Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - Bruce J. Degi: Braiding the New Native American Narrative: Michael Dorrié Yellow Raft in Blue Water.

issue is braided onto the first: how do native Americans begin to understand their own complexity? In working backward through time, in revealing and creating history in reverse, Dorris has already offered his answers. Nancy Shoemaker, in a "Point of View" essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education

, provides a useful framework for us to explore the problem Dorris confronts. A Professor of History, Shoemaker relates her continually frustrating problems of trying to teach undergraduate courses in the history of the American West. American students, she points out, are in every case so tied to popular myths about the west in general

—and native Americans specifically

—that they are absolutely unwilling to hear, much less accept, the historical reality about the settlement of the west. One of the strongest issues she finds is that "most of the students come equipped with the classic stereotypes about Indians, what the historian Robert Berkhofer has called the "Noble Savage" and the "Brutal Savage" (A48). These romantic myths simply refuse to die. Even a so-called sensitive (or is it "politically correct?") film like "Dances With Wolves," Shoemaker points out, ultimately degenerates once again into these same two, simplistic views of native Americans: the Lakotas are the Noble Savages who mystically love the land and accept the converted white man into their midst; the Pawnees, on the other hand, remain the basically naked, apparently homeless, killing machines, or Brutal Savages. "Students still cling to the simplistic image of Indians as Noble Savages," she concludes, "and fail to understand that Indian people are just as complex and varied as white people" (A48). That statement, which should be painfully obvious, but never seems to be, is Dorris' central concern. This continuing problem of comfortable stereotypes, in both life and art, continues to diminish the complexity surrounding native American art, and is exactly what Yellow Raft sets out to explode. An unfortunate lack thus far of serious critical attention to the novel forces our attention here to a brief look at several book reviews which have, like the previously mentioned review in Western American Literature, attempted to examine this theme. American reviewers, for 26