W. P. Kinsella is not an Indian, a fact that would not be extraordinary were it not for the stories Kinsella writes about the Cree Silas Ermineskin; and his sister Illiana, who moved to the city and married a very straight white man; and his friend Frank Fencepost; and the medicine lady, Mad Etta, who wears dresses made from five flour sacks, with ermine tails fastened along the sleeves, and the rest of a Cree world. Kinsella's Indians are counterculture figures in the sense that their lives counter the predominant culture of North America, but there is none of the worshipfully inaccurate portrayal of "the Indian" that has appeared from James Fenimore Cooper through Gary Snyder. Kinsella writes about Indian men who get drunk and beat their wives and children, women who run away to be prostitutes, an Indian used-car salesman who has an inside track on cheating Indians, and a chief who uses his Indianness only for the political leverage it gives him to be more white. Yet it is only in the face of these defeated people and these betrayals that the significant victories of the other characters and the real strength of the lives they have created and salvaged become apparent.

Scars is Kinsella's second collection, and readers of the first, Dance Me Outside, will be glad to see the development of earlier characters and themes, although this collection, and each individual story, stands on its own. "Fawn" is a sequel to the earlier story "Butterflies," in which a white girl finds a refuge which her own society couldn't give her. "Mr. Whitey" is a further exploration of the need for but defeat of a genuine messianic force, first stated in "Penance." In Scars it is again the women who bear the brunt of living in a culture that keeps from being crippled only by its sense of being alive. Silas, who is studying to become a tractor mechanic and also studying with Mad Etta to become an assistant medicine man, continues to serve as narrator. His voice unifies the stories as his life unifies at least some of the paradoxes of his culture.

Yet finally what makes Kinsella's stories work is his eye for detail and his sense of how a few remembered images come together to create a place and a people that compel belief. Kinsella's Indians wear the counterculture uniform of jeans, yet in Kinsella's hands this is no uniform but a theme on which to compose variations. The Indians confuse some visiting Italian film makers. "They say you Indians are all dressed up in denim like cowboys supposed to be. They want to know if cowboys dress up like Indians." The used-car dealer is dressed like an imitation cowboy, too, with his "old cowboy boots" and "wide brown belt." A girl who has struggled to acquire seeming security and a decent life wears a white sweater and "clean jeans." A woman in jeans and running shoes lacerates her arm in mourning for her child which her husband has given away, and the blood drips "from her fingertips into the fine grey dust and onto her running shoes." Yet for all their ubiquity, jeans can't be fully adapted to the old ways of the Cree and thus are a compromise part of the culture. (pp. 84-5)

Scars is an excellent book: moving, funny, often brutal, yet joyously affirming sex and life and honor and responsibility, and handsomely produced withal. (p. 86)