Review of Winning The Dust Bowl. By Carter Revard. Tucson: Univ. Of Arizona Press, 2001. Xvi + 214 pages. 26 illustrations. Notes. Paper bound. ISBN 0-8165-2071 2. $ 17.95 (Also available in hard cover. $ 40.00)

Anyone who grew up in the 40s and 50s Ozarks, anyone interested in the development of contemporary pan-Indian culture, and anyone interested generally in Native American history will find this book an interesting read, as will those interested in contemporary Native American poetry. Revard grew up in the vicinity of Miami, OK, and apparently lived a life that had much in common with my own. In fact, when I was about halfway through the book, I e-mailed an old friend, who is also a Native American, and told him that Revard had written the book we should have written. Of course, that was hyperbole, but this is a book that, page after page, evoked my childhood memories. The author is, as he puts it, from “a mixed-blood family of Indian and Irish and Scotch-Irish folks.” (p. Xiii) He grew up in the Ponca, Miami, Osage country of northeastern Oklahoma, in the kind of rural, almost-but-not-quite poverty that I grew up in, and he played along the creeks and in the woods as I did, and worked odd jobs for odd change as I did, and so on. The book speaks to me on a very personal level.

But, though I find it troubling to label it, this book is more a memoir than a scholarly treatise. It doesn’t offer much to folklorists or historians. The depictions of the social world are not detailed enough for the cultural anthropologist, though it offers some tantalizing hints about Native American life in 1930s and 40s Oklahoma, and even a few glimpses into the intertribal pow-wow movement. It stops at hints, though. I don’t mean that to be a criticism of Revard. He didn’t set out to write that kind of book.

Rather, as he says, he wrote the prose parts of the book to help explain his poetry, “How Coyote came into a sonnet . . . , Why a Birch Canoe spoke Anglo Saxon.” (p. Xiv) Within that frame, he does an excellent job. The poems this book offers are excellent contemporary Native American art. They reflect both Revard’s life experiences as a Native American and his professional experience as a scholar of Medieval literature. It is an interesting combination. As I read it, I kept trying to compare it to Scott Momaday’s work, though I think ultimately that is a comparison that doesn’t work. Though they are contemporaries who take a similar approach to Native American mythology, and who share a few political ideas and use their personal backgrounds is somewhat similar ways, their works are ultimately quite different.

It’s just plain old interesting stuff. On that basis, as well as on the basis that I think Revard qualifies as a Missouri writer since he is on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, I believe anyone interested in Missouri poets will want to check it out. Revard is also a Gourd Dancer and, as he mentions in the book, one of the founders of the Jefferson Barracks Pow-wow, so those interested in intertribal culture will find the book worth their attention. In general, I recommend this book to all our readers.

Jim Vandergriff

Knox College

Galesburg, IL