In Born Indian, Kinsella creates the composite impression of a carnivorous, overtly hostile white society: "the daughter, who was named Dora, went off to Edmonton, got swallowed up by the city and it be just the same as if she died."… On one hand, the sheer absurdity of racial oppression becomes almost a liberating force: as one character says, "When we're down as low as we are on the totem pole then the only thing there is to do is laugh."… Balanced against the humour of the stories, however, is the sense of dangerous unpredictability which generally prevents the narratives from lapsing into the seductive category of the formulaic short story. For Kinsella's longtime narrative persona, Silas Ermineskin, any tendency towards artistic complacency is prevented by the constant evidence of his "beneath the underdog" role as an Indian and a creative artist….
As in the case with most single-author story collections, a successive reading of the fourteen stories in Born Indian accentuates certain narrative and structural deficiencies. Most notably, Silas occasionally seems little more than a mouthpiece for his author; at these moments, the charge of Kinsella's presumptuous liberalism seems justified. And yet, it is a tribute to Kinsella's story-telling ability that, overall, the stories benefit from placement in an anthology. In particular, the subject of cultural, rather than economic, poverty emerges as the most important and convincingly stated theme of the collection. The surprising shift, in the final piece of the collection, to magic realism, however, radically affects the significance of this theme. The process of cultural degradation is momentarily reversed as Silas realizes, in his ability to create fictional worlds, a far greater power than that of his antagonists. The story, "Weasels and Ermines," is one of the more impressive pieces of short fiction to appear in Canada in recent years. (pp. 146-47)
Ian B. McLatchie, in a review of "Born Indian" (reprinted by permission of the author), in Canadian Literature, No. 93, Summer, 1982, pp. 146-47.
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