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The Snake Game
The Snake Game
Author: Wayne Johnson
In his first novel, Johnson evokes a community of disenfranchised Indians, the Ojibway and Chippewa, as its members slowly leave their cultural enclave over 30 years from the '50s to the '80s. Chronicling the defeatism, desperation and the violence of the neglected poor, using unabashedly spare language -- a style that stringently avoids...  more »
ISBN-13: 9780394583358
ISBN-10: 0394583353
Publication Date: 10/17/1990
Pages: 257
Edition: 1st ed
Rating:
  • Currently 4/5 Stars.
 1

4 stars, based on 1 rating
Publisher: Knopf
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 1
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The Snake Game is a deeply disturbing, deeply moving novel, it's characters drawn with an exacting eye and placed in a perfectly rendered world- both physical and emotional. It is a striking powerful novelistic debut.

The time is our own- the 1950's to the 1980's. The place is a vast, remote tract of dense pine forest and deep lakes along the Minnesota/Canada border- Big Pines, sacred Ojibway and Chippewa ground arrogated by the white government. Here, what was once the sanctuary of the Indians "old life" is now a graveyard, the only monument to it, a white-owned sportsmen's lodge where the indians' inherited knowledge of the land and waters make them valuable guides. Follows the lifes of three generations of Ojibway and Chippewa.


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