Melanie Benson Taylor explores a significant “family resemblance” between Native American writing and non-Indian culture in the modern U.S. South. Indian literature, she observes, displays a fixation on a Native American “Lost Cause” every bit as powerful as some white southerners' obsession with the Civil War and Reconstruction. For instance, Native writers dwell upon tribal histories of violent conquest and colonization much in the way that neo-Confederates endlessly revisit their ancestors' defeat at the hands of Yankee invaders. Native American literature also often invokes an idyllic tribal past comparable to the mythic image of genteel plantation culture. Both versions of the Lost Cause, moreover, sometimes express opposition to capitalism and a concern for issues of sovereignty and self-determination. Southern white and southern Indian cultures, Taylor suggests, overlap and inform one another to a degree contemporary observers seldom recognize. In pursuing the implications of this insight, Taylor examines the work of a large and quite diverse collection of Native American writers, from established figures like Louis Owens and LeAnne Howe to lesser-known authors such as Dawn Karima Pettigrew. She also draws extensively on the writings of contemporary Native American literary critics like Robert Warrior and Craig Womack. While much of this work attempts to express a distinctly Native outlook, Taylor places it within southern literature, demonstrating the extent to which Native American fiction and poetry perpetuate themes commonly associated with southern writing. She notes a powerful strain of nostalgia, for instance, along with a growing emphasis on retaliatory violence. She describes a southern Indian literature that is as haunted by history as any Faulkner novel. Taylor suggests that these common tendencies reflect a “southern mode of storying” (p. 65) tied to a shared experience of historical trauma and deprivation. She argues, moreover, that Native American writers did not simply appropriate these practices from an existing southern literature. Rather, the commonalities reflect a process of cross-pollination among defeated southern peoples.