The Hiawatha by David Treuer (Granta: #14.99) Tecumseh: A Life by John Sugden (Pimlico Original: #15.00) History often resembles an old frontier map, undrawn territory resting alongside overwritten land. No history has more lacunae and palimpsests side by side than that of Native Americans. They watched freely gifted land parcelled off in surveyed squares. They saw their placenames deleted. They listened as languages and tribal identities were twice neutralised, first as commodities, and then as style icons - Mohican, Winnebago, Algonquin, to say nothing of those shrieking, single-rotored Apaches currently charged with taking out Serbian tanks. The languages have a ghostly afterlife. But the underlying stories are still not told.

As James Fenimore Cooper understood, the Red Indian could only enter the American historical imagination when the historical red man was no more - murdered, neutralised by intermarriage, or penned into reservations. Thereafter, the Native American becomes a powerful, totemic figure, and none more so than Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief killed in Lower Canada in the autumn of 1813 and almost immediately propelled into mythology. There are many Tecumseh stories in circulation, but until now no authoritative account of a life which ended in heroic failure. The Shooting Star - a misleading version of his clan name - and his one-eyed-brother, the Prophet, are key figures in Native American historiography. And to be precise about it, the vision of the Tecumseh myth - a vast confederacy of tribes united in resistance to the United States - was given its key expression not by the Shawnee, but by the Mohawk Joseph Brant.

It lies there, as animals do, until someone thinks to clear it. No one knows where Tecumseh lies. Perhaps the victors simply came, as garbage men do, and took the body away for disposal. Like Lorca and Guevara, Tecumseh seems one of the unburied, and all the harder to release from the prison of myth. Sugden's biography has at least prepared a decent grave. David Treuer's novel tells a more moving and immediate story, about the Indians' tentative survivals, about their small lives lived in the in-between.