Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Brown, Dee - Joshua Gilder

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JOSHUA GILDER

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown's best-selling history of the American Indian, had a sweep and an authenticity due in large measure to his letting the Indians speak for themselves. [But Dee Brown, as the author of Creek Mary's Blood,] simply does not share their eloquence; his characters talk history to one another in an improbably self-conscious way.

Even more uncomfortable is Brown's imposition of contemporary social obsessions on a different time and culture. Creek Mary is more than a little absurd with her frontier sloganeering in the cause of women's rights….

[Unfortunately Creek Mary's Blood] is afflicted with a simpleminded egalitarianism. Dee Brown would have us believe that beneath the savage skin of every Indian beats the bleeding heart of a liberal environmentalist. Creek Mary's dream of "a mingling of the races … a paradise in which the best of the two cultures would take ascendancy" is most...

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1. Introduction
2. Margaret Wallace
3. N. Scott Momaday
4. JOSEPH McLELLAN
5. Mary Anne Norman
6. Joshua Gilder
7. Leslie Marmon Silko
8. Copyright

1. Dee Brown