[In the following review, Carlson argues that Crossbloods is an eclectic but revealing look at contemporary Native American culture.]

Gerald Vizenor's Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports is, as the title suggests, an eclectic collection of essays and articles written over the last two decades by this prolific author, whose subject matter is Native American life and culture. Mr. Vizenor, a mixed-blood member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe, has been a reporter and editorial writer for The Minneapolis Tribune and now teaches literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also written two novels, Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles and Griever: An American Monkey King in China, the latter of which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1988; beautiful new paperback editions of these books are being published by the University of Minnesota Press along with this new collection.

This is a collection of picked-up pieces. The introduction and the first set of essays, "Crossblood Survivance," are free-flowing polemics that touch on the major issues confronting Native Americans in the United States. "Crossbloods," he says, "are a postmodern tribal bloodline" of part-Indian, part-white individuals, and their economic survival has become interwoven with the development of high-stakes gambling on reservations; the redefinition of treaties and land allotments; fishing and hunting rights; new concepts of entrepreneurship, and other concerns. Bingo, which generates an estimated $3 million to $4 million a year on one reservation alone, is both boon and bane. On the one hand there is all that money; on the other, there are all the problems of gambling and the strong feeling in some corners that bingo runs counter to any sense of tribal heritage.

The longest sustained narrative is the story of Thomas White Hawk, who murdered a jeweler in Vermillion, S.D., in March 1967. This section, "Capital Punishment," shows Mr. Vizenor's true skill as a reporter as he recounts the crime, the trial and the aftermath in magazine articles he wrote in 1968 and 1970. It would have been better still if there had also been a more complete update on Mr. White Hawk (whose sentence was commuted) and the community of Vermillion.

In fact, the entire second half of the book, composed mainly of short newspaper articles written in the early 70's about tribal matters, would have benefited from current news or updates, especially on the issues of education, the phenomenon of "stolen children" (children who are placed in foster care and adoptive homes in white society), the movement back to the reservation, ideas of natural tribal rights and the American Indian Bank, which was established in Washington almost 20 years ago.

Mr. Vizenor's intriguing essay "Bone Courts: The Natural Rights of Tribal Bones" confronts the issue of the hundreds of thousands of tribal bones that now reside in museums and research institutions. He proposes a "Bone Court," in which the bones would be "mediators and narrators" and have the legal right to be represented. He quotes Walter Echo-Hawk, an attorney for the Native American Rights Fund, who said, "If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D." Mr. Vizenor doesn't offer a way to implement his very moral plan, but his essay is a telling glimpse at a huge injustice.

This collection is confusing at first, because Mr. Vizenor spans so many years on such an array of issues (even using completely different prose styles—from reportorial to academic), but he does offer an unvarnished view of aspects of contemporary tribal culture. "Thirty years ago," he notes, "it was not uncommon to read about tribal people as if they were somnolent cultural artifacts or uncivilized pagans living on wilderness reservations." Crossbloods, scattered as it may be, is another step toward rectifying that notion.