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Originally Posted by sun surfer
I almost didn't vote for this book in this initial poll until I read more about it. Finding that the author not only wrote from a Native American perspective but also wrote in the style of Native American speech intrigued me, and I was not disappointed. I also enjoyed the historical information in the book and the imagining of what normal non-idealised day-to-day life might've been like for the Lone Eaters and others of the area just before the encroachment of the white man.
Including the fantastical elements was an interesting decision and I liked how that gave me not only a glimpse of their religion but helped me to better understand their view of the world.
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It's not relevant to the book, but one issue for me is the tendency to refer to an idealized time which didn't really exist. This is not limited to American Indians of course. This is touched on in the book in Fools Crow's last mystical quest; in real time, time doesn't stop.
The Pikuni culture as it had evolved had them hunting buffalo on horseback, and yet horses are not native to America and had only been introduced with the Spanish invaders. I read somewhere that before that, buffalo hunting involved herding buffalo over a cliff. (I can't vouch for the accuracy of my recollection; I have an embarrassing lack of knowledge about Native Americans.) Generally speaking, there's also the significant issue of to what extent the Native Americans lived in harmony with nature and to what extent their lives reflected a sparse population in a rich land. One theory for the disappearance of the Anasazi in the Southwest suggests that they despoiled the land and resources and had to move on.
I'm not excusing or even rationalizing the cruelty of the white men to the natives. Welch doesn't pull his punches on this one, either. The internecine warfare of the Pikunis and the Crows was as savage in its particulars as anything the white men practiced; unfortunately for both, the white men had better toys and it wasn't an equal fight.
I'm not a huge fan of magical realism in story telling. Very effective at evoking a people and their beliefs, it tends to beg a lot of questions.