Wild Indians and Other Creatures

Wild Indians & Other Creatures is a stunning book that will startle readers who harbor romantic notions of contemporary Native American life. In these interrelated stories, most animals speak and most humans drink. A number of these irrelevant stories of Indian life are reworkings of traditional Trickster talescomplete with horny humanesque coyotes, randy ravens, and mystical bears - which transcend that form and become something new and arresting. Set on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, these unsettling, often politically incorrect stories almost function as a novel. Many are laugh-out-loud funny, while others are stark and sad, yet grimly human and powerful. Many more stories and lives are interwoven in these sometimes bawdy but always moving and memorable tales. In Wild Indians & Other Creatures, Adrian C. Louis, one of the leading American Indian poets, presents an unblinking look at the social ills of reservation life while at the same time speaking of hope and survival for native peoples.

Publishers Weekly

Modern Native American life is the topic as Louis (Skins), a Paiute Indian and noted poet, joins a tradition of Native humor with a hard edge that runs from Alexander Posey straight to Sherman Alexie. In these 25 pieces, traditional tricksters like Coyote and Raven (from the Northwest Coast) mingle and marry easily with humans. These tricksters possess strong sexual appetites: in "Why Coyote Knotted His Whanger," Coyote ties the eponymous appendage into a knot because it has gotten him into trouble once too often. Characters are often abusive: in "Raven in the Eye of the Storm," the title character constantly shrieks at his wife, whom he considers to have been rendered incompetent by Christianity. Alcohol, prostitution and self-hatred abound. Obviously, these are not the romantic Indians of screen and popular fiction. Timmy John Pretty Bull schemes to leave his life and seduce a new woman by appealing to the power of dreams; Raven prepares gourmet food out of a Pierre Franey cookbook. Even in this world of human derelicts, however, there is hope and warmth. In "Auntie Angie's Cheyenne Affair," an aged woman, looking for her missing granddaughter, finds comfort and companionship with someone as wounded as herself. But the coziness of that story stands out as Louis's voice runs acidly ribald and raw through the rest of this bitterly entertaining collection. (Apr.)

Adrian C. Louis was born and raised in Nevada and is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. From 1984 until 1997, he taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Since 1999 he has been a professor in the Southwest Minnesota State University system. He has written ten books of poems and two works of fiction. His recent collection, Logorrhea, was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.