BOOK REVIEW : Lush Vignettes Tread in Indian Territory : THE SNAKE GAME <i> by Wayne Johnson</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $18.95, 262 pages

Wayne Johnson has set his book in the woods and lakes of northern Minnesota, where Ojibway and Chippewa Indians struggle to retain their existence and identity in a world darkened by the world of the whites.

The 19 stories in “The Snake Game” are a portrait of violent encroachment. It is as if the passenger pigeon were telling us the history of its own extinction.

The stories, most of them brief, harsh vignettes, touch upon two families over the course of 30 years from the 1950s to the 1980s. One, an extended kinship group, centers around Osada, an old Ojibway craftsman and follower of the old ways. It includes Red Deer, his son; Martha, his wife, and Joe, father of two other children by Martha: Bear and Eli.

In contrast to these blurred and shifting relationships--which conceal an abiding, organic loyalty--is the tight, white family of Dr. Neal Sorensen; Mary, his wife, and their son Martin. The tightness is an opposite illusion; the coarsely macho father, his pinched wife and the sensitive and rebellious son are cold galaxies apart.

The vignettes, lush and bitten-off at the same time, and stylistically in considerable debt to Upper Michigan Hemingway, select incidents in the lives of the families that make the author’s points about the beleaguering of the Indians and the arrogant domination of the whites. The Indians are portrayed with a full sense of their mystery, their values, and the loss that their loss represents. The whites are written with as much nuance as a weather report about a killer drought.

The first story tells of the deadly encounter that scattered the Osada clan. The state had ordered the Ojibway children into school, thus restricting their families’ freely wandering life. The children do badly; the authorities threaten to take them away. Osada, Joe and friends go to take them home; there is a confrontation that turns violent, and one of Joe’s brothers is killed.

Osada leaves his family and goes north to live in a lake cabin and work occasionally as a guide to a fishing camp. Red Deer, Bear and Eli will eventually join him and find work there. Many of the stories are set in and around the lake, and shift back and forth between the Indians and the white families who go up for fishing holidays.

The Sorensens are one of the families. From the beginning, Martin, regarded by his father and his father’s friends as something of a sissy, is drawn to the Indians. He will, as time goes by, become the author’s voice. Several of the stories, in fact, tell of his acts of rebellion against the values of his father and friends, and of solidarity with those of the Indians.

As a boy on a picnic run by one of the fathers of the white families at the lake, Martin sneaks hot dogs to Bear, who is a year or two older. Years later, he gets a job as a camp guide, submits to a harsh initiation by Bear, his boss, and gradually gains his acceptance. When the camp owner dumps a load of trash in the marsh near Osada’s cabin, provoking the old Indian to fury--it is one more encroachment--Martin douses the marsh with gasoline and sets it on fire.

He becomes a trusted friend of Bear and Eli. After the Vietnam War--Martin flees to Canada in another protest against the conservative values of his community--he comes back to the lake to find that Bear has been killed. Ostensibly, it was in a hunting accident; in fact, the “accident” was arranged by one of the whites who had held a long-standing resentment of Bear’s uppity ways.

In one of the best of the stories, Martin wins back Eli’s trust. After his brother’s death, Eli has chosen to judge all whites the same. The two walk to a promontory 70 feet above the lake. Eli jeers that Martin is afraid to go near the edge. In a foolhardy gesture of anger and heroics--a legendary, nonwhite gesture--Martin grasps Eli by the waist and hurls them both off the edge.

Johnson tends to use melodramatic and occasionally sentimental touches. His plotting can be excessively contrived to bring out the nature of the Indians’ pain and the white man’s oppressiveness.

Martin’s leap, though, is authentic drama. Here, and in some of the stronger stories, the author matches an extraordinary lost gesture with the extraordinary lost reality of the Indians. Martin cannot save his Indian friend or his friend’s two brothers--one killed, one in an aimless depression. But he can embrace him and fall with him.

It is despairing, but it makes its point. Johnson’s whites are object lessons in shortsighted arrogance. Our lakes are filling up with trash. We may not entirely believe all the maneuverings of these stories, but we do believe in the Indians, and in what we are all losing with their loss.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews “Bad Desire” by Gary Devon (Random House).