[In the following review, Mogen contends that while Dead Voices is difficult to read, it is an eloquent and original work.]

Like Vizenor's earlier work, Dead Voices dramatizes the complex "word wars" waged between tribal peoples and mainstream culture. Indeed, this strange "novel" creates a living trickster voice—at once profane, lyrical and wondrously bizarre—through which to dramatize a radical perspective on the Western tradition of written culture, embodying "dead voices" that suppress the "natural agonies" of tribal peoples and the natural world. By giving written "voice" to the internal narrator Bageese, a reclusive tribal woman who is at once a bear and the vehicle through which we hear the agonies of animal beings surviving in the urban landscape, Vizenor paradoxically translates unspeakable realities into a written medium that historically has obliterated them in wars of words. Because the very voice of the novel embodies a paradox of articulation, this is a difficult book to read, one in which meaning and narrative alike seem to hover just beyond the reach of written language. Like the mirrors in Bageese's home that provide glimpses of her bear identity, the language here presents tantalizing refractions from realms of experience that never entirely come into focus. But this effect of suspension between worlds of discourse creates a curious poetry as well, in which conventional images of tribal cultures, nature, and reality itself are radically transposed.

The novel's messages are implicit in its paradoxical point of view, which integrates "voices" that are inherently untranslatable, so that decoding the perspectives of the various voices telling the narrative becomes part of the process of "reading." The three major categories of "voice" are suggested in the opening chapter, "Shadows," which serves as a fictional author's preface to the tales that follow. Here the tribal storyteller Bageese warns the scholarly narrator of the dangers of translating her stories into the "dead voices" of lectures and printed words. This introductory warning about the difficulty of translating oral into written "hearing" is later compounded by the nature of the stories themselves, which originate in the tribal "wanaki game," and which must be experienced and told from a first person plural point of view, in which the human narrator's voice is fused with those of the beings whose stories are being told. Bageese's education of the narrator also prepares the reader for the uniquely conceived voice of the stories that follow: "The secret, she told me, was not to pretend, but to see and hear the real stories behind the words, the voices of the animals in me, not the definitions of the words alone." Thus we are introduced to the wanaki game, in which the "we" of the stories become, in turn, the being designated in the story titles.

Despite the difficulties it presents to readers—or perhaps partially because of them—Dead Voices is a humorous, original, and curiously eloquent contribution to contemporary Native American fiction, which translates onto the page living voices that finally can be heard.