For almost twenty years, Peter Matthiessen has pursued a vanishing world of wilderness and uninhabited spaces in which man is no more than a sparse, gentle guest. In a dozen books of fiction and naturalist reportage, Matthiessen has written about the Amazon jungle and the plains of eastern Africa; he has tramped across the Nepalese Himalayas, and climbed into the high jungle valleys of New Guinea. No one writes more vividly about the complex sounds and sights of a world without man, or where man blends in uncannily as merely another venture in nature's billion-year experiment.

Matthiessen's knowledge of the botanist's and zoologist's lore is encyclopedic. His descriptions of the African savannah or of the inner reaches of the Himalayas may be the best we have. In such remote places, his writing becomes a poetry of nomenclature in all its whimsy and barbarism, but also its curious splendor, as man casts his net of language upon the fluid rhythms of a world that ignores him, or would if man did not have a power of destruction which cannot be ignored….

Matthiessen the naturalist has also been an elegist, chronicling the decline of an older earth of sparse populations hunting and gathering, or planting according to modest needs, in a ritual of respect for the cycles of the year. It is a gentle picture, maybe a purely invented one, expressing as it does a powerful longing: the dream of a reconciled world.

The opening scenes of Matthiessen's newest book, Indian Country, take us yet again into this vanishing world, in this case a part of inland Florida…. [There is a] sort of lyrical precision one appreciates in Matthiessen's writing: the sense of limitless space, an elusive population of vividly named species, grasses, sky—whole vocabularies of trees. (p. 36)

Matthiessen has two subjects in Indian Country: the destruction of America's last open land by the grinding pressure of big industry, in particular the energy industry; and the tragic struggle of the last people on the land to preserve their shrinking territories, and even more, to preserve the holy balance of their traditions, linked to the complex, fragile ecology of the land.

Matthiessen has crisscrossed the country, visiting Indian reservations in Florida and Tennessee, New York, California, the Dakotas, the Southwest. Among Hopis and Navaho, Cherokees, Mohawks and Muskeegees; among countless remnants of tribes that have left powerful names in the sagas of the American past—Sioux, Apache, Comanche—he has stopped to talk, and found distrustful, secretive peoples, who have learned that there is little to hope for from a white man, even a friendly one. They are struggling to keep old traditions intact, amidst the desolation of rugged territories, hostile white neighbors, and energy conglomerates who often conspire with the Indians' own lawyers to steal the oil and mineral rights of America's last wilderness for pennies an acre.

With patience and impassioned sympathy, Matthiessen has penetrated the "Indian awakening" that has been taking place for more than twenty years on reservations around the country. Repeatedly he has encountered a complex, often bitter political struggle between Indians who have bought the B.I.A.'s offer of welfare money, running water, and electricity—who have moved into tract villages, abandoning traditional settlements located near sacred pools rich with hundreds or even a thousand years of tradition—and recalcitrant, usually minority groups of "traditionals," for whom the B.I.A. (along with other official state agencies) is merely a more cunning face of cultural annihilation. (pp. 36-7)

It is a tragic conflict; both the "traditionals," longing to observe the old "Mohawk Way," and the "Tribals," hoping to manage some integration with white society, live under a destructive shadow. In this wilderness of upper New York State, almost visible from the camp of the "traditionals," a General Motors foundry spews acrid smoke into the air and a Reynolds Aluminum plant wafts "a light warm haze of fluoride effluvium."… The Indians are fighting, but they are fighting for a dead land.

Indian Country tells the same desperate story over and over again…. In place after place, the rape of the land and the despoiling of the Indians go hand in hand; and all of us are poorer for it. For, in Matthiessen's view, the Indians—those that are left, even half-acculturated, desperately poor, often alienated from their own past—are the spiritual custodians of a relationship to the natural world which we have lost.

The loss may destroy us. The Indians are our conscience; as they are silenced, bought off, discouraged, "terminated," something irrevocable is happening to our country. Those places of silence and ancient emptiness, about which Matthiessen writes so movingly, are vanishing, and with them our own secure place in the world is vanishing too, replaced by factory smoke, by piles of radioactive tailings at the mouth of uranium mines, and by the planet-wide death still barely bottled up in nuclear warehouses. (pp. 37-8)

Indian Country tells the story of many lost battles, and a few battles won. Every celebration of Indian courage and determination, every injunction barring the destruction of yet another tract of glorious country, gives the measure of what, year by year, is being lost. Matthiessen's story is, finally, an unutterably sad one. (p. 38)