SOURCE: Review of Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World, in Western American Literature, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, Winter, 1994, pp. 361-62.

In the following review, Mogen contends that while Dead Voices is difficult to read, it is an eloquent and original work.

Like Vizenor's earlier work, Dead Voices dramatizes the complex "word wars" waged between tribal peoples and mainstream culture. Indeed, this strange "novel" creates a living trickster voice—at once profane, lyrical and wondrously bizarre—through which to dramatize a radical perspective on the Western tradition of written culture, embodying "dead voices" that suppress the "natural agonies" of tribal peoples and the natural world. By giving written "voice" to the internal narrator Bageese, a reclusive tribal woman who is at once a bear and the vehicle through which we hear the agonies of animal beings surviving in the urban landscape, Vizenor paradoxically translates unspeakable realities into a...