Introduction: The Indigenous Contexts of “Native.” “American.” “Literature.”

Abstract

This essay argues for the editorial vision that unifies the 40 commissioned essays that comprise the volume. This vision can be explained as follows. “When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, 'Ours'” (346). In this reversal of the dominant colonialist view of New World colonial history, Vine Deloria Jr. highlights an indigenous-centered perspective that is characteristic of Native American Literature and the approaches to it used in this Companion. If asked what Indians might call American Literature, they could answer simply, “ours.” That is to say, the work of indigenous expressive artists in the Americas, since long before contact with Europeans, has constituted the literature of Native peoples in America. In Red on Red, Craig Womack uses the metaphor of a tree to challenge the genealogical assumption that indigenous literatures are only one of the ethnic or multicultural “branches” of the canonical U.S. literary tree: “tribal literatures are not some branch waiting to be grafted onto the main trunk,” he asserts. “Tribal literatures are the tree” (6-7 original emphasis). The inappropriate juxtaposition of Native American texts with other “hyphenated” American literatures (such as African- or Asian-American) obscures fundamental differences between indigenous literatures and the literatures of migrant (all non-indigenous) communities. The most fundamental aim of this Companion is to promote the reading of Native American Literature as indigenous literature by providing the contextual information that is needed in order to recognize and appreciate the complex relations among modes of Native identification, historical events, sovereign tribal worldviews or cosmologies, indigenous expressive and aesthetic traditions, and the specific traditions of Native American Literature.