Selwyn Hanington Dewdnev is, probably, more widely known as an authority on aboriginal Canadian art and culture than he is as a novelist. But although his reputation may endure longer with such definitive works as Indian Rock Paintings of the Great Lakes (a 1962 collaboration with Kenneth E. Kidd) and The Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway (1975), it is to the novels that students of Canadian culture will have to turn not only to explain the drives behind the Indian research but also to map that stage in Canadian cultural history when, for the first time, those of European descent began to depict the way the native people had of looking at the world. Dewdney is a pivotal character in any study of how the cultural gap between the two cultures began to be bridged. His semi-autobiographical novels are the best key to a man who played so many...