The Man to Send Rain Clouds

Book excerpt: Fourteen stories about the strength and passion of today’s American Indian—including six from the acclaimed Leslie Marmon Silko. Anthropologists have long delighted us with the wise and colorful folktales they transcribed from their Indian informants. The stories in this collection are another matter altogether: these are white-educated Indians attempting to bear witness through a non-Indian genre, the short story. Over a two-year period, Kenneth Rosen traveled from town to town, pueblo to pueblo, to uncover the stories contained in this volume. All reveal, to varying degrees and in various ways, the preoccupations of contemporary American Indians. Not surprisingly, many of the stories are infused with the bitterness of a people and a culture long repressed. Several deal with violence and the effort to escape from the pervasive, and so often destructive, white influence and system. In most, the enduring strength of the Indian past is very much in evidence, evoked as a kind of counterpoint to the repression and aimlessness that have marked, and still mark today, the lives of so many American Indians.