The Grass Dancer
Susan Power
1994

Introduction

The Grass Dancer grew out of a series of stories that Susan Power wrote while she was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa. The novel was published in 1994 by Putnam and received immediate critical acclaim, and also won the 1995 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first fiction of that year.

The book tells the story of Harley Wind Soldier, a young Sioux, and several generations of his ancestors. The novel includes non-human as well as human characters; the spirit world is an important part of all the stories, and ghosts and magical powers are part of the characters' everyday lives. Long-dead ancestors, such as lovers Red Dress and Ghost Horse, who lived in the nineteenth century and saw the first impact of European-American culture on their own, are still vital figures in Power's twentieth-century characters' lives.

The book's title refers to a traditional Native-American dance, and there are two kinds of grass dancing. A character in the book explains: "There's the grass dancer who prepares the field for a powwow the old-time way, turning the grass over with his feet to flatten it down. Then there's the spiritual dancer, who wants to learn grass secrets by imitating it, moving his body with the wind."

"I cannot tell you where characters come from," Power told Caroline Moseley in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin. "They come before themes; they come before action. And they sometimes take me places I don't want to go." She told Moseley that the character of Red Dress was supposed to be evil, but when she heard Red Dress's story, she realized Red Dress had reasons for her actions. "She became a heroine, the heart and soul of the book, even though she killed some people who did not deserve to die."

When the book was published, critics praised Power's use of magic, spirits, and myth, and the way she worked them into the characters' everyday lives, showing how they perceived reality and imparting a vividly mystical quality to their often difficult existence. Dani Shapiro wrote in People Weekly that Power's book would "haunt readers—and perhaps [give] them pause to check the sky for ancestors of their own." A Publishers Weekly reviewer hailed Power as "a major talent," and in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Dorris praised her "series of related, beautifully told tales that unravel the intricate stitch of related lives, the far-reaching consequences of chance acts, the lasting legacies of love and jealousy."

Although Power is proud of her dual heritage, she does not want to be called a "Native-American writer." She told Moseley, "I think of myself as an American writer who happens to be Indian."

Author Biography

"My mother tells me the ancestors really wanted me to write Grass Dancer, Susan Power told a contributor to People Weekly. "I'm not a person of real faith—but I try to keep an open mind." The Grass Dancer tells the story of a young Sioux man, his teacher, and his ancestors.

Power told an interviewer from george jr. that both her parents contributed to her storytelling gifts. "My mother has a tremendous gift of imagination," she said, "and was always telling me stories—true tales and those she dreamed up on her own." Power's mother, Susan Dunning Power, was a Native-American activist who grew up on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles North and South Dakota; Power's father, Carleton, was a sales representative for a publishing company. He died when she was eleven, but not before filling her with a love of reading and books by reading to her every night, even after she was old enough to read on her own.

Both of her parents also imbued her with a deep sense of her double heritage. In her childhood home, portraits of her mother's Native-American ancestors and her father's white ancestors were dis-played. Power told Caroline Moseley in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, "My great-great-grandfather, who was governor of New Hampshire during the Civil War, faced my great-great-grandfather Chief Mato Nupa (Two Bears)."

Power attended Chicago prep schools, but also went to Native-American powwows and, encouraged by her mother, worked in Native-American activist groups.

Power was born October 12, 1961, in Chicago, Illinois. She attended Radcliffe College, and later earned a law degree at the Harvard University Law School with the encouragement of her mother, who reminded her that Native Americans could use a few good lawyers on their side. However, she did not go into law after she graduated. Two summers of work in law offices had already taught her that her creative and artistic side would not be satisfied by the practice of law. She found her degree useful, however, because her carefully organized study had taught her to be a disciplined writer, instead of relying solely on inspiration.

For three years after she graduated from Harvard in 1986, she worked as a technical writer and editor, and wrote poetry during her free time. In 1989, she took a leap of faith and applied to the University of Iowa's writing program, where she was accepted. During her three years there, she published numerous short stories in literary journals, and ultimately earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. During her time at Iowa, she told Anne Putnam of The Bucknellian, she "lived, ate, slept, dreamed, breathed fiction."

She began writing The Grass Dancer while at Iowa, as a series of short stories. She told george jr. that although she was writing stories, she knew at the time that they were interconnected and that eventually they would become a novel. One of the first images she saw was that of an old Native-American woman in ceremonial dress dancing on the moon. She said, "Naturally, I wanted to know what she was doing there, and in discovering her story I realized I had written the first chapter."

The Grass Dancer was critically acclaimed, and won the 1995 PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first work of fiction of that year. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Story, Best American Stories of 1993, Ploughshares, and other journals and literary anthologies.

In 1997, Power had the honor of becoming a Hodder Fellow in the Humanities. With the funds provided by the award, she began working on another novel, set in the Native-American community in Chicago, where 25,000 Native Americans now live. Titled Strong Heart Society, it will be published in 2001 by Putnam.

Plot Summary

1981

Pumpkin, a young Indian girl from Chicago, travels to the reservation to dance at a powwow. She is due to attend Stanford University in the fall, and because of this is the pride of the Indian community; she is also the best grass dancer at the powwow. She catches the eye of Harley Wind Soldier, a popular young man who invites her to go with him after the powwow. Several people see them go off together, including Charlene Thunder, a girl who has a crush on him. Harley takes Pumpkin to a deserted old house. It is haunted by the ghost of an old white woman who is always seen doing chores: churning butter, darning socks, sweeping the floor.

Pumpkin is as interested in Harley as he is in her, and the two of them spend the night in the house. Harley tells her of his mother's silence, and how it has left him empty and lonely. "Nothing's here," he says, touching his chest. "My brother died a few weeks before I was born…. He took everything with him." Pumpkin tells him she has plenty of soul, and she will give him hers. She rubs her soul into him, and says, "You won't be alone now. I'm a part of you, like it or not."

The next morning, Harley sees the old ghost leaning over Pumpkin and crying, but he doesn't know why until the final day of the powwow, when Pumpkin is declared the winner of the dance competition. She moves on to the next powwow, but on the way there, she and her friends drive into a sudden storm, skid off a ledge, and die in a fiery crash. Later, Charlene Thunder, whose grandmother is a witch, wonders if her grandmother made the crash happen so that Charlene, not Pumpkin, might get to be with Harley in the end.

1977

White teacher Jeannette McVay tries to get her students to tell traditional stories. While each tells a stale story, which they think Jeannette wants to hear, they remember another, more vibrant tale that tells the truth about their lives, but which they are afraid to reveal to her or the other students. The students like her, but are wary of her because of her romanticized attitude toward them as "noble savages" and inherently spiritual people, just because they're Indian.

When Harley's turn to tell a story comes, he doesn't have any because his mother has never told him any. He makes up a story, and when he goes home, his grandfather Herod Small War asks about it and tells him a story about Ghost Horse, Harley's great-great-grandfather's brother. Ghost Horse was a heyo'ka, told by the spirits to do everything backward or differently from everyone else: walk backward, cry at happy occasions, laugh at funerals, run cheerfully into battle. "That one was fearless and took many risks on the battlefield," Herod says. "Your father was that way too." Harley, who knows little about his father, is fascinated and for a while he decides that he is a heyo'ka too. In basketball games, he shoots to miss instead of score, and wears a jacket on hot days.

1976

Herod Small War's friend Archie Iron Necklace has had a dream about the "medicine hole," a mysterious portal into the spirit world that is located in a nearby valley. The two men fast, hold a purifying sweat lodge ritual, and gather the elders together, and they hold a Yuwipi ceremony in which Herod sees Archie's dream, which replicates a time long past, when Indian warriors escaped from pursuing whites by entering the hole. Herod, Archie, Harley, and Frank Pipe set out to find it, but don't succeed.

However, the trip reminds Herod that when he was a young man, he had an affair with Clara Miller, the white woman who lived in the old wooden house and who is now a ghost there. He was married at the time, but Alberta did not sleep with him often, and Clara Miller was interested in him and showed it.

A sudden storm arises, and the four men end up at Clara's old house. They spend the night there, and the ghost comes to Herod. "As a Yuwipi man, I had heard spirit voices and encountered dead ancestors, but a white ghost was something different altogether," he says. He asks her where the medicine hole is, and she doesn't answer, but later in a dream, the spirits tell him, "You are the medicine hole."

1969

Lydia Wind Soldier's mother, Margaret Many Wounds, is dying. Her two daughters, Lydia and Evie, come home to tend to her. They cook old Sioux recipes, make her comfortable, and listen as Margaret tells her whole life story, including the fact that their father was not a rodeo cowboy, but a Japanese-American doctor working in a prisoner of war camp in Bismarck in 1942. Margaret was working at the camp as a nurse, and she soon became pregnant. She left without telling the doctor, had her daughters, and told them that their father was a Canadian Indian who had married and then left her. Her daughters are shocked, since they had thought they were full-blood Indians all this time.

As Margaret is dying, the television shows the astronauts walking on the moon for the first time. She is not impressed: she can go there, as a spirit. As the chapter ends, she is dancing on the moon, a traditional Sioux dance. "Look at me," she says to Harley, her grandson, who is five. "Look at the magic. There is still magic in the world."

1964

Crystal Thunder, daughter of Charlene, is a high school girl who falls in love with Martin Lundstrom, a white boy who is an artist. The school and town are scandalized when Crystal and Martin start going out together, as is Mercury, who violently opposes their marriage. Crystal is pregnant, and when the baby, Charlene, is born, Mercury takes her, working spells to keep her. Crystal says, "I do not know my daughter's name, or the shape of her face. In dreams she stands with her back to me, her hair in tight braids, stiff like black ropes." All she has of her daughter is a beaded amulet shaped like a turtle, in which Mercury put a piece of her daughter's umbilical cord; this amulet is supposed to distract evil spirits from the actual child, so they will not be able to find her and hurt her.

1961

Young white schoolteacher Jeannette McVay comes to Mercury Thunder because she has heard that Mercury knows traditional magic, and Jeannette is fascinated with traditional ways. Mercury tells Jeannette an old story of Red Dress and Ghost Horse, lovers from the nineteenth century. They never came together, but are still ghosts, searching for each other across the plains.

Partly to impress Jeannette and partly for her own reasons, Mercury decides to work love magic on Calvin Wind Soldier, who is married to Lydia. However, the magic doesn't work, because Calvin wears a belt the Yuwipi man, Herod Small War, gave him to protect him against such things. It's made of snakeskin, and Mercury can't get past its magic. In revenge, although she knows she can't have Calvin, she makes him have an affair with Evelyn, Lydia's sister, which results in a child, Duane, who will later be killed along with Calvin in a car wreck. Jeannette, who previously saw Mercury's magic as a sort of game and did not fully believe in it, now believes, and she's frightened by Mercury's power. She tries to leave the reservation, but can't—Mercury has placed a spell on her, and she will never be able to leave.

1954

A year after Lydia Wind Soldier finishes high school, she's working as a cook. On the way home in a snowstorm, she almost hits Calvin Wind Soldier. She takes him home, warms him and feeds him, and falls in love with him, and they get married two months later. Ghosts attend the wedding: Red Dress and others. Red Dress is looking for her lost lover, Ghost Horse, and she is interested in Calvin because he is the last direct descendant of him.

Harley stops drinking and becomes responsible, joining the tribal police, but he is haunted by his past experience as a soldier in the Korean War. He tells Lydia that during his time there, he had a vision of Red Dress, who warned him about her descendant, Mercury Thunder. "She warned me that her niece was confused, and determined to confound everyone else. She didn't want to see me trapped by that one's scheming," he tells Lydia. When he came back from Korea, Herod Small War made him a snakeskin belt to protect him from Mercury. Snakes are sacred to Red Dress and hold her energy, and Mercury can't fight them: her power is not as strong as her ancestor's. In revenge, Mercury makes Calvin have an affair with Lydia's sister Evelyn, resulting in Duane's birth. One day, Lydia notices that Duane resembles Mercury, and, spooked, tells Calvin to get him out of the house. "We'll go for a drive," he says, and on that drive, both he and Duane are killed. From that point on, she stops speaking. "They said a drunk driver was responsible for the tragedy, but I knew it was my anger and the terrible power of my voice," she says.

1935

In the midst of the Depression and Dust Bowl, Mercury Thunder is making her niece Dina a traditional Sioux dress and moccasins. Her young son Chaske is ill, and she has been a widow for two months; her husband died of tuberculosis, and now Chaske has it too. Mercury wonders if she can use her power to heal him, but realizes that she can't. "I knew we did not have the healing touch," she says sadly.

That night, a powwow is being held, but Dina's dress isn't finished yet, and Chaske needs a doctor. He coughs up blood and dies, but Dina's mother Joyce, who comes to get the dress, is unsympathetic. The doctor didn't come when her child was sick, so she is angry that Mercury thinks the doctor should come to Chaske. Angered, Mercury gives Joyce every dress in her closet, including her wedding dress. Then she sets to work beading Dina's moccasins with red beads.

She goes to Dina's house, dresses her, and tells her to dance. Dina can't stop dancing. "She danced herself into another world," Mercury says. Dina is found later, frozen in the snow, far from home. Her ghost, and Chaske's, remain close by, visiting Mercury, telling her that magic, once let loose, takes on a life of its own.

1864

Red Dress, a young Sioux woman, is apparently converted to Christianity, but this is only on the surface. She sees the crosses she wears as symbols of the Sioux Morning Star, and although she takes the Christian name Esther, she knows that she will never be the convert the priest wants. "I am Red Dress, beloved of snakes," she says. When she was still a baby, snakes visited her and climbed on her, and a rattlesnake was her baby rattle. They are her helpers and spirit guides.

At a service held by the priest, a stranger appears, laughing at the service. He is Ghost Horse, a heyo'ka, or sacred clown, a position he was forced to take because he dreamed of the thunderbirds. Red Dress senses that he is lonely, set apart from ordinary life and relationships by his spiritual calling.

Red Dress's father has seen that trade with whites brings trouble and disease, so he has decided only to trade with other tribes. Her family uses traditional tools and technology, not the new metal and cloth brought by the whites. Like Ghost Horse, she has a dream that alters her life. Because of the dream, she must travel to Fort Laramie, a white stronghold.

She and her brother travel to the fort, where she gets a job by convincing the whites that she is Christian. She becomes secretary and assistant to Reverend Pyke, the post chaplain. Her brother lives nearby and hunts with local Indians. She knows the spirits have sent her to the fort for a reason, and she waits to find out what it is.

Several of the men in the cast fall in love with Red Dress, which offends her: she knows that they don't love her, they just want to use her. One night she sets out to meet her brother, and the men watch her leave. One follows her, and she enchants him and tells him what to do, using two smooth stones that are filled with power. Obedient, under her spell, he calmly hangs himself. The second man, under the stones' spell, also hangs himself. Now that two men have died, Pyke chops down the tree they hung from, saying it's evil, but of course this doesn't stop the deaths. The third man hangs himself at the fort, which is now full of fear.

Red Dress is in her brother's lodge when Reverend Pyke appears. She has not thought to put a spell on him, and he brings out a revolver and kills her. In spirit, she follows him and sees that the Sioux ancestor-spirits have punished him by making him shoot himself and die in a snowbank.

After her death, Ghost Horse goes to her father and tells him that although he and Red Dress never spoke about it, he knew she loved him, and, he says, "I request the honor of marrying your daughter's spirit, mourning her as only a devoted husband would grieve."

Ghost Horse later dies in battle, and his spirit doesn't wait to be united with Red Dress's. She is angry at this abandonment, but there's nothing she can do. Unlike him, she has never moved on to the next world, but remains in the world of the living, the Sioux people. She watches over them, only hoping that someday she will find joy.

1981

Charlene Thunder is in pain, wanting to go out with Harley, but he's still grieving over Pumpkin, who has died in the car crash. Desperate, she works some of her grandmother's love magic and ends up with six different boys in the old ruined house where the white ghost lives. After the boys leave, she sees the old white woman's ghost, and the ghost of Red Dress, who kindly advises her not to use medicine for evil, and to give it up since she doesn't understand it. Charlene agrees.

Shamed, she goes to the school guidance counselor, Jeannette McVay, and tells her that she has to change her homeroom to get away from the boys she slept with. In her new homeroom, someone leaves a present on her desk: a newspaper article about an Indian woman in Chicago who has beaded the image of Da Vinci's Last Supper, using a pattern drawn by her white husband. Charlene realizes these are her parents: they are not dead, as Mercury has always told her.

She goes to Chicago to be reunited with them, and on the way there sees Pumpkin's spirit. All this time, she has felt guilty about Pumpkin's death, thinking that Pumpkin died because of her, but Pumpkin tells her, "It wasn't your fault. These things happen. There was nothing you could do."

1982

Jeannette McVay and her husband have a baby, who looks more like a full-blood Sioux than her Sioux father, and who shows no trace of Jean-nette's white heritage. Herod Small War cautions Jeannette that despite this, she must tell the girl about both sides of her lineage. "Otherwise she'll stand off-balance and walk funny and talk out of one side of her mouth. Tell her two stories."

Frank Pipe has decided to become assistant to Herod, and learn the Yuwipi ways. He is receptive to the spirit world, but knows this is a great sacrifice and responsibility; Herod believes he can do it.

Harley is still dealing with Pumpkin's death, still startled that someone as strong as she, as full of dreams and goals, could suddenly be taken out of the world. And unlike Pumpkin, he doesn't see himself as even being remotely talented. Why should he live, when people like Pumpkin die? What he doesn't recognize is that he is gifted with a rich imagination and vision. He thinks everyone can see the spirits he sees, but they can't. Powers writes, "Harley was nearly trampled by ghosts but wholly unaware of how remarkable his vision was."

His mother, Lydia Wind Soldier, has been working on a traditional costume, a replica of a dress her great-grandmother once wore, which is now in a museum in Chicago. She plans to wear it at a powwow and show Harley, without using words, the story of his heritage. At the powwow, however, Harley gets drunk, disgusting Lydia, who slaps him.

Frank Pipe takes him home to Herod Small War's house. Herod, Frank, Archie Iron Necklace, and another man are there. They hold a sweat lodge to purify him, and he fasts for three days and asks the spirits for a vision to guide his life, alone in a hole in the ground. In his vision, spirits come and show him the long-lost medicine hole. He crawls through and meets his grandmother Margaret Many Wounds. He remembers her death—an event he's forgotten until now. "I saw you dancing on the moon," he tells her. He meets his brother Duane, and his father, who embraces him and tells him he is doing well. "We have to be careful what we say, because you're supposed to find your own answers," his father tells him. "But you are my son."

Harley also meets Ghost Horse, a beautiful and wise man who teaches him that true warriors are gentle and loving people who would give their hearts to their people. Red Dress is there too, and she tells him, "I want you to be happy, because I know what it is to be sad."

Through this vision, he finds his own strength and his own voice; he's come through a dark time in his life and is moving past it to a new life as a man. As the vision ends, he hears a strange voice singing: his own. As Powers writes, "What he heard was the music of his own voice, rising above the rest."

Characters

Evelyn

The twin sister of Lydia, Evelyn left the reservation as a young woman and moved to Minneapolis with her husband, Philbert. "You look back, you never get off the res," she tells him. Thirty years old, he is a retired rodeo bull rider, and she married him not because she loved him but because her mother told her that her father, whom she has never met, was a bull rider. Although Evie and Lydia are twins, they do not look alike: Evie is aware that Lydia is much more beautiful.

Ghost Horse

Ghost Horse is a heyo'ka, or sacred clown. Because he has dreamed of the thunderbirds, he must take on this role. Red Dress says of him, "His behavior was perverse: he wept at social dances, laughed at solemn events, shivered in the hot summer sun, and sweltered in frigid temperatures. He rushed into battle ahead of other warriors, treating war as play, and he always said the opposite of what he meant. I sensed he was lonely."

Martin Lundstrom

A white boy, a misfit in his high school, he walks with a limp and has been secretly making a living as an artist, drawing covers for a seed catalog, since he was fifteen. He and Crystal Thunder fall in love and get married. He is the father of Charlene Thunder.

Jeannette McVay

A white woman who has romantic notions of Indians as noble, spiritual people, she comes to the reservation to study them and ends up teaching in the reservation school. Because of one of Mercury Thunder's spells, she is soon unable ever to leave the reservation. Her students are bewildered by her exalted view of them, and although they like her, they think she's pitiful because they know she is often beaten up by her no-good Indian boyfriend. She doesn't seem to know that Native Americans live in the twentieth century like everyone else, and is continually telling them to do things in the old way of their people. She dyes her hair black in an attempt to look Indian, but even with her deep tan, it's evident that she's still white.

Frank Pipe

A friend of Harley Wind Soldier and grandson of Herod Small War, Frank is a beautiful young man, with hair so long that the ends of his sleek black braids brush his knees. He wears two silver hoops in each ear, and twists his hair into a bun when he plays basketball or thinks there will be a fight. He is small-boned, with delicate features, and dislikes this. He has two scars, one across his left eyebrow and one under his right eye, and is proud of them because they mar his otherwise feminine appearance. He does not dance in costume at powwows, because he wants to be free to leave at any time without dealing with the heavy and cumbersome beadwork, feathers, and bells.

Pumpkin

Pumpkin is a half-Sioux, half-Irish young woman from Chicago, who travels to the reservation to take part in a powwow. She received her nickname from her Irish father, who named her for her red hair. She is intellectually curious and loves to read, which sets her apart from her peers; of her graduating class in high school, she was the only girl not pregnant. Because of her reading, she feels different and no longer fits into Indian culture. She is due to attend Stanford University in the fall, and is the pride of the Indian community. She is nervous about college, knowing that she will have to leave the Indian community to go there; on her college application, she wrote, "I sometimes feel I am risking my soul by leaving the Indian community." She plans to spend the summer on the powwow circuit, dancing at as many as possible before heading back to Chicago. She is a "grass dancer," a style of dancing that is usually performed only by men, and she is the best dancer on the field, embodying the spirit of the grass as it bends and sways in the wind. Harley Wind Soldier notices her, and falls in love.

Reverend Pyke

Post Chaplain at Fort Laramie, Reverend Pyke is a stern, religious man. He is impressed by Red Dress's apparent Christianity and makes her his personal interpreter and secretary. He is an orphan and thinks of himself as "God's child…. No mother, no father, no strangling ties to come between me and the Lord." He sees nature as a filthy place, ruled by Satan, kills any insect he finds, and believes in the biblical notion that humans are meant to rule over all of nature.

Red Dress

Red Dress is a powerful and magical woman. Her descendant, the witch Mercury Thunder, dreamed of her as a child, and says, "I had heard her insistent voice, crackling with energy, murmuring promises of a power passed through the bloodlines from one woman to the next. I had seen her kneeling beside a fire, feeding it with objects stolen from her victims: buttons, letters, twists of hair. She sang her spells, replacing the words of an ancient honor song with those of her own choosing." Mercury also tells her niece, "She spelled one too many, and he killed her."

Herod Small War

Frank Pipe's grandfather, he is a Yuwipi, or dream interpreter. At the powwow in the opening chapter, he gives the invocation, or prayer, to the Great Spirit, so that the powwow can begin. He is a practical man, and believes in short, effective prayers. He does have power, but he is realistic about his humanity. "I could clear my face of any expression, retreat into my thoughts, and the people around me would wait quietly, respectfully, convinced I was experiencing a vision. Sometimes their assumption was correct, but nine times out of ten I was just spacing out."

Anna Thunder

See Mercury Thunder

Charlene Thunder

Charlene is the granddaughter of the witch Mercury Thunder. She is in love with Harley Wind Soldier. Other people are wary of her because of her grandmother's power, so she doesn't have many friends and is often lonely. She is reluctant to practice magic like her grandmother, because she would rather earn things on her own, despite the fact that prejudice against her resulting from her grandmother's behavior often thwarts her. Although she likes dancing at powwows, she no longer competes in them, because her grandmother makes sure that she wins, thus taking the joy away from competition. She identifies with the character of Darrin from the television show Bewitched. Just as Darrin was constantly trying to get his witch wife to stop practicing magic, she tries to get her grandmother to stop, but without success. She is in love with Harley Wind Soldier and knows she could get him by practicing love magic like her grandmother's, but she wants him to be hers of his own free will.

Charlene lives with her grandmother, who tells her that her parents ran off to a large city and became drunks, then died. However, Charlene has never seen any hard evidence of their deaths, and Mercury won't tell her where they're buried. Mercury does not believe Charlene should attend school, but thinks Charlene should simply learn what Mercury wants her to know.

Crystal Thunder

Crystal Thunder is Charlene's mother, daughter of Mercury Thunder. She marries a young white man, an artist named Martin Lundstrom, and leaves the reservation with him. She disapproves of her mother's bad magic, because it makes her an outcast in the school, and she is embarrassed by her mother's steady stream of bewitched boyfriends.

Mercury Thunder

Mercury Thunder is the grandmother of Charlene Thunder and descendant of Red Dress. She practices "bad medicine," and is known as a witch. Power writes, "Mercury believed she held her life firmly in place beneath her tongue, and she didn't spit it out here and there, in bits and pieces, diffusing its power." She was originally named Anna, but changed her name to Mercury after Charlene came home from school and explained the table of the elements to her: "An element is a substance that can't be split into smaller pieces." "That's my story," Mercury said, "I'm all of a piece." Mercury uses her magic to get her way in all things, most notably to snare men; although she is about seventy years old, she has a steady stream of dazed young lovers. "All of Mercury's lovers appeared addled, exploited by the magic she stirred with her spoons," Power writes. As a young girl, Mercury dreamed of her powerful ancestor, Red Dress, who was also a witch, indicating that she would carry on Red Dress's magic.

Calvin Wind Soldier

Husband of Lydia and father of Harley, Calvin becomes a tribal policeman. His wife Lydia stops speaking when he and their other son Duane are killed in a car crash, before Harley is born.

Harley Wind Soldier

He is the son of Lydia Wind Soldier and Calvin Wind Soldier. Lydia has not spoken since Harley's father and brother were killed in a car crash, before Harley was born. Because of her silence, he has always felt lonely and empty; as a child, he drew this empty space inside him as a black spot on his torso, to the dismay of his teachers. As he grew older, Powers writes, "The empty box didn't fill itself in the way he'd hoped. It stretched to accommodate his new size. It grew as his bones lengthened and his heart swelled." Harley dances at the powwow, wearing a costume and makeup that his father wore; because his father died before he was born, his mother showed him the patterns, without saying a word.

Lydia Wind Soldier

Lydia Wind Soldier is the mother of Harley. She has not spoken for seventeen years, since her husband and son were killed in a car crash. Her other son, Harley, has never heard her speak. The only time anyone hears her voice is at powwows, where she sings. Her sister Evie says, "People said she had the voice of a ghost. When she sang, women would carry their tape recorders to the drum to record her, and men would soften their voices to let Lydia's rise, above the dancers' heads, above the smoke of cigarettes and burning sage, some thought beyond the atmosphere to that dark place where the air is thin and Wanagi Tacanku, the Spirit Road, begins."

Themes

Magical Elements

"People in that community believe in magic, spirits and ghosts," Power told Dani Shapiro in People Weekly, and when ghosts, magic, and spirits appear in the book, Power and her characters treat them matter-of-factly; there is no obvious seam between the vividly sensory description of an abandoned old house and the old white woman's ghost who inhabits it. The ghost woman is usually seen doing everyday chores such as beating rugs, sweeping floors, and churning butter, a fact that only reinforces the everyday nature of the spirit realm. In other examples, Herod Ghost Horse leads a group out on horses to look for the "medicine hole," a mythical opening to another world. The description of the search is full of concrete physical details—the bottled water and sandwiches they bring, the Star Trek t-shirts the boys wear, the wild-flowers and the heat of the sun. The medicine hole is a magical place, but Herod and the others believe that they can reach it. They don't, but Herod encounters ghosts and spirit warriors.

In another incident, Margaret Many Wounds is dying. At the same time, the television shows the astronauts walking on the moon. Margaret is unimpressed: she's been there before, in spirit. When she dies, she goes there again, and dances traditional dances there, near the astronauts' metal flag, before she moves on "toward the council fire, five steps beyond the edge of the universe."

This acceptance of the presence of spirits, magic, ghosts, and the spiritual realm, and Power's seamless treatment of them, reinforces their place in the Sioux world, where they are a normal part of everyday reality. Ghosts do not live in some other realm: they are often here, with humans. What people do in the physical world can affect the spirit world, and vice versa. Unlike the European-American world, where many people no longer believe in spirits, Power's characters don't just believe: they know the spirits are there.

Topics for Further Study

• In the book, Herod Small War tells Frank Pipe and Harley Wind Soldier that Christianity came to the Sioux when a steamboat came up the Missouri River, bringing the first piano to the area. "That sound made them believe about heaven better than any priest's words," he says. "After that piano and all the church music hit this tribe, there were a lot of converts." Investigate early contacts between Sioux and whites. Is this description historically accurate?
• Find out more about Sioux spiritual beliefs, specifically the hanbdec'eya, or vision quest, which Harley undergoes at the end of the book. What purifications do young people have to go through before they are allowed to seek a vision for their lives?
• Investigate powwow customs, costumes, and dances. What are some of the different dances, how did they develop, and what do they represent?
• Herod Small War is a holy man, but he is modest about his abilities, noting that when he appears deep in thought to others, he may simply be not paying attention. Compare his behavior and his beliefs, as shown in the book, to those of Reverend Pyke and Father La Frambois.
• Margaret's grandmother had a beautiful, intricately beaded dress that was taken to the Field Museum of Anthropology in Chicago after her death, and Charlene mentions that many of the customers for her grandmother's beadwork are white collectors of Native-American art. Do you think these artifacts belong in museums and collections, or should they remain in the hands of Native Americans? Why or why not?

Living in a Larger World

"It's hard to explain how you identify, as a part of who you are is raised with a certain world view as well as an Indian world view," Susan Power told Anne Putnam in the Bucknellian. She acknowl-edged the necessity of dealing with that "certain world view," telling Putnam, "We're living in a larger world, not just an Indian world."

Power wrote in Reinventing the Enemy's Language,

As the only Indian in every school I attended through twelfth grade, I knew I was different. But I didn't see it as a liability. I thought of it as an advantage. I felt I had a secret, another world I could retreat to when the dominant culture, for all its material success and political power, felt empty and meaningless. In the Indian world there were living stories: ghosts, mischievous spirits, bad medicine and good medicine, people with real problems, problems of survival. The Indian world always seemed immediate and startlingly real, a place where things happened.

In the book, this view of the Indian world as more vivid and important holds true, and so does the idea that dealing with the white world is difficult: the whites in The Grass Dancer all have limited world views, fueled mostly by books: anthropology texts, the Bible. Charlene is likewise immersed in her high school studies, but she uses them mainly as an escape, a screen against her grandmother Mercury, who works magic and mocks Charlene's tests and grades, telling her that Mercury's lessons and tests are more important than those she'll endure in school. Herod Small War's teachings, and his guidance in the vision quest Harley undergoes at the end of the book, are more helpful to Harley than any amount of school. Pumpkin, who is the most educated of all the Indian characters, says that she is afraid that if she goes to school and leaves the Indian community, she will lose her soul, and the extensive reading she's done has already left her feeling alienated, cut off from her people.

Style

Flowing Backward in Time

A notable feature of the novel is that the story is told in reverse; each successive chapter goes backward in time, not forward as in most other novels. This unusual technique gives the reader a sense of the deep connections between past and present generations in Sioux belief and culture, and events in the novel reinforce this sense of the past being vividly alive. Long-dead ancestors are still active in the present life of the characters, influencing them as much or more than other living people. Red Dress and Ghost Horse interact with most of the characters in the book, either directly or through the actions of their descendants. When Harley, in despair, seeks a vision, he meets his dead grandmother, brother, father, and both Red Dress and Ghost Horse, and is blessed and guided by all of them.

Lawrence Thornton commented on this technique in the New York Times Book Review, noting,

The reader responds to the narrative as if it were a series of photographs ranging from the crisp images of a Nikon to grainy daguerreotypes spotted with age. But Ms. Power's method has thematic as well as technical brio, for it also replicates the tribal sense of time and connectedness, reifying a world where ancestors are continually present in everyday life as spirits, memories and dreams.

Michael Dorris agreed, writing in the Los Angeles Times that, "moving a century backward from the early 1980s and reclosing the loop in the present," the book reveals the deep interconnections between the past and the present, and the human links of emotion, memory, and event that bind the characters together.

The obvious connections between different generations and ages in history also lead the reader to wonder how the people of today will influence their descendants. Just as Red Dress and Ghost Horse are still vivid presences to the current-day characters, the reader senses that Pumpkin and Harley Wind Soldier will appear in the dreams and actions of Sioux people in the distant future. This gives a sense of the continuing vitality of Native-American life, and in the Women's Review of Books, Linda Niemann wrote, "Power chooses to reveal indigenous history not as a record but rather as a continuing process whose outcome is still uncertain."

The Oral Tradition of Storytelling

For Native-American people traditionally, and to this day, oral storytelling is an important way of passing on values, history, and teaching to others. Powers, who heard her mother's storytelling and attended powwows where other women told hair-raising ghost stories, was raised with this tradition, which was also nourished by her father, who read stories out loud to her even after she had learned to read. The Grass Dancer is written in flowing, musical prose that sounds very much like that which a traditional storyteller would use, and this style is not accidental. Power told an interviewer for george jr., "writing is such an oral experience for me. I have to read my work aloud over and over at both the writing and editing stages. I need to hear the language, hear the story, in order to make it live."

Historical Context

The Grass Dancer spans over a hundred years of Sioux history on the Standing Rock reservation, which straddles North and South Dakota, but it begins and ends in the present day, in 1981 and 1982, showing the continuing vitality of Native-American culture, which has become more apparent to mainstream society since the civil rights protests and Indian activism movements that began in the 1960s.

Power was touched by these movements directly, and her activist awareness of these present-day causes informs the book. She was brought up with her mother's commitment to activism on behalf of Indian people, and as a child went with her mother to sit-ins and civil rights protests. She moved back and forth from the white world of her Chicago prep schools to the Indian world of powwows and activism on the weekends. At powwows, she and her mother shared hotel rooms with older women, who told ghost stories and gave her an awareness of the richness of Sioux culture. Her encounters with her two cultures, mainstream and Sioux, inform the book and are relevant to many Native-American people today.

The book opens as Pumpkin, a young Sioux girl from Chicago, travels back to the reservation where her family has lived for generations so that she can dance in a powwow. She plans to cover the powwow circuit in the northern states for the rest of the summer, before going to school at Stanford in the fall. Because of her acceptance at the college, she is the pride of her family and community, and her sudden death in a car accident is a tragedy.

In this short chapter, Power tells the reader a great many things about current Indian life. One is that many Native Americans now live in the city; in one interview, Power estimated that there were about 25,000 Native Americans in Chicago alone. Not everyone lives on the reservation, and not everyone is a "full-blood"; Pumpkin is half Irish and half Menominee, but she is treated as Indian by everyone in the book. Another piece of information is that there are many powwows held across the country, that the dancing at them is competitive, and that it is common for young people to travel the circuit, winning prizes and money. In addition, the circuit is intertribal: Pumpkin, a Menominee girl, wins a powwow held by the Sioux.

In this chapter, Power also lets readers know that, sadly, alcohol and car crashes involving Indians are common. "So many Indians smashed them selves on the roads it was old news, but most accidents involved alcohol." In the book, six Sioux people die in car crashes: Pumpkin and her three friends, and Calvin Wind Horse and his son Duane. This is an aspect of Native-American life that is upsetting to many; Power wrote in Reinventing the Enemy's Language that in high school, when she wrote a story about the funeral of Big Tom, a Winnebago friend who drank himself to death, her high school English teacher told Power's mother she was worried about her, and that she thought Power should try to be more like the other students, something that was impossible for Power, since it would mean turning her back on half of her heritage.

In the closing chapter of the book, there's another powwow, this one held on the grounds of a prison. Just as in the earlier chapter, Power lets the reader know that Sioux people are just as "modern" as anyone else and experience all the same temptations of the modern world—at this last powwow, Harley gets drunk, and Frank Pipe notes that his cousin Aljoe used to be a thief before converting to Christianity, which appeals to him because of its organization and apparent lack of confusion. At the same time, the Sioux have their own rich traditions and ceremonies, such as the powwow, the Yuwipi ceremonies, and the vision quest that, in the end, leads Harley to begin, at long last, to heal from his emotional wounds.

Critical Overview

When The Grass Dancer came out, praise for Power's work was almost unanimously favorable. Power won the 1995 PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first fiction of that year, and received glowing reviews. All the reviewers were fascinated by the window into Sioux culture that the book provided, praising Power's depiction of her Native-American heritage as much as they praised her vivid, mesmerizing prose style. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer wrote, "a major talent debuts with this beguiling novel," and praised Power's use of historical events such as the Apollo moon landing and the great drought on the plains during the nineteenth century, along with supernatural and spiritual events, "reinforcing the seamless connection" between these two realms. Calling her "a consummate storyteller," the reviewer also praised her use of suspense, humor, irony, and drama, and wrote, "Seduced by her humane vision and its convincing depiction, one absorbs the traditions and lore of the Sioux community with a sense of wonder."

In the New York Times Book Review, Lawrence Thornton remarked that Power "writes with an inventiveness that sets her writing apart from much recent American fiction…. Written with grace and humility, The Grass Dancer offers a healing vision that goes to the core of our humanity." Stephen Henighan wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that "this scrupulously wrought novel, deftly fusing traditional story-telling with the forms of contemporary fiction, provides a sparkling demonstration of that [Sioux] culture's continued vitality."

Caroline Moseley wrote in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin that the novel was "a mesmerizing tale," and that "the numinous power of the spirit world illumines the novel; the narrative flows forward and backward in time, and dead forbears—such as the 19th-century lovers Ghost Horse and Red Dress—are vital presences in daily life."

Dani Shapiro in People Weekly praised Power's musical, magical prose style, and in The Bucknellian, Anne Putnam praised the insights embodied in Power's work, which add a deeper dimension to the novel than exists in most current work.

Robert Allen Warrior, an Osage writer, was one of the few critics whose assessment of the book was not unequivocally favorable. He praised the author's "strong debut," but tempered this by remarking, "The novel exudes youthfulness, both in terms of tremendous energy and some telling unevenness, but this is a writer to watch for in the future." Warrior did not specify the nature of the "un-evenness," but summed up by writing that "The Grass Dancer is a sometimes brilliantly told story that is well worth reading." He also drew hope from the fact that Power is clearly influenced by the excellent Native-American writers who have preceded her, most notably Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Joy Harjo, and wrote that, clearly, "new writers are learning from those who have already trod the difficult path of realizing artistic vision and are … honoring that earlier work."

Criticism

Kelly Winters

Winters is a freelance writer and editor and has written for a wide variety of academic and educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses themes of cultural conflict and a spiritual world view in The Grass Dancer.

Susan Power wrote in Reinventing the Enemy's Language that she began writing when she was five, and that a large part of her impulse to write came from the fact that, by writing, she could "sort through the conflicting values and belief systems I was taught by being raised with one foot in the Indian world and the other in mainstream society." As the only Native American in her school classes until high school, she was keenly aware of white attitudes toward her and toward Native Americans in general.

Throughout her novel The Grass Dancer, Sioux characters encounter whites and white culture. Power's vivid characterization, dialogue, and storytelling style subtly, accurately, and often humorously portray various ways that whites view the Sioux, all of them based on misconceptions.

When Jeannette McVay comes to the reservation in the early 1960s, she is a starry-eyed anthropology student who wants to "go out there and meet humanity" instead of reading about people's customs in dusty books. Originally, she is sent to Herod Small War when she asks people about tribal religion and medicine people, but her feminist sensibilities are offended when he tells her she cannot participate in his sweat lodge because she is female, and can't attend his Yuwipi ceremony because she is menstruating. "What's the use of studying with someone like that, who excludes me, who doesn't recognize me as a full-functioning peer?," she complains to Mercury. Of course, Jeannette is not a peer of Herod Small War at all, since she doesn't share his world view or spiritual experience, but she doesn't realize that.

Like many non-Native Americans, Jeannette has preconceived notions about who Native Americans are, and about who they should be. For example, she is shocked and amused by the fact that Crystal, who is then in high school, listens to the popular singer Little Richard. "I have to get this down," she says, making notes. "A Sioux girl listening to Little Richard." It's as if, to her, Native Americans are museum pieces, with no interaction with current culture. This notion is verified by the fact that she tells Mercury Thunder that she had thought Sioux culture was dead, but that she is pleasantly surprised to find "all this activity and vitality and living mythology. I feel like I've stumbled on a secret." It's also symbolized by the beaded dress that belonged to Margaret's grandmother, which is now on display in the Field Museum in Chicago. Margaret would have loved to take that dress out, dance in it, and pass it on to future generations, but this use does not fit white notions of what is appropriate: the dress has become a dead museum piece, not a living part of culture, so now no one can use it. On display in the museum, it verifies the white visitors' impression that Sioux culture is a thing of the past.

Of course, the vibrancy of Sioux life is not a secret or a new discovery to those living it; Jeannette doesn't know it, but her attitude is much like that of the European explorers who "discovered" America, as if it was not previously "discovered" and settled by the Native Americans already living there.

In addition, Sioux culture is only fascinating to her when it fits into her comfortable notions of what it should be: she is disgusted with Herod Small War's "prejudice" against women, and she can't see Mercury as the Sioux witch she is, but must label her in terms of the Greek mythology that is familiar to her from her East Coast schooling. Mercury becomes "Aphrodite, Goddess of Desire," and this supposed familiarity and accessibility makes her all the more interesting: "You're not in some book or reclining on Mount Olympus. You're right here in the kitchen, serving me peaches!"

When Jeannette finally realizes that Mercury is not what Jeannette thought she was, that she's not some character from a book but a very powerful, selfish, and frightening woman, she flees—too late, since Mercury has already created a spell to trap her on the reservation. Like it or not, her wish to "go out there and meet humanity" has come true, and for the rest of her life, she'll be on the reservation, learning about Sioux culture.

Jeannette's views of Native Americans as a dead or dying cultural group, and simultaneously as a nobler, more spiritual people than whites, seems to be only a continuation of the nineteenth-century attitudes depicted in later chapters of The Grass Dancer. For example, Red Dress is aware that in the view of the Catholic missionary priest, Father La Frambois, "We were already a degraded people, whom he intended to elevate, single-handedly, into the radiant realm of civilization."

Reverend Pyke shares this view, extending his vision of degradation and disorder to the entire natural world, which the Native Americans are part of: "Pyke said there was nothing natural about the natural world: it was an evil disorder requiring the cleansing hand of God." He crushes a spider's egg sac and licks his fingers clean, saying, "I've swallowed the spit of Satan." He is a deep believer in the biblical notion that humans, specifically white Europeans, were created to own and master the earth and everything on it: "Replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." As Power makes clear, Native Americans don't share this belief, preferring to live in harmony with nature and its spiritual forces rather than "subdue" it. As Vine Deloria, Jr., the activist writer mentioned by the character Frank Pipe, wrote in his book God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, "We are a part of nature, not a transcendent species with no responsibility to the natural world."

Just as Jeannette is amazed and amused to see a Sioux girl listening to the popular singer Little Richard, the whites at Fort Laramie are taken aback by Red Dress's familiarity with English and her apparent conversion to Christianity. The white widow Fanny Brindle patronizingly tells Red Dress, "Do you know what they're saying about you? That you're a princess…. Yes, a Sioux princess with the light of the world in your heart, and a love of Jesus Christ that is so pure, your soul is white as cream. I think it's because of your remarkable English…. They can't conceive of it as anything but a miracle, and it is, you know. It is."

What Do I Read Next?

• Susan Power's Strong Heart Society (2001), tells the stories of three Native Americans—a Sioux from South Dakota, a Vietnam veteran, and a powwow princess—in a braid of tales set in the city of Chicago.
• In Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native American Women's Writings of North America (1998), editors Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird present a collection of writings by Native-American women.
• Native-American women share their lives in the autobiographical stories presented in American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives (1987), edited by Gretchen M. Bataille.
• Jane B. Katz, editor, presents more true stories of Native-American women in Messengers of the Wind: Native American Women Tell Their Life Stories (1996).
• Paula Gunn Allen's The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1992), first published in 1986, documents the continuing vitality of the Native-American tradition and of women's leadership within that tradition.
• In Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing (Sun Tracks, Vol. 35, 1998), editor Simon J. Ortiz presents nine Native-American writers who discuss the storytelling traditions of their tribes and the influence writing in English has had on their work.
• Linda Hogan's Woman Who Watches over the World: A Native Memoir (2001), tells the powerful story of Hogan's own family and the way in which tribal history informs her own past.

Another response to Native-American people in the book is the attempt to freeze them at some mythic time in the past, as "noble savages." This begins early, when Red Dress travels to Squaw Town and finds that the people there, unlike her own band, have accepted white trade goods. Red Dress's band is more conservative; her father, who noticed that trade with whites brought disease and dependence on them, decreed that his band would continue making bone arrowheads instead of using metal, cook with pots made of buffalo stomach lining instead of iron ones, and wear traditional buckskin clothes decorated with paint and quills, instead of beaded cloth. When Red Dress and her brother go to Squaw Town, the people there, who are now poor and unkempt, think they are the ghosts of their ancestors, and revere them because they follow the old ways.

Jeannette eventually also falls into this position. She reads to the students from a complete set of the works of the white writer James Fenimore Cooper, whose descriptions of Native Americans exasperate and bore the students—as she reads, they roll their eyes at each other, but she doesn't notice. Finally, Frank Pipe approaches her and asks, "Instead of this stuff, could we read some of that Vine Deloria?"

Jeannette has never heard of Deloria, who is a Native-American writer famous for writing activist texts such as God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, and Beyond the Trail of Broken Treaties. His work is much more relevant to the students, and not just because, as Frank tells her, he's their cousin. After Jeannette reads his work and that of other Native-American writers, she begins viewing her students as "royalty in exile"—an echo of the view, a hundred years earlier, of Red Dress as a "princess."

In any time period, all of the characters, both white and Sioux, are challenged by fate and by the contrast between white and native cultures. They are also constantly aware of the presence of the spirit world, which Power describes as vividly and concretely as she describes the ordinary physical world. The spirit world is not easily categorized as "good," or "evil"; like nature, it exists within and outside everyone, and includes forces that may or may not be controlled, but must be reckoned with. In every chapter, ghosts, spirits, and mysterious events occur, so much a part of ordinary life that there is no obvious dividing line between them. To Power's characters, this is reality: ghosts move among the living; a man who killed dogs is stalked and killed by the protective coyote spirit; an elder dances on the moon; a witch can make any man come to her; men can be forced to hang themselves; there is a medicine hole that leads to another reality; and a young man who fasts and prays for vision can find it and be led to a healing understanding of himself and his past.

Red Dress describes the way she is "hitched to the living and their concerns," and says, "I can bear witness to only a single moment of loss at a time. Still, hope flutters in my heart, a delicate pulse. I straddle the world and pray to Wakan Tanka that somewhere ahead of me he has planted an instant of joy." Throughout the book, characters have these moments of understanding and joy as they come to terms with history and their own past, and as they discover secrets about their heritage. Harley's brother Duane is not his full brother, but the result of an affair between his father and his mother's sister. Lydia and Evelyn are not full-blooded Native Americans, but half-Japanese. Charlene's parents are not dead, they are alive, and her father is a white artist who designs his wife's beadwork. Crystal Thunder's father was an abusive man who disappeared. Harley meets his father and brother, filling his lifelong craving for connection and validation. Through all these events, Power shows the healing power of love, truth, and reconciliation with the past.

Source: Kelly Winters, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

Stephen Henighan

In the following review, Henighan asserts that The Grass Dancer "reassembles the history of the Sioux Indians … with disarming equanimity."

The act of reclaiming a lost or suppressed cultural identity is often carried out with defiance. Histories that have been denigrated or marginalized tend to be reborn in the contentious language of rebellion. Susan Power's first novel, The Grass Dancer, set on a North Dakota reservation, reassembles the history of the Sioux Indians—a term Power seems to prefer to the currently favoured "Native Americans" with disarming equanimity.

Four weeks before Harley Wind Soldier's birth, his father and brother are killed by a drunken driver. The driver is white, and, though Power makes little of this detail, the accident epitomizes the offhand way in which, throughout this novel, white society wipes out the Indian past more through carelessness than malice. Harley's mother, traumatized by the accident, becomes mute; Harley grows up feeling that he has a "black, empty hole squeezed in his chest between heart and lungs". When the novel opens, in 1981, he is an introverted seventeen-year-old. At a summer pow-wow, he meets Pumpkin, a red-haired Menominee dancer of Irish ancestry. "You shouldn't ever be too arrogant or too loud about who you are", she tells Harley, in response to his anger at having been denied knowledge of his past. Before their relationship can release Harley from his stunned resentment, a second road accident claims Pumpkin's life. Her successful projection of her heritage into the hybrid reality of the present serves as a model for the stories that follow.

Later chapters of the novel hop back and forth between 1961 and the early 1980s; one tale reaches back as far as the 1930s, and there is a full-blown historical re-creation of a tragic encounter between Sioux and missionaries in 1864. Each of these narratives contributes, in a subtle way, to the reader's understanding of the opening accident. Nearly all of the narrators are women. Power is anything but a racial purist; her heroines have their children by wayward Swedes and errant Japanese doctors, yet their offspring's claims to Sioux history are never in doubt. The narrating voices are tough and matter-of-fact, even when their vision elides the barrier separating life from death; spirits abound in this novel, yet their activities are depicted as unremarkable. The mingling of living and dead, like that of Indians and whites, is crucial to Power's integrated account of her community. If her various narrators all speak in similar language, at once frank and lyrical, this appears to be a strategy rather than a stylistic lapse: the complementary insights and images evoked by their respective stories forge the shared history which, in the novel's final pages, succeeds in restoring Harley Wind Soldier's sense of self.

Comparisons of The Grass Dancer to the work of Louise Erdrich are unavoidable. Despite the shared North Dakota settings, Indian themes and layering of voices, however, Power has succeeded in creating a universe resonant with its own obsessions. Her fiction is more introspective and less plot-driven than that of Erdrich. This novel concludes with the white woman whose meddling is indirectly responsible for the initial accident marrying and having a child with a Sioux man. Yet one of the reservation's elders discourages her from bringing up her daughter solely in the Sioux tradition: "She needs to know both sides … tell her two stories." Acceptance, here, grows out of a deep-seated indifference. The lure of white society fails to impress Power's Sioux characters; their culture rolls on, adapting prevailing modes to express a Sioux vision. This scrupulously wrought novel, deftly fusing traditional story-telling with the forms of contemporary fiction, provides a sparkling demonstration of that culture's continued vitality.

Source: Stephen Henighan, "The Sioux Sense of Self," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4783, December 2, 1994, p. 22.

Christopher McIllroy,

In the following review, McIllroy calls The Grass Dancer a "weaving of spells, passions, spirituality and history," and says Power exhibits an "understanding that allows compassion for white and Indian."

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Source: Christopher McIllroy, "Devil with a Red Dress On," in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 24, No. 30, July 24, 1994, pp. 3, 9.

Sources

Dorris, Michael, Review, in Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1994, p. E7.

Interview in george jr., September 1996, online at http://www.georgejr.com/september/qapower.html (May 31, 2000).

Henighan, Stephen, Review, in Times Literary Supplement, December 2, 1994, p. 22.

Lynn, David H., "The Energizing, Liberating World of Multicultural Fiction: Your Culture," in Writer's Digest, November 1997, p. 36.

Moseley, Caroline, "Grass Dancer Evokes Past, Present," in Princeton Daily Bulletin, March 10, 1997.

Niemann, Linda, Review, in Women's Review of Books, January 1995, p. 23.

Power, Susan, Introduction to "Beaded Soles," in Reinventing the Enemy's Language, edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, W. W. Norton, 1997.

Review, in Publishers Weekly, June 6, 1994, p. 56.

Putnam, Anne, "From Heart of Chicago Fiction of Native America Arrives with Great Spirit," in The Bucknellian, online at http://coral.bucknell.edu/publications/bucknellian/sp97/2-20-97/lifest/1660.html (May 31, 2000).

Shapiro, Dani, "Spirit in the Sky: Talking with Susan Power," in People Weekly, August 8, 1994, p. 21.

Thornton, Lawrence, Review, in New York Times Book Review, August 21, 1994, p. 7.

Warrior, Robert Allen, Review, online at the Stanford website, http://www.stanford.edu/∼warrior/grassdance.html (May 31, 2000).

For Further Study

Contreras, Dan, and Diane Morris Bernstein, We Dance Because We Can: People of the Powwow, Longstreet, 1996.

Vivid photographs and profiles of powwow participants, with profiles of tribal leaders, craftspersons, and others.

Deloria, Vine, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, Fulcrum, 1994.

Deloria discusses Native-American spirituality.

Marra, Ben, and Richard Hill, Powwow: Images along the Red Road, Harry N. Abrams, 1996.

Photographs and interviews of powwow dancers from many different tribes.