Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture

John Steckley teaches in the Human Studies Program at Humber College in
Toronto. He is the author of Beyond Their Years: Five Native Women’s
Stories.

Gail Guthrie Valaskakis grew up in the Chippewa community of Lac du
Flambeau, Wisconsin. Indian Country is based on a series of eight
articles she wrote in 1998–99. The book is haunted by the understated
presence at her great-grandmother, Margaret Gauthier, informant for a
who’s who of anthropologists (including Frances Densmore, Victor
Barnouw, and A. Irving Hallowell) that studied her community in the
first half of the 20th century.

Many readers of Indian Country will be distracted from its important
content by the author’s excesses of post-modernist literary style, in
which wordplay is often substituted for analysis, and the explanation
and exemplification of jargon-laden terminology is lacking. Further,
while alliteration is an often engaging literary device, in this work it
is often forced and overdone, as the following illustrates: “But, in
fear of the foreign, the dark, the drunk, few tourists followed the
rutted road to the gathering grounds of our powwows at Bear River.”

Still, there is much to praise. The author is at her best when she
discusses her own experiences. Her portrayals of her community are
particularly moving. In “Living the Heritage of Lac du Flambeau:
Traditionalism and Treaty Rights,” she focuses on the significance of
the flame-lit spearfishing that gave her people their French name, and
on their fight for their rights for in the 1980s. In “Drumming the
Past: Researching Indian Objects,” she talks about the difficulty of
understanding the cultural lineage of her father’s Mide water drum.
Her brother is a born-again Christian minister, and the family
experienced real anguish as they tried to deal with the drum’s
spirituality. Many people in Indian Country can relate.