Customer Reviews

Native American Fiction: A User's Manual

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David Treuer, Ojibway academic and literary critic, offers a truly thought-provoking and edgy foundation of work in this book that challenges the critical reader of Native American fiction to closer inquiry and new understandings. Treuer provides commentary that is fresh, engaging, sophisticated, deeply intellectual, and at times laugh out loud hilarious in the true spirit of Indian humor. Treuer examines the work and popular interpretations of Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch in a way that sometimes makes the reader do a double take, reflect, process, and then return to Treuer's criticism armed with new insight.

With the rush of college and high school educators to strip bookstore shelves of the most recent Sherman Alexie novel, this book emerges on the horizon of Native American literary criticism at a very crucial time. Although Alexie is loved by all, both Native and non-Native readers, there is a growing concern amongst Native intellectuals regarding the near cultish fascination with Alexie's work, work that is often thematized around poverty, alcoholism, violence, and despair; common themes perpetuating the more widely believed stereotype. Treuer asserts that when it comes to reading Native American fiction, there is no "suspension of belief." Everything that Americans have come to know about Indians is shaped from birth by the media and literature. As a result, we are pre-equipped to interpret what we read through the dominant narrative and its prescribed imagery. Thus, the interpretive emphasis unintentially fixates on the word "Native" rather than "fiction," and when it comes to American Indians, fiction sustains the American reality: the stereotype remains unchanged. To be entertained denotes immediate gratification, critical thinking does not. American education does not teach us to question why the fictional Indian or the Indian of the American imagination is so much more compelling than the diverse and living Indian reality. Treuer calls this kind of knowledge, "A form of knowingness based on nothing."

No reader of Native American fiction should read another Native authored novel without first having given some thought and attention to Treuer's "user's manual." This work is revolutionary and integral to the elimination of racism as well as to the advancement of cultural awareness. For Native peoples, this work adds to the intellectual underpinnings of sovereignty. For non-Native readers, these insights create a new and critical genre of knowledge that carries with it an obligation of literary accountability.