Culturalism and Its Discontents: <i>David Treuer's</i> Native American Fiction: A User's Manual

Abstract

We usually date the beginnings of American fiction from John Rollin Ridge's rather odd novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, published in 1854; the first American novel by a woman is S. Alice Callahan's Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891). Just after the turn of the twentieth century the body of American fiction increased with the appearance of short fiction by Zitkala-Sa, Pauline Johnson, and John Milton Oskison, who would later publish full-length novels in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927 Mourning Dove, aided by or interfered with by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, published Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, a. novel she had largely completed by 1916. Also from the 1930s comes fictional work by Francis La Flesche, John Joseph Mathews, and D'Arcy McNickle. Although Ella Cara Deloria had com pleted her novel Waterlily by 1944, it was not published until 1988. But it is N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn (1968) and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction it won the following year that, as has again and again been written, initiated a Native American Renaissance in lit erature, an important component of which is the fictional work by Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor that appeared in the first decade after Momaday's Pulitzer.1 These writers continued to pub lish fictional work and were soon joined by many more novelists. To offer an overview of and an introduction to this by-then-already-sub stantial body of American fiction, Louis Owens, himself a American novelist, in 1992 published Other Destinies: Understanding the American Novel.