Review of \u3ci\u3eMixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place\u3c/i\u3e By Louis Owens

In Mixedblood Messages, novelist and critic Louis Owens combines literary and film criticism with personal memoir and environmental writing. The core subject in this book is writing by authors identified as mixedblood, he explains, and the collection is concerned with two major issues: questions of mixed heritage ... and the way in which we relate to the natural world. In the first of the book\u27s four sections, Owens addresses some difficult questions, perhaps the most challenging of which deals with authenticity: if the Indian must conform to an identity imposed from the outside in order to be seen, what constitutes Indian authorship? The author rewrites his readings of Momaday\u27s House Made of Dawn as modernist achievement and of Cogewea as radical frontier novel, borrowing from while subverting the Western genre. He includes a version of an earlier essay on Vizenor\u27s Bearheart and calls into question sometimes commercially successful novels as depicting Indians who are nonthreatening to a white readership. Beware of presold, commodified Indian fiction, he warns. Owens takes on John Wayne and Kevin Costner in the section on film, arguing that Dances with Wolves-for all its political correctness- is more damning than Wayne\u27s early westerns: When Dunbar has absorbed everything possible from the fragile Lakota band, the Indians become disposable. It is time then to erase and replace the Indian-the ultimate fantasy of the colonizer come true. Wayne\u27s racist and genocidal movie, The Searchers, on the other hand, at least honestly faced the consequences of American history. In recounting his family history (complete with photos), Owens links autobiography and art, demonstrating how his people deserve to be honored as human beings who loved one another while crossing and erasing borders and boundaries ; they remain survivors who embody and occupy the borderland. His personal history, he argues, bears on the subject of mixedblood identity as it is articulated in literature