FICTION

DEAD VOICES by Gerald Vizenor (University of Oklahoma Press: $17.95; 144 pp.). A dirty, toothless, malodorous American Indian woman lives in an apartment near Lake Merritt in Oakland. People who wait at a nearby bus stop call her “the crazy bear.” This isn’t just an insult; it’s a remnant of the intuitive animal knowledge that white city-dwellers have almost lost. For the woman, playing the “wanaki game” with cards and mirrors, can indeed transform herself into a bear--or into a stone, a flea, a squirrel, a praying mantis, a crow, a beaver or that staple of Indian folklore, a “trickster.”

Then along comes a young academic--much like author Gerald Vizenor, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. He persuades the woman, Bagese, to tell him her animal stories, which are linked to Indian creation myths. She forbids him to write them down, saying “wordies”--white people and their imitators--have already done enough to destroy an oral tradition and reduce knowledge to mere science. But he writes them down anyway.

The result is “Dead Voices,” subtitled “Natural Agonies in the New World.” It’s an uncompromisingly original book. For the non-Indian reader, accepting the idea of transformation is the easy part. More difficult is linking the story cycle, as Vizenor intends, with the idea that Indians should struggle to affirm themselves as “crossbloods” in the cities rather than cling to a sterile purity on reservations. The human-animal synthesis is a metaphor for how this struggle should be waged, but Vizenor’s animals are more real than his people, and the battlefield--in this case, quotidian Oakland--is foggy.