Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. By David Hollinger. New York Basic Books, 1995, 1996. 224 pages. $22.00 cloth; $13.00 paper. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community. By Jace Weaver. New York Oxford, 1997. 256 pages. $49.95 cloth; $18.95 paper. When Nickels Were Indians: An Urban Mixed-Blood Story. By Patricia Penn Hilden. Washington: Smithsonian, 1995,1997.260 pages. $29.95 cloth; $17.95 paper. Questions of ethnic identity have become so complex today, not to mention contentious, that one may yearn for a simpler time when blacks were blacks, whites were whites, Indians were Indians, and everyone knew who was who and what was what. The problem is that there was really no such time. Today whites may be simply white, but for many years Jews were not really white, Italians were not very white, and Slavs were off-white at best. As for blacks, there were mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons, categories which disappeared in favor of the “one drop rule,” though perhaps mulatto is coming back as the designation for biracial. As for Indians, there were at least two categories, full-blood and the pejorative half-breed. The arbitrary nature of racial distinctions in regard to Indians is best demonstrated by the 1869 decision of the Supreme Court of New Mexico Territory that Pueblos were “not actually Indians, since they were ‘honest, industrious, and law-abiding citizens’. . . [who] exhibited ‘virtue, honesty, and industry to their more civilized neighbors.” That is hard to beat as a combination of liberal impulse and racist condescension, although there is no shortage of modern examples.

I. Blackfeet surrealism James Welch is Blackfeet on his father's side (Blackfeet say Blackfeet, not Blackfoot), and Gros Ventre on his mother's. He was born in 1940 in Browning, a town of 2000 in northwest Montana which serves as the headquarters and trade center for the Blackfeet Reservation. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations, ultimately graduating from high school in Minneapolis. He attended Minnesota University and Northern Montana College before receiving a B.A. from the University of Montana. He went on to teach in the Creative Writing Program there for two years before leaving teaching to devote more time to writing. Welch published his first collection of poems, Riding the Earth-boy 40, in 1971. Earthboy was the name of a family from Welch's reservation; the 40 refers to the number of acres in their allotment of land. The poems are drawn mainly from Welch's Montana experiences. The collection was reviewed favorably in the Saturday Review (October 2, 1971), but World Publishing Company allowed it to go out of print. Harper and Row has since reissued it, with seven new poems. Welch has attracted some attention in Europe; Roswith von Freydorf Riese, a German poet and critic from Heidelberg, has been translating his poems into German. While some of Welch's poetry is perfectly clear, even to an unsophisticated reader, much of it is difficult to understand. The reason is that like many other American poets today-James Dickey, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Robert Bly and James Wright, to name just a few - he has been influenced by surrealism. The most important direct influences have been the poetry of his friend James Wright and the works of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo.