SOURCE: Review of The People Named Chippewa: Narrative Histories, in World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 1, Winter, 1986, p. 160.

In the review below, Loudon praises The People Named Chippewa as a witty and imaginative discussion of current Native American culture.

Gerald Vizenor's writing began in a boldly experimental mode and has moved steadily toward more conventional prose, but even in his most recent nonfiction, he has never once left the battlefield of his "word wars." In the prologue to the "narrative histories" of The People Named Chippewa he deconstructs the unconscious conspiracy of the either-or fallacy that dominates the view which many Native Americans have of themselves and with which they are frequently viewed by others. Nineteenth-century ethnologists and revisionist historians unwittingly fashioned an academic attitude, eventually popular, that tribal peoples must either assimilate or, suffering the loss of a "pure" culture, die. Vizenor, referring to the work of Kroeber...