When I learn that a book is populated by characters called Robert Coyote, Frank Fence-Post, Sadie One-Wound, and Poppy Twelvetrees, my response is usually a groan in anticipation of an attempt to make restitution for or to make me pay for Wounded Knee. Dee Brown's work seemed to call forth lost tribes of white men who discovered roots they never knew they had. The Great Spirit moved within them, and they felt, or at least suspected, a tickle of feathers down their backs. Kinsella's book Dance Me Outside is all the more refreshing because it quite consciously eschews ersatz heroics and any kind of nostalgic, mythopoeic reflections on a technicolour golden age.
This collection of almost a score of stories gives us wry, picaresque vignettes of life on an Albertan Reserve near Wetaskiwin. A teenager, Silas Ermineskin, recounts to us, in a syntax that has stubbornly survived the tinkering of school-teachers, the adventures of his friends and relatives. The book is held together by a sardonically amused response to the mysterious habits of the white men. We learn how confidently Wilbur Yellowknees handles his stable of whores, how skillfully Old Joe Buffalo takes revenge on a white farmer, how relieved Annie Bottle is when the child she gives birth to in a barn dies, how the gargantuan Mad Etta makes magic in trying to solve Rider Stonechild's amorous problems. The stories are low-key, deliberately unspectacular, full of rueful mirth and a carefully accumulated wisdom, as Silas learns the ways of his world. They are as far as can be imagined in mood and intention from the souped-up mythology and hokey gibberish that Carlos Castaneda peddles.
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