FROM NOTED JOURNALIST and author Alison Owings comes an exciting new book, Indian Voices: Listening to Native Amencans. For this innovative oral history project, Owings crossed the country and spoke to Native people from a variety of tribes, young and old, in cities and on reservations. Their conversations with Owings convey the wealth of experiences that make up Native American life in the twenty-first century from frustration over the lingering ignorance of those who still expect that Native people live without modern conveniences or technology to learning to live in both the traditional and modern worlds. And whether the words come from tribal people in Hawai’i, northern California, or Maine, they convey the sense of humor that has helped indigenous people survive.
“Let me start with my own ignorance.” Owings begins with this sentence, and goes on to tell a story about a research trþ to the southwest for a different book. While driving across Arizona, she encountered a reservation (the Navajo) for the first time, and spoke with a Tohono O’odham waitress in the town of Sells. Realizing she knew little of either historic or contemporary Native Americans, she set to reading widely and then to speaking with Native people from disparate tribes and backgrounds. Owings provides a brief but thorough history of the interactions between Natives and non-Natives in North America as background to the oral histories that make up the rest of the book. Each chapter of Indian Voices tells the story of a specific person or small group of people. Rather than simply interviewing the participants, Owings also spent time with them, getting to know them and their lives: harvesting blueberries in Maine with Darrell Newell (Passamaquoddy); talking with Darwin Hill (Tonawanda Seneca) during his tribe’s annual Field Day celebrations in upstate New York; watching as Ansel Deon (Lakota / Navajo), cultural coordinator at the American Indian Center in Chicago, educated non-Indians during Native American Heritage Month (or, as he refers to it, “Rent-an-Indian-Month”); and attending a performance by Pawnee / Seminole rapper Quese IMC (real name Marcus Frejo) at the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland.
Owings’s prose is lucid and clear, and she tells the stories of her informants
effectively, weaving their words together with her own observations. But the real stars here are the people themselves and the stories they choose to tell. Elizabeth Lohah Homer (Osage), a D.C.-based lawyer, spoke of the complexities of Indían law, of casinos and trust land. Lumbees Pamela Brooks Sweeney, Curt Locklear, and Mary Ann Cummings Jacobs talked about the unique background of their tribe, the largest unrecognized tribe in the country, whose current members are multi-racial and have their own distinctive dialect, Lumbee English.
Patty Talahongva joked about her Hopi-ness, carrying business cards listing her as “four-fourths” Hopi and gently mocking her stereorypical Hopi shortness.
Incarcerated in San Quentin State Penitentiary, Yurok artist Henry Frank shared his linoleum cuts, which feature scenes of life on his native Klamath River.
The Native people interviewed here don’t shy away from hard topics, discussing everything from casinos to powwows, substance abuse and poverty to the famous Osage ballerina Maria Tallchief. And through all these conversations and experiences, the reader picks up on a clear picture: Native people are, well, people, every bit as varied in their lives and opinions as any other group of Americans. For every moment that highlights the uniqueness of Native cultures, there’s another that shows just how much Native people have in common with the wider American society.
Ultimately, Owings’s book is aimed at a wide audience, at those Americans who are as ignorant of Native Americans as she once was. But that is not to say that it is not also a book for the people it is about. Native people of all backgrounds and opinions will find something to engage with in IndianVoices: something to laugh with, to sympathize with, perhaps even to argue with.
