Embracing Fry Bread: Confessions of a Wannabe by Roger Welsch

It was with some trepidation that I fi rst opened Roger Welsch’s book, having come from a history of teaching Native American literature for over eight years as a “nonIndian,” and having encountered Sioux writer Vine Deloria Jr.’s essay “Indians Today, the Real and Unreal.” In this essay Deloria states, “Th ose whites who dare not claim Indian blood have an asset of their own. Th ey understand Indians.” He goes on to emphasize, “We need fewer and fewer ‘experts’ on Indians. What we need is a cultural leave us alone agreement in spirit and in fact.” My trepidation left as I encountered Welsch’s work on “Wannabes.” Perhaps this term is best understood in the beginning of the book when he writes that he avoids radical activism and polemics regarding Indian interests because he is not Indian and therefore cannot speak for Indians. “American Indians speak quite well enough for themselves, thank you very much, so I sit back and listen.” Th roughout, Welsch manifests himself as a listener who has spent fi ft yfi ve years involved in Native culture where he has made uncountable friends. His ability to write honest prose, both informative and erudite, captivates from the beginning. Th e choice to start with a coyote story is both applicable and ironic. Coyote, a trickster fi gure in Native American cosmology, is one who both contradicts and illuminates. According to Welsch, those who are Wannabes become that way for a variety of reasons, which are equally contradictory (to nonIndians and Indians alike) and illuminating. Welsch clarifi es all this and more in subsequent chapters full of personal anecdotal information and hishe is also a Returner: he comes back, at least temporarily, to research his family for an mfa at Columbia, a project that takes him to Nebraska and ultimately to California. Th ere he reconnects with an older cousin, herself a model Achiever. One way to appreciate Ghost Dances is to see it as an amalgam of two other books about middle America— Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1987) and Debra Marquart’s Th e Horizontal World (2007)— combining travelogue with autobiography, even spiritual geography, in the manner but without the tone of Kathleen Norris. Rather than choosing Lawrence Welk as an example of someone who made it out, GarrettDavis gives us his cousin Ruth Harris, a music teacher turned activist from Nebraska who traveled the world in pursuit of peace and justice. Th e third and fi nal section of the book is called “Buff alo Commonplace,” a pun on Frank and Deborah Popper’s response to the depopulation of the rural Great Plains by proposing the creation of a vast bison commons. In many ways, the entire book is a commonplace, where the author has assembled retellings of his encounters with such ghost dancers as Scotty Philip, Willa Cather, William Jennings Bryan, William Janklow, and park ranger Bob Menasek. Here also are Fred Phelps, the Westboro Baptist pastor who foments hatred of gays, and the gay cowboys of Cap Iversen’s novels. In their own paradoxical way, each is seeking a vision, hoping for utopia, moving toward a time when the oppressors will vanish and the buff alo will return, as prophesied.