Roofwalker

By Susan Power

Book Overview

In a collection by the author of The Grass Dancer, a Sioux spirit travels the night sky in search of good dreams that are rendered true when he consumes them, from a Sioux elder's hope to return to her prairie home to a Harvard student's reevaluation of the learning process.

Roofwalker, made up of a unique combination of fiction and nonfiction, or "stories" and "histories," reveals the ways that native traditions and beliefs work in the lives of characters who live far from the reservation--and in the author's own life. Many of the "histories" repeat subjects and themes found in the "stories," making Roofwalker a book in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy.

The first seven pieces in the book are "stories," fictional accounts primarily of girls and women. In the title story, a young girl believes in the power of the "roofwalker" spirit to make her dreams come true. In "Beaded Souls," a woman is cursed by the sin of her great-grandfather, an Indian policeman who arrested Sitting Bull. "First Fruits" follows a native girl's first-year at Harvard.

The nonfiction pieces include Power's imaginary account of the meeting of her Phi Beta Kappa father and Sioux mother, a piece about the letters of an Irish ancestor and another in which Power and her mother visit the Field Museum in Chicago, where a native ancestor's dress is on display.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157131041X
• ISBN13: 9781571310415
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.4" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Too Short

After reading Grass Dancer by Susan Power I wanted to read more of her work. I love the way she weaves characters, visions and the circular way Native life and thought flow. I could read Power's writing forever but she hasn't published enough to satisfy me.

Roofwalker tastes good.

This work may be too generous for the general reading public. Susan Power is not indulging the dominant culture's taste for stereotype and ownership of native american identity. This book challenges romantic assumptions that native women "celebrate life" or any other mantra that limits us to a single dimension. Roofwalker is a compliation of short stories which allows for multiple perspectives, ultimatly subverting the stereotypes the reader may be craving.

Powerful

Susan Power masterfully blends fantasy, myth, and "Real Life" in this collection of "Urban Indians," frequently centered around the Chicago Native American Center. Guided by many Native voices, the reader is drawn along from pregnancy and birth to wasicum Nursing Home and death and back again in the circle of lives. Historical stops along the way to Here and Now include White Stone Hill, Little Big Horn, the "Indian ReOrganization" of the 1930's, and "relocation" of the 1950's. Of particular poignancy is the tale of St. Jude and the "Angry Fish" and the visitation of grandma's dress in the Field Museum of Natural History. Published by Milkweed, Reviewed by TundraVision

Dakota Values in the English Language

Susan Power's second book more than fulfills the promise suggested by her earlier novel, The Grass Dancer. In a collection of fictional stories and nonfiction histories, she shows an incredible facility, even majesty, with the English language even as she shares with the reader both Lakota/Dakota faith and practice and the pains and pleasures of being principally an urban Indian with sometimes only a genetic memory of the Great Plains. Her characters are original and quirky--and therefore ring true, even as she causes readers to rethink not only the place and plight of American Indians but of all caring people who are destined to live, love, understand, misunderstand, forgive, become ill, and die then to reach not an exclusive Christian heaven denied to most but to an "Indian heaven [that] is democratic, it is home, it is the place where we shall all meet again to join in the Great Powwow which goes on well into the night."As an English professor, I await with great expectation the opportunity to teach a Contemporary Literature course this summer when I will share this special text with undergraduate students.