Books like Seven Arrows

Seven Arrowsis weird and difficult and interesting and you should read it and I don’t say that lightly. It comes with a load of caveats. Seven Arrows is a book about Sundance, the relgion/philosophy of the native peoples of the Great Plains of North America, told by an (alleged) Cheyenne medicine man in the form of allegorical stories-within-stories. It twigs all of my instincts honed by writing in the field of Asian Studies, which remain skeptical of any book written in the early seventies that present a non-western culture as a better alternative to our own (since festishizing outside cultures for our own purposes is a variation of orientalism). Indeed, Storm has been called a “plastic shaman,” a term about which you can read a lengthy description on Wikipedia. It also twigs my Western Scholar skepticism of obscure narrative and language, a skepticism which suggests that such language exists to provide the form of profundity without the substance. And even though I ultimately loved the book, I remain skeptical of the idealized version of Sundance it paints. I have trouble imagining proud Native Americans riding around the plains hardcore psycho-analyzing each other at the drop of a hat. (A cursory google search of the author reveals some severe discrepancies is the author’s claim to be Cheyenne, and some serious objections on the part of the Cheyenne Nation to his claims to represent them in anyway, and to the idea that Seven Arrows in any way actually represents their culture). That said, I found Seven Arrows to be genuinely moving. The first two thirds or so was a real slog, but somewhere in the process of reading, all of the allegorical meanings of the stories start to be saturated in the reader’s mind, and you start to see what the author is getting at. By the end, nature of the allegory is enough to provoke an emotional response. You could read this book several times to figure out what the hell is going on, but the point is to experience it. It has some really brilliant small details. I particularly enjoyed the reactions to Christianity, which consistently baffles the Plains protagonists. My favorite stroke of brilliance involved a Jesuit priest speaking to one of the narrators in broken Cheyenne, rendered in English in the grotesque patois of the 50s movie Indian. “Geesis have great medicine. You join him get heap big power.” The pictures were also pretty hardcore, with a great seventies emphasis on black-and-white sad Native American faces in profile. There were also some great color depictions of medicine shields, which in the novel are personal symbolic identifiers used to psychoanalyze passersby at a distance. It’s also thematically complex, moving away from the “white men bad, native Americans good” narrative that you would expect from this kind of novel. Ultimately, this is a work of real genius that is dramatically undermined by the illegitimacy of its author. Though I enjoyed it, Storm’s blatant misrepresentation of his own authority and subsequent appropriation of Native American themes for his own purposes, presenting a distorted image of Plains Nations belief systems in the process is unacceptable. So while I recommend reading this book for the experience, make sure you acknowledge that it tells you more about what hippie charlatans in the seventies wanted Sundance to be like than what Sundance is actually like.