From the River's Edge

Native-American cattleman, John Tatekeya, seeks redress in the white man's court when his cattle are stolen, but instead finds himself the accused

A trial concerning stolen cattle becomes the foil to the tragic relationship between Native Americans and later arrivals in Cook-Lynn's ( The Power of Horses ) spare, poignant novel. Soon after agreeing to press charges against a young white man for the theft, Sioux John Tatekeya finds himself and his tribe, the Dakotahs, on trial. Along with other South Dakota reservations dwellers, Tatekeya has been forced to relocate in order to make way for a new dam. Accordingly, the trial seems a sad continuation of the Dakotahs' troubled history. But when a relative testifies against him, Tatekeya feels that a line has been crossed: colonialism has finally cost his people their essential value, responsibility to family. Woven throughout the courtroom proceedings are the mournful recollections of Tatekeya and his lover, Aurelia. Beautifully fusing the Northern Plains setting with her plot, Cook-Lynn establishes a larger significance for the trial and, despite occasional lapses in narrative momentum--telling rather than showing salient developments--places the sorrows and frustrations of Native Americans in stark relief.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the author of the story collection The Power of Horses (1990): a short, rather lackluster novel about the loss of culture and ethics among a Native American plains tribe. When the course of a river that runs through the Dakotahs' homeland is altered to accommodate the building of a hydroelectric plant, more than the flow of water is affected. Over 40 of John Tatekeya's cattle are missing, and he and the feds take two young tribal brothers to court. It's the first time that Tatekeya--a cattleman in his 60s who likes his booze and his mistress and, hating the hypocrisy of the white man, seeks solace in the sweatlodge of his ancestors--finds himself on the side of the law. He sees the theft by one of his own as a sign that tribal codes are breaking down. Eventually he wins his case, only to have his haystacks set on fire. Here are a novel and a writer in desperate need of an editor. What should be an engaging story, given the raw and rugged material and larger-than-life issues, is told in a monotonic, sacrosanct manner. There is no development; the characters are flat; good dialogue is virtually nonexistent (court transcripts are occasionally interjected), the description, at times, hyperbolic (``there were great ponderous waves on the gray water''). In all, Cook-Lynn's first novel reads more like a first draft, which is too bad since the writer obviously has something worthwhile to say. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Like the dead trees which protrude from the white people's reservoir covering tribal land, John Tatekeya and other Dakota Sioux discover that, in 1967, their Indian roots are dying from modern society's en croachment. John wins a court case against a white man who rustled his cattle but is left uncompensated by the court and betrayed by Indians corrupted by the white world. Basing her story on an actual trial, Cook-Lynn has written an intro spective appeal for Indians to retain their culture. While the book is a snapshot of that particular period, its characterization is less one-dimensional than such novels of the 19th-century Sioux, most notably Ruth Beebe Hill's Hanta Yo ( LJ 1/15/79) and Ella Cara Deloria's Waterlilly ( LJ 6/1/ 88)--and the film Dances with Wolves . But the theme of harmony between Indians and nature is common to all. Recommended for libraries collecting fiction on Native Americans.
- Robert Jordan, Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.