Reinventing the Enemy's Language: North American Native Women's Writing.

by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird W.W. Norton and Co. 448 pages. $27.50.

In their introduction, editors Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird urge readers of this anthology to consider the power of story as a tool for social and political activism. But this body of work in no way supports the misguided notion that Indian literature should serve some nationalistic agenda. The writers whose work is presented here know that. Intentionally or not, they have refused the fallacious role of warrior for the tribe." Instead their writings serve a more crucial purpose. They reveal again and again the Indian woman's heritage of survival.

Take the opening pages of Louise Erdrich's acclaimed first novel, Love Medicine. Anti-heroine June Kashpaw is wandering around the frozen streets of an off-reservation North Dakota town. Looking to kill time before catching the bus back to the rez, June steps into a tavern where she meets one of the locals, someone called Andy. Hours and drinks later, the twosome end up on a country road. As snow begins to fall, Andy passes out. June, bent on making her bus, wanders off into the snow.

"The heavy winds couldn't blow her off her course. . . . Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on. . . . The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home."

In these few pages, Erdrich captures the pain and determination of a generation of Native women like June. Despite June's failure as a mother, lover, and good tribal member, she carries within her a hidden dignity--an unbreakable connection to her Chippewa spirit.

Arguably the most well-crafted chapter in modern Native American fiction, Erdrich's endearing portrait of June Kashpaw is one of a hundred stories in the expansive new anthology Reinventing the Enemy's Language: North American Native Women's Writing.

Layers of meaning emerge with each story, poem, prayer, and memoir. Like newly discovered diaries, each chapter releases a lifetime. Mary Brave Bird's account of the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., in 1972 is more than political reflection. Brave Bird reveals that Native American women were one of the cornerstones of the American Indian Movement, which captured the nation's imagination and called attention to the government's flagrant abuse and neglect of Indian peoples.

"For me the high point came not with our men arming themselves, but with Martha Grass, a simple middle-aged Cherokee woman from Oklahoma, standing up to Interior Secretary Morton and giving him a piece of her mind, speaking from the heart, speaking for all of us," writes Brave Bird. "She talked about everyday things, women's things, children's problems, getting down to the nitty gritty. . . . It was good to see an Indian mother stand up to one of Washington's highest officials."

In compiling this anthology, Harjo and Bird have made a prudent attempt to include a variety of writers. Judging whose writing should be included is without question a precarious high-wire act, though critically acclaimed writers like Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen were shoo-ins. There is also that sticky problem of Indian identity. Both editors admit their struggle to find a balance between those with an enrollment number from a federally recognized tribe (the only legal proof of one's Indianness) and those who are not card-carrying tribal members. In the end, the editors chose a wonderfully broad representation of some of the best Native American writers around.

Reinventing the Enemy's Language is filled with the many different types of thought and experience that come from mixed-blood, Indian-city, land-based, and generational perspectives. Even the literary styles reflect this cultural panorama. Some writers experiment with original language and oral storytelling. Others dabble with Western forms. Gloria Bird's "In Chimayo" is a hybrid of poetry, sudden fiction, and short story: "Early I lay on the floor to give birth, a veil of rain falling. Hina-tee-yea is what he called it in his elemental language. Four days later, named our daughter also, fine rain, child of the desert mesas, yucca, and chamisal."

It is impossible to impose a single political purpose on modern Native American literature. But the gravitation toward such an academic endeavor is understandable. The "curse" of Indian literature is its inseparable ties to memory--a yearning to redeem the near destruction of an original existence. Still, an attempt to create a revolutionary aesthetic by fusing it into a weapon against colonization would be dishonest.

To their credit, the editors of this anthology recognize that Native American women's literature is not a faddish, burgeoning genre of writing. It is a new sphere of storytelling, part of a larger hidden culture. These writers immunize us against the plague of marginalization. Their growing acceptance is a shift away from the Western literary canon. Perhaps this is the kind of politics Harjo and Bird should lobby for in the second volume of North American native women's writings.

Mark Anthony Rolo is a member of the Bad River band of Ojibway in Wisconsin and the editor of The Circle, a Native American newspaper based in Minneapolis.