The Sound of Rattles and Clappers: A Collection of New California Indian Writing

This volume brings together writings by 10 Californian Native Americans. The work includes stories, performance art texts and an essay on Native American cuisine, but the primary form is poetry. Janice Gould's ``We Exist'' expresses the urgent impulse behind this work: ``Our writers try to counteract the history / that says we are dead, a conquered People. / But our words are like a shout in a blizzard.'' Yet if the recovery and celebration of culture and indictment of the oppressor seem to be drowned out by an uncaring mass culture, Wendy Rose's ``For the Scholar Who Wrote a Book About the `American Indian Literary Renaissance' '' points out the danger of mass appeal, that the mainstream treats Native American literature as if it only abruptly came into existence when non-Native Americans noticed it. Some of the poetry here is complex, lyrical and political, influenced not only by Native American traditions but by the mainstream of English and American poetry. William Oandasan's ``Round Valley Songs I'' (``an emptied bottle of Coors / ditched in moonlight at Inspiration Point / mirrors the faces of drunkards / cold like snow'') evoke present as well as past tragedy, and the nobility of the modern survivor as well as the ancestor. The disappointment of the anthology is that the editor's introduction fails to contextualize or illuminate these complexities for the reader. (Mar.)