Feathering Custer

Meghan Saar - True West

“Penn weaves in life experiences that grounded me from the academe. His arguments for a satire forming community, empowerment being false power and a mythic mind connecting all things prove his potent point that history reveals itself by telling us how we can continue to be (not what we have been).”—Meghan Saar, True West

Western Folklore - William M. Clements

“Folklorists interested in these issues will benefit from Penn’s insightful and engagingly written commentaries.”—William M. Clements, Western Folklore

“Penn demonstrates his own mastery of critical theories as he weaves them into his life experiences.”—Choice

“Feathering Custer points to the need for critical understanding of the literatures of Native America. Penn's volume offers a challenge to all those interested in meaningful insights into these literary works to search the indigenous storytelling traditions, lives, and literatures of Native Americans.”—World Literature Today

“James Joyce–certainly a canonical writer–once said he expected to forge the consciousness of his race through his writing. For Joyce, that was a choice; he could have swum with what had already been created. For W. S. Penn, there is no such freedom: he must forge what the white world long ago destroyed, and he must forge it passionately and alone.”—Southwest Book Views

Just in time for the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Little Big Horn comes this provocative if uneven collection of essays by Nez Perc? fiction writer and critic Penn, who attempts, with commendable verve and insight, to take the measure of Native American studies today. Like many another successful academic (Penn is professor of literature and creative writing at Michigan State), the author is rather embattled and defensive in these works, and a bit chagrined to find himself at the heart of an often patronizing and reductive academy. Especially self-conscious about his precarious position as a Native American (Nez Perc? is his publisher's designation; Penn prefers "mixblood"), Penn employs a number of strategies to "keep it real," including the compelling form of these 10 extended essays. Penn is a passionate advocate of the oral tradition and an enemy of "purity," whether of racial designation or literary form, and his essays often incorporate fictional elements, showing a healthy respect for anecdote and digression as methodological tools. He uses such techniques most successfully in the book's opening essay, "Tonto Meets Chuang Tzu," which combines fiction, essay and autobiography to illustrate and explain Penn's hybrid methods and goals. Yet even when (as in the rambling "Donne Talkin") it is difficult to separate illustrative digression and core substance, or when he takes Pagliaesque cheap shots at such disparate figures as Courtney Love, Richard Ford, Bjork and Amy Tan, Penn refuses to take refuge in jargon or doublespeak, and his attempts to negotiate complicated cultural thickets prove winning. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

A mixed bag of essays by the Nez Perce writer on Native American literature, academic life, and other intellectual topics. Penn (English/Michigan State Univ.; All My Sins Are Relatives, 1995, etc.) does honor to the trickster characters Rabbit, Frog, and Coyote with these broadsides, which range from highly personal memoirs to formal, sometimes stilted literary analyses, which make use of sometimes simultaneous, sometimes conflicting voices; ego, superego, and alter ego all have a chance to speak, and they can make quite a din. At their best, the essays punch current notions of political correctness and academic protocol square in the chops, as Penn counts coup on stuffy deans, rad-lib separatists, guilty white liberals, conservative columnists (especially the hapless George Will), and semiliterate undergrads. Penn wreaks havoc with a smile or a sneer, as when he twits the dominant culture for ennobling all Indians, forgetting that there are degrees of quality and sophistication to differentiate the work of, say, James Welch from, say, Sherman Alexie, and when he repudiates postmodern approaches to literature ("in order to have the ‘post-modern,' one needs a foreshortened sense of time and importance. . . . [T]he price for seeing this way, for aspiring to and even achieving this narrowed depth, is boredom"). At their worst, the essays fall into the expected Indians/good honkies/bad cant ("what do you call a white Christian who pretends to accede to the Ten Commandments and yet lusts after power and closeted fellatio with adolescent girls or who kills directly or indirectly every day"), a scattershot approach that lowers the average. Still, it's an entertainment to watch Penn as heescapes being pinned down, taking up apparently contradictory positions-and even putting in a mild good word for George Armstrong Custer-just for the fun of it all, making friends and foes alike sweat a little. Penn has emerged as an important presence on the Native American literary front, and this collection does a generally good job of showing why that should be so.

“Folklorists interested in these issues will benefit from Penn’s insightful and engagingly written commentaries.”—William M. Clements, Western Folklore

— William M. Clements