[In the following review, Niemann focuses on the magical and supernatural aspects of The Grass Dancer.]

The Grass Dancer flows along the page with the grace of its title character, a Menominee woman named Pumpkin who dances what is traditionally the male role of the grass dancer in powwows. The book as a whole becomes a place—the reservation where the series of stories that make up the novel are heard. Each chapter is as long as one night's storytelling, reflecting different points of view on the same set of events and characters. Susan Power draws on both novelistic technique and oral tradition to create a newly emerging form.

Storytelling, like grass dancing, is a tribal art: Power is working within her tradition to unfold spiritual secrets through the narrative. Each chapter is a discrete story in its own right, taking the reader from the 1860s to the 1980s as the lives of younger generations come to intersect with the still-present spirits of their ancestors.

This structuring of the novel as a series of overlapping stories is similar to Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The difference is in focus: Alexie's stories are deeply rooted in reservation life and are triumphs over despair, while Power is more concerned with myth-making in all its new-car excitement. People get up from their deathbeds and walk on the moon with Neil Armstrong. They come back from the dead in pretty good shape, with consoling messages for the living. They give advice. History is not drenched in gore, as in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead; it's less of a tragedy than we thought it was.

Power tells stories of how the Dakotas used white magic to defeat their enemies, such as the story about the "Medicine Hole"—the magical opening up of the earth that hid and protected warriors surrounded in a battle with US soldiers in the 1860s. She chooses to represent indigenous history not as a record of defeat but rather as a continuing process whose outcome is still uncertain. The past and the spirit world lie within and around the present.

The germinal story tells of Red Dress, a woman warrior who left her people to go to the US soldiers' Fort Laramie in 1864. There she pretended to accept their culture, but secretly used her magical powers of sexual attraction to lure and kill a number of them. Accepting this role separated her from her lover, Ghost Horse, and she died at the fort before they could be married. Ghost Horse married her spirit anyway, but in his grief he was unable to release her. He sought death in battle, and his spirit went to the place of the ancestors, while hers remained attached to the places of the living.

The modern inheritor of Red Dress' power is Anna Thunder, her grand-niece. Anna, however, uses her sexual power for her own ends rather than for the good of the tribe—to bewitch lovers and take revenge. This is not to say that her character is unsympathetic; Power presents her as a formidable, intelligent, intensely alive woman:

"Too many people don't believe in their souls, don't recognize them when they feel the spirit twist against their heart or snap across their brain. And some that do believe hand their spirits over to the care of others, just give them blithely away, though they may be tightfisted when it comes to their coins. I own my spirit. Can you say that? How many can say that?"

Anna is grooming her teenage granddaughter, Charlene, to succeed her as a bruja, but Charlene prefers the approval of the tribe over the personal power a black magic worker possesses. It mortifies her that everyone is afraid to eat any of her grandmother's casseroles or to buy any of her beadwork for fear of bewitchment:

Charlene trained her headlights on the dog, but he didn't look up. His front paws were planted in the macaroni casserole Charlene had baked. Two neat squares—the servings Charlene had carved for her grandmother and herself—were missing, but the pan … was otherwise full. "They must have thrown it out," Charlene thought. "And it was good, too." Tears pooled in her eyes, but she squinted fiercely to keep them from spilling down her face.

The other series of intercut stories concerns the descendants of Ghost Horse, the Wind Soldier family. Harley Wind Soldier, the great-great-nephew of Ghost Horse, is struggling for spiritual healing after the tragic death of his father, Calvin, and in the face of his mother's continuing vow of silence. The family tragedy is complicated by the involvement of Anna Thunder, whose witchcraft made Calvin sleep with his wife's twin sister. Harley turns to traditional medicine with the help of the tribe's practitioner, Herod Small War. In a vision quest ceremony he meets Ghost Horse and is given knowledge of himself and the history of the tribe:

Harley Wind Soldier stood in the same deep pit his father had occupied thirty years before. Harley was more cooperative than Calvin had been, and wore only his gym shorts and a blanket. He clutched Herod Small War's pipe against his chest and watched the flags staked at the perimeter of the pit rise in the wind. His mother and Alberta Small War had made the long string of tobacco ties that encircled him.

"I don't know how to pray," Harley mumbled, but he dismissed the idea. "I will learn," he told himself.

The title character, the grass dancer Pumpkin, appears only briefly in the narrative. She is in a way a cipher for the author, being a mixed-blood on her way to an Ivy League education. Grass dancers imitate the way the prairie grass moves; their costume is fringed, and they wear grass bundles on their backs. Early in the book Pumpkin turns up at a powwow, where she wins the heart of Harley Wind Soldier, whose emptiness she promises to fill with her own soul. Leaving the powwow she is killed in a car wreck, another victim of Anna Thunder's witchcraft.

Pumpkin beat Charlene in the powwow competition, and Charlene is haunted by the responsibility for her death. But the way in which she is relieved of this burden illustrates the philosophy permeating this novel—that life works itself out in ways not understandable to humans, but with a beauty, even in tragic events, that is accessible and healing.

Pumpkin opened her mouth to speak, and Charlene flinched, dreading the beautiful little birds, which she knew would leave the dancer's lips only to die. This dream was different. The birds emerged, the same as always, but this time darted away. They were a neat flock, so miniature and close together that they looked to Charlene like a school of fish. Her mouth creaked open in surprise. Quickly, easily, the birds flew past her teeth, entering the cave of her jaws. Charlene coughed, but the birds coasted down her throat, tickling her with their fluttering wings.