Studies in American Indian Literature
Author: Paula Gunn Allen
Publisher: Modern Language Assn of Amer
Published: 1983-01
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780873523554
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American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism
Author: Joni Adamson
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9780816517923
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlthough much contemporary American Indian literature examines the relationship between humans and the land, most Native authors do not set their work in the "pristine wilderness" celebrated by mainstream nature writers. Instead, they focus on settings such as reservations, open-pit mines, and contested borderlands. Drawing on her own teaching experience among Native Americans and on lessons learned from such recent scenes of confrontation as Chiapas and Black Mesa, Joni Adamson explores why what counts as "nature" is often very different for multicultural writers and activist groups than it is for mainstream environmentalists. This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of nature and place. Adamson shows that when we begin exploring the differences that shape diverse cultural and literary representations of nature, we discover the challenge they present to mainstream American culture, environmentalism, and literature. By comparing the work of Native authors such as Simon Ortiz with that of environmental writers such as Edward Abbey, she reveals opportunities for more multicultural conceptions of nature and the environment. More than a work of literary criticism, this is a book about the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities in order to arrive at a better agreement of what the human role in nature is and should be. It exposes the blind spots in early ecocriticism and shows the possibilities for building common groundÑ a middle placeÑ where writers, scholars, teachers, and environmentalists might come together to work for social and environmental change.
Other Words
Author: Jace Weaver
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 412
ISBN-13: 9780806133522
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEloh’, a Cherokee word, is usually translated by anthropologists as "religion," but it also simultaneously encompasses history, culture, knowledge, law, and land. In this provocative work, Jace Weaver interlaces these seemingly disparate meanings to form a coherent approach to Native American Studies. In nineteen interrelated chapters, Weaver presents a range of experiences shared by native peoples in the Americas, from the distant past to the uncertain future. He examines Indian creative output, from oral tradition to the postmodern wordplay of Gerald Vizenor, and brings to light previously overlooked texts. Weaver also tackles up-to-the-minute issues, including environmental crises, Native American spirituality, repatriation of Indian remains and cultural artifacts, and international human rights.
Literary Indians
Author: Angela Calcaterra
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2018-10-26
Total Pages: 247
ISBN-13: 1469646951
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlthough cross-cultural encounter is often considered an economic or political matter, beauty, taste, and artistry were central to cultural exchange and political negotiation in early and nineteenth-century America. Part of a new wave of scholarship in early American studies that contextualizes American writing in Indigenous space, Literary Indians highlights the significance of Indigenous aesthetic practices to American literary production. Countering the prevailing notion of the "literary Indian" as a construct of the white American literary imagination, Angela Calcaterra reveals how Native people's pre-existing and evolving aesthetic practices influenced Anglo-American writing in precise ways. Indigenous aesthetics helped to establish borders and foster alliances that pushed against Anglo-American settlement practices and contributed to the discursive, divided, unfinished aspects of American letters. Focusing on tribal histories and Indigenous artistry, Calcaterra locates surprising connections and important distinctions between Native and Anglo-American literary aesthetics in a new history of early American encounter, identity, literature, and culture.
American Indian Literatures
Author: A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff
Publisher: New York : Modern Language Association of America
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 200
ISBN-13: 9780873521918
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis survey of Native American literature from 1772 to 1989 describes types of oral literatures and life histories and evaluates secondary works in the field.
The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature
Author: James H. Cox
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 769
ISBN-13: 0199914036
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"This book explores Indigenous American literature and the development of an inter- and trans-Indigenous orientation in Native American and Indigenous literary studies. Drawing on the perspectives of scholars in the field, it seeks to reconcile tribal nation specificity, Indigenous literary nationalism, and trans-Indigenous methodologies as necessary components of post-Renaissance Native American and Indigenous literary studies. It looks at the work of Renaissance writers, including Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Sacred Water (1993), along with novels by S. Alice Callahan and John Milton Oskison. It also discusses Indigenous poetics and Salt Publishing's Earthworks series, focusing on poets of the Renaissance in conversation with emerging writers. Furthermore, it introduces contemporary readers to many American Indian writers from the seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, from Captain Joseph Johnson and Ben Uncas to Samson Occom, Samuel Ashpo, Henry Quaquaquid, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, Sarah Simon, Mary Occom, and Elijah Wimpey. The book examines Inuit literature in Inuktitut, bilingual Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, and literature in Indian Territory, Nunavut, the Huasteca, Yucatán, and the Great Lakes region. It considers Indigenous literatures north of the Medicine Line, particularly francophone writing by Indigenous authors in Quebec. Other issues tackled by the book include racial and blood identities that continue to divide Indigenous nations and communities, as well as the role of colleges and universities in the development of Indigenous literary studies".
Dead Voices
Author: Gerald Robert Vizenor
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 156
ISBN-13: 9780806125794
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGerald Vizenor gives life to traditional tribal stories by presenting them in a new perspective: he challenges the idyllic perception of rural life, offering in its stead an unusual vision of survival in the cities-the sanctuaries for humans and animals. It is a tribal vision, a quest for liberation from forces that would deny the full realization of human possibilities. In this modern world his characters insist upon survival through an imaginative affirmation of the self. In Dead Voices Vizenor, using tales drawn from traditional tribal stories, illuminates the centuries of conflict between American Indians and Europeans, or "wordies." Bagese, a tribal woman transformed into a bear, has discovered a new urban world, and in a cycle of tales she describes this world from the perspective of animals-fleas, squirrels, mantis, crows, beavers, and finally Trickster, Vizenor’s central and unifying figure. The stories reveal unpleasant aspects of the dominate culture and American Indian culture such as the fur trade, the educational system, tribal gambling, reservation life, and in each the animals, who represent crossbloods, connect with their tribal traditions, often in comic fashion. As in his other fiction, Vizenor upsets our ideas of what fiction should be. His plot is fantastic; his story line is a roller-coaster ride requiring that we accept the idea of transformation, a key element in all his work. Unlike other Indian novelists, who use the novel as a means of cultural recovery, Vizenor finds the crossblood a cause for celebration.
Narrative Chance
Author: Gerald Robert Vizenor
Publisher:
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTen essays discuss themes and specific works without reliance on structuralism social-science analysis, or historical context, but on the use of language and flow of narrative. Familiarity with the concepts and terminology of postmodern criticism is assumed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Other Destinies
Author: Louis Owens
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9780806126739
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks at the novels of John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Gerald Vizenor. These authors are mixedbloods who, in their writing, try to come to terms with the marginalization both of mixed-bloods and fullbloods and of their cultures in American society. Their novels are complex and sophisticated narratives of cultural survival - and survival guides for fullbloods and mixedbloods in modern America. Rejecting the stereotypes and cliches long attached to the word Indian, they appropriate and adapt the colonizers language, English, to describe the Indian experience. These novels embody the American Indian point of view; the non-Indian is required to assume the role of "other". In his analysis Owens draws on a broad range of literary theory: myth and folklore, structuralism, modernism, poststructuralism, and, particularly, postmodernism. At the same time he argues that although recent American Indian fiction incorporates a number of significant elements often identified with postmodern writing, it contradicts the primary impulse of postmodernism. That is, instead of celebrating fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaos, these authors insistupon a cultural center that is intact and recoverable, upon immutable values and ecological truths. Other Destinies provides a new critical approach to novels by American Indians. It also offers a comprehensive introduction to the novels, helping teachers bring this important fiction to the classroom.
The Native American Renaissance
Author: Alan R. Velie
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2013-11-11
Total Pages: 377
ISBN-13: 0806151315
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence. The contributors scrutinize writers from Momaday to Sherman Alexie, analyzing works by Native women, First Nations Canadian writers, postmodernists, and such theorists as Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. Weaver’s own examination of the development of Native literary criticism since 1968 focuses on Native American literary nationalism. Alan R. Velie turns to the achievement of Momaday to examine the ways Native novelists have influenced one another. Post-renaissance and postmodern writers are discussed in company with newer writers such as Gordon Henry, Jr., and D. L. Birchfield. Critical essays discuss the poetry of Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Diane Glancy, Luci Tapahonso, and Ray A. Young Bear, as well as the life writings of Janet Campbell Hale, Carter Revard, and Jim Barnes. An essay on Native drama examines the work of Hanay Geiogamah, the Native American Theater Ensemble, and Spider Woman Theatre. In the volume’s concluding essay, Kenneth Lincoln reflects on the history of the Native American Renaissance up to and beyond his seminal work, and discusses Native literature’s legacy and future. The essays collected here underscore the vitality of Native American literature and the need for debate on theory and ideology.
