Growing up as a mixed-blood Minnesota Chippewa Indian, novelist-poet Vizenor faced racism and personal traumas. His father, at age 26, was fatally knifed; his mother, who periodically left him with foster families, remarried an alcoholic who beat him. Enlistment in the army took Vizenor to Japan, where views of Mount Fuji and a romance with a Japanese woman helped liberate his imagination. His haikus won him a college teaching job; he also worked as a mental hospital orderly, organized Indian protests and, as a Minneapolis Tribune reporter, exposed covert CIA domestic operations. In a questing autobiography that hops from Wounded Knee to Beijing, the author, a professor at UC- Santa Cruz, tries on the mythic identities of compassionate trickster and tribal hunter. As a guest at anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn's haunted house in Santa Fe, N.M., he finds his dreams invaded by skinwalkers, beasts from the world of the dead. (Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.)