The Hiawatha.

• Author: Rolo, Mark Anthony

The Hiawatha by David Treuer Picador USA. 320 pages. $24.00.

David Treuer's literary fantasy on the urban American Indian experience brings up a disturbing question of historical accuracy. Did Indians who migrated to the streets of Minneapolis in the middle decades of this century actually live the kind of lives Treuer evokes in his latest novel?

Treuer, a mixed-blood writer of Ojibwe and Jewish descent, was raised on the Leech Lake Ojibwe reservation of northern Minnesota. His debut novel, Little (Graywolf, 1995), revealed the pain of a small community of reservation Indians struggling to face their pasts immediately following the death of a young child. He knew that world well--he had seen the poverty, buried secrets, and loneliness on aged faces through the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

Treuer received considerable critical acclaim with Little. Though he borrowed the layered first-person style of Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, he still showed a budding talent.

His second novel, The Hiawatha, is an ambitious work that explores one of the hidden cultures of the contemporary American Indian community: life in the city. Other writers, including Sherman Alexie, have shown us urban Indians. But Treuer's problem is that he is obsessed with the spectacle and irony of an Indian trailing paths of cement instead of grass. In The Hiawatha, he attempts to give insight, social relevance, and historical perspective to the question of why Native people left their land for concrete pathways over the past fifty years.

The Hiawatha is set in Minneapolis during the 1960s and 1970s, where, as in other urban centers, large groups of Native families resettled under the federal government's relocation program. This policy of assimilation--designed to integrate Indians into mainstream America by luring them off the reservations--disconnected many Native families by shuffling them into poor, crowded, urban areas with limited access to decent education, job training, and health care.

But many Indians originally saw relocation as a chance to live the American dream. These people viewed the exodus from their reservations as an opportunity. Like them, Treuer's main character, Simon, is in Minneapolis to start again.

Simon is returning, however, after spending more than a decade in jail for murdering his brother Lester. Flopping in a room of a once grand hotel, he is haunted by the voices of his past. Shadows of those he knew, including his dead brother, follow him...