The bear is in me now.

Not since the darkness at the federal boarding school and the writing of this book, the heirship chronicles on the wicked road to the fourth world, has the blood and deep voice of the bear moved in me with such power.

Listen, ha ha ha haaaa.

We raise the secret language of bears in the darkness, stumble into the fourth world on twos and fours, and turn underwords ha ha ha haaaa in our visions. Bears are in our hearts. Shoulders tingle downhill on dreams. The darkness moves in ursine shivers, moves in the...

“Some upsetting is necessary,” Gerald Vizenor has said about his writing. And “upsetting” may be the key word in describing Vizenor’s first novel,Bearheart. According to the author, the manuscript was “lost” three times in succession by the first three publishers who looked at it. “I think the people probably threw it away,” Vizenor says with a coyote chuckle. “They probably read it and thought ‘Holy shit,’ because it’s not anything they would expect on an Indian theme.” Vizenor, mixedblood Chippewa—or Anishinaabeg, as the tribal people call themselves—from Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation, has made a career as a...