Reinventing the Enemy's Language: North American Native Women's Writing.

• Author: Rolo, Mark Anthony

by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird W.W. Norton and Co. 448 pages. $27.50.

In their introduction, editors Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird urge readers of this anthology to consider the power of story as a tool for social and political activism. But this body of work in no way supports the misguided notion that Indian literature should serve some nationalistic agenda. The writers whose work is presented here know that. Intentionally or not, they have refused the fallacious role of warrior for the tribe." Instead their writings serve a more crucial purpose. They reveal again and again the Indian woman's heritage of survival.

Take the opening pages of Louise Erdrich's acclaimed first novel, Love Medicine. Anti-heroine June Kashpaw is wandering around the frozen streets of an off-reservation North Dakota town. Looking to kill time before catching the bus back to the rez, June steps into a tavern where she meets one of the locals, someone called Andy. Hours and drinks later, the twosome end up on a country road. As snow begins to fall, Andy passes out. June, bent on making her bus, wanders off into the snow.

"The heavy winds couldn't blow her off her course. . . . Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on. . . . The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home."

In these few pages, Erdrich captures the pain and determination of a generation of Native women like June. Despite June's failure as a mother, lover, and good tribal member, she carries within her a hidden dignity--an unbreakable connection to her Chippewa spirit.

Arguably the most well-crafted chapter in modern Native American fiction, Erdrich's endearing portrait of June Kashpaw is one of a hundred stories in the expansive new anthology Reinventing the Enemy's Language: North American Native Women's Writing.

Layers of meaning emerge with each story, poem, prayer, and memoir. Like newly discovered diaries, each chapter releases a lifetime. Mary Brave Bird's account of the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., in 1972 is more than political reflection. Brave Bird reveals that Native American women were one of the cornerstones of the American Indian Movement, which captured the nation's imagination and called attention to the government's flagrant abuse and neglect of Indian peoples.

"For me the high point came not with our men...