SOURCE: "The American Monkey King at Home," in San Francisco Review of Books, Vol. XV, No. 3, Winter, 1990, p. 23.

In the following review, the critic provides an overview of Vizenor's works, commenting on the author's varied forms.

Complainingabout those "wily, more competent Indians" who could use their knowledge of the White Man to make him appear in a bad light, the former head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Dillon S. Myer wrote to Interior Secretary Douglas McKay in 1953: "[They] are capable of making the Bureau … appear as a group of paternalistic bureaucrats who will not allow them to handle their own internal affairs …"

Indians are expected to use education as the way out of the misery of poverty and discrimination, and join ranks with those who have helped them. This makes a "good Indian." A "bad Indian" either rejects the offer or uses it to his own ends...