While love is not easy anywhere for anyone, the Native American heritage of Jack and Dot Mauser in Tales of Burning Love is a complicating factor. Jack imagines that the only reason to acknowledge his Native American heritage is if he is defeated in life, and so, like many African-Americans at the turn of the century, he spends much of the novel "passing," sometimes as a white contractor or a white singer. For Jack to achieve an integration that a lifetime of hopeless temporary fixes never provided, he needs to acknowledge his Indian mother, the foundation of his character and a clue to loving others, and even the rich land that he carelessly develops. To some extent Jack's uneasiness about his heritage helps precipitate the failure of his bar "marriage" to June Morrissey, who dies in a snowstorm after their drunken encounter, a willed death and...