Bookshelf
by Paddy Macdonald
Viet Cong at Wounded Knee: The Trail of a Blackfeet
Activist
By Woody Kipp ’91, M.F.A. ’97
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 151 pp., $24.95
Woody Kipp recounts his life as a Blackfeet tribe member, high
school basketball player, Marine Corps Vietnam veteran,
hard-drinking cowboy, consciousness-raising UM student, and
participant in the American Indian Movement in his
close-to-the-bone autobiography. Revisiting a trail littered with
womanizing, alcoholism, and jail time—that led him from the
Blackfeet Reservation of his birth to a terrible moment of
reckoning on the plains of South Dakota—Kipp tells a story
of native values and practices uneasily crossed with teenage
angst and quintessentially American temptations and excesses.
Striking passages throughout the book offer glimpses into
American Indian culture, from a gripping account of an
unsuccessful attempt to break a horse to an insightful
description of native singing: “The tribal songs connect
existentially; they are patterns of energy that allow immersion
into the energies around us, telling us who we are.”
Strung together like clay beads on a string are sad, sad,
stories, like the one in which two brothers-in-law engage in a
barroom brawl—over “something about
horses”—resulting in the death of one of the men. The
other man, “Truman,” was initially charged with
manslaughter, a charge that was later dropped. Truman’s
story has a happier ending than most. “But we can
change,” writes Kipp. “That fight with his
brother-in-law was Truman’s last bout with alcohol. . . .
After the trauma of the barroom ordeal dissipated, Truman began
hosting youth rodeos. The theme behind the youth rodeos was that
one doesn’t have to be a drinking, fighting, whoring,
whiskey-drinking individual to be a cowboy.”
The book sometimes lacks detail that would help the reader
more fully understand Kipp’s motivations and choices, but
his straightforward and revealing style make clear Kipp’s
feelings about the Native American experience—Indians
“surviving but not surviving well because of the disruption
of their traditional lifeways.”
Amphibians and Reptiles of Montana
By J. Kerwin Werner, Bryce A. Maxell, M.S. ’98, Paul
Hendricks ’75, M.A. ’87, and Dennis L. Flath, M.S.
’70
Missoula: Mountain Press Publishing, 2004, 262 pp., $20.00
Every creepy-crawler from the pygmy short-horned lizard to the
rough-skinned newt is covered in this comprehensive guide to
Montana’s herpetology. With brilliantly colored
photographs, a glossary, and morphological drawings, the book
displays fascinating and detailed information on our native,
cold-blooded vertebrates.
It is rife with oddball factoids. Take the Western skink. A
smooth-scaled, striped lizard about seven inches from head to
tail, the skink forages in coniferous forests, especially
communities of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. Its
predators—rattlesnakes, hawks, and coyotes, among
others—are often foiled in their attempts to capture the
skink. When grasped, the nether end of the lizard’s
blue-tinged tail breaks off and continues to wiggle, distracting
the predator, allowing the skink to—well—slink
away.
Woodhouse’s toad, which resembles a fistful of pebbly
mud and resides in the Missouri and Yellowstone river valleys,
makes a loud, high-pitched, nasal “waaaaaaaah”
similar to a baby’s cry. Tiger salamanders, which can be
found in basements, window wells, and prairie dog burrows, as
well as glacial potholes, stock reservoirs, and ponds, fend off
predators by way of noxious secretions.
The book features dramatic descriptions of phenomena we
haven’t much thought about since grammar school, like the
metamorphosis of a tadpole into a frog: development of front and
hind legs, absorption of the tail, and conversion of its entire
system from the intestine to the jaw. Or the process of
overwintering, when some amphibians and reptiles lower body
temperatures and metabolic rates to the point of inactivity.
Photographs range from close-ups of the ventral side of a spiny
softshell to a gophersnake caught mid-meal as it devours a mouse.
This field guide is a terrific tool for layperson and
professional alike to identify the state’s frogs, toads,
salamanders, turtles, lizards, and snakes. Readers will be
surprised to learn of the magnificent variety of Montana’s
amphibians and reptiles and their relationship to our
ecosystems.
The Best of Montana’s Fiction
Edited by William Kittredge and Allen Morris Jones ’93
Kittredge headed UM’s Creative Writing Program Guilford,
CT: The Lyons Press, 2004, 342 pp., $22.95
The newest collection of Montana-centered stories features
violence, greed, perfidity, lies, guns, and bleak, punishing
weather. As Richard Ford warns in the opening line of
“Great Falls,” “This is not a happy
story.”
“Days of Heaven” by Rick Bass is narrated by a
ranch caretaker confronting a variety of predators, from the
development-minded real estate agent, with his “narrow,
close-together eyes . . . like raisins set in dough” to the
agent’s client, an alcoholic New Yorker who “did
something on the stock exchange” to the owls, moose, and
ravens that inhabit the ranch.
The narrator radiates disgust for the deviant behavior and
profiteering intentions he sees in the other two men, but is not
immune to corruption himself: “ . . . how narrow the
boundary is between invisibility and collusion. If you
don’t stop it, if you don’t step up and
single-handedly change things, then aren’t you just as
guilty?”
Truth—and, more ominously, lies—rear up as
thematic material in several stories.
In “Real Indians,” by Debra Magpie Earling, two
siblings hitch rides up and down the reservation, playing on the
prejudice and ignorance of the people who pick them up:
“And we’d be what they wanted us to be, we’d be
the lost tribe, we’d be the Mexican cherry pickers,
we’d be the bored sons home for vacation.”
In Kevin Canty’s “Junk,” Jess Parker
willingly accepts his ex-wife, Dorothy’s, lies. By the
story’s end, Parker has become so entangled in the mess
Dorothy brought back to town with her that he can’t find a
way out—can’t tell his girlfriend, Maggie, what she
needs to know: “ . . . I couldn’t tell her about
Dorothy, there in the cafeteria—it was too bright, too
normal, too much in the light of day. What I really needed was
three in the morning, a couple of drinks.”
Throughout the collection curls a pervasive sense of
loneliness, a feeling expressed by Claire Davis in
“Grounded”: “Marriage and friendship, sons and
daughters, were just a respite between you and the knowledge that
every choice you make is yours alone.”
Apocalypse Then
By Rick DeMarinis ’61, M.A. ’67
New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004, 268 pp., $22.95
Quick dark humor and a certain incendiary zanines characterize
Rick DeMarinis’s latest collection of stories.
DeMarinis’s characters are irreverent: “I learned
to distance myself from anyone who had a ‘bright’
idea,” says the narrator in “Handyman.”
“Incompetence was often rewarded in the aerospace
business,” Moss remarks in “Structure.”
“They come and they go,” says Nick’s date, Lana
Faye, in “A Forty-Nine Pound Man,”
“Everyone’s a temp.” These people aren’t
particularly comfortable in the world: “I was almost fifty
and still feeling my way in the dark,” says one man.
“I’m always aware of the Worst Case Scenario,”
says another.
Most have jobs, and they’re all of a certain ilk:
evaluating satellite photographs for the Forest Service; teaching
“techie-wannabees” at Western States Institute of
Mining and Metallurgy; or stuck “out in the boonies,
driving from one Minuteman silo to the next collecting Unplanned
Event Records.”
The characters’ names and physical attributes have a
hilarious specificity: Winona Mufkey; Hans Ludens; Ursula Klock;
and Billie Blood. One fellow has a nose “as thick and red
as a peeled yam.” Another man, seeing his own face in the
mirror, remarks that he looks like “Jean Paul Sartre on a
bad day.” An airline passenger sports “a big bushy
beard you could hide a machine gun in.”
There’s something amiss with nearly everyone. The
narrator of “Bête Noir” sleepwalks, awakening
at his drafting table, or falling down the stairs, or at the
wheel of his car. Moss, the major subject of the book’s
first section, has a benign brain tumor “big as a golf
ball.” The married couple in “Handyman” conduct
disconnected, elliptical conversations such as this: “If I
said, ‘Louise, why are the horses out in the yard instead
of the corral,’ she would answer, ‘Doug
Mayberry’s axle is somewhere between Pocatello and
Butte.’”
What the inhabitants of DeMarinis’s world may have in
common is that they’re all poised somewhere between fear
and fecklessness; conformity and abandon. As Nick admits to
himself in “A Forty-Nine-Pound Man,” “He led a
careful and structured existence because he was aware of how
delicate the thread was that held things together.” Each
character, in his own way, is steeped in the knowledge that
“everyone’s a temp.”
BookBriefs
Soldier-Artist of the Great Reconnaissance:
John Tidball and the 35th Parallel Pacific Railroad
Survey
By Eugene C. Tidball ’53, J.D. ’55
Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2004, 226 pp.,
$39.95
This book examines the memoirs of Lt. John Tidball, who joined
Ameil W. Whipple’s survey team, which set out from Fort
Smith, Arkansas, in search for a route for a transcontinental
railroad.
Lucky Stars and Gold Bars:
A World War II Odyssey
By Karen Sladek ’78
Seattle: Penlyric Press, 2003, 522 pp., $32.95
Letters written by Lt. Lyle Sladek from five continents to his
family in South Dakota serve as a coming-of-age tale as well as a
chronicle of one of our country’s most epic eras.
Charles M. Russell:
The Storyteller’s Art
By Raphael James Cristy, M.A. ’92
Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 2004, 347 pp.,
$28.35
Well known for his art, Charles Russell was also an accomplished
author. Cristy shows how Russell amused his peers with stories
that delivered sharp observations of Euro-American suppression of
Indians and humorous treatment of wilderness and range
issues.
Staying Home:
Reflections on Food, Farming, and Place
Edited by Kristi Johnson, M.S. ’04
Missoula: Garden City Harvest, 2004,159 pp., $14.95
This collection celebrates connection to the land and community.
Authors touch on the politics of food, loss and renewal, and
growing seasons—while showcasing the development of
Missoula’s Rattlesnake Community Farm.
Movie Stars & Rattlesnakes
The Heyday of Montana Live Television
By Norma Ashby ’57
Helena: Farcountry Press, 2004, 160 pp., $19.95
Norma Beatty Ashby, one of Montana’s pioneer live
television personalities, recalls her twenty-six years at the
helm of Today in Montana.
Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Edited by William C. Prentiss and Ian Kuijt
Prentiss is a UM associate professor of anthropology
Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004, 219 pp.,
$19.95
Contributors to this book seek to understand prehistoric social
organization, subsistence practices, and lifeways of those who
lived on the the Plateau region of the Pacific Northwest.
Discuss this article in Montanan
Chat now!
