Native American Fiction Research Articles

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) as ‘crisis fiction’

ABSTRACT Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013) has been read as contesting imperialist histories in its use of ironic magical realism: asengaging with debates in Australian indigenous communities about sovereignty; and, as world-making in its portrayal of conflicting and overlapping material forces and temporalities. Previous readings have examined the text’s dramatisation of biopolitical interventions into the lives of Aboriginal people, and the novel’s near-simultaneous evocation of different time periods. To date, scholarship on The Swan Book has not fully conceptualised its assault on western narrative forms. The following paper focuses on the novel’s contestation of crisis and catastrophe as metonyms for colonial and western ways of being and knowledge, and its narratival focus on what could be termed ‘survivance’, a term used (after Derrida) by Native American fiction writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, to whose novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), Wright’s book makes intertextual references. The following paper contends that Wright’s novel offers radical structures of feeling that counter western notions of narrative,history, time and the individual. These are manifest in the text’s inclusion of nested narratives, its critique of western notions of history, its de-hierarchisation of time, and in its disputation of the centrality of the individual.

Exploration of Major Trends in the Realm of Native American Fiction

Exploration of Major Trends in the Realm of Native American Fiction

Mapping the Transnational in Contemporary Native American Fiction: Silko and Welch

Author(s): Merish, Lori | Abstract: Revisiting the terrain of the 2012 JTAS Special Forum, “Charting Transnational Native American Studies,” this essay argues both that the transnational is a valuable, productive lens for understanding Native American literature, and that a consideration of Native American texts is indispensable to the “transnational turn” in Americanist literary scholarship. The essay argues that Native American literary texts engage the transnational in three ways: affirming “America” as transnational cultural space from its inception by staging ways Native cultures “dis-identif[y] with the nation”; affirming the transnational complexity of Native cultures; and registering Pan-Indian and indigenous transnationalisms vitally alive in the present. The essay advances these claims through readings of two recent historical novels by major Native American authors: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens of the Dunes (2000), and James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2001). Both novels are set in the late nineteenth century, a critical period in Native American history, especially in the American West; and both novels map complex itineraries for Native American characters who travel abroad, scripting transnationalism in diasporic terms. The essay argues that Silko’s novel portrays transnational encounter as global transindigeneity, casting the transnational as a vehicle to awaken and activate feminist and especially ecofeminist transindigenous solidarities, while Welch employs the form of the transnational bildungsroman to make visible tribal processes of cultural adaptation and transnational dimensions of tribal cultures at “home.”

NATIVE, NATURE AND NEGOTIATION: AN ECO-LITERAL STUDY OF CONCILIATION OF PAST AND PRESENT WITH REFERENCE TO LESLIE SILKO’S NATIVE AMERICAN FICTION GARDENS IN THE DUNES

The indigenous cultures all over the world are strongly interwoven with a range of natural components. All these indigenous and aboriginal worlds including Native Americans are known for their holistic tradition as they love and revere a variety of ecological elements such as the Mother Earth, foliage, waterway, deep marine, and downpour. In the Native American fiction Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko, the author weaves a spectacular narrative to convey the story of nature, home, mother, memory, exile, and return. Silko portrays this strong bonding while depicting the close relationship between Nature andvarious Native American characters. As the Native American culture believes in the deep bonding between its nature and its community members, their varied forms of farming and gardening become integral to their cultural identity. The recurrent recollections of Indigo’s mother, her Grandmother Fleet, Sister Salt, and above all, the image of the Old Garden represent the recreation and reconstruction of her cultural memory and its association with the Mother Nature. The protagonist Indigo’s love for gardens brings back the mythical memory of the Biblical ‘Garden of Eden’ which is the ‘Garden of God’ as described in the Book of the Genesis. The displacement of Indigo from her indigenous garden becomes a representation of the man’s dissociation from nature and Indigo’s homecoming to her native garden denotes man’s perpetual longing to reconcile with Mother Earth. Thus, this paper seeks to analyze the re-establishment of a negotiation between old and new, past and present and most importantly the man and the nature in the backdrop of colonization with reference to Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko.

Rewriting <em>Billie</em> and Asserting Rhetorical Sovereignty in Linda Hogan's <em>Power</em>

Rewriting Billie and Asserting Rhetorical Sovereignty in Linda Hogan’s Power Helen Makhdoumian (bio) Legal situations in American Indian literatures reveal how Native peoples actively resist the imposed paternalistic federal Indian policy that diminishes their sovereignty. One such example is Linda Hogan’s Power (1998), which rewrites the legal case United States v. James E. Billie (1987) from an indigenous perspective. In Billie, Seminole tribal chairman James E. Billie was charged with violating the Endangered Species Act (1973) after he hunted a protected Florida panther. While the court case in Power similarly revolves around a Native tribe member’s killing of a panther and her violation of the Endangered Species Act, the novel’s larger concern is the tangle of tribal and federal laws undermining Native self-governance. Hogan broadens the relevance of the case by changing the tribe at the center of the novel. Instead of depicting Seminoles—which would enable readers to recall narratives written by European Americans about Seminoles in Florida from the Spanish conquest to the Billie case—Power focuses on the fictional Taiga tribe. In Power, Ama, an older Taiga member, kills a Florida panther as part of a ritual for her tribe’s cultural renewal and ultimately faces two trials and two different outcomes. Ama is acquitted under U.S. law in a federal courtroom but exiled by the Taiga tribal council, which convenes in Kili Swamp. In this article, I argue that by reimagining Billie, presenting two trials and the questions they raise about power and justice, and contrasting rhetorical imperialism exercised within the federal court with Native rhetorical sovereignty in the tribal court, Power resists U.S. federal Indian policy’s erasure of Native sovereignty. Whereas U.S. law subordinates Native sovereignty to a state of dependency, Hogan’s counternarrative envisions Native control over their identities and definitions. [End Page 80] Indeed, Hogan critiques long-standing and intertwined historical and legal narratives that systematically shape federal Indian policy, which in turn undermines Native nations’ survival. Because the novel raises a number of issues relevant to the environment, previous scholars have understandably engaged with Power through ecocritical perspectives.1 However, I emphasize the social, historical, and political contexts in which the novel takes shape. To read the representation of environmental concerns without these contexts risks reiterating “unstated assumptions [that] can mischaracterize the real makeup of Native communities and reactivate the old ethnographic-formal model” of interpreting American Indian literatures, which focuses on texts’ formal properties in limited cultural contexts (Lyons, “Actually Existing” 279). In contrast, I interpret Power by centering the notion that while “federal Indian law” serves as a “force in the colonizing of Native tribes, or nations,” American Indians resist that force through multitudinous rhetorical practices (Cheyfitz 6). Relevant and prominent sites of resistance leading up to Hogan’s novel include the Red Power movement and American Indian Movement (aim). These activist conversations about Native sovereignty inform Scott Richard Lyons’s concept of “rhetorical sovereignty,” codified in his essay in 2000, which calls for Native communities to control their communicative needs. While previous scholars of contemporary Native American fiction have analyzed courtroom scenes and the assertion of jurisdiction in texts like Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman (1997) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Tayo’s Story” (1975) as sites of negotiating rhetorical sovereignty (Katanski 63, 68), Hogan’s novel has not yet received this attention. This article seeks to restore Hogan and Power to a tradition of Native writers working alongside scholars and activists developing rhetorical sovereignty as a concept and asserting its reach in the late twentieth century. In so doing, I conclude this article by reflecting how my own interpretive practices participate in the crafting of pedagogical and methodological frameworks grounded in rhetorical sovereignty. To that end, I situate Power in conversation with the original court case upon which it is based and the historical newspaper reports of the trial. I delineate how the novel extracts the Billie case and its portrayal in news media from a larger rhetorical situation that dispossesses Native peoples of their agency. The legal and societal discourses generated by and concerning Billie do not elucidate to a U.S. audience the key issues [End...

MELANIE BENSON TAYLOR. Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause.

Melanie Benson Taylor explores a significant “family resemblance” between Native American writing and non-Indian culture in the modern U.S. South. Indian literature, she observes, displays a fixation on a Native American “Lost Cause” every bit as powerful as some white southerners' obsession with the Civil War and Reconstruction. For instance, Native writers dwell upon tribal histories of violent conquest and colonization much in the way that neo-Confederates endlessly revisit their ancestors' defeat at the hands of Yankee invaders. Native American literature also often invokes an idyllic tribal past comparable to the mythic image of genteel plantation culture. Both versions of the Lost Cause, moreover, sometimes express opposition to capitalism and a concern for issues of sovereignty and self-determination. Southern white and southern Indian cultures, Taylor suggests, overlap and inform one another to a degree contemporary observers seldom recognize. In pursuing the implications of this insight, Taylor examines the work of a large and quite diverse collection of Native American writers, from established figures like Louis Owens and LeAnne Howe to lesser-known authors such as Dawn Karima Pettigrew. She also draws extensively on the writings of contemporary Native American literary critics like Robert Warrior and Craig Womack. While much of this work attempts to express a distinctly Native outlook, Taylor places it within southern literature, demonstrating the extent to which Native American fiction and poetry perpetuate themes commonly associated with southern writing. She notes a powerful strain of nostalgia, for instance, along with a growing emphasis on retaliatory violence. She describes a southern Indian literature that is as haunted by history as any Faulkner novel. Taylor suggests that these common tendencies reflect a “southern mode of storying” (p. 65) tied to a shared experience of historical trauma and deprivation. She argues, moreover, that Native American writers did not simply appropriate these practices from an existing southern literature. Rather, the commonalities reflect a process of cross-pollination among defeated southern peoples.

The Haitian Connection in Connie May Fowler’s Sugar Cage

SUZANNE W. JONES University of Richmond The Haitian Connection in Connie May Fowler’s Sugar Cage IN HER FIRST NOVEL, SUGAR CAGE (1992), CONNIE MAY FOWLER, A WHITE Floridian with Cherokee ancestry and an early exposure to Voodoo, employs some of the narrative conventions of magical realism as a way around the impasse of Southern race relations in Florida in the 1960s. Her otherwise modernist narrative technique of nine first-person narrators emphasizes the isolation of her characters at the same time that the variety of viewpoints encourages readers to see both the interracial and international connections that elude or confuse her characters. The culturalandtransnationalcomplexitiessheexplores,especiallyasregards the importation of African and Haitian belief systems and Florida’s reliance on Haitian migrant workers, make magical realism an interesting, if perhaps contested, connective tissue between black and white worlds in Florida.1 In exploring the historical circumstances that produced South American magical realism, circumstances similar to those in the US South, Antonio Benítez-Rojo argues that Caribbean revolutionary discourses, which reacted to slavery, colonialism, and the plantation economy, inform the genre. He believes that such discourses when “passing into the genres of literature” attempt “to decenter the 1 Differing views, such as those by Arnold Krupat and Richard Fleck, about whether the term “magical realism” should be applied to Native American fiction are pertinent to Fowler’s depiction of Voodoo rituals in Sugar Cage. At the root of the debate is a question about whether the term “magical realism” devalues what westerners would identify as “magic” in such texts, thereby denying what constitutes a nonwestern reality (and so making realism a more accurate descriptor for such fiction) or whether magical realism functions as Lois Zamora and Wendy Faris argue, “as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation” (3). Lee Schweninger presents a helpful overview of the debate in “Myth Launching and Moon Landings.” He focuses on whether the alternative “realities” in Native American fiction should be seen as parallel (and so in keeping with the conventions of realism), braided, or fused. Applying these categories to Fowler’s Sugar Cage, the answer seems to vary: her presentation of Voodoo rituals suggests a parallel coexisting reality, the clairvoyance of Inez and Soleil Marie hints at braided natural and supernatural aspects of reality, while the fantastic ending of the novel represents a fused reality employed as a “cultural corrective.” 84 Suzanne W. Jones violence of their origins with their own excess, looking for legitimation in their own illegitimacy” (212-13). In a large cast of characters, Fowler’s most compelling focus is on a young interracial couple and an old African American cleaning woman, but the novel’s many subplots manifest a palpable desire to reach a sphere of “effective equality” which Benítez-Rojo attributes to creole cultures, “where the racial, social, and cultural differences that conquest, colonization, and slavery created would coexist without violence” (52). This is just the place that several of Fowler’s characters reach by the conclusion of Sugar Cage, crossing color lines, belief systems, and national boundaries to make personal connections, although hardly to effect institutional changes. Set in the seedy central Florida town of Tiama, “Prison Capital of the World,” the novel begins in 1945, spans more than two decades, and examines the race relations of two generations of Southerners. By including a migrant worker of mixed Haitian and Seminole Indian ancestry in her story of Southern race relations, Fowler complicates the received biracial history of the South and presents the interracial romance between Soleil Marie BeauvoirandEmoryLooneyasamodelforinterpersonaltransformation. At the same time, she shows how agribusiness has produced a neo-plantation system that exploits migrant workers of color and lingers to the present day. At one time or another all nine narrators of Sugar Cage are imprisoned within their own narrow perspectives, and their individual stories are about moving beyond these “cages.” Fowler creates two exceptions, characters who because of their prescience and supernatural powers take the novel into the realm of magical realism: Soleil Marie Beauvoir, a racially mixed Haitian-Seminole cane field worker, and Inez Temple, a poor African American cleaning woman. Voodoo provides a spiritual and cultural link...

Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary

So then, after having expelled all Jews from all your kingdoms and domains, in same month of January, Your Highnesses commanded me to take sufficient ships and sail to said regions of India. And in consideration you granted me great favours and honoured me thenceforth with title 'Don' and rank of Admiral of Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Governor in perpetuity of all islands and mainland that I should discover and take possession of. --Christopher Columbus, Journal of First Voyage, 1492 (3) Columbus, marrano in search of an eternal haven, landed five centuries later in hundreds of historical studies. That a marrano would be celebrated as discoverer of this nation, and, in words of President Ronald Reagan, inventor of American Dream, is an ironic weave of narrative histories; alas, marrano must be an onerous signature to antisemites. --Gerald Vizenor, Eternal Havens (113) In their reflections on quincentenary commemorations of Columbus's discovery of America, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam observe, For many Native Americans, to be asked to celebrate is equivalent of asking Jews to celebrate (66). Accordingly, a number of Native American activists, artists, and scholars have employed analogies to advance their critiques of myth. Contributors to The Submuloc Show/Columbus Wohs, a 1992 exhibit that explored Native American responses to quincentenary, refer in catalogue to Hitlerian facts (Smith 9) of the Holocaust (62). In her curator's statement for The Submuloc Show (the title of which reverses spelling of explorer's name), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith identifies as responsible for beginning of world's major holocausts and characterizes US government's Quincentennial Jubilee as the celebration of holocaust of Americas (iii). Controversial Native American studies scholar Ward Churchill also relies heavily on analogies in his A Little Matter of Genocide: and Denial in Americas, 1492 to Present (1997). Churchill includes as a frontispiece to his book Pam Colorado's poem What Every Indian Knows, which opens with lines Auschwitz ovens / burn bright / in America (xi, lines 1-3). Like highly charged discussions surrounding United States Memorial Museum's relationship to National Museum of American Indian, these assertions of a Columbus Holocaust are informed by a logic that Michael Rothberg terms competitive memory, in which the interaction of different collective memories ... takes form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence (3). (1) Two Native American novels that were published in 1991 to coincide with quincentenary, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich's The Crown of and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus, distinguish themselves from such contestations by advancing an identificatory reading of Columbus. Moreover, in an inversion of Shohat and Stare formulation, this identificatory reading is made possible by their presentation of explorer not as a Hitler figure but as a crypto-Jew--a Marrano or secret Jew who preserved a connection to Judaism after forced conversions in Spain and Portugal. Indeed, while Crown and Heirs diverge significantly from one another in formal and thematic terms, they share an unusually sympathetic reading of that is enabled by distinctive manner in which they bring Native American and Jewish cultural narratives into relation. Crown and Heirs each feature prominent Jewish characters who serve as allies, facilitators, and mentors for Native American protagonists in their quests for political and imaginative sovereignty. It is striking that in both novels, majority of non-Native characters are Jewish. Both novels also incorporate a retelling of expulsion of Jews from Spain, thereby resituating landfall and its aftermath for indigenous peoples in context of Europe's relations with its internal Jewish Others. …

“All the Talk and All the Silence”: Literary Aesthetics and Cultural Boundaries in David Treuer'sLittle

Much has been written about how contemporary Native American writers explore the intersection between cultural or social materialities on the one hand and aesthetic or imaginative autonomies on the other. In keeping with that discussion, this essay examines David Treuer's Little (1995) alongside his recent collection of critical essays, Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (2006) and queries the extent to which Treuer's exploration of the universal nature of fiction meshes with various articulations of indigenous sovereignty and tribal independence. In doing so it examines the tensions arising out of a situation in which indigenous fictionists wish to introduce tribal perspectives in their writing without ceding their cultural autonomy. The expressive parsimony found in Treuer's novel might well be read in terms of a figurative defiance. By refusing to speak, the eponymous protagonist quite literally practices a form of personal self-rule—one that marks out his difference from those around him—while also denying the reader easy access to his particular version of events. However, in light of the Ojibwe author's advocacy of close reading and New Critical approaches to Native American fiction, alongside his claim that a certain form of affective fallacy is at play within Native American literary criticism, Treuer seems relatively disinterested in real-world situations or contexts. In response, the essay examines his particular emphasis on “artistry” and “style” and questions whether this critical agenda can be linked to the definitions of artistic autonomy currently informing discussions of indigenous sovereignty and tribal nationalism.

Textual Fantasies and Culturality in Native American Fiction: A Review Article of New Books by Treuer and Justice

Textual Fantasies and Culturality in Native American Fiction: A Review Article of New Books by Treuer and Justice

The Critique of Violent Atonement in Sherman Alexie's <em>Indian Killer</em> and David Treuer's <em>The Hiawatha</em>

The Critique of Violent Atonement in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and David Treuer's The Hiawatha Lydia R. Cooper (bio) John Smith, the disturbed, violent Native American protagonist of Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer (1996), decides that his pain and the suffering of all Indigenous people will end only when "one white man … [dies] for all the lies that had been told to Indians" (132). John's belief that his and his people's salvation will be attained in the death of a white victim becomes the disquieting issue at the heart of Indian Killer, a question that is answered but not resolved when John decides to kill himself instead of his chosen white victim, imagining his suicide as a reenactment of the Spokane Jesuit priest Duncan's Christ-like trek into the desert, bearing in his soul the suffering of his people (412). Because of the horrifying violence at the end of the novel, Indian Killer remains Alexie's most controversial book to date, disturbing to critics, reviewers, and the author himself. In one interview, Alexie claims that the novel "still, to this day, troubles me the most" of all his books (Campbell par. 15). Indian Killer is undeniably challenging with its relentless anger and despair. John Skow's often-cited description of the book, for example, calls it "septic with … [an] unappeasable fury" (88). The "septic" violence of Indian Killer, rooted in the protagonist's self-inflicted martyrdom, reflects the same problematic sacrificial action at the heart of David Treuer's The Hiawatha (1999). In Treuer's novel, the main character, Simon, claims responsibility for murder on behalf of his nephew in order to atone for accidentally killing his brother. His expiatory act solidifies his mother's belief that he is like Cain, the prototypical Judeo-Christian scapegoat condemned to wander in [End Page 32] penance for fratricide (Treuer 23). Indian Killer and The Hiawatha thus describe acts of suffering that are manifestations of the symbolism and rhetoric of religious violence. What makes the respective death and exile in these novels so disconcerting, however, is that the acts are committed by men intent on fulfilling archetypal savior roles who nevertheless fail to save themselves or anyone else. Their failures suggest that the novels assert the critical importance of subjugating religious symbolism to practical and ethical critique. In general, examinations of religious symbolism in Native American fiction tend to focus either on celebrations of tribal ceremonies, rituals, and beliefs as authenticating or liberating images or on criticisms of imperialist, missional aspects of American Christianity. However, in order to understand the critique of violent atonement in Alexie's Indian Killer and Treuer's The Hiawatha, it is necessary to place these novels within the context of theological and literary studies that move beyond the binary breakdown of tribal versus Christian ideology. In his article "Native and Christian: Religion and Spirituality as Transcultural Negotiation in American Indian Novels of the 1990s," Karsten Fitz draws attention to a reluctance among literary scholars to explore "the issue of whether or not it is possible to negotiate a middle ground" between "traditional tribal and Christian religions" in Native American fiction (1).1 This reluctance to navigate the admittedly tricky terrain of religion in Native fiction, particularly the contentious area between religious assimilation, syncretism, and adherence to tribal traditions, creates a gap in literary scholarship. In fact, Fitz suggests that religious contact zones in Native fiction "operat[e] as a relational cultural model" by promoting exchange over and against exclusion, a relational model that often plays out in religious forms and symbolism that are varied and generative (13). Therefore, studies of how religion and religious symbolism play out in contemporary fiction by Native authors may yield surprising and important insights into the capacity of narrative to negotiate meaningful syntheses of competing religious ideas, practices, and beliefs. Furthermore, such a study may illuminate practical methods for incorporating what Fitz calls "transcultural," or culturally hybrid, identities. [End Page 33] Fitz's claim is part of a growing critical interest in how Native American writing describes meaningful ways of negotiating contrasting and often competing cultural contact zones through the lens of religious syncretism. James Treat, in his...

Language and Signs: An Interview with Ojibwe Novelist David Treuer

The publication of David Treuer's (Ojibwe) Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (2006) initiated something of a controversy within Native American Literary Studies. Interpreted as an assault on the political and cultural meaning of tribal fiction, the collection has been critiqued by those who argue that indigenous specificity is reflected by a distinct, and specific, Native American literary aesthetic. In this interview Treuer clarifies his position, explains his dual concern for Ojibwe traditions and tribal fiction, and discusses the genesis of his novels Little (1995), The Hiawatha (1999), and The Translation of Dr Apelles (2007).

A Turning Point in Native American Fiction?

Review Article| September 01 2008 A Turning Point in Native American Fiction? Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, by Treuer, David, St. Paul: Greywolf Press, 2006. 212 pages. Karl Kroeber Karl Kroeber Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (3): 388–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Karl Kroeber; A Turning Point in Native American Fiction?. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2008; 54 (3): 388–395. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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.

A Conversation with David Treuer

David Treuer is the author of three novels, Little, The Hiawatha, and most recently The Translation of Dr. Apelles. He has also authored a provocative book of critical essays entitled Native American Fiction: A Users Manual. Treuer won a Washington Post Critics Choice Award in 2006, and in 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on a nonfiction book on reservation life. In November 2004, provoked by his essay, Reading Culture an essay that would be expanded to become a part of User's Manual, I wrote to David Treuer, and so began a three-year conversation that spanned numerous e-mail letters, phone calls, and a meeting for lunch not quite halfway between Minnesota and Pennsylvania at a little eatery interest ingly called Native, on the Upper West Side of New York City. What follows is the fruit of our wide-ranging exchange between the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2007, edited in order to organize our dialogue into a coherent readable format.

Native American fiction: a user's manual

Native American fiction: a user's manual

Remapping Place and Narrative in Native American Literature: David Treuer’s The Hiawatha

David Treuer's 1997 novel, The Hiawatha, engages the traditional literary strategies employed by Native American writing, compares those strategies to earlier narratives (Native American and canonically American), offers a reassessment of indigenous novelistic structures, engages critical responses to tribal fiction, and does so in response to current discursive debate within the field of Native American literary studies. In this essay, the author aims to explicate Treuer's use of that style and how this usage facilitates a fresh sense of space within Native American fiction. Most particularly, this essay will examine a sense of space that makes palpable the potential directions open to tribal literatures and attendant criticism while remapping existing images of place and subverting notions of homecoming.

Moving Stories: Visualization, Mise-en-scène, and Native American Fiction

M o v i n g S t o r i e s : V i s u a l i z a t i o n , M i s e - e n - s c è n e , a n d N a t i v e A m e r i c a n F i c t i o n J o h n P u r d y Concurrent with the growth of criticism as a field of study and applica­ tion, in the United States there was an increasing discourse centered on the canon of American literature. W hile it may be argued that this has been a perennial discussion, in the twentieth century it brought to the fore works by authors who define ethnically, and the expansion of the number of visions of the country and the voices that carry them has been, once again, an invigorating influence on the production of works of literature and the critique of them. The “expansion of the canon” has also spawned an ancillary discussion of how texts may or may not differentiate themselves ethnically. Heated debates about “authenticity” (cultural and/or ethnic verisimilitude), “authority” (who is authorized to speak from a specific cultural or ethnic perspective), intellectual property rights, and the appropriateness of applying Western theory to nonWestern texts enlivened the latter decades of the century and continue to shape the ways we think and talk about texts and the meanings they may provoke. None of this is news, of course, to those who have been engaged in or by the debates. However, one still wonders. Despite attempts to draw lines and categorize narratives, in particular fictional narratives, is there anything inherent in them that one may point to as a truly remarkable ethnic marker, specifically in those works that are written in English for a wide, multicultural audience? In her provocative essay from the 1970s, “A n Old-Time Indian Attack,” Leslie Marmon Silko, the Laguna Pueblo author, suggests that there are significant differences between works of art produced by Native and non-Native artists. Furthermore, she argues that writers should stay within their own cultural frameworks when creating them: Since white ethnologists like Boas and Swanton first intruded into Native American communities to “collect” prayers, songs and stories, a number of implicit racist assumptions about W e s t e r n A m e ric a n L it e r a t u r e 41.2 (S um m er 2006): 177- 2 0 0 . 1 7 8 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 Native American culture and literature have flourished. The first is the assumption that the white man, through some innate cultural or racial superiority, has the ability to perceive and master the essential beliefs, values and emotions of persons from Native American communities. (211) The conjoining of culture and text is significant, for Silko’s critical eye next focuses upon two non-Native authors whose works— employing Indian “content”— won Pulitzer Prizes: Oliver LaFarge for his novel Laughing Boy (1930) and Gary Snyder with his poetry collection Turtle Island (1975). There are several issues that form the complex matrix of her argument, some of which anticipate and provide contexts for the canon debates that resonate with her broadside (and are noted above); however, despite her attempts to articulate and specify these two literary works’ shortcomings, one must still ask of texts that identify as “N ative,” no matter who writes them, what makes them culturally representative, or not. More specifically, what in them carries and reveals “the essential beliefs, values and emotions of persons from [their respective] communities ”? This would imply, in the case of LaFarge and Snyder, the beliefs, values, emotions of an Anglo community as well. While Silko’s stance on this issue may have changed over the ensuing decades as the discourse evolved, her contentions posit an intriguing dilemma for buyers, readers, and critics of fiction; besides the crafting of characters and content (dialect, locale, etc.) that are ethnic-specific, what constitutes...

Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry Molly McGlennen (bio) Dean Rader and Janice Gould, eds. Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003. 294 pp. There has been a lack of critical attention toward Native American poetry to date. As editors Dean Rader and Janice Gould of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry note in their introduction, only a handful of book-length texts are devoted entirely to native poetry, despite the burgeoning field of Native American literary criticism, and despite the extensive attention to Native American fiction, autobiography, and oral traditions. As Speak to Me Words shows, native poetry needs its own critical studies because the poets are developing a site of unique native discourse as well as a forum to continue the fight against prejudice and injustice. While native poetry often has a minimal presence at conferences and in college [End Page 104] classrooms, Speak to Me Words labors to fill this gap and lay the groundwork for subsequent critical attention to contemporary Native American poetry. In this way, it is a book of beginnings. It respects poetry's demand for astute close reading and honors the spirit that native poets invoke through their creative expression. Because of the enormous task upon which Speak to Me Words embarks, the breadth of its coverage of native poetry as a genre is overwhelmingly varied; however, despite the diversity of approaches, the essays each note similar notions of native poetry's power and healing capacity. Speak to Me Words reflects upon as many trajectories of native poetry as the text's space allows: Fourteen essays in all, not including Rader and Gould's dialogical and candid introduction, the collection includes older essays alongside brand new ones (for example, Simon Ortiz's well-known 1993 essay "Song/Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" beside Robert Nelson's new essay "Dawn/Is a Good Word: Naming an Emergent Motif of Contemporary Native American Poetry"), female and male voices, and native and non-native authors. What is more, eight of the fourteen essays are exclusively about native women's poetry; three of the authors identify as Two-Spirit. At its very best, the essays in the collection provide criticism that recognizes the significant distinction of native poetry as a genre. The authors analyze what the poetry is doing both because of and in spite of the fact the poetry is written by native people. Each essay in the collection explores how scholars of Native American poetry are not only reading, discussing, and analyzing the work, but also how native poetry is positioning itself alongside and distinct from the American canon. Eric Gary Anderson's essay, "Situating American Indian Poetry," complicates notions of genre that stem from Western literary traditions and asks "can American Indian literature be properly and best taught, critiqued, and understood by way of non-native categories such as genre?" (34). His essay goes on to address hard questions about what characterizes native poetry, showing how the writing itself collapses western constructs while expressing its primary concern: to give back to and sustain community. Janice Gould's "Poems as Maps in American Indian Women's Writing" illustrates native women poets' preoccupation with mapping as [End Page 105] well as the significance of cartography as a tool to restore balance and allow healing. In acknowledging the spirit in poetry, Gould is not alone. Marilou Awiakta's "Daydreaming Primal Space: Cherokee Aesthetics as Habits of Being" examines the use of native knowledge as a means to—once again—live "poetry as a habit of being" (61). Carter Revard's essay "Herbs of Healing: American Values in American Indian Literature" argues how Native American poetry not only stands up against the Western classics, but also how it adds to this canon by taking poetry one step further: native poetry has the power to cure. Other essays in the collection utilize specific tropes and motifs in order to situate native poetry; for instance, Daniel Heath Justice's "Beloved Woman Returns: The Doubleweaving of Homeland and Identity in the Poetry of Marilou Awiakta," utilizes Cherokee basketweaving, while Janet McAdams...

The life and writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American mill worker

During the 1830s and 1840s, Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (1797-1886), a mixed-race writer of English and Algonkian heritage, labored in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, where she penned colorful stories and sketches for two workers' magazines-the Lowell Offering and New England Offering. A courageous and pioneering author, Chamberlain wrote the earliest known Native American fiction and published some of the earliest prose to challenge the persecution of Native people and affirm their dignity and worth. life and works of this remarkable and multi-faceted woman are now recovered from obscurity in this volume, which collects for the first time thirty-four of Chamberlain's richly varied contributions. Organized in three thematic sections (Native Tales and Dream Visions; The Unprivileged Sex: Women's Concerns; and Village Sketches), the captivating writings range from humorous autobiographical sketches of New England life to protest pieces that raise consciousness about the treatment of Native people, excessive mill hours and poor working conditions, and the oppression of women. Drawn from Euro-American and Native oral literary traditions, Chamberlain's fiction and other prose shed new light on nineteenth-century American working women and illuminate the multicultural roots of New England writing. volume, which features a comprehensive biographical and critical introduction based on literary detective work and meticulous research, restores to history the significant contributions of this Native American writer, feminist, and humorist.