Overview
An enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Indian tribe and resident of Pine Ridge Reservation takes an unflinching look at the harsh realities of modern-day Native American life.Synopsis
An enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Indian tribe and resident of Pine Ridge Reservation takes an unflinching look at the harsh realities of modern-day Native American life.
BookList
Still living on South Dakota's famous/infamous Pine Ridge Reservation, Louis seems less bitter about it than in his last collection, Among the Dog Eaters (1992). He's no less spasmodically drunken, lustful, and gallows-humored, though, and he seems here more than before to be becoming a Kerouac with a cause or a Bukowski with a soulthe Indian cause and the Indian soul, of course (Native American is a term Louis uses only scathingly). Like those two white Beat bards of excess, Louis' language inflates, comitragically but not vainly, the significance of the small, desperate, misspent, yet not utterly hopeless and far from loveless or meaningless lives of reservation Indians. Here more than before, he writes from the perspectives of two representative contemporaries of his who have been considerably less successfulVerdell Ten Bears and Jake Red Horseas much as autobiographically. It's safe to say that no American poet better reflects his community and its ethos.