American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Look, I'm a man. I exist. Take notice of my existence! -Lame Deer In the eighteen years since the publication of John (Fire) Lame Deer's autobiography, Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, very few critics of Indian literature have responded to the old Lakota's plea. Of these critics, only Kenneth Lincoln, who discusses Lame Deer at length in an essay on Indian humor, has used the book for anything more than a passing reference or brief excerpt. This prolonged silence says a great deal about the conventional perception of the text. Lame Deer is a widely available and highly entertaining book; it has not been ignored because scholars do not know it exists or because it is incapable of producing a response. Most likely, it has received short shrift in the study of Indian literature because it has been considered insufficiently "literary" or insufficiently "Indian." Perhaps because academics have been unsure if Lame Deer is a serious artistic work or because its genre has been confused by the participation of a white coauthor, Richard Erdoes, the book has been treated as if it were the scholarly equivalent of a junkyard car-good for spare parts, but incapable of running on its own. The best way of responding to the dismissal implicit in such a minimal critical history is to offer a reading that demonstrates that the book does run on its own, that both formally and thematically it is a serious work of literary autobiography. Formally, however chaotic it might seem to readers raised on Western literature, Lame Deer has a meaningful structure, based on Lakota understandings of numerology and discourse. Thematically, the book consistently explores the conflict between white and Indian conceptions of history, identity, and property; it does so not just to increase cross-cultural awareness, but to help bring on an apocalyptic triumph of the Indian way of life. Lame Deer imagines the struggle between whites and Indians as a battle between spiritual forces which, to use the language of nuclear physics, could be called fission and fusion. The white’s power has derived from division, privatization, and accumulation, Lame Deer thinks, while the Indian’s power depends on connection, community, and gift-giving. By repeatedly invoking the image of the fence, which whites have used in both actual and metaphorical ways to subdue the Indians, Lame Deer identifies the problem; by presenting us with Indian forms of spiritual fusion, particularly in his treatment of the Lakota pipe ceremony, he offers a solution.