[Rascoe was an American literary critic who served on the staff of several influential periodicals during the early and mid-twentieth century. Noted for his perceptiveness in recognizing new or obscure talent, Rascoe was, at one time or another during his career, the chief literary critic of such publications as The Chicago Tribune, The New York Herald Tribune Books, Bookman, Esquire, Newsweek, and American Mercury. In this review, he offers high praise for The Man Who Killed the Deer.]

[The Man Who Killed the Deer] is by far the finest novel of American Indian life I have ever read, not excepting the notable Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge; but a reviewer, anxious to bring to the attention of a large audience a novel he believes to be of high merit, hesitates to disclose the inescapable fact that the book is about Indians, and wishes he could just say that Mr. Waters has written a beautiful and entrancing novel and let it go at that.

For it is almost an axiom in the book trade that novels, or, indeed, books of any kind, about Indians do not sell well. In more than thirty years there have been but two conspicuous exceptions to this rule—Wah-kon-tah, by John Joseph Mathews and Laughing Boy, by Oliver La Farge. And there can be little doubt that these two books, one non-fiction and the other fiction, were greatly aided in their wide circulation by having been book club selections, the first by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the second by the Literary Guild of America.

Perhaps half a dozen excellent and much-needed works of scholarship are published each year which add to the sum total of our knowledge of the history and the ways of the various tribes of the North American Indian, and of these many of them are not only informative but highly entertaining. Yet they seem to be bought and read only by those like the late Mary Austin, Mr. La Farge, and Mable Dodge Luhan, who are convinced that, in many ways, the Indians are ethically and spiritually superior to their white conquerors or, like Grant Foreman, Angie Deboe, Everett Dale, Ralph Henry Gabriel, and Morris Wardell, who have a deep sense of guilt over our treatment of the Indians and wish to atone for it vicariously not only by spreading the facts on the record but by showing wherein we still may learn much to our advantage from the Indian ways of life, which we have tried so hard to extirpate.

The Man Who Killed the Deer is a dramatization of the effort of the elders of the Pueblo Indians to preserve their way of life, in its spiritual essentials, while making all possible concessions to white civilization. The story is both pathetic and tragic, with overtones of a mystical musical character which put the reader into a mood of feeling that he is apprehending more than he can comprehend. If that seems badly stated, perhaps I can put it more baldly by saying that the reader leaves the book with a belief that these Pueblo Indians have a psychic power that is absent in, or lost to, us and that they can see, feel, and (with their minds) do things we cannot; and further that their superior psychic powers come from ancient mystic rites and observances which better identify them with all the elements of life than do our religions and customs—which put them "more in tune with the universe."

And, if that still sounds as though I don't know what I want to say, perhaps you had better read the novel yourself and see if you can express the matter better than I can. When I use the phrase "in tune with the infinite" I don't mean to imply that there is any Ralph Waldo Trine sort of sentimentalism in Mr. Waters's novel. On the contrary, he is hard, steely, realistic. But he is stumped, baffled, by things he has observed during his long association with the Indians of Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico (which contain remnants of divers and often hostile tribes with differing customs, prejudices, and beliefs) and therefore tries humbly and admiringly to present what he has seen and felt.

The conflict between Indian and white civilization is dramatized in the story of Martiniano, a Pueblo Indian, who "belongs" to neither white nor Indian civilization. Having been sent away to be educated in the white schools, only to return to his tribe as a rebel, an outsider, a youth who falsely believes he has been liberated from tribal "superstitions" he soon finds that he is a tragic misfit. He is treated as a merely tolerated outcast by his tribe not only because he neglects the tribal ceremonies but also because he marries a beautiful Ute girl.

Martiniano further complicates his life by killing a deer on the government reservation, in defiance of laws laid down in Washington. Now, although this offense is serious enough in the eyes of the government authorities and requires punishment in the form of a fine and jail sentence, it is, curiously enough, much more serious in the eyes of the elders of his tribe. For merely doing what his ancestors would have done naturally when they wanted food, he finds that, in the minds of the tribe, he has committed not a misdemeanor but a sin. The sin is against the whole tribe and must be expiated in strange, mystic ways. At first, he tries to escape atonement by joining the Peyotes, who drug themselves with the poison of the peyote plant and escape reality temporarily thereby; but he learns that drunkeness cannot dim his deepening consciousness of guilt.

How Martiniano atones for his sin is a meaningful allegory for all of us. You see, the tribe had given its word that its members would obey the white laws, and any violation of this pledge threatened the most important thing in the life of the tribe—the regaining of its sacred Dawn Lake as the seat of its holiest rituals. The whites had very utilitarian uses for Dawn Lake and did not mean to be stopped in a great federal project by any nonsensical Indian mumbo-jumbo. Mr. Waters conveys the impression, quietly but emphatically, with compelling power, that the whites deceive themselves; their utilitarian projects are mumbo-jumbo; only spiritual values possess any great use. Otherwise [Adolf] Hitler is correct.