In the following excerpt, Owens discusses the significance of identity in the lives of three generations of Native American women.

At the end of Michael Dorris's novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), one of the book's three narrators and protagonists, Aunt Ida, is braiding her hair as a priest watches: "As a man with cut hair, he did not identify the rhythm of three strands, the whispers of coming and going, of twisting and tying and blending, of catching and of letting go, of braiding." The metaphor of braiding-tying and blending-illuminates the substance of this novel, for it is, like [Louise] Erdrich's works, a tale of intertwined lives caught up in one another the way distinct narrative threads are woven to make a single story. Like Erdrich, Dorris-part Modoc and for many years a professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth College-constructs his novel out of...