Volume 46, Number 7 · April 22, 1999
Chopping Down the Sacred Tree
By Larry McMurtry
The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America
by James Wilson
Atlantic Monthly Press, 466 pp., $27.00
It takes a bold paleface to attempt a comprehensive history of Native American life nowadays—after being forced to swallow five hundred years of insulting and mainly inaccurate Anglo-European generalizations about their character and behavior, the Native Americans are justifiably tetchy. Get it wrong and Russell Means, the activist-turned-actor who has managed to play both the last of the Mohicans (Chingachgook, in Michael Mann's adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's novel) and the fiercest of the Sioux (Sitting Bull, in my own Buffalo Girls) might show up on your doorstep, wearing his big hat; or Vine Deloria, Jr., the unmellowed Sioux polemicist, might launch a lightning bolt or two, possibly from that bastion of nativism, the Op-Ed page of The New York Times; or the young rumbler from the Northwest, Sherman Alexie, recently anointed by Granta as one of the twenty best young American writers, might pop onto one of the paleface talk shows and complain.
Review, 4003 words
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