Great Plains Quarterly

Lest the reader pull up short, wondering either how and why Native American orators and authors would turn to the western genre of elegy, or how in so doing those orators and authors would be able to avoid the tired figure of the doomed indian, to invoke White Earth Anishinaabe Gerald Vizenor’s apt phrasing of the stereotype created by Europeans and Euro-Americans, so beloved by the dominant society—lest the reader be asking just what is Arnold Krupat thinking, you should know that Krupat wondered the same things. To his credit, and to our good fortune, Krupat opted to resist the temptation to hold that there was no such thing as Native American elegy, and, critically, he opted to recognize crucial differences between elegies first spoken and later written by Native Americans and those penned by European and Euro-American writers. In four chapters covering oral literatures in the elegiac mode from the Haudenosaunee to the Tlingit, from speeches purportedly from Native orators and statesmen such [End Page 100] as Sauk Black Hawk, Suquamish Chief Sealth, and Nez Perce Chief Joseph, from written texts such as Black Elk Speaks and William Apess’s Eulogy for King Philip, and from the works of N. Scott Momaday and the Native American Renaissance to contemporary Native American elegiac poetry, Krupat makes a convincing case for the role elegy and the elegiac mode play in survivance for the peoples of Native North America.

Krupat links Vizenor’s notion of survivance, Vine Deloria Jr.’s underappreciated idea of the exile suffered by all Natives and their tribal nations due to the “disruption in the enabling conditions of [their] ongoing ceremonial and ritual life,” and the thinking of Freud and others on mourning and melancholia in order to show how Native texts in the elegiac mode, be they spoken or written, are offered not merely in recognition of a loss, a passing, but rather in order, to use the phrase that Krupat borrows from Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver, “that the People may live.” Whether Arapaho Ghost Dance songs or Black Hawk’s lament, whether the Iroquois condolence rites mourning the death of one of the fifty high chiefs of the Confederacy or what Krupat sees in Dead Voices as Vizenor’s “commitment to preserving the oral tradition in writing,” Native American elegies engage in “melancholic mourning” that “will not quite release the past so that it may be included in a possible future.”

Readers of Great Plains Quarterly will especially appreciate Krupat’s attention to texts from Great Plains nations. Beyond the texts, orators, and writers referred to above, Krupat offers readings of works by Cheyenne poet Lance Henson, Osage poet Carter Revard, and others. Readers in general will recognize that Krupat, a scholar who has devoted his academic life to the study of Native American literatures, has produced a book both careful and caring, a book that will reward thoughtful attention.