X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: M. X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape Karen Coats Yeahpau, Thomas M. X-Indian Chronicles: The Book of Mausape. Candlewick, 2006231p ISBN 0-7636-2706-2$16.99 R* Gr. 10 up Mausape and his friends Brando, Hoss, and Maddog are X-Indians, a term Yeahpau coined to describe his experience of growing up as a member of "a race that was losing its culture and a generation that was losing its mind." In a series of interconnected short stories, Yeahpau traces the growth of these boys, from the loss of Mausape's grandfather to an encounter with the vicious Deer Lady, through their multileveled entanglements with tribal spirits and distilled ones, to their various ends—some successful, some violent, some mystical. The stories are compelling and disturbing, laced with the irony of living between two worlds, an experience [End Page 313] that Yeahpau captures with laconic intensity. Yeahpau's X-Indians have come to a point where their only language for the beauty and violence of the spirit world has been overwritten by the coarse banality of street slang; for instance, when Mausape's guardian angel is so overcome with desire for him that she falls to earth and assumes a sublimely perfect human form, his response is "She was Great-Spirit given, and Mausape knew he better hit that." Yeahpau is a master storyteller for his generation, showing with uncompromising force and edgy humor the fraught intersections between Kiowa tradition and a hard-driving adolescence and early adulthood steeped in a haze of anger, poverty, crime, sex, drugs, and alcohol. Even a hokey premise like putting Mr. Al Cohol on trial for crimes against the Indians and the X-Indians yields a gasp of insight when Cohol testifies to a grisly parody of the well-known Christian poem of solace, "Footprints." Tough and provocative yet laced with wicked humor, this is an honorable successor to Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in both candor and grace. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois