Tricksters, medicine shows, and ghosts are some of the story elements discussed in this collection of essays about First Nations Canadian authors. Posing questions about how such folklore adds to the country's collective memory, the essays look at Ben Cardinal's No Name Indians and Generic Warriors; Tomson Highway's The Sage, the Dancer and the Fool; Billy Merasty's Fireweed; Beatrice Mosionier's Night of the Trickster; and Floyd Favel Starr's Lady of Silences. An eye-opening look at Native Canadians as they negotiate their way through white culture, the book also offers insights on Native Americans in similar predicaments in movie westerns and the musical Oklahoma!

Daniel David Moses, playwright and poet, is a Delaware who was born at Ohsweken, Ontario on the Six Nations lands. Now living in Toronto, he writes and works with Native and cross-cultural organizations. He is the author of Coyote City, nominated for the 1991 Governor General's Award for Drama, and The Dreaming Beauty, Big Buck City, Almighty Voice and His Wife, and The Mite Lines, a book of poetry. He is co-editor with Terry Goldie of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English.

Daniel David Moses' profile page

"Moses's voice is firm and assured, but oddly hard to define, combining a loose colloquial sprawl and a pared-down tenseness with a mythic imagination and an everyday chattiness. He writes in a world in which everything is not only possessed of consciousness, but seems engaged in thoughtful consideration of itself."  “Maggie Helwig, author, One Building in the Earth

"I was hooked on the first page . . . In Pursued By A Bear, Daniel David Moses’ [explorations of] the differences and disparities between western white expectations and heritage and Moses’ native upbringing and heritage are juxtaposed and intertwined throughout the book, with surprising results. It’s the crisscrossing of boundaries?from Cree to Ojibwa to Delaware, from native to non-native, from straight to gay, from past to present and back - that makes [the book] a delightful and startling read. . . . And he does it with an elegant simplicity, a wealth of knowledge and, above all, a wonderful wit that takes his art, but not himself, very seriously."  “The Calgary Herald

"Moses writes with a poetic suggestiveness that recalls Tenessee Williams: he is operating as an artist, not as an explainer of apologist for his people."  “The Globe and Mail