Native American Literature Research Articles

Gerald Vizemor: Writing in the Oral Tradition by Kimberly M. Blaeser

404 Western American Literature Gerald Vizertor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. By Kimberly M. Blaeser. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. 260 pages, $29.95.) Kimberly Blaeser loves Gerald Vizenor’s work, his rebellious spirit, and his sense of play. This amazingly thorough discussion of his fiction, autobiography, journalism, and literary critiques will be indispensable for those wanting to bet­ ter understand Vizenor’s elliptical metaphoric style or to ferret out the meaning of a particular piece. Instead of going into an exegesis of Vizenor’s major works, Blaeser focuses on short pieces, which she can analyze in depth, and then shows how the same techniques and beliefs drive his larger works. Kimberly Blaeser’s background enhances her analyses. She is a university professor, a published poet, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, who are also Gerald Vizenor’s people. Their shared tribal sensibility enables Blaeser to give very sophisticated analyses of Vizenor’s trickster, his English “reexpression” of Ojibway dream songs, and his continual press toward orality despite the printed page. Blaeser’s skills as a poet also enable her to write a very interesting and accessible chapter on haiku poetry, its appeal for Vizenor, and its usefulness as a mode of comprehend­ ing Vizenor’s surprising use of techniques such as juxtaposition, word omissions, and abrupt changes of thought. Her discussion of the functions of metaphor, silence, and ambiguity in Vizenor’s works are also at once lucid and complex. But Blaeser’s most impressive achievement—and it is one that reflects the workings of Vizenor’s mind—is her critical discussion. She draws important lit­ erary theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard, Terry Eagleton, Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Walter Ong, Elaine Jahner, and Susan Griffin into discourse with Native American scholars Arnold Krupat, Louis Owens, Larry Evers, Filipe Molina, Leslie Marmon Silko, and N. Scott Momaday. Historians Ward Churchill, Richard Drinnon, Calvin Martin, and Richard Slotkin and anthropologists Frances Densmore, Julie Cruikshank, and Barbara Babcock also join the discussion alongside critics of photography Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. This discursive flow enables one to comprehend Gerald Vizenor’s work in the context of American as well as Native American literature and creates the dynamism essential to engage Gerald Vizenor’s discourse. A l a n n a K a t h l e e n B r o w n M o n t a n a S ta te Un iv e r s it y Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr. Introduction by Robin Laurence. (Vancouver/Seattle: Douglas McIntyre/University of Washington Press, 1996. 104 pages, $17.95.) Sky, moss, fern, cedar, totem pole, and salai: on one level, these are the main ingredients of Emily Carr’s paintings. Yet her “beloved land” is not only coastal ...

Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936

Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936

Virtual Tribal Voices: Native American Literary Resources on the Web

Virtual Tribal Voices: Native American Literary Resources on the Web

Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936

Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936

Transferring and Transforming Cultural Norms

In this essay, I describe moments in my mother's life and examine them as living narratives or "lifestories" and apply critical theory and analysis that has traditionally been reserved for written narratives. I argue that these moments are teaching tools that reinforce and sometimes challenge cultural norms and discuss how her living narratives were revised by me as I began to "tell" them to my own children. I apply performance narrative, fiction, and Native American literature theories to these narratives. I point out the cultural and generational differences in me and my mother, and discuss the influence of the different regions where we spent our childhoods. This essay is a comparative literary study of a multigenerational living text in process. (Literature, Critical Theory)

Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice by Kathleen M. Donovan

Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice by Kathleen M. Donovan

Discerning Connections, Revising the Master Narrative, and Interrogating Identity in Louis Owens's "The Sharpest Sight"

Non-Native and Native scholars of Native American literature, many of the latter themselves contributors to the growing body of that literature, have consistently recognized the importance of stories and storytelling. For instance, James Ruppert takes one of Leslie Marmon Silko's comments on the power of storytelling to bring people together across time, space, and cultures as epigraph and point of departure for his introduction to Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction.' Anishinaabe writer and scholar Kimberly Blaeser opens Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition by stressing the importance of stories and storytelling to Vizenor and his people.2 Vizenor himself begins The People Named the Chippewa by recounting a storytelling session in which are told Anishinaabe stories of the trickster Naanabozho and the first earth's creation.' This gambit, shifting the frame and offering an alternative way of seeing, is part of his longstanding effort to educate his audience about Native peoples and their inventions by the dominant society. The recognition and emphasis in their works indicate that Vizenor, his contemporary Native American writers, and many of their predecessors know and have known that telling stories both orally and with and in writing can be an extremely powerful instrument with which to counteract the hegemonic, self-serving impulses of the dominant society.

Indian nation: Native American literature and nineteenth-century nationalisms

Indian nation: Native American literature and nineteenth-century nationalisms

The Way to Confusion

A workshop on Native American literature challenges a teacihe ers beliefs and practices. n October some years ago the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carried an article entitled 'Spiritual Ceremonies Divide School (Oct. 31, 1995, A5). Originally written by Mark Shaffer of The Arizona Republic, this article recounted a troublesome series of events that began when a junior at a high school northeast of Phoenix brought the cremated remains of her mother to an English class to show her friend. After the box was opened by mistake, some of the ashes fell on the floor, and this led to a panic and a student boycott. Of the school's 800 students more than

The Way to Confusion

Describes the creation and teaching of a high school elective course on American Indian literature, and discusses how a workshop on Native American literature challenged the teacher’s beliefs and practices. Concludes that it is important to address the limitations non-Native readers bring to this literature but that those limitations need not confine what students choose to read.

Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender, and the Representation of Native American Literary Traditions, 1789-1936.

A radical new reading of the subject which analyses how responses to the existence of Native American traditions have shaped ideas of American identity and literature.

Traditional Techniques in Classical Hebrew Verse

Before, during and after the preparation of Classical Hebrew Poetry: A Guide to its Techniques, Wilfred Watson published several articles on Hebrew poetry in a wide range of periodicals. The present volume collects together the most significant of these writings, including a chapter from a book on chiasmus, as well as a few unpublished items. After an opening survey of current work on Hebrew verse the articles cover the following topics: parallelism (including half-line parallelism, previously almost unnoticed), antithesis, word pairs, chiasmus, figurative language and introductions to speech in verse. The last section deals with structural devices and a folktale motif in narrative verse, hyperbole, apostrophe and alliteration. Previously unpublished items are on the contribution of ethnopoetics, from the study of Native American literature to Hebrew narrative verse (a new topic in biblical studies), parallelism in the Song of Songs and a metaphor in Jeremiah. This anthology is intended as a companion volume to Classical Hebrew Poetry. It includes additions and corrections to that book and there are also several indices.

Telling about Bear in N. Scott Momaday's "The Ancient Child"

In oral literary traditions across the Northern Hemisphere, the bear, like no other animal, has worked as an intermediary between humans and animals for many thousands of years. Across geographical, social, and racial boundaries, and across time and space, the bear as a literary device has mediated between humans and animals and the above and below worlds of life and death, as well as between individuals and groups of humans. Using such a literary device, storytellers have told about the bear to help work through the tensions of female and male forces, both natural and social. Throughout Native American and Old European traditional oral literatures, the bear has borne such metas phorical possibilities for human-animal relations and transformations through the storytelling process. N. Scott Momaday, long recognized for his juxtaposition of Native American and European traditional oral literatures throughout o N his work, retells the Kiowa story of Tsoai, the boy who turned into a bear, in The Ancient Child.1 Momaday not only structures his novel . 149 around this Kiowa myth, but to a significant degree he also weaves northern Plains and Athapaskan elements of Bear Boy or Bear Woman motifs into his characterization of the two protagonists: the painter, Set, and the young Kiowa medicine woman, Grey. In addition to using bear elements recognizable from these Native American oral traditions, Momaday also carefully synthesizes references from Old European traditional oral literatures to depict bears throughout the novel.

Nightland by Louis Owens

Reviews 87 has a hyphenated identity that sets him or her apart from the rest of Americans: hence the title from a childhood joke, “What are you— Chinese, Japanese, or American knees?” After being divorced from his wife, Raymond Ding, a forty-year-old Chinese American working as a college affirmative action officer, meets Aurora, half Japanese and half Irish, at a party where they are the only two Asian Americans. Although Aurora moves in with Raymond in San Francisco and works as a photographer for a newspaper, their relationship lasts only two years because of Raymond’s insistence upon being 100 per­ cent Asian. In writing the novel, Wong dutifully bears the burden of rehabilitating the Chinese American image. But unlike other writers with heavy politi­ cal agendas, Wong is actually playful and at ease; in contrast, he was in his first novel, Homebase, a bit too intent on “correctly” representing early Chinese immigration history. Raymond is sufficiently human: sensi­ tive, whimsical, sardonic, sexually creative, and pathetically foolish. And as the narrative viewpoint swings back and forth between Raymond and Aurora, readers gain valuable psychological insights into the characters. Wong has shown other ethnic writers how to write politically sound fiction without losing the mainstream audience. SEIWOONG OH Rider University Nightland. By Louis Owens. (New York: Dutton, 1996. 217 pages, $22.00.) Louis Owens’s Nightland is a ghost story, a mystery, and a grail myth all tied into one small book. As with his previous novel, Sharpest Sight, Owens presents a ghost endangered by the “Anglo” blindness of his Native American protagonists. Unlike Sharpest Sight, however, in Nightland the very quality of the land is similarly endangered. In keeping with the tradition of grail myths, this has a wounded Fisher King, and a grail, and a powerful expectation for a ceremonial statement that can save the land from its Wasted condition. Traditionally, the Fisher King has been wounded in the groin, lan­ guishing unto death while waiting for the Grail Knight to ask the proper question. In Nightland the Fisher King is impaled on abroken juniper, and his ghost languishes, threatened with eternal death if the Grail Knights fail to meet his need: “He couldn’t shake the feeling that the dead man had known he was there and wanted something from him.” The grail in 88 Western American Literature this story is a golden grail (money) of British tradition. The British grail, however, is unholy—implying that the Holy Grail of the Anglos is wrong for Native Americans. And so begins the profound irony of this book: the question Owens presents (“Whom does this serve?”) and the manner in which he answers it. Readers of Nightland will find far more wealth than just an enjoyable story. Owens thoroughly understands the history of Native American lit­ erature—a history that consistently asks the question, “Is there a place for Native American tradition in contemporary America?” In the past, answers to this question have tended to be accidental, implicit in the evo­ lution of Native American literature; Owens seems to make it the focus of his novel (his grail question). A Native American literature class would be incomplete without the likes of McNickle, Momaday, Vizenor, Silko, Erdrich, and Welch. It seems to me that a complete Native American literature class will also contain two of Owens’s most recent books: Other Destinies (his scholar­ ly essays) and either Sharpest Sight or Nightland. My choice is all three. DAVID E. HAILEY, JR. Utah State University The Journal of Antonio Montoya. By Rick Collignon. (Denver: MacMurray & Beck, 1996. 217 pages, $17.00.) In this short novel of northern New Mexico, struggling artist Ramona Montoya returns to her girlhood village of Guadalupe after her grandfa­ ther dies and leaves her the family adobe home. In the next dozen or so years Ramona captures Guadalupe in her paintings; yet she irritates the townspeople by refusing to be social—that is, make small talk at Felix’s Cafe and attend her fair share of the town’s seemingly countless funerals. Ramona’s self-imposed isolation abruptly ends with the death of her younger brother José and his wife Loretta in a car wreck. After the...

Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, xiv + 158 pages, $45.00 (cloth), $12.95 (paper).Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a Crow Creek Sioux Tribal member and Professor Emeritus of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University, is well-known in academic and Native American circles as a forthright literary critic and proactive political commentator. Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner is an anthology of her more provocative and insightful critical essays from past three decades.Cook-Lynn's essays address a range of Native American Studies concerns -- from Indigenous philosophies, historical and contemporary realities, to literature, theory, criticism and appropriation. In addition to challenging Western paradigms and constructs of Native American experiences, she challenges Indigenous scholars to push beyond existing academic confines. Native American Studies reaches its 30th anniversary in 1998, and Cook-Lynn's work provides an overview of criticisms, pitfalls and challenges facing it. Most importantly, she forcefully distinguishes Native American Studies from conventional disciplines by reminding us why it emerged 29 years ago -- why our subjects, objectives, methods and theoretical developments make us different.One essential and distinct element in Native American Studies derived from Indigenous intellectual knowledge is the reality of race memory connection to land (p. 82). Since relationship between Indigenous peoples and land is inherently spiritual, it is imperative that Native American scholars maintain spiritual and ideological groundings in their own intellectual traditions. Further, since Indigenous intellectual traditions inform discourse, Native American scholars are most valuable and inspirational when proactively engaged in partisan struggles (p. 39).These essential criteria, often called grass-roots intellectualism, are evident in each essay. Cook-Lynn intimately places herself in her texts and grounds her work in best of both worlds -- her tribal tiospaye and her transdisciplinary academic background which is predominantly informed by postcolonial critical thinking of Said, Deloria Jr., Medicine, D'Souza, Momaday, Otriz and others. Politics also informs core of her work, a point criticized by mainstream scholars who perceive it as a lack of objectivity. Native American scholars agree that Eurocentric standards of objectivity serve as rationales which often undermine, minimize and negate our scholarship.Cook-Lynn's field is Native American literatures and she challenges Native American writers to engage their own and each others' work more critically. …

Why No Iroquois Fiction?

S ince the 1960s, many Native American writers have been publishing wonderful poems and prose narratives, among other things finally proving vain the earliest white settlers' darkest hopes. The Natives have stood their ground. Looking out from their reservation borders, their vision is clearing. Cautiously we coin the term Native American literature to characterize their output. Consider novels such as Love Medicine by the North Dakota Chippewa Louise Erdrich, Ceremony by the New Mexico Laguna Leslie Marmon Silko, Fools Crow by the Montana Blackfoot James Welch. Compare them to memoirs such as The Way to Rainy 3 Mountain by the New Mexico Kiowa N. Scott Momaday, The Business of Fancy Dancing by the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene Sherman Alexie, and : Black Eagle Child by the Iowa Mesquakie Ray Youngbear. Together these < works no more constitute a uniform Native American literature than o these words a Polish American sentence. Together with writers lesser known, these writers write variously well in various literary forms5 205 almost always influenced by very different earlier, usually oral Native storytelling traditions. To categorize the variety of their productions for academic agendas (like conference papers, journal articles, and course syllabi) necessarily overlooks the nuance of point of view that readers read individual literary works to savor. Yet comparative readings draw out underlying features of this writing as transparent overlays placed upon a topographical map.

Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie

Reviews 181 knowthat “conquesthadbeenthewayoftheworld,notsimplyoftheWest”andthatthe weaker has always lost “to some interloper who came with greater strength, a more unyieldinghunger,”sotheydiginanddetermine tobethe strongest inorderto seetheir dreams become reality. The Pumpkin Rollers isnot simplyanother storybemoaningthe loss ofthepastbut one that understands that the same pioneer spirit that drove the settlers still drives man today, that it is not the open trail or the wide, starry sky that sets on fire a man’s spirit but the possibility of dreaming a dream and making it a reality. Kelton has written yet another true Western about Texas, about history, and aboutpeople he knows from long studyandpersonal acquaintance. The manwhowontheWesternHeritageAwardforthe best novel in 1987has done it again. R. L. STRENG International Christian School San Jose, Costa Rica Indian Killer. ByShermanAlexie. (NewYork:AtlanticMonthlyPress, 1996. 432pages, $22.00.) DidShermanAlexie writethisnovel?Readers familiarwithhisprevious workmay well wonder. Where are theoutbursts ofwildly imaginative writing, the humor, andthe wholly original way ofdealing withthe ironies ofcontemporaryreservation life? Set in Seattle, Indian Killer recalls Almanac of the Dead, the novel in which Leslie Marmon SilkomovedawayfromLagunaPueblotowriteabouttheconditionsthatengenderclass conflictinthecityofTucson. Butwhereas Silkoviewedthecityas agatheringplacefor sordid and corrupt opportunists who degrade the land and the human spirit, Alexie is concernedless with deploringvice andeconomic injusticethanwithexploring the poli­ tics ofpersonal identity within anurban setting. TherearethoselikethetribelessJohnSmith, adoptedatbirthbywhiteparents, who driftnumblythroughlifewithoutknowingwhotheyare.EquallyconfusedaretheIndian “wannabe’s,” like Dr. Mather, a white professor who claims to understand the realities of Indian life, yet teaches his course in NativeAmerican literature without including a singlebookbyanativewriteronhis syllabus. Mather’snemesis, MariePolatkin, acam­ pus activist for native causes andan advocate for thehomeless, has always felt alienat­ ed fromher tribe on thereservationbecause ofher desire for formal education, yet she upholdsthetribal ideal ofcommitmenttoothers. Shealoneinthenovel seems secure in who sheis. Alexie isasunkindto liberals like Mather ashe istobigots likeTruck Schultz, the arrogant radio host, who broadcasts his rants across the city. A killer is terrorizing Seattle, ritualistically scalping white people, and Schultz seems intent upon fueling the flames ofracial anxietythatthekillingshaveignited. Theantithesis ofMarie, Schultz is allego, andagoodexample, amongseveralinthenovel, ofapersonwhose“ideas”upon race thinly disguise anetwork ofpersonal insecurities andirrational fears. As befits a novel that is, at least on the surface, amurder mystery, Indian Killer is moretightlyplotted thanAlexie’searlierfiction. True,nosinglecharacterisdrawnwith much depth—each represents a certain idea about, or a different version of, identity—but Alexie constructs enough types to keep things interesting. Though fans 182 Western American Literature might long for something a bit more like Reservation Blues or The Lone Ranger and TontoFistfight inHeaven, why, intheend, criticize someoneforwantingtostretchhim­ selfartistically, especially whentheresults areas highlyreadable asthis novel is? PAULHADELLA Southern OregonState College The Summer ofBlack Widows. By Sherman Alexie. (Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 1996. 139pages, $13.50.) At present, at least two major dangers loom for non-Indian reviewers of Native Americanliterature: misunderstandingitbecauseofthereviewer’soutsidemess orover­ valuing it for politically safe reasons. Yet even with these potential pratfalls in view, Native American written literature, for the most part a creature only of the past thirty years, forms one of the richest literatures of twentieth-century America. Much of its power no doubt is paradoxically a positive outgrowth of the tragic reality comprising Native American history over the last five centuries. Along with Momaday, Erdrich, Welch, Silko, Owens, Hogan, Vizenor, and the like, the young, prolific Spokane/Coeur d’Alene ShermanAlexie—whose previous short stories, poems, and novels have made him one of the most significant Native American literary voices—has continued his quest to turn that painful history into art. This volume of poetry and his novel Indian Killer arecurrentlyjoint subjects ofa double booktour. As suggested by the spider in the book’s title, themes frequently visited byNative American writers run through these poems. These themes range from death, survival, and the search for identity to reservation life (including much ado about basketball), leaving for thecity (oftenbut not always to return), Wovokaand the Ghost Dance, and so on.Alexie’suse ofIndian humor is one ofthebook’smost noticeable strengths, and the sarcastic “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel” is probably the most enjoyable if not the best of the poems here focusing on what we might call “at-large Indianconcerns.”Yetthisbook,likeAlexie’sotherwork,revealsmorethanjusttheinter­ connectedness ofthevarious Indiantribes intheUnitedStates; italsoincludeselements unique to tribes ofthe Pacific Northwest, such as the centrality of salmon to their cul­ ture(“ThePlaceWhereGhostsofSalmonJump...

Mourning Dove and Mixed Blood: Cultural and Historical Pressures on Aesthetic Choice and Authorial Identity

Mourning Dove is the pen name of Christine Quintasket, one of the foremothers of contemporary Native American women novelists. Her only novel to reach publication was western romance entitled Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, published in 1927, fifteen years after she began writing it. In Cogewea, Mourning Dove created some of the earliest heroic half-blood characters of Native American literature, anticipating by fifty years the recuperative theme of Leslie Silko's Ceremony (1977) and Paula Gunn Allen's Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). Mourning Dove's choice to identify herself and her fictional heroine, Cogewea McDonald, as half-blood raises interesting questions about her cultural and historical context. Why would (possibly) full-blooded Salishan woman center her first novel around the struggles of mixed-blood characters? And what might have induced her to create family tree for herself incorporating European and Native ancestry and to claim, as she does in her preface to Coyote Stories (1933), that her paternal grandfather was a hardy, adventurous Celt? These choices of mixed-blood identity are vital aspects of Mourning Dove's project in Cogewea, the Half-Blood: the creation of imaginative space in which to represent the reality of mixed-blood people, and concurrent creation of cross-cultural genre, complete with its own halfblood aesthetic. And, as critics have argued, while identity and authorship are complex aesthetic and personal issues for women writers outside the AngloAmerican mainstream, I want to suggest that some of the answers to questions about Mourning Dove's choices lie in her location in time and space the late nineteenth and early twentieth century near the western border between the United States and Canada. Contemporary Native author and critic Louis Owens (Choctaw-CherokeeIrish) is among those whose work engages the double perspective of Native authors who produce literary texts in European media and genres but who also draw on the traditions and contemporary realities of Native cultures. Owens writes of the meaning of mixed blood in Silko's Ceremony:

Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature by Tey Diana Rebolledo

406 Western American Literature of an index necessitate hunting for specific items. This compilation is best suited for readers intending to read through it page by page and perhaps tab sections of special interest to themselves. A brief Preface explains that the selected novelists have been chosen because they “came to prominence in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s.” Each listing is preceded by a short, useful account of the author’s literary importance, major points of critical attention, and several plausible topics for further research. Although no bibliography is ever complete, Kich has scoured the territory well for germane writings, including stray items as well as the more important primary and secondary works. Readers of Clark, Davis, Fisher, et al., will find Western American Novelists valu­ able—expensive but informative and clear. Future volumes with additional authors of the period are promised. SANFORD E. MAROVITZ Kent State University Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. By Tey Diana Rebolledo. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995. 250 pages, $35.00/$16.95.) This work is presented as the first book-length analysis of the Chicana literary tradition, and Rebolledo has done an admirable job of covering an immense amount of previously uncharted territory. As she points out in her introduction, “not a single article on Chicana literature by a Chicana critic has been published in . . . PMLA, Critical Inquiry, or other mainstream journals.” Women Singing is not an in-depth, critical examination nor a deeply theoret­ ical work, but it does place Chicana writers and theorists within a living sociohistorical and cultural context. Rebolledo begins with a look at some of the earliest MexicanAmerican women whose stories were collected as oral histories, cuentos, and estorias, linking them to the later, more well-known works of Nina Otrero-Warren, Cleofas Jaramillo, and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, among the first Chicanas to be published in English. Chapters three and four are devoted to detailed examina­ tions of the ways in which Chicanas have claimed and altered liter­ Reviews 407 ary myths and archetypes, from the Aztec goddess Coatlicue to La Llorona and the figure of the curandera/bruja. Rebolledo includes extensive discussion of the work of other Chicana critics like Maria Herrera-Sobek, Alvina Quintana, and Gloria Anzaldua, as well as some examination of male theorists. One of the most interesting ideas Rebolledo tackles is how Chicana literature fits within the postmodern. That many texts pro­ duced by Chicanas contain multiple voices and shifting subjectivi­ ties, she says, implicates them as typically postmodern. However, Rebolledo rejects the idea of “the death or absence of the speaking subject.” Chicana writers are actively and deliberately articulating their identities, they simply do so in a manner unlike that of their white or male counterparts. Her discussion of postmodernity follows closely a fascinating examination of the role of recipes and the claiming of authorial power. From Cleofas Jaramillo’s indignant 1939 response to inaccu­ rate portrayals of New Mexican recipes to Laura Esquivel’s best­ selling Like Water for Chocolate, Rebolledo posits that Chicanas’ critical strategies are often formed around metaphors of cooking, an act which she describes as “cooking the texts” and one which forms a gendered line of authority stretching back to mothers, grandmoth­ ers, and great-grandmothers. SARA L. SPURGEON University of Arizona Dictionary of Native American Literature. Edited by Andrew Wiget. (New York: Garland, 1994. 598 pages, $95.00.) This handsome volume is an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, and general readers of Native American literature. The book consists of a brief introduction and three sections—oral litera­ tures, the historical emergence of American Indian writing, and the Native American Renaissance from 1967 on. The sections begin with critical overviews (by Andrew Wiget, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, and Joseph Bruchac) that help orient readers to the discus­ sions of genres, archetypes, and individual writers that follow. The work of fifty-two scholars in over seventy essays is represented in a ...

Dictionary of Native American Literature ed. by Andrew Wiget

Dictionary of Native American Literature ed. by Andrew Wiget