The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians

Earlier this week, American Presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech where the focus was race relations. As the recent events indicated, there is a great deal that the black and white races do not understand about each other. The history is of course a sad one; the white European immigrants to the Western hemisphere enslaved the blacks and exterminated the Native Americans. There remain many intense feelings of hostility between the three groups. This book is a collection of stories by Native Americans written in 1974 and those works express many of the feelings that they have about their treatment by the white culture. There is one about a sadistic white state trooper who hates Indians and beats them every chance he gets. Another story describes a "crazy" Indian brave called Kaiser who went to prison rather than be drafted into the U. S. army. There is the story of the massacre of an Indian village by white soldiers and one about an Indian hitchhiker with no place to go. Although these stories are not loaded with action, there is still a great deal of emotion expressed in them. You can clearly detect the frustration, the anger at the continued systematic destruction of the Indian culture and the stoic acceptance of their fate when they fight back and kill a police officer that was harassing them. There is also despair expressed by consuming the contents of a wine bottle. These stories provide a glimpse into the Native American culture by illustrating their frustrations and anger at how their culture was disrespected and destroyed.

The Man to Send Rainclouds rates as my favorite collection of short stories written by Native Americans. With 12 of the 19 selections penned by Leslie Silko or Simon Ortiz during the early stages of their important writing careers, many of the themes focus on the challenges native people confront living in the dominant American culture. But the news is not all doom and gloom. The title story, especially, provides a glimpse into how individuals from vastly different backgrounds and belief systems -- in this case, those who practice Catholicism and those who follow Native American spiritual beliefs -- can somehow manage to co-exist.