Dee Brown is known primarily for his best-selling tragic history of American Indian policy, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."… Although the prose was somewhat plain, the strength and conviction of Dee Brown's view of this history brought the book alive. "Creek Mary's Blood" covers much the same material but in the novel Mr. Brown attempts to deal with a point of view other than his own…. In attempting … to cover such great spans of history and geography and provide an Indian perspective on these events, Mr. Brown overreaches his abilities as a novelist.
For one thing, Mr. Brown's prose style, though it served him well enough in "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," becomes inadequate, far too sketchy, for a novel that attempts to evoke what Indian people felt for the land that was being taken away from them and for a way of life that was being destroyed. Places and characters are outlined as if for a script treatment of a television mini-series, not a novel. At the beginning of the book, Mr. Brown's white journalist narrator tells us how startling the Montana landscape is and describes it as "an immense space of frosted yellow grass and blue sky." We wait for further description or visual details, but they never come. Yet this is the land for which Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and thousands of their people fought and died. When the narrative shifts to the Indian characters, still no attention is paid to the powerful kinship between the Indian tribes and the land for which they fought.
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