[Of Blackfeet and Cherokee heritage, Highwater is an American novelist, poet, author of children's books, and nonfiction writer who has written over a dozen critical and creative works on Native American culture. In the following excerpt, he offers a generally favorable assessment of Lost Copper, emphasizing Rose's incorporation of personal pain and anger in her poetry.]

The images created by Wendy Rose are … compelling and alive. She is clearly a poet with an enormous capacity for feeling. Her works tend to cry out, to howl. The dirge has become a frantic accusation, steeped in an ancient landscape, personal and tribal:

       I think I need an Indian Star
       for mixing colors I was born to paint
 
       the ties of earth distract my glands yet
       were they gone
 
       I would drift nameless—
       a simple idea to carve from fire,
       a new sky that loves red/white.

In his introduction to Lost Copper, N. Scott Momaday suggests that Wendy Rose supersedes her political hostility and transforms it into literature. I am not entirely convinced. Her language never quite manages to overcome her rage. Yet that very paranoia may be the ultimate virtue and source of her finely produced writing, for the cumulative impact of Lost Copper provides an image of the poet angrily ascertaining a deeply troubled identity. Since self-recognition is the most acute personal problem of many contemporary tribal people, the writing of Wendy Rose strikes dramatically upon a central dilemma of Indians. Her lines are haunted by an unresolved search for a personal as well as a tribal sense of identity. That search gives her words strength and spirit. It dissolves the barrier of race with which she cautiously surrounds itself, and it gives us access to her pain. In that pain we are all related.