When I learn that a book is populated by characters called Robert Coyote, Frank Fence-Post, Sadie One-Wound, and Poppy Twelvetrees, my response is usually a groan in anticipation of an attempt to make restitution for or to make me pay for Wounded Knee. Dee Brown's work seemed to call forth lost tribes of white men who discovered roots they never knew they had. The Great Spirit moved within them, and they felt, or at least suspected, a tickle of feathers down their backs. Kinsella's book Dance Me Outside is all the more refreshing because it quite consciously eschews ersatz heroics and any kind of nostalgic, mythopoeic reflections on a technicolour golden age.

This collection of almost a score of stories gives us wry, picaresque vignettes of life on an Albertan Reserve near Wetaskiwin. A teenager, Silas Ermineskin, recounts to us, in a syntax that has stubbornly survived the...