[The stories in] Born Indian are cleverly written in a free-wheeling style…. This is Kinsella's third collection of funnysad tales about white-Indian confrontations, most of them narrated by Silas Ermineskin, a young Cree from a central Alberta reserve. It's cowboys and Indians in reverse, with the stupid, bigoted whites outfoxed, outjoked and outsexed by crafty salt-of-the-earth natives. Unquestionably, white racism deserves all this and more, but the crude articulation of stereotyped emotion glossed over with aw-shucks moralizing … adds up to submissive politics and punching-bag art.

Kinsella's difficulties with perspective are unfortunately abetted by his greatest strengths. To a remarkable degree, he invests his characters with credible speech patterns, behavior and ideas. But because the narrator Silas has no distance on his own stories, the result is a puppet show, realistic and detailed yet devoid of insight….

The format of Born Indian is questionable too. Most of the stories...