SOURCE: "The Sioux Sense of Self," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4783, December 2, 1994, p. 22.

[In the review below, Henighan argues that The Grass Dancer fuses traditional storytelling with contemporary fictional forms and demonstrates the continuing vitality of Sioux culture.]

The act of reclaiming a lost or suppressed cultural identity is often carried out with defiance. Histories that have been denigrated or marginalized tend to be reborn in the contentious language of rebellion. Susan Power's first novel, The Grass Dancer, set on a North Dakota reservation, reassembles the history of the Sioux Indians—a term Power seems to prefer to the currently favoured "Native Americans"—with disarming equanimity.

Four weeks before Harley Wind Soldier's birth, his father and brother are killed by a drunken driver. The driver is white, and, though Power makes little of this detail, the accident epitomizes the offhand way in which, throughout this novel, white...