The Hiawatha.

The Hiawatha by David Treuer Picador USA. 320 pages. $24.00.

David Treuer's literary fantasy on the urban American Indian experience brings up a disturbing question of historical accuracy. Did Indians who migrated to the streets of Minneapolis in the middle decades of this century actually live the kind of lives Treuer evokes in his latest novel?

Treuer, a mixed-blood writer of Ojibwe and Jewish descent, was raised on the Leech Lake Ojibwe reservation of northern Minnesota. His debut novel, Little (Graywolf, 1995), revealed the pain of a small community of reservation Indians struggling to face their pasts immediately following the death of a young child. He knew that world well--he had seen the poverty, buried secrets, and loneliness on aged faces through the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

Treuer received considerable critical acclaim with Little. Though he borrowed the layered first-person style of Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, he still showed a budding talent.

His second novel, The Hiawatha, is an ambitious work that explores one of the hidden cultures of the contemporary American Indian community: life in the city. Other writers, including Sherman Alexie, have shown us urban Indians. But Treuer's problem is that he is obsessed with the spectacle and irony of an Indian trailing paths of cement instead of grass. In The Hiawatha, he attempts to give insight, social relevance, and historical perspective to the question of why Native people left their land for concrete pathways over the past fifty years.

The Hiawatha is set in Minneapolis during the 1960s and 1970s, where, as in other urban centers, large groups of Native families resettled under the federal government's relocation program. This policy of assimilation--designed to integrate Indians into mainstream America by luring them off the reservations--disconnected many Native families by shuffling them into poor, crowded, urban areas with limited access to decent education, job training, and health care.

But many Indians originally saw relocation as a chance to live the American dream. These people viewed the exodus from their reservations as an opportunity. Like them, Treuer's main character, Simon, is in Minneapolis to start again.

Simon is returning, however, after spending more than a decade in jail for murdering his brother Lester. Flopping in a room of a once grand hotel, he is haunted by the voices of his past. Shadows of those he knew, including his dead brother, follow him as he trudges the winter streets. He meanders through the city like a soulless wanderer stuck between here and the other side. There are certainly people, including Natives, who are so severely broken in spirit, but a protagonist without a dream does not gain reader sympathy--only yawns.

Even as melodrama, The Hiawatha is a bore. Violence breaks out between two close-knit brothers over a woman. This results in the death of one and prison for the other. There is a bastard child looking for someone brave and caring enough to tell him the truth about his past. The plot line is old and cold. Treuer does not warm his characters to his readers. Instead, he uses this contrived plot of betrayal and murder in an attempt to stir sympathy for his shallow characters. Many of these characters die horrible and seemingly meaningless deaths.

Treuer's narrative is difficult to follow. He drifts between time and place, leaving the reader thumbing pages trying to keep things straight. Simon's friends and family seem painfully distant, just sketches of urban poverty. Sadly, Treuer romanticizes his one-dimensional Indians as hapless victims who have inherited every burden of loss during the past 500 years.

But what is most disappointing is how he has nothing to reveal about the curious relationship between the Indian and the city. Treuer falls for the current perception that Indians who live in urban America are out of their place and consequently quite messed up. In one section where Simon has decided to return to the reservation, the author writes, "He was on the bus within two hours of being released. He felt that if he stopped, if he stood still for too long, he would root, send down taps through the concrete into the rubble of previous versions of the city, that he would never move and that eventually trouble would find him again and he would not be able to escape."

And yet when Simon is back on the reservation, Treuer portrays him as a poster boy for present-day Indians so disconnected from their tribal sense of being that they are lost in the landscapes their ancestors inhabited.

The Hiawatha not only proves to be terribly unoriginal, it also misrepresents the Native people of Minneapolis. Treuer settles his Indian family in a small south Minneapolis neighborhood that probably had very few Indians. Most Native people moved to north Minneapolis or settled in the southside Phillips neighborhood, where the majority of the Twin Cities' Indians still live. He does not explore the infamous Indian bars along Franklin Avenue, where old war stories of gun shootings and broken hearts and noses are still told by those who remember the good old red days.

Treuer dismisses the significant struggle it took for these early Indians to create a new life in the city. He is more concerned with forcing the argument that Indians were never meant to settle in urban areas than he is with trying to humanize a community of Native people.

The Hiawatha is perhaps the first grand setback in Native American fiction.

Mark Anthony Rolo is a member of the Bad River band of Ojibwe. He is the former editor of "The Circle," a monthly Native American newspaper based in Minneapolis.