When I learn that a book is populated by characters called Robert Coyote, Frank Fence-Post, Sadie One-Wound, and Poppy Twelvetrees, my response is usually a groan in anticipation of an attempt to make restitution for or to make me pay for Wounded Knee. Dee Brown's work seemed to call forth lost tribes of white men who discovered roots they never knew they had. The Great Spirit moved within them, and they felt, or at least suspected, a tickle of feathers down their backs. Kinsella's book Dance Me Outside is all the more refreshing because it quite consciously eschews ersatz heroics and any kind of nostalgic, mythopoeic reflections on a technicolour golden age.

This collection of almost a score of stories gives us wry, picaresque vignettes of life on an Albertan Reserve near Wetaskiwin. A teenager, Silas Ermineskin, recounts to us, in a syntax that has stubbornly survived the tinkering of school-teachers, the adventures of his friends and relatives. The book is held together by a sardonically amused response to the mysterious habits of the white men. We learn how confidently Wilbur Yellowknees handles his stable of whores, how skillfully Old Joe Buffalo takes revenge on a white farmer, how relieved Annie Bottle is when the child she gives birth to in a barn dies, how the gargantuan Mad Etta makes magic in trying to solve Rider Stonechild's amorous problems. The stories are low-key, deliberately unspectacular, full of rueful mirth and a carefully accumulated wisdom, as Silas learns the ways of his world. They are as far as can be imagined in mood and intention from the souped-up mythology and hokey gibberish that Carlos Castaneda peddles.

The book very effectively illustrates the variety of ways in which Indians are not merely victimized but are conditioned to expect and accept victimization…. The narrator enjoys stealing the white man's best lines and forking them back mockingly, as when he defines a prosperous Indian: "The house is painted and they got a car that runs." Kinsella does not, however, set up the whites as straw-men. One of the absurdest figures in the book is Hobart Thunder, a militant Indian who comes to spread the gospel of violence and becomes a victim of it. Silas and his friends cast a shrewdly sceptical eye on politicians, both red and white, who seek to use them. Their posture is stoical rather than aggressive. Any casual violence they happen to unleash on their enemies must give the impression of being caused by dumb foolishness rather than by calculation. Kinsella's people have developed many of the strategies found in concentration camps. There is no celebration here of noble, old-fashioned heroism. The best we can ask for, as in such a vast range of modern literature, is the ethics of the survivor. But the Indian paradoxically has an advantage over many other survivors. The reserve, which is in so many ways a trap, is also the source of strength: "With us here, it don't matter what you done, it always okay for you to come back home." Kinsella makes it clear in many of his stories that the Indian harbours a kind of bewildered contempt for the white men who so consistently cast aside the comforts of this refuge.

One of the best stories in the book, "Ups and Downs," recounts the roller coaster adventures of Silas and his friend on a trip to Las Vegas. Whether they are winning a thousand dollars and living in a suite or broke and sleeping on a golf course, the next day they manage to maintain an air of imperturbable, cocky amusement. They have what Kinsella in another story calls panache. It is an error to think that this results from having nothing to lose. Even as they take advantage of the white man's stereotypes, they refuse to submit to them. They manage effortlessly to "live on the edge," as the west coast hipster would phrase it. In reading this picaresque account of violence and mayhem, I was inevitably reminded of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. On reflection what seems remarkable is the self-conscious lengths Thompson has to go to in breaking away from up-tight white society. He invokes the whole self-destructive mythology of the romantic hero; he invents a monstrously berserk alter-id-Dr. Gonzo; he blows his brains out on a smorgasbord of drugs—then he can feel free enough to tear through the straight world like one of the horse-men of the apocalypse. Kinsella's characters do not melodramatize themselves. They are aware that Indians have been treated like dangerous children for at least a hundred years. When an opportunity arises to fulfill the image in spades, it seems churlish to pass it up.

One of the advantages of having these stories gathered together in a collection is that one comes to enjoy the flavour of the characters in a wide variety of situations and to appreciate their ingenuity in honing the art of the survivor. One of the disadvantages is the repetition and the sense that too many of them are pitched to achieve a similar impact. There is no really outstanding story in the collection, none which reveals a great reach or power in reserve, or which takes any great risks. Many anthropologists have begun to use the methods of the short story writer in accumulating anecdotal case studies. The stories here are thoroughly enjoyable, but Kinsella will have to reach out a little more if he is to avoid being crowded off his turf by sociologists. But it is pleasant to find a man who can mock the pathetic attempts of the 'apples'—those with red skin desperate to be white inside—and who would surely be able to nail those white writers who desperately try to invent a new identity as red warriors. (pp. 137-38)