Dance of the Returned by Devon A. Mihesuah (review)

Reviewed by: Dance of the Returned by Devon A. Mihesuah Carter Meland (bio) Dance of the Returned Devon A. Mihesuah University of Arizona Press, 2022 HAVING JUST COMPLETED teaching my Spring 2023 course on Native genre fiction, I was eager to jump into Devon A. Mihesuah's Dance of the Returned before I even knew it was a supernatural thriller. I thought it was a detective novel, the third in Mihesuah's series centering on the Chahta (Choctaw) police detective Monique Blue Hawk. I haven't read the other two books. Maybe they are all supernatural thrillers; however, unlike a good detective, I'll lead with my assumptions rather than the facts. I assumed it was a detective novel because the plot initially concerned the disappearance of East James, a Chahta man in the Norman, Oklahoma area. Monique's investigation into East's disappearance is met with a startling lack of concern on the part of most of his friends and family members, including his wife and their children. Over the course of the next few days, Monique learns that East was involved in a Renewal Dance, a ceremony she's never heard of, under the guidance of her uncle Leroy Bear Red Ears. She meets other Renewal Dancers, who all appear weak and exhausted, sunburned (and windburned), but seemingly rejuvenated. When East returns, as exhausted as the others but seemingly at peace, Monique decides, after questioning her uncle Leroy, to try the Renewal Dance herself. It's at this point the novel ceases to be a detective novel and becomes something more mysterious, more compelling: something I shouldn't say too much about for fear of spoiling it for readers. I will say it becomes an adventure tale and a kind of time-travel story, as well as a piece of historical fiction, one meditating on the tension between what the novel deems the Nationalist Chahta people, who want to keep the ancestral ways, and the Progressivists, who believe accommodation to white ways is best. Fasting and dancing under the guidance of her uncle, Monique and her companion dancers (who represent a cross-section of Chahta people, ranging from traditionalists to hippies to war vets) find themselves lifted out of their present and into a time and place without twenty-first-century comforts. Along with the dancers, readers may find themselves wondering where they are and how they will survive. Through their adventures we get a crash course in living off the environment (as their End Page 155 ancestors had) as well as reflections on history (their "removal" from the present echoes the Chahta removal from the Southeast to what is currently Oklahoma). As one of the dancers puts it amid their tribulation, "Looks like we got our wish to be decolonized," only it is muttered in resignation not celebration (227). This statement gives Monique the opportunity to point out that living in a precolonial manner is not what decolonizing is about. "Decolonization," she says, "means to retain traditions, to fight for treaty rights, and to ensure cultural sustainability in modern society" (228). It means to use traditions to understand how to live with cars, smartphones, and settler peoples—to live as twenty-first-century Chahta, not as imitation white folk. The book's decolonizing move, of looking beyond the dichotomy of either living in the manner of ancestors from dozens of generations past or total assimilation, is to acknowledge that modern life is Chahta life, and Chahta modernity needs to be rooted in Chahta cultural ways, not settler ones. Decolonizing means you can have an iPhone and be a Chahta traditional-ist because of how you think and live with reference to ancestral teachings. With such an understanding of decolonization, we can also think about another important decolonizing move that Mihesuah's novel makes. Earlier I identified the book as a supernatural thriller, which is a marketing category in the contemporary economy and important to drive sales (and I hope this book achieves such sales), but if your cultural cosmology allows for what to settler eyes looks like slippages between this time and others—and if such slippages are allowed and expected in certain ceremonial conditions—then is...