Native Writers Research Articles

In the Land of Giants: Eco-Mythology and Islamic Authority in the Post-Soviet Tatar Imagination

At the turn of the twenty-first century, giants occupied the imagination of occultists, neopagans, and nationalist writers. This article explores why those mythical colossi, a product of the pre-modern imagination, folklore, and childhood fantasy are still relevant to modern Tatars. More specifically, it centers on Fäüziyä Bäyrämova, whose fiction stands prominently in environmental public-school curricula. This inquiry provides a literary genealogy of Tatar eco-mythology, while nuancing the previous assumption in literary studies that in its evolution, the gigantic has moved away from enchantment to secularization. Unlike medieval Anglo-Saxon giants who embodied the sins of humanity or represented the uncivilized “other,” Soviet giants were builders and guardians of Tatars’ Islamic sacred geography, threatened by urbanization and secularization. In Bäyrämova's reinterpretation, they reappear not only as guardians of a nationalist cartography, but also as transmitters of Islamic reform and orthopraxy. In both Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, giants emerge as conduits of religious authority.

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Essays on American Indian and Mormon History

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the most successful religions to have emerged from the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s. Today it boasts a membership of over 16 million worldwide and an estimated net worth of several billion dollars. Its foundational text, the Book of Mormon, purports to be a story of the peoples of the America prior to European colonization. These peoples supposedly descended from refugees from Jerusalem who came to be divided into Nephites and Lamanites, the latter of whom bested the former and came to populate the Americas.Although Joseph Smith Jr. founded the LDS church in New York state, under his successor Brigham Young, it came to dominate Utah and the Intermountain West as part of the conceit of Manifest Destiny. The Mormon takeover of the territory of the Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Navajo was as racist and ruthless as other invasions, even as it was also fraught with efforts at peace and reconciliation.This collection of essays came out of a seminar hosted by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University in 2015. Participants “sought to make American Indians the subjects rather than the objects of discussions in relationships with Mormons.” The resulting anthology includes “personal testimonies” such as Michalyn Steele's “Sovereignty and the Corn Soup Social,” in which she describes a peaceful embrace of both Seneca and Mormon culture. It also includes case studies of “Mormonism and the Catawba Indian Nation” and “A History of the LDS Northern Indian Mission, 1964–1973.”One of the most poignant essays is “When Wakara Wrote Back” by Max Perry Mueller. Walkara was the powerful Timpanogos Ute chief and slave trader who was able to stall but not prevent Mormon takeover of the land and resources his people held. In the world that would soon overpower his, words on the page mattered more than words in the air. Walkara, who spoke several languages, came to understand this, and so he “wrote” a letter to Brigham Young: a letter of looping lines that cannot be read literally but that can be read as an attempt to “repeal a violent army of colonizers” (the Mormons) who were bent on destroying the Ute way of life.One of the most provocative essays is “The Book of Mormon as Mormon Settler Colonialism,” in which Elise Boxer denounces the LDS church as a “colonizing enterprise” and the Book of Mormon as “a powerful tool to subjugate Indigenous Peoples.” By promoting the Book of Mormon as the history of the original inhabitants of the Americas, Boxer argues, the church obliterates any Indigenous histories; by privileging Mormon settler stories, the church erases any Indigenous claims to land.In “Reclamation, Redemption, and Political Maneuvering,” Erika Bsumek interrogates the Mormon beliefs of Senator Arthur Watkins and the lawyer Ernest Wilkinson in their push for the federal termination program of the 1950s, which left several tribes stranded and at the mercy of rapacious bankers and developers. On the other hand, Farina Noelani King uncovers a tangled web of cooperation and confrontation as Hawaiian missionaries worked in Navajo country in the 1960s and 1970s. Some returned to settle there, sharing beliefs in the beauty of harmony, “Aloha in Diné Bikéyah.”In efforts to decolonize Mormonism, Thomas W. Murphy offers “Other Scriptures,” suggesting a parallel between Joseph Smith, a “seer from a colonializing society,” and Handsome Lake, a Seneca seer who created the Code, in which he attempted to simplify the spiritual practices of the Iroquois. Lori Blaine Taylor, in “Joseph Smith in Iroquois Country,” refutes the idea of a collaboration between Smith and Handsome Lake as “wishful thinking.” However, Michael B. Taylor's “In the Literature of the Lamanites,” is an invitation to consider Native writers who depicted Latter-day Saints as a way to “create more bilaterally respectful and beneficial future relationships.”How has the LDS church reframed relationships with Native Americans? The Indian Student Placement Program, ably described by Megan Stanton, has been dismantled, as has the American Indian Studies Program at BYU, which R. Warren Metcalf writes about. The LDS church is ending its ethnocentric dramas, such as the Hill Cumorah Pageant, which had been performed annually in Palmyra, New York, since 1937. And the church nowadays explains the Book of Mormon as a spiritual guide not necessarily as a literal history of American Indians.Hafen and Rensink's volume could serve as a guide for further decolonization of the LDS church. It is thick with documentation: there are seventy-three pages of endnotes. The authors are earnest and skilled in their efforts to explore the intertwined histories and experiences of Mormons and Native Americans. This is an anthology that should be widely read.

Dobrilo Nenadić i jezičko zavičajno nasleđe - lingvistički i obrazovni kontekst (na primeru romana Vreme kokoški)

The paper discusses the linguistic, stylistic and educational potential of the novel Vreme kokoški (2013) by Dobrilo Nenadić, part of whose oeuvre can be used to introduce native literature. The problem of student familiarization with the cultural heritage of the immediate community opens up, in order to build awareness of the values of one's own culture along with European values in education. The goal is to shed light on the peculiarities of the novel Vreme kokoški from a linguo-stylistic perspective, as well as to examine the possibilities of utilizing this novel in high school education to encourage students to become familiar with their native heritage. A qualitative research analysis was conducted using the technique of content analysis 1) on the corpus of scientific literature dealing with the works of Dobrilo Nenadić, as well as (2) on the corpus of one of the writer's works. This analysis showed that the application of native narrative prose in high school classes and extracurricular activities will enable: (1) students to become familiar with the idiolect of the native writer; (2) teachers to design student activities for researching native language heritage using a specific text. It is concluded that Nenadić's novel Vreme kokoški (2013), thanks to its linguistic and stylistic features and educational values, represents a stimulating work for secondary school teaching, especially for various extracurricular activities in the Serbian language.

Elemental Air in French Poetry and American Nature Writing

This article discusses elemental air in twentieth-century French poetry and American nature writing, focusing on a comparison of human breathing to wind. Beginning with an overview of Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximines, it examines select French poets’ expressions about wind. It turns to American nature writers' extensive experiences in the air outdoors. It looks at wind in the desert, prairie, forest, and Alaskan Sierra. Gaston Bachelard’s observations of air in motion serve as a segue to a discussion of elemental phenomenology. Building on the written expressions and experiences of French poets and American nature writers, the section on elemental phenomenology presents the importance of elemental air in philosophy but also in how one feels the many faces of wind and lives with and enjoys it.

Utah History Textbooks and Utah History

Utah History Textbooks and Utah History

Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger

Reviewed by: Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West by Blake Allmendinger Christine Bold Blake Allmendinger, Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 215 pp. Hardcover, $55; e-book, $55. The more stories of settlers going west to transform their identities emerge, the clearer the link between acts of “personal reinvention” (10) and the systemic dispossession of Indigenous lands becomes. This is not exactly the thesis of Blake Allmendinger’s Geographic Personas, but it is, to my mind, the volume’s most consequential implication. [End Page 430] Allmendinger brings together nine stories of self-transforming performance from the mid-nineteenth- to the early twentieth-century US West. Among the transnational array of figures some are familiar (Willa Cather, German author Karl May, mixed-race actor Sylvester Long / Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, French-Canadian cowboy artist and writer Will James / Joseph Dufault), some less so (con man James Addison Reavis, Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, Polish actor Helena Modjeska), and some surprising to find in this company (geologist and nature writer Clarence King, dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan). What this diverse group has in common is their reworkings of identity in western lands and social spaces. Allmendinger closely reads their stories for traces of performance, in his subjects’ maps, archival documents, autobiographies, fiction, visual art, theatrical style, and social relationships. Some stories bear directly on the land. Clarence King led the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, mapping boundary lines onto western lands that dispossessed and erased Indigenous peoples; back east he secretly straddled the color line, living as a member of an exclusive New York white men’s club and as a light-skinned Black man residing with his African American family in a segregated area of the city. James Addison Reavis invented an aristocratic Spanish lineage for himself, undergirded by forged archives and masqueraded relationships, in order to claim one of the “floating” land grants issued by Spanish colonizers (12), in this case 18,6000 square miles in New Mexico and Arizona Territories. When Joseph Ernest Nephtali Dufault of Montreal, Quebec, made himself over into Will James, cowboy, artist, writer, and Hollywood stuntman, the transformation depended both on his fictional autobiography and his larger rewriting of “the West into a fictional space bearing little resemblance to the settled territory” (51). Other stories carry different relationships to power, and the stakes in their impersonations seem quite different. Sylvester Long carried a complex lineage of Indigenous, Black, white, and Kainai (Blood) adoption; his self-identification as Buffalo Child Long Lance (naming himself first Cherokee then Blackfoot) and the fictions he performed on and off camera can be read as strategies [End Page 431] of survival, as he navigated the lines and fantasies laid down by dominant forces. Yone Noguchi arrived in California as “an educated member of the Japanese middle class” (97), but in pursuit of a career as poet and writer found himself navigating very different social structures. Employed first as hotel dishwasher, then as poet Joaquin Miller’s houseboy, he worked his way into patron-ship by members of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, for whom he performed identities crossing classes, sexualities, and Orientalist fantasies, including authoring The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1902). After his return to Japan, Noguchi reflected on his identity performance: “two people, the Oriental and the Occidental, on one pair of shoulders are too painful to carry about” (106). In 1876 actor Helena Modjeska fled her own multiple and fractured identities, as well as the oppression of Poland under partition, to found an agricultural commune in California. When the experiment failed, she went on the American stage as a “self-styled Polish countess” (112), a layering of identities novelized in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy (1926) and Susan Sontag’s In America (1999). Allmendinger starts in a familiar place, with Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis, rereading it as a parade of westward-moving actors changing costume as they encounter different landscapes. It’s a nice conceit and can work well—for example, when he parses the movement work of Isadora Duncan, the California-born “creator of modern American...

"A Word for Nature": A Reflection on a Contemplative Teacher-Training Course in the Desert

This paper reflects on an interdisciplinary, environmental, and contemplative course the authors taught at Kibbutzim College of Education in Tel Aviv. Entitled "I am in Nature," the course was co-taught by an ecologist and a literary scholar. It included a two-day base camping and hiking experience in the Negev Desert and three on-campus meetings. The students read Nature Writing and Ecopoetry, practiced guided mindfulness meditations in the field, and kept contemplative-writing journals. In this community voices piece, we offer an innovative pedagogy for higher education that centers on the integration of the learner’s mind, body, and heart through interdisciplinary, contemplative, and holistic approaches and ways of being.

한국의 캐나다 아동문학연구 현황과 전망

Canadian children’s literature has established itself as Canada’s national literature in a relatively short period of about 170 years. While Canada establishing its national identity, national writer and literature represented by Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables was born. The process of birth and growth of Canadian children’s literature has been in line with such context of the nation. Understanding the history and current status of Canadian children’s literature requires a macroscopic view of geographical, human, and cultural factors that have shaped the present Canada. Then, what about Canadian children’s literature ‘reserch’ in Korea? What development has Canadian children’s literature research made in Korea? What is the current status? These questions come from the awareness that Canadian children’s literature is still an unfamiliar area in domestic English literature research, and that the research itself is insufficient in quantity and quality. Responding to the questions, this study examines the development and current status of Canadian children’s literature research in Korea, focusing on research papers published in domestic academic journals from 1991 to 2022. Both quantitative analysis of the papers and qualitative analysis of the contents and timely topics covered by the papers will be carried out together. As a conclusion, this study will diagnose the challenges and future prospects left by the current Canadian children’s literature research in Korea.

Linking Adverbials in Indonesian EFL Students’ Essays: A Corpus-Driven Study

Writing is the activity of arranging and organizing ideas that need some logical connectors to make the ideas cohesively structured. There are several plausible means for cohesiveness, including linking adverbials (LAs). This study examines the LA categories found in EFL students’ academic essays and explores how EL students use them. The data were collected from students’ essays compiled as a learner corpus, Learner Corpus of Academic Writing, comprising 52,404 words. The present study employed LancsBox as the corpus tool and The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays as the control corpus to assist the analysis. The study results show that all primary categories of LAs are found in the corpus. However, the subcategory transition to another topic is absent from the corpus. In the frequency of use, causal resultative LAs outnumber all other categories, followed by additive and adversative LAs. As for the least frequent LAs, the study identified sequential types. In comparison to the native writer corpus, it is found that there are shared similarities, including the categories and the subcategories of LAs found in both corpora. Regarding the frequency of use, the most frequent types are relatively similar with different positions, namely causal resultative and additive LAs, while the least frequent type is sequential. These results suggest more considerations in designing writing materials, especially in regard to transition markers belonging to the sequential category.

Native and Non-native Speakers’ Reaction to Errors Flagged by Grammarly: Evidence from Screen Capture

The now ubiquitous use of advanced Web 2.0 tools in writing and the emergence of automated error flagging applications with affordances far beyond Word Processing requires some attention from both L2 researchers and L2 tutors, especially when both native (skilled) writers and non-native (less skilled) writers have, reportedly, started to use various commercial and freemium technological tools that claim to provide automated written corrective feedback. In fact, little is known about tracking writers’ editing behaviour when automated error flagging is in place and whether such behaviour would vary between native and non-native writers. Using a pre-post activity interview, an IELTS writing task 2 and screen capture software, the current case study compared the editing behaviours of native and non-native speakers of English when Grammarly was used. Major results revealed that native speakers had overall more flagged errors than non-native speakers did, but the latter group had more grammar errors flagged. However, the two groups followed a similar pattern in reacting to the flagged errors. Both native and non-native writers accepted suggestions from Grammarly. The study also suggests that evidence is needed with regard to teachers’ roles in and learners’ uptake from error flagging applications.

Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

Communicating Felt Knowledge to Decolonize #MeToo: A Native Feminist Approach to the Sherman Alexie Allegations

In February 2018, several women leveled allegations of sexual misconduct against Sherman Alexie, an author known for championing Native causes, challenging racism, and serving as a mentor for Native writers. Through a textual analysis, this article examines how two essayists, Deborah A. Miranda and Tracy Rector, embrace a Native feminist approach in responding to the allegations. I argue that these texts complicate the dominant narrative of the #MeToo movement and Western ideas of justice through a rhetoric of felt knowledge, or the sharing of personal narratives in which the emotional content is shaped by the settler colonialist experience, that explores other ways of knowing.

Creation of Literary Associations of Writers of Chuvashia in the 1920s-1930s.

The article examines the process of the origin and development of literary associations of writers of Chuvashia in the period of the 1920s-1930s. The object of research is the literary associations of writers of Chuvashia in the period under consideration. The subject of the study is the formation of creative literary associations of Chuvash writers in the 1920s-1930s. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study was made up of comparative historical, logical methods, as well as a chronological approach. Their application made it possible to reveal the literary and unifying processes in the development and in the context of phenomena occurring both in the whole country and in individual regions. The purpose of the article is to identify the features of the origin and development of literary associations of Chuvash writers as an emerging whole, including some structural elements. In modern Russia, in conditions of spiritual crisis, when interest in the literary works of national writers is declining, it is necessary to use the experience accumulated in the 1920s and 1930s. Over two decades, a galaxy of professional writers has formed in Chuvashia, largely due to the cultural and educational activities of literary associations. The scientific novelty lies in the identification of the specifics and conditions for the creation of literary associations in Chuvashia. Thus, we come to the conclusion that the peculiarities of the origin and development of literary associations of Chuvash writers acted as a becoming whole, which includes moments and stages of formation: 1) groups of Chuvash writers, 2) Chuvash journalism, 3) Chuvash literature with a variety of literary genres.

“Stories of Making and Unmaking”: Deep Time and the Anthropocene in New Nature Writing

New Nature Writing reflects many of the anxieties which are becoming increasingly prevalent in the Anthropocene, an era which necessitates temporal leaps between the present moment, the deep past, and the deep future. Coming to contextualize our impact on the planet in the Anthropocene era in such expansive, geological terms poses profound challenges to the ways we have conventionally framed our wider place on Earth. When viewed through the lens of deep time, our impact on the planet has been comparatively brief, but we are scarcely beginning to comprehend its lasting effects. While the scale of the environmental problems we have created often seems insurmountable, this chapter argues that writing which helps us to think about deep time and acclimatizes us to its vast scale can itself serve as a way for us to grapple with the immensity of the problems we face. Through a consideration of the writing of new nature writers Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie, it looks at how their engagements with deep time challenge the feelings of helplessness that the scale of the environmental crisis can sometimes burden us with. By arguing that coming to terms with the Anthropocene is to come to terms with a changing narrative we tell ourselves about our role on the planet, it considers how New Nature Writing is playing a crucial role in this narrative shift more specifically, as it explores different ways for us to reimagine our relationship with the more-than-human world in the Anthropocene era.

Wharton, Writing, and Nature

Abstract Although past critics of Wharton’s work have focused on the social world she depicts, Wharton also presents the natural world in her work, from poems she wrote as a teenager through her late writings. Using Thomas Lyon’s “Taxonomy of Nature Writing” (1989), this article looks at a range of Wharton’s work to argue that she is indeed a “nature writer.” Wharton’s work in Italian Villas and Their Gardens and A Motor-Flight Through France meditate on the relationship between landscape and human habitation, and her lifelong experiences of gardening in various climates deepened her ecological understanding of climatological differences. Wharton’s first published story “Mrs. Manstey’s View” argues for the importance of nature even in an urban setting, while also creating a character who is a phenologist (someone who studies seasonal cycles); much later in her career, her paired novels Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive not only demonstrate Wharton’s own skill as a nature writer, but also convey the importance of nature, both cosmic and local, as inspiration to the writer. Finally, the article suggests that Wharton’s attentiveness to nature may have made her a better writer; moreover, it asks readers to consider Wharton’s depictions of nature as they consider today’s ecological crisis.

Experimental Visions of Modern Morocco: Expertise, Popularization, and Everyday Technologies in the Work of ʿAbd al-Salam al-Diyuri

AbstractThis article examines the work and trajectory of ʿAbd al-Salam al-Diyuri, a Moroccan engineer educated in Egypt who became a nationalist writer, editor, and publisher during the last decade of the French Protectorate (1912–56). One of only a few Moroccan engineers trained in Arabic during this period, al-Diyuri developed a vision of modernization rooted in the popularization of technical knowledge that distinguished him from colonial engineers as well as nationalist elites. French experts exercised an epistemic dominance over the practice of engineering under the protectorate as well as after Morocco's independence. In this context, al-Diyuri's arguments traced the contours of an alternative future for the country—one that tied decolonization to the cultivation of technical competencies among the public at large. This article follows the path of a nationalist engineer and intellectual whose work both embodied and attempted to move beyond a contradiction between the democratization of knowledge and the demands of development.

A Corpus-Based Comparative Study on Syntactic Complexity in University Students’ EFL Writing in Southwestern China: A Case of Pu’er University

Syntactic complexity is the variety and sophistication degree of the syntactic structures conveyed in written production. The syntactic complexity of general Chinese university students’ EFL writing has been studied previously, but the performance of university students in educationally underdeveloped Southwestern China remains unclear. Taking Pu’er University as a case, this study collected 400 EFL compositions from 100 university students in Southwestern China and compared them with 200 writing samples from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays. Scores of 11 syntactic complexity indices were calculated using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer. The independent samples t-test was conducted to investigate whether and the extent to which the two groups differed on syntactic complexity indices. The results showed that university EFL students in Southwestern China produce a similar length of linguistic units when compared to native English writers. However, the amount of subordination in EFL writing is significantly less than that of native English writers. For the amount of coordination, the university EFL students produced a lower proportion of coordinate phrases than that of native writers, but the proportion of coordinate sentences is not significantly different between the two groups. Finally, for degree of phrasal sophistication, university EFL students in Southwestern China produce significantly fewer complex nominals than native writers do. The results imply that university students in Southwestern China should write more subordinated sentences and complex nominals, such as nominal clauses, infinitives, or gerunds, in their future EFL writing, instead of writing long sentences just heavily relying on simple coordination.

Broken English: What to Do with Wongar, the European Migrant Who Became an Aboriginal Writer

Streten Božić arrived in Australia in 1960 with a ‘European concept’ of the country, but his outlook was transformed by the experience of living with Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. In the 1970s, he began publishing as B. Wongar and until it was revealed otherwise in 1981, he was assumed to be Indigenous. While his reputation suffered, Wongar remained committed to elucidating the ongoing colonisation of Aboriginal people. This article historicises Wongar’s work and its reception in the light of his own self-representation as a Serbian migrant uniquely positioned to sympathise with and comprehend Aboriginal Australia.

Life of Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk, or Black Hawk, An Autobiography

From its initial publication in 1833, Black Hawk's autobiography has challenged readers to confront dominant narratives of race and progress, justice and inequality, and US territorial acquisition and Native sovereignty. A Sauk war chief, Black Hawk related the annual cycles of his peoples’ lives from the 1780s in the modern border area of Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri, including their several relocations, aspects of their spirituality, society, and economy, their sometimes-violent relations with other Indian peoples as well as with British and Americans. Black Hawk credits the British with being more honest and trustworthy, particularly as the US perpetrated a fraudulent treaty in 1804 in which the Sauks and Foxes were supposed to have ceded much of their lands. While Black Hawk and his people had regular interaction with American traders over the years, the treaty fraud and intermittent violence led some Sauks to follow Black Hawk into siding with the British in the War of 1812 and later to fight the US again in the so-called Black Hawk War in the summer of 1832.Black Hawk's autobiography recounts the causes and course of the 1832 conflict as well as the subsequent tour of Eastern cities that he and his main Sauk advisors were compelled to take as prisoners at the insistence of President Andrew Jackson. As well explored by Michael Loraro, Black Hawk's message to white America was much more than an account of the eponymous war; it offered a broader criticism of the cultural and political context of the conflict and a vision for future peace and friendship. Black Hawk's autobiography both reflected and influenced Romantic literature and emerged as one of the most important and compelling works by a Native American in the nineteenth century, retaining a canonical place to the present day.Loraro's new engagement with Black Hawk's autobiography is a welcome update to Donald Jackson's 1955 edition from the University of Illinois Press. For those who may wonder whether they should upgrade their bookshelf with a new edition of Black Hawk's Life, I assure you that you should. Whereas Jackson's introduction and notes provided solid historical context from relevant primary sources, his book is obviously decades out of date regarding scholarship and includes some cringe-inducing verbiage. Loraro's update includes three main forms of editorial commentary. First, a brief introduction offers a sketch of Life's content, its implications for contemporary readers, and an overview of scholarly analyses. Second, Loraro includes a more developed version of this introduction as a distinct essay, “Resistance, Rebellion, Resignation, and Re-creation: Black Hawk's Life as Negotiation, Transition, and Testimony.” As suggested by the complicated title, the essay delves more thoroughly into literary analysis and modern scholarship, advancing several interesting observations and arguments, culminating in the idea that whereas Black Hawk failed militarily in 1832, he succeeded the following year in publishing a widely read and well-regarded Nativist criticism of American settler colonialism. Black Hawk influenced subsequent critics in the nineteenth century, and Native writers continue to reflect his ideas. Third, Loraro includes explanatory notes throughout Black Hawk's narrative, with clarifications, some primary sources, and references to recent historical and literary scholarship. Finally, Loraro adds to the Native voice element of Black Hawk's Life with inclusion of lines from Meskwaki (Sac and Fox) poet Ray A. Young Bear, “For You, a Handful of the Greatest Gift.”Loraro rightly points out that Black Hawk's Life continues to be considered and analyzed by new generations who bring their own interests and ideas to their reading of this foundational work. Loraro's edition reflects his own background as a literary scholar of frontier writings mostly east of the Mississippi River. He largely takes Black Hawk's authorship at face value with some limited consideration of his nineteenth century editor and mediator, J. B. Patterson. The third player in the production of Black Hawk's Life receives almost no attention, the interpreter Antoine LeClair, a culture broker of French and Indian descent, and the man who rendered Black Hawk's oral testimony and performance into written English. Perhaps a scholar will develop this crucial third element of the narrative's triangular production in a future edition Black Hawk's Life.