion to Other Destinies. Some of these essays were first published in hard-to-find interdisciplinary journals. While he has reworked and updated most of these works, the crisp ideas and criticism are intact. He has installed a few hot buttons as well, particularly with his chapter “Blood Trails: Missing Grandmothers and Making Worlds,” which responds to a broadside against “urban mixedblood writers” delivered by Lakota critic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn in the American 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...