From: brock@ucsub.Colorado.EDU (Steve Brock)
Subject: Review of The Light People by Gordon Henry (fiction, Native Am.)
Date: 26 Apr 1995 00:47:10 GMT

THE LIGHT PEOPLE by Gordon Henry, Jr.  University of Oklahoma
Press, 1005 Asp Ave., Norman, OK  73019, (800) 627-7377, (405)
325-5000 FAX.  237 pp., $10.95 paper.  0-8061-2735-X

     The paperback version of "The Light People" has just been
published.  Here is my review of the hardcover edition from last
year:

                             REVIEW

     When Oskinaway, a Chippewa boy on the fictitious Fineday
Reservation of Minnesota, asks his grandfather where his mother and
father have gone, he is taken to a relative of the light people, a
healer named Jake Seed.  Seed ponders the question, then sends the
boy home to wait for one of his helpers (an eccentric named Arthur
Boozhoo who will tell the boy "the meaning of certain things") to
stop over.  Two days later, the helper knocks on the grandparent's
door, and after dinner he begins to tell the family a story about
how he learned magic.
     The story involves his meeting Rose, Seed's daughter, and
author Henry abruptly inserts a story about her.  Rose's story
involves a stone being shot from a slingshot through the window of
her artist's studio, and, you guessed it, the plot switches to the
story of the boy who shot it.
     These transitions occur twenty-eight times and the narrative
style varies from dreams, songs, poems and haikus, court tran-
scripts, to a script from a play.  The experiences of the story-
tellers involve just about every Native American issue imaginable. 
Here are two of them:
     An elderly man loses his leg to diabetes, and the leg is
wrapped in ceremonial garb, placed in a box, and a boy is told to
bury it by the river.  A snowstorm comes up, so the boy puts the
box in a tree and runs for cover.  The box disappears, only to turn
up in a museum.  When it is discovered, the family of the man who
lost the leg sues (under the Repatriation Act) to get it back.
     A boy in a government boarding school refuses to learn English
and is brutally punished, resulting in his not being able to speak
at all.  Returning to his reservation, he becomes a saboteur. 
Caught and thrown in jail, he learns Oriental poetry.  When a
spiritual leader begins to conduct sweats on the prison grounds,
the boy's voice returns, but he can only speak in dream songs
recited in the haiku pattern.
     With all of the transitions of plot and mutations in the style
of writing, the reader may begin to wonder if Oskinaway ever finds
out about the whereabouts of his parents.  He does, as Seed
performs a Houdini-like feat while in a trance.  But the reader who
gets too caught up in this anecdote will miss the point of the book
entirely.
     "The Light People" is cunning, wise, and infused with a
powerful (and dextrous) spirit.  The book is highly recommended for
general readers, as well as classes in Native American literature.