Award(s):

Received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Awards
Career
Further Readings About the Author
Personal Information
Sidelights
Source Citation
Writings by the Author

WRITINGS:

• Waiting to Be Fed (poem), Graywolf Press, 1975.

• Winter of the Salamander: The Keeper of Importance (poems), Harper & Row, 1980.

• The Invisible Musician (poems), Holy Cow! Press, 1990.

• Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (novel), foreword by Albert E. Stone, University of Iowa Press, 1992, reprinted, Grove, 1997.

• Remnants of the First Earth, Grove, 1996.

• RThe Rock Island Hiking Club : poems, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2001.

"Sidelights"

One of the best known contemporary Native American poets, Young Bear is highly regarded for verse and prose in which he explores the conflicts arising between his Mesquakie heritage and his identity as a writer.

Raised on the Tama Indian Reservation in Tama, Iowa, Young Bear first attracted critical attention with the verse collections Winter of the Salamander: The Keeper of Importance and The Invisible Musician. Noting Young Bear's attempts to recreate the sacred story world of Native American oral tradition, reviewers have praised his use of precise imagery and his emphasis on dreams, visions, and traditional Mesquakie songs in his poems. This focus on storytelling is also central to Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives, which centers on Edgar Bearchild and his friendship with Ted Facepaint. Incorporating prose, verse, and Mesquakie vocabulary, this fictional autobiography--a novel in the loosest sense--is considered a veiled record of Young Bear's attempts to become an author and document his heritage without betraying tribal secrets. Douglas Glover has noted: "Young Bear is freighted with a terrible dual responsibility: to satisfy his readers that he is being truthful and informative, and to satisfy his personal and tribal need for secrecy. He must invent a new form, the nature of which is duality, a form that is never straightfoward, yet full of implication. It will be poetic, but it will not fulfill every demand of traditional poetic genre. It will always be surprising; it may not end. A code, in other words, that only the right people can break."

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

BOOKS

• Bruchac, Joseph, Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, Sun Tracks and The University of Arizona Press, 1987, pp. 337-48.

• Native North American Literature, Gale, 1994.

PERIODICALS

• The American Book Review, January, 1982, p. 16; April-May, 1991, p. 10-11.

• Choice, June, 1986, p. 1509; October, 1992, p. 303.

• Kliatt, September, 1990, p. 29.

• Library Journal, September 15, 1980, p. 1865; March 1, 1990, p. 96; March 15, 1992, p. 129.

• Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 12, 1992, p. 10.

• Poetry, March, 1993, pp. 339-55.

• Publishers Weekly, January 13, 1992, p. 41.

• Southwest Review, Autumn, 1981, pp. 427-33.

• Western American Literature, Summer, 1980, pp. 93-102.

• World Literature Today, Summer, 1981, p. 515.

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