Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown's best-selling history of the American Indian, had a sweep and an authenticity due in large measure to his letting the Indians speak for themselves. [But Dee Brown, as the author of Creek Mary's Blood,] simply does not share their eloquence; his characters talk history to one another in an improbably self-conscious way.

Even more uncomfortable is Brown's imposition of contemporary social obsessions on a different time and culture. Creek Mary is more than a little absurd with her frontier sloganeering in the cause of women's rights….

[Unfortunately Creek Mary's Blood] is afflicted with a simpleminded egalitarianism. Dee Brown would have us believe that beneath the savage skin of every Indian beats the bleeding heart of a liberal environmentalist. Creek Mary's dream of "a mingling of the races … a paradise in which the best of the two cultures would take ascendancy...