[Vickers is a Bloomsbury Review associate editor whose master's thesis will examine the work of Frank Waters. In the following review, he praises Brave Are My People, which he says "is destined to become a textbook in cultural studies."]

Now in his 91st year, and recently nominated a sixth time for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Frank Waters continues with his intrepid work, bringing a revisionary and visionary light upon the nature of the American Indian. Balancing out a career equally dedicated to fiction and nonfiction, this latest book [Brave Are My People: Indian Heroes Not Forgotten] is a tribute to 22 of Waters' most revered Indian tribal leaders, medicine men, statesmen, and warriors who stood, or tried to stand, against the white tide of materialism that swept them into desolation from 1600 to 1900. As Waters points out, several aspects of the malignant ideology responsible for the demise of Indian culture still adhere today in the Euroamerican (as opposed to Amerindian) culture of America, illustrating the need for ongoing dialogue between those two divergent cultural philosophies.

The point of this book is not to glamorize or romanticize pre-contact Amerindian cultures, or to cast blame on particularly heinous white offenses against them, but rather to tell the most reliable historic truth of what happened and to observe, by example, the crucial differences that define two opposing worldviews. It has become an increasingly meaningful perspective among Indian scholars and philosophers that the time is ripe for Euroamerican culture to learn from its assimilated Indian cultures how to survive meaningfully into the next century. Georges E. Sioui, a Huron of Quebec, for instance, states in his philosophical work For an Amerindian Autohistory that "the essence of original American thought is being communicated to other continents … [which is] a phenomenon of reverse assimilation." Sioui, like Waters, believes that "modern American societies could benefit from demythologizing the socio-political discourse and becoming aware of their 'Americity.'" Brave Are My People also points to this seeming inevitability. Waters observes in his introduction, with characteristic irony, that "English is [already] a foreign language in many barrios of [Los Angeles], and Anglo residents fear they may become a minority as the Indians had become before them." In answer to this guilty paranoia, both authors recommend a new understanding of the polyglot nature of "Americity" and an acceptance of the Indian notions of spiritual commonwealth, mutual respect, and tolerance.

Waters' new book is beautiful in its simple eloquence and straightforward distillation of the dramatic essentials from more than 45 bibliographic references and histories. Each chapter is a mini-biography of usually one, sometimes several, Indian heroes, from the preternaturally lucky warrior Crazy Horse to the linguistic scholar Sequoya, who developed an alphabet over ten years for the Cherokee nation. The narrative is sequenced historically from the beginning treacheries of the Puritans against the Powhatans of Virginia and the Wampanoags of Plymouth, through the odyssey of westward migration and war against the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas in New York and Pennsylvania, the Seminoles and Creeks in Florida (where, Waters proffers, there still exist "small bands whose fathers never surrendered"), and the Ottowas, Ojibways, Hurons, Delawares, and Shawnee in the Midwest, to the Great Plains and American desert wars against the Apaches, the Lakota Sioux, the Navajo, Mojaves, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Kiowas, Comanches, Blackfeet, and Crows, and finally to the overwhelmed and incredulous capitulation of the great Nez Percë Chief Joseph. The work thus provides a rare overview of three centuries of wholesale slaughter, deception, greed, and unmitigated genocide committed by white forefathers (including such Euroamerican heroes as Jefferson, Grant, Jackson, and Sherman). The Indians, it seems, never understood the materialist mandate for private property nor the Christian imperative to "subdue" the earth, immersed as they were in their view of the earth and its inhabitants as a "sacred circle of life" and predicated on "the universal interdependences of all beings" (to use Sioui's words). You can bet they do now.

To his credit, Waters does not soft-pedal (and never has) the sometimes "barbaric" customs of the Amerindians in order to offer up a perfectly harmonious portrait. "Barbarism" is, after all, in the eye of the beholder. But neither does he miss their philosophical acumen, their social convictions, respect for nature, and their tragic nobility. As the noted author Vine Deloria, Jr. (Custer Died for Your Sins, 1988) affirms of these Indian heroes in his foreword to Brave Are My People:

Imagine the inner feelings of these Indian leaders who, not fearing death, at the same time lived their lives until the very end, and thereby ensured that their lives counted in the midst of utterly senseless change.

This book is an essential primer for anyone who wants the "true" history, and one of the emerging "autohistories" (Waters himself is part Cheyenne), of the great Indian leaders as seen through the eyes of their progeny. With its huge bibliography, Brave Are My People encourages more in-depth study of what might well become a crucial cultural paradigm to consider as we approach what Waters believes is "the greatest change in the life of mankind since the beginning of the Christian era." In so saying, he echoes the prophetic words of Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe, spoken in 1854, "one year after the city named for him passed a law making it illegal for Indians to live in Seattle." Aware of the recent controversy surrounding the verity of this speech, Waters has here used the original translation by Dr. Henry Smith, who published it in 1887:

Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come; for even the White Man, whose God walked and talked with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

Brave Are My People is destined to become a textbook in cultural studies.