Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place

An issue that is often debated is who gets to tell the stories for Native Americans? Only full-blooded, reservation-raised Indians, or anyone with Indian ancestry? In this collection of essays, Owens, a Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish literature professor at the Univ. of New Mexico, hammers on this and other topics of concern to Indians. Because of his mixed ancestry he has been accused of being an ""urban Indian"" and therefore not a credible social critic for Native America. Owens (Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel) disputes this, over and over, in every piece. He acknowledges that these essays constitute a book, but still repeats the same thoughts, and sentences, in nearly every essay, thereby stretching the reader's patience. The first section, ""Mixedbloods and Mixed Messages,"" is not only ponderous and pompous, but little more than veneration of author Gerald Vizenor masked as literary criticism. Owens's position here, while tediously quoting Vizenor, is that ""Euramericans"" have conspired to create a myth of Indigenous Americans as braided, buckskin-wearing, noble savages and that bestselling Native American writers are perpetuating the stereotype by buying into white expectations of ""real Indians."" On rare occasions, in his autobiographical works especially, he rises from the quagmire of academic gobbledygook (""the subsumption of Indian identity into the national metanarrative"") and the voice of a gifted writer emerges. So who gets to tell the First Americans' stories? Apparently even Indian authors do not know. Photos. (Sept.)