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A HIGHLY SELECTIVE WEBLIOGRAPHY on NATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES
U.S. Honors Contributions of American Indians, Alaska Natives From www.america.gov
(National American Indian Heritage Month is celebrated every November)
Washington - Each November, National American Indian Heritage Month pays tribute to the legacy of the American Indians and Alaska Natives – the first Americans - and celebrates their enduring contributions to the history and culture of the United States.
Today, there are nearly 5 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States, or 1.6 percent of the total population, and this is expected to jump to 8.6 million, or 2 percent of the population, by 2050.
Most American Indians live in metropolitan areas and not on the 227,000 square kilometers of land held in trust for reservations. The states with the highest percentage of American Indians and Alaska Natives are Alaska (18 percent of its population), Oklahoma (11 percent) and New Mexico (10 percent).
There are 564 federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States. The largest, by far, are the Cherokee and Navajo nations, according to the 2000 U.S. census.
Navajo is the most widely spoken American Indian language, and almost one-fourth of Navajos speak a language other than English at home - the highest percentage of all tribes. Unfortunately, only one-half of the300 or so native languages once spoken in North America still have any living speakers. )
A study by the public opinion research organization Public Agenda found that non-Indians have little knowledge of the active, vibrant culture of American Indians today. There was a consensus among both Indians and non-Indians in the study about the need for more education on American Indian history and culture.
The first U.S. state to set aside a day to recognize the importance of American Indians in the nation's history was New York, in 1916. National American Indian Heritage Month was first designated in 1990 under a joint congressional resolution approved by President George H.W. Bush.
Each year, the sitting president issues a proclamation as did President Obama this year.
THE CREATION OF AMERICAN INDIAN HERITAGE MONTH
The U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs provides some background on what has become an annual celebration of the culture and contributions of American Indians and Alaska Natives.
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What started at the turn of the century as an effort to gain a day of recognition for the significant contributions the first Americans made to the establishment and growth of the United States has resulted in a whole month being designated for that purpose.
One of the very early proponents of an American Indian Day was Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca Indian, who was the director of the Museum of Arts and Science in Rochester, New York. He persuaded the Boy Scouts of America to set aside a day for the "First Americans" and for three years they adopted such a day. In 1915, the annual Congress of the American Indian Association meeting in Lawrence, Kansas, formally approved a plan concerning American Indian Day. It directed its president, Reverend Sherman Coolidge, an Arapahoe, to call on the country to observe such a day. Coolidge issued a proclamation on September 28, 1915, which declared the second Saturday of each May as an American Indian Day and contained the first formal appeal for recognition of Indians as citizens.
The year before this proclamation was issued, Red Fox James, a Blackfoot Indian, rode horseback from state to state seeking approval for a day to honor Indians. On December 14, 1915, he presented the endorsements of 24 state governments at the White House. There is no record, however, of such a national day being proclaimed.
The first American Indian Day in a state was declared on the second Saturday in May 1916 by New York Governor Charles S. Whitman. Several states celebrate the fourth Friday in September. In Illinois, for example, legislators enacted such a day in 1919. Several states designated Columbus Day as Native American Day, but it continues to be a day observed without any recognition as a national legal holiday.
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November 1990 "National American Indian Heritage Month." Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994.
See the U.S. Census Bureau Web site for a fact sheet (http://www.census.gov/Press- Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/014346.html) on American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month
Additional data may be found here: http://factfinder.census.gov/home/aian/index.html
Both the U.S. Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/topics/nativeamericans/index.html ) and the National Park Service ( http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/feature/indian/ ) have Web pages devoted to American Indian Heritage Month.
The Library of Congress Veterans History Project includes a guide (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/search?query=race:American Indian and Alaskan Native ) to American Indian and Alaska Native military veterans and interviews with former Navajo "code talkers" Keith Little (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.28922/ ) and Merril Sandoval (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.14223/ ).
Also see the Web site of the Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs (http://www.bia.gov/ ).
The Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin lists numerous information resources (http://usa.usembassy.de/society-natives.htm ) on Native Americans.
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CENSUS INFORMATION AND FAST FACTS:
We the People: American Indians and Alaska Natives in the U.S. compiled by the U.S .CENSUS DEPARTMENT: http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS76068
Health Characteristics of the American Indian or Alaska Native Adult Population: United States, 2004- 2008. National Center for Health Statistics, U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services, March 9, 2010 (23 pages) http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr020.pdf
PORTAL GATEWAY AND DATABASE SITES:
Native American Resources: Sites for Online Research: (a September 2010 online article in College and Research Libraries News) http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/8/430.full
National Museum of the American Indian The National Museum of the American Indian is the first national museum dedicated to the preservation, study, and exhibition of the life, languages, of the American Indian: www.nmai.si.edu/
Bureau of Indian Affairs (U.S. Department of the Interior) (http://www.doi.gov/bia/) Established in 1824, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) provides services directly or through contracts or grants to about 1.7 million American Indians and Alaska Natives. There are 562 federally recognized American Indian tribes ( http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/E8-6968.htm ) in the United States (see PDF version ( http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/E8-6968.pdf )
BIA manages 66 million acres of land held in trust ( http://www.doi.gov/indiantrust.html ) for American Indian tribes and Alaska Natives. There are 562 federally recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Natives in the United States. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is responsible for the administration and management of 66 million acres of land held in trust by the United States) and provides education services to about 44,000 Indian students.
The BIA site offers links ( http://www.doi.gov/bia/links.html ) to many other agencies and organizations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs website is replete with useful information for those within the Native American community and those who might wish to learn more about such communities. A great overview of Native American land rights, tribal government, language, and the various Indian Bureaus can be found in the FAQs tab near the top of the page.
The interactive "Services Overview" section near the bottom of the homepage, allows you to discover more about the services provided by Indian Affairs. Some of the categories of services include "Federal Acknowledgement", "Genealogy", "Self-Determination", "Self-Governance", and "Real Estate". The "Knowledge Base" tab near the top of the page has a multitude of topics to choose from, including a "Tribal Directory" that lists the federally-recognized tribes in each state, and includes the link to appropriate websites. 4
Indigenous Peoples. eJournal , June 2009. This issue of eJournal “provides insight into Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. Articles provide historical background and look at issues surrounding their languages and culture, their legal status, and how they are networking around the world.” eJournal USA is a monthly electronic journal of the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Information Programs. http://photos.state.gov/libraries/amgov/30145/publications-english/EJ-indigenous-0609.pdf
The National Museum of the American Indian – NMAI: the 16th Smithsonian Institution museum -- which opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2004, is the first U.S. national museum dedicated solely to Native Americans. And we think teachers, scholars, librarians and researchers everywhere will be interested in the excellent collection search tool available on the museum's website. http://digbig.com/5bahyr
Native American Heritage Month: http://www.loc.gov/topics/nativeamericans/index.html (Includes Lesson Plans for Teachers and students, and resources from the Library of Congress and a variety of Museums.)
American Indians: The North American Indian Works: http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/szwedzicki/index.asp
Resources on Native American Law from the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/law/help/commemorative-observations/american-indian.php
National Indian Law Library, provided by the Native American Rights Fund. http://www.narf.org/nill/
Publications are available here: http://www.narf.org/pubs/index.html
Resources by Topic are available here: http://www.narf.org/nill/resources/rlinks.htm
Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy: http://nni.arizona.edu/index.php
Digital Collections on Native Americans: (Native American Heritage Month Collections) http://www.loc.gov/topics/nativeamericans/collections/
Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History: http://digital.libraries.ou.edu/whc/duke/ As one might expect, the University of Oklahoma has a tremendous amount of material related to the history of the American West. One particularly noteworthy collection in their holdings is the Duke Collection of American Indian Oral History. The digital version of this collection provides historians and others with access to hundreds of interview transcripts from the period 1967 to 1972. These interviews were conducted with Indians across Oklahoma regarding the cultures and histories of their different nations and tribes. Visitors can read these documents for insights into customs, social conditions, philosophies, and ceremonies.
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Native American Links through ALCOVE 9 from the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/alcove9/indians/indians.html
Indians of North America Bibliography, from the Library of Congress Reference Specialists. http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/indians_rec_links/overview.html Includes Digital Resources, Audiovisual Materials, and Free Webcasts for public viewing.
American Indian Policy Center (http://www.americanindianpolicycenter.org/aboutus.html ) Non-profit group focusing on research, policy development and education on critical issues in contemporary American Indian life.
American Indian Science & Engineering Society (http://www.aises.org/ ) AISES offers scholarships to qualified American Indian students majoring in the sciences, engineering or natural resources fields.
U.S. Embassy in Berlin ( http://usa.usembassy.de/society-natives.htm ) The embassy offers a Web page with extensive background material and teachers' resources on the American Indian population of the United States.
U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs ( http://indian.senate.gov/public/ ) The committee has jurisdiction to study the problems of American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Alaska Native peoples and to propose legislation to alleviate these difficulties.
Virtual Library - American Indians http://www.hanksville.org/NAresources/
Native American Resources http://www.cowboy.net/native/index.html
Native Tribes of the United States and Canada http://www.dickshovel.com/trbindex.html
Native Americans Nations http://www.nativeculturelinks.com/nations.html
Smithsonian Education: American Indian Heritage Teaching Resources: http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/resource_library/american_indian_resources.html
Native Culture Links (http://www.nativeculturelinks.com/indians.html ), compiled by Lisa Mitten, social sciences editor for CHOICE Magazine, a journal published by the American Library Association; American Indians:
Index of Native American Resources on the Internet (Native Wiki ( http://www.nativewiki.org/Main_Page ), a project of Native Web (http://www.nativeweb.org/ ).
LITERATURE: Native WIKI includes a section on Native American authors (http://www.nativewiki.org/Storytellers:_Native_American_Authors_Online ).
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Environmental Protection Agency: American Indian Tribe Portal (http://www.epa.gov/indian/ ) Coordinates EPA efforts to strengthen public health and environmental protection in Indian country, helping tribes administer their own environmental programs.
Indian Health Service (http://www.ihs.gov/PublicAffairs/Heritage/index.cfm ) A federal health program for American Indians and Alaska Natives.
IHS also has a Heritage Month (http://www.ihs.gov/PublicAffairs/Heritage/index.cfm ) Web page.
National Indian Law Library (http://www.loc.gov/law/help/guide/federal/indians.html )
Native Web: Law and Legal Issues (http://www.nativeweb.org/resources/law_legal_issues/ )
Library of Congress: Native American Heritage Month (http://www.loc.gov/topics/nativeamericans/index.html ) This Web portal, produced by the Library of Congress and several other institutions, links to exhibits, collections, images and other resource materials.
National Archives: Native American Records ( http://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/ ) Links to online records and listings of microfiche and other offline records
The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian - which opened in Washington, D.C., in 2004 - is committed to advancing knowledge and understanding of Native cultures of the Western Hemisphere. See NMAI's Heritage Month: http://www.nmai.si.edu/heritagemonth/index.html
Another Smithsonian Exhibit in Honor of Native American heritage Month:
IndiVisible – African Native American Lives in the Americas http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible/introduction.htmlIndiVisible – African Native American Lives in the Americas
National Park Service: National American Indian Heritage Month (http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/feature/indian/ )
Links to Web pages describing sites protected by the National Park Service and National Register of Historic Places, lesson plans and other publications. NPS has a Tribal Preservation Program (http://www.nps.gov/history/hps/tribal/ ) that assists Indian tribes in preserving their historic properties and cultural traditions.
Also see the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (NATHPO) (http://www.nathpo.org/mainpage.html ).
Native American Rights Fund (http://www.narf.org/ ) A nonprofit law firm dedicated to asserting and defending the rights of Indian tribes, organizations and individuals. 7
HISTORY, LAW AND ANTHROPOLOGY:
Smithsonian Museum: American Indian History and Culture http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/History_and_Culture/AmericanIndian_History.htm
American Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/index.htm
American Indian History and Related Issues http://e.experience.uces.csulb.edu/AmericanIndianStudies/HTML/TroyJohnson.html
Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture: Section on American Indians: http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/indians.html
National Indian Law Library (http://www.loc.gov/law/help/guide/federal/indians.html )
MUSEUMS AND VIRTUAL EXHIBITIONS:
National Museum of the American Indian The National Museum of the American Indian is the first national museum dedicated to the preservation, study, and exhibition of the life, languages of the American Indian. www.nmai.si.edu/
American Museum of Natural History Research Library: Digital Library of Major Research Studies: http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/6//browse-title
IndiVisible – African Native American Lives in the Americas http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/indivisible/introduction.htmlIndiVisible – African Native American Lives in the Americas
The North American Indian Works is a collection of 364 images and six texts hosted by the University of Cincinnati Libraries. Between 1929 and 1952 C. Szwedzicki, a publisher in Nice, France, produced six portfolios of North American Indian art. The publications were edited by American scholars Oscar Brousse Jacobson, Hartley Burr Alexander, and Kenneth Milton Chapman. Many of the images were published as pochoir prints, which are similar in appearance to silk-screen prints. These works represent original works by 20th-century American Indian artists Users must allow Java and pop-ups for this collection site. http://digitalprojects.libraries.uc.edu/szwedzicki/index.asp
Images of Native Americans http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/nativeamericans/
Digitized Native American History Collections from the Library Of Congress: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSome.php?category=Native%20American%20History
Edward Curtis Photographs of American Indians (Library of Congress collections) http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html 8
Newberry Library: A Virtual Exhibition of Lewis And Clark And Indian Country: Celebrating 200 Years of American History: Based on an exhibition originally mounted at the NEWBERRY LIBRARY: http://www.newberry.org/lewisandclark/
National Museum of the American Indian: http://americanindian.si.edu
California Museum of Photography. Stereotyping Native America http://138.23.124.165/exhibitions/stereotyping/default.lasso
Native American History Month: Resources at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/topics/nativeamericans/
After Columbus: Four Hundred Years of Native American Portraiture from the New York Public Library’s Digitized Collections: http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=history&collection=AfterColumbu sFourhun&col_id=182
LITERATURE: See Also Appendix One for a Bibliographic Essay on Native American Literary Studies
LITERATURE: Native WIKI includes a section on Native American authors (http://www.nativewiki.org/Storytellers:_Native_American_Authors_Online ).
Early Native American Literature: A Brief Outline Guide: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/native.htm
For additional resources on American Indian Literatures and Culture, see the link to Minority Studies in the award winning web site Voice of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu) http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=2721#id1891
Native American Authors: http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/
Native American Literature Web Resources: http://www.ability.org.uk/native_american_literature.html
STUDY AND RESEARCH: ORGANIZATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS:
Edsitement: Native American Heritage Month: November 2007 http://edsitement.neh.gov/monthly_feature.asp?id=133
National Congress of American Indians: www.ncai.org contains a Tribal Directory and Policy Issues.
Questions about Siouan and other Native American Languages: http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq.htm 9
National American Indian Data Center: http://www.asu.edu/lib/archives/labriola.htm
Native Americans Rights and Funds: the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) is the oldest and largest nonprofit law firm dedicated to asserting and defending the rights of Indian tribes, organizations and individuals nationwide. http://www.narf.org/
Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science: http://www.sacnas.org/
American Indian Library Association http://aila.library.sd.gov/
The American Indian Studies Research Institute http://www.indiana.edu/~aisri/index.shtml
Links to American Indian Studies: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill http://www.americanindianstudies.unc.edu/pages/links.html
Links to Native American Indian Study from the University of Massachusetts http://www.umass.edu/nativestudies/links.html
Information on American Indians: http://www.ovc.edu/missions/indians/
MEDIA:
Native American Public Telecommunications: http://www.nativetelecom.org/
Tribal College Journal-The Voice and the Vision of American Indian Higher Education http://www.tribalcollegejournal.org/
Native American News: http://www.nanews.org/index2.shtml
Indigenous People in the Media: http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/resources/
Native American Public Telecommunication There are organizations that create, distribute or advocate for Native programming, such as Native Public Media (), AIROS (http://www.airos.org/ ) (American Indian Radio on Satellite), Native Voice One ( http://www.nv1.org/ ), National Native News (http://www.nativenews.net/ ) and Reznet ( http://www.reznetnews.org/ ).
There are over 30 Native-owned noncommercial radio stations in the United States. Indian Country Today ( http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/ ), Native Youth Magazine ( http://www.nativeyouthmagazine.com/ ) and Indianz.com ( http://www.indianz.com/ ) are among the commercial Native media. The Native American Journalists Association (http://www.naja.com/ ) supports the development of Native media and communications. 10
The American Native Press Archives ( http://www.anpa.ualr.edu/ ) preserves the written words of Native peoples.
National Congress of the American Indian ( http://www.ncai.org/ ) NCAI informs the public and Congress on the governmental rights of American Indians and Alaska Natives. It has 250 member tribes and is the oldest and largest national Indian organization.
WIKIS:
NATIVE AMERICAN WIKI: http://www.nativewiki.org/Main_Page
VIDEOS: FREE VIDEOS FROM THE ANNEBERG FOUNDATION: ALL FREE, BUT, ONE MUST REGISTER FIRST. REGISTRATION IS FREE:
National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month began with the efforts of Dr. Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca Indian -- considered the first Native American archaeologist -- who argued vigorously for recognition of Native Americans and persuaded the Boy Scouts in the early 1900s to recognize a "First Americans" day.
F. Red Fox James of the Blackfoot Nation was also instrumental through his campaign in 1914, traveling around the country on horseback to gain the support of state governors for the idea of a national observance. In 1915, the Congress of the American Indian Association put together a plan to establish American Indian Day on the second Saturday of May. The first official state observance was in New York in May of 1916.
Other states followed. However, it wasn't until 1990 that a national observance was formally recognized. President George H.W. Bush proclaimed November of 1990 "National American Indian Heritage Month."
Indian tribes in North America: Our Collapse interactive
America's History in the Making
Bridging World History http://www.learner.org/courses/worldhistory/ examines various aspects of ancient civilizations of the Americas.
"New World Encounters" http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog01/>, the first unit of A Biography of America, presents a historian's view of civilizations of the Americas and the deleterious effects of Spanish conquest on Native people.
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American Passages: A Literary Survey
Teaching Multicultural Literature: A Workshop for the Middle Grades
The Expanding Canon: Teaching Multicultural Literature in High School
At the end of Literary Visions
Art Through Time: A Global View http://www.learner.org/resources/series211.html program 4, "Ceremony and Society," includes a segment about a soul recovery ceremony site, presented by CHiXapkaid, Dr. Michael Pavel, Associate Professor at Washington State University, and two other Traditional Bearers of the Skokomish Indian Reservation. Program 10, "The Natural World," spotlights the work of Native American artist and educator Kay Walkingstick.
"Pre-Columbian America," "Mapping Initial Encounters," and "Colonial Designs," The first three units of America's History in the Making, http://www.learner.org/courses/amerhistory/ look at America before Columbus through the early contacts with European settlers and colonizers. Unit 1 includes a 50-page text chapter and four brief QuickTime videos.
A Biography of America does not begin with Columbus! The program "New World Encounters" http://www.learner.org/biographyofamerica/prog01/ traces the development of civilizations from ancient times through the conquests of Columbus and other European explorers.
"Alaska: The Last Frontier?" -- program 5 of Human Geography: People, Places, and Change http://www.learner.org/resources/series85.html -- looks at the history of settlement in Alaska and exploitation of the region's natural resources, as well as the efforts of the people of Kenai Peninsula to reclaim their lost heritage.
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Rural Communities: Legacy & Change http://www.learner.org/resources/series7.html shows both losses experienced by Indian communities and more positive developments. See program 4, "Legacy," and program 5, "Act Locally...and Invest."
In our series Teaching Multicultural Literature: A Workshop for the Middle Grades, http://www.learner.org/workshops/tml/ authors Joseph Bruchac, Shirley Sterling, and Laura Tohe discuss their work, while teachers present literature lessons to their classes.
Professor Greg Sarris demonstrates the use of Native American Pomo baskets to enhance the teaching of literature in "Ceremonial Artifacts," http://www.learner.org/workshops/artifacts/sessions.php?s=8 workshop 8 of Artifacts & Fiction: Workshop in American Literature.
Three contemporary authors -- Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo) -- are featured in "Native Voices," http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit01/ the first program of American Passages: A Literary Survey. Find information on Chippewa Songs, Ghost Dance Songs, and several authors. http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit01/authors.html Also search the archive for pictures of Navajo soldiers and code talkers and other relevant artifacts.
APPENDIX ONE: NATIVE AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES: AN ESSAY FIRST APPEARING IN CHOICE MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER, 2010: by PROFESSOR SUSAN BERNARDIN
Bernardin, Susan. Native American Literary Studies. Choice, v.48, no. 03, November 2010.
Susan Bernardin is associate professor of English and chair of women’s and gender studies at SUNY College at Oneonta.
In her travel memoir, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, acclaimed writer Louise Erdrich notes that the root word in Ojibwe language for rock painting--mazina--is the same for text or made image. Referencing Ojibwe birchbark scrolls and petroglyphs as longstanding textual productions, she claims that for the Ojibwe “books are nothing all that new.” Such a comment turns on its head deeply entrenched views about both Native American peoples and their relationship to the settler nation known as the United States. In an observation that invokes a precontact world of text making, Erdrich alludes to what Craig Womack, in Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, calls the “vast, and vastly understudied written tradition in America”: from Mayan codices to wampum belts, winter counts, and baskets, indigenous peoples have always inscribed their world with meaning. The necessary and complicated turn to writing in English, beginning in the eighteenth century, launched a Native American literary tradition that flourishes today. 13
Native literary studies is concerned with the shared experiences of indigenous peoples under U.S. occupation and colonialism, as well as the historically, regionally, and tribally situated experiences of the hundreds of federally recognized tribes, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians, and the many tribal communities that remain “unrecognized.” Readers will note the use of a range of terms in this essay: Native American, Native, American Indian, First Nations, Indigenous. None of these terms is universally accepted; all have been debated and variously rejected or adopted by diverse Native peoples and Native and non-Native scholars. “First Nations” is the common designation for indigenous peoples located in Canada. “Indian” is a preferred term for many Native people in the Lower 48 states, even as Gerald Vizenor decries it as the ultimate simulation and even as the term does not encompass Alaskan Natives and Native Hawai'ians. “Indigenous” and “Native” are increasingly preferred because of their transnational and politically resistant connotations. When possible, the best practice is the use of tribally specific, self-identified names: Onondaga, Yurok, Choctaw.
However, tribes sometimes have multiple names, drawn from colonial nomenclature, the language of formal tribal government, and Native languages.1 For example, when discussing the work of Louise Erdrich, readers can expect to see her referred to as “Turtle Mountain Chippewa” or Chippewa (the official designation of her band in Belcourt, North Dakota), Ojibwe, and Anishinaabe. Most works of Native literary scholarship include a note on terminology and preferred usage. In his seminal 1981 essay titled “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” published in Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior's American Indian Literary Nationalism, Acoma Pueblo writer Simon Ortiz refutes prevalent assumptions that any sign of indigenous cultural change signifies loss, erasure, or assimilation.2
About the use of English instead of, or in addition to, Native languages, in the same essay Ortiz claims that “it is entirely possible for a people to retain and maintain their lives through the use of any language. There is not a question of authenticity here; rather it is the way that Indian people have creatively responded to forced colonization. And this response has been one of resistance; there is no clearer word for it than resistance.” Erdrich and Ortiz suggest that typical binarisms used to differentiate Native and non-Native peoples (oral/literate, traditional/assimilated, Native religions/Christianity) fall apart when indigenous peoples define their own intellectual traditions, knowledge systems, and perspectives. In doing so, Erdrich and Ortiz--and Native writers in general-- communicate the power of writing to both disrupt common assumptions about Native peoples and forge innovative articulations of indigenous continuance in the twentieth century.3
In 1969, Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn, and Standing Rock Sioux legal scholar and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. published Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Taken together, these landmark texts in Native intellectual history are widely cited for making possible the development of Native literary studies as a field in the 1970s. Several decades later, Native literary texts are included in standard U.S. and multicultural literature anthologies, and canonic works by Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, and now most notably Sherman Alexie are widely taught in colleges and even in high school classrooms.
Students at many colleges and universities can major or minor in American Indian studies; journals (now available online) such as ASAIL (from Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures), Wicazo- Sa Review, and AIQ (American Indian Quarterly) have nourished the development of Native literary scholarship. Since 2002, indigenous scholars have organized annual meetings of the Native American Literature Symposium (NALS). A new interdisciplinary professional organization, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), founded in 2008, held its first official conference in 2009. 14
The increasing institutional legitimacy of Native American literary studies is also demonstrated by its status as a division within the Modern Language Association. Yet its location as part of the American literature section denotes it’s complex, and often-contested, relationship to U.S. and multicultural literatures. Most faculty who teach Native literature have not been formally trained in the field; their approaches to the literature tend to differ dramatically from the approaches of those who specialize in the field. This difference poses an ongoing problem for how Native literature is included in the classroom. Interdisciplinary by definition, Native literatures encompass a wide range of genres and styles; their focus on Native peoples, their nations, remembered pasts, and imagined futures often requires contextual knowledge that privileges Native readerships but is unfamiliar or even alien to non- Native readers.
Readers of Native literatures can expect to broach topics ranging from tribal sovereignty and treaty discourse to U.S. popular culture, from sacred sites to repatriation of human remains. Even as Native writers routinely reject formulas of literary categorization, they are subject to formulas of interpretation that reflect the limited, and limiting, understanding of Native peoples. Native writers’ striking innovations in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and mixed-genre work implicitly respond to the continued invisibility of a diverse contemporary Native America. At the same time, Native American literatures offer a crucial place for articulating stories of survival, grief, healing, recovery, remembering, and the creation of indigenous futures.4
This essay is divided in sixteen sections, the first of which situates Native American literary studies in a broader context of indigenous intellectual interventions, beginning with the question of what counts as knowledge about Native peoples.
A brief overview of the field’s development over the past few decades serves as necessary context for ensuing sections addressing the most important areas of current inquiry: nationalism and sovereignty, “survivance,” and recoveries (of early literature and literacies, representations, and resistances). The essay also highlights the emergence of tribally specific and centered methodologies and innovative approaches to the conventions of literary criticism. The field’s interdisciplinary, often international scope is addressed in sections on comparative indigenous, transnational, and transatlantic studies. Intersections between Native literary studies and fields such as feminism, film studies, and ecocriticism are also noted. The field’s sustained engagement with U.S. colonialist policies and attitudes appears in a section on U.S. popular culture representations.
The final sections of the essay identify resources specifically useful for faculty and students: resources on genre, anthologies, references and teaching guides, individual authors, children’s and young adult literatures, and selected Internet resources.
Critical Frameworks
A constitutive challenge in the development of indigenous literary studies has been the colonial enterprise itself, specifically, its legacy of knowledge formation, academic disciplines, and Western educational models. A landmark text in Native studies is Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which delineates how Western conceptions of history, time, space, and individualism have dictated the production of knowledge about indigenous peoples. As part of the book’s overt project of decolonizing research about indigenous peoples, chapters offer methodologies and protocols that recenter indigenous worldviews and concerns. In the United States, Choctaw historian Devon Mihesuah focuses on reclaiming indigenous 15
control over knowledge production in her edited collection Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians. Here, Native scholars address questions of research and academic writing about American Indians. A sequel collection, edited by Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson (Dakota), Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities, continues important discussions about challenges and responsibilities Native intellectuals face and about the imperative of incorporating indigenous methodologies in academic disciplines.
Native literary scholarship also agrees on and highlights the ongoing challenge of “representing” the approximately 564 federally recognized American Indian tribes and Alaska Native communities, not to mention the more than million Native Hawai'ians/Pacific islanders resident in the United States. Agreement ends, however, on how to do that: much of the scholarship in the field comprises debates about the literature’s status, its relationship to indigenous nations and the American literary canon, and the most relevant methodologies and approaches. In the 1980s and early 1990s, many critics took their cues from novels by Silko, Momaday, Erdrich, and James Welch (respectively, Ceremony, House Made of Dawn, Love Medicine, Winter in the Blood) and produced scholarship focused on identity (especially “mixedblood” experience), authenticity, and culture.
These foundational book-length studies of Native American literature include Paula Gunn Allen's The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, Arnold Krupat's The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon, Louis Owens's Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, James Ruppert's Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, and David Murray's Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts. By the early-to-mid 1990s, some scholars increasingly and openly critiqued the inadequacy of prevailing approaches used in Native literary criticism: the dialogic, ethnographic, thematic, postmodern, postcolonial, multicultural, magical real. In the 1990s, Elizabeth Cook Lynn, Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack made varying cases for renewing old methodologies and forging new ones that made literary scholarship responsive to and aligned with Native nations’ ongoing efforts to forward- -through land claims, arts, language revitalization, cultural renewal, political and social control--the right of self-determination, a condition of the treaty-based nation-to-nation relationship with the U.S. federal government. For example, in Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays, Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya's Earth and New Indians, Old Wars, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Standing Rock Sioux) presents uncompromising views on U.S. colonialism, the centrality of sovereignty in Native writing, and the need for writers to benefit their communities.
"Nationalism” and Sovereignty in Native Literary Studies
With the publication of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions, Robert Warrior (Osage) emphasizes the ethical primacy of “intellectual sovereignty” by pairing the work of two twentieth-century Native intellectuals: John Joseph Mathews (Osage) and Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux). As its title suggests, this comparative study recovers and constructs a genealogy of indigenous thought to inform contemporary Native studies.
In The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction, Warrior builds on this work by placing nonfiction at the center of Native literary history to examine its relevance for contemporary Native literary study. Here, in chapters focusing on Pequot minister-activist William Apess, the Osage constitutional crisis, Indian boarding school narratives, and Momaday’s influential speech “Man Made of Words”--given at the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars, held in 1970 at Princeton, a milestone in the formation of Native American studies as an academic discipline--Warrior extends 16
definitions of what kinds of texts might constitute Native American literature. And in an important conclusion to The People and the Word, “Intellectual Trade Routes," Warrior values the networks of ideas that link Native intellectuals.
In similar fashion, in Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827- 1863 Maureen Konkle foregrounds the recovery of nonfiction, especially treaties and other documents, in the development of Native literary history. She faults Native literary criticism’s elision of the political basis of Native writing and its reliance on multicultural interpretive frames that view Native Americans as “one of many ethnic groups to be recognized and appreciated through their literary works.” Like Warrior and others, Konkle demonstrates a continuity of concerns--political, legal, cultural--linking nineteenth-century and contemporary Native writers.
Like Warrior, Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver, in That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, models intellectual sovereignty and intellectual trade routes by linking diverse Native writers working in a variety of genres from the eighteenth century to the present. Weaver’s introduction critiques dominant frameworks for reading Native literature in the field’s first few decades, including the emphasis on a Native literary canon at the expense of many understudied texts, and the danger of subsuming that canon within an American canon. Through his neologism “communitism”--a fusion of "community" and "activism"--Weaver posits an alternative framework that “most defines” American Indian literature: commitment to Native and broader communities. A theologian and legal scholar, Weaver also addresses the significant place of religion and law in Native studies in the nineteen wide-ranging essays of his Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture.
The scholar most closely linked to Warrior and Weaver is Craig Womack (Muscogee/Creek). In his transformative Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, Womack produces the first book- length study of tribally specific, generated criticism with his Muscogee (Creek) national literary history. In the book's introduction, “American Indian Literary Self-Determination,” Womack persuasively advocates Native-authored scholarship’s responsibility to the needs of Native communities: “Native literature, and Native literary criticism, written by Native authors, is part of sovereignty: Indian people exercising the right to present images of themselves and to discuss those images.” Like Konkle and Weaver, Womack rejects the “pure versus tainted” framework--which informs too much Native literary criticism--that locks Native people in binaries that do not fit their dynamic, diverse experiences. Womack uses the book's strikingly innovative format to model his theory: chapters on Muscogee political and literary history from the nineteenth century to the present alternate with stories narrated by characters drawn from the writing of Creek satirist Alex Posey, humorous acts of storytelling that reframe the book’s academic discourse. This seminal work also makes a major contribution in its chapter on Lynn Riggs, a Cherokee whom Womack includes because of his “written theories about Oklahoma” and his importance for addressing sexual orientation (“a topic long overdue in our field”). Womack extends this discussion in Art as Performance, Story as Criticism: Reflections on Native Literary Aesthetics, in which he provides a sustained analysis of Riggs in the context of Native queer studies, an area of burgeoning scholarship.
The importance of collaboration as methodology and the centrality of nationalist approaches to Native literary study are realized in Weaver, Womack, and Warrior's American Indian Literary Nationalism, which comprises three chapters (one by each author), an afterword by Lisa Brooks, and a reprint of Ortiz’s essay “Towards a National Indian Literature" (cited above). Taking various approaches to nationalist criticism, the authors make forceful arguments on behalf of historically grounded criticism 17
that rethinks popular forms of analysis, especially theories of hybridity drawn from post colonialism and multiculturalism. For Brooks, hybridity "does not seem to account for the relationship between the community and land. Rather, culture and identity seem to rest within the individual 'subject,' who seems oddly out of place, displaced, caught between two assumed worlds or perspectives.”
All the contributors to this volume, but especially Womack, strenuously critique theories of hybridity and biculturalism. Womack presents a detailed refutation of Elvira Pulitano’s Toward a Native American Critical Theory, in which Pulitano's selective readings (and misreadings) of nationalist critics cast “tribalcentric” approaches as internally contradictory while at the same time advocating what the author perceives as the syncretic, cross-cultural approaches in the works of Gerald Vizenor, Louis Owens, and Greg Sarris. In sum, American Indian Literary Nationalism brings together the central concepts in nationalist criticism: ethical responsibility, sovereignty, community, nationhood. Debates over contemporary indigenousness and its place in Native studies are ongoing: Scott Richard Lyons (Leech Lake Ojibwe) generates fresh insights on all of these concerns with X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent.
Tribally Specific, “Nation-Based” Criticism
In his influential work in nation-based literary criticism, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, Daniel Justice offers a cogent, accessible study premised on the paradox that whereas “Cherokees are among the most widely studied Indigenous peoples in North America, [they] remain one of the most misunderstood.” Justice emphasizes both the diversity of Cherokee experience and cultural continuity across transformative histories of "removal" and "regeneration." In his afterword, “Stories That Matter,” he presents a useful retrospective of major Native literary theorists, offering an inclusive genealogy of tribal-nationalist approaches. Particularly helpful is Justice's rearticulation of key nationalist concepts. He affirms the importance of intellectual sovereignty as an “ethical repositioning” of Native perspectives from the margins to the center, and claims the “political expression of peoplehood [as] the central principle of Indian literatures. Without understanding these tribal-specific concerns and their influences on the writers, a reader risks a fundamental misreading of the texts.”
Other examples of tribally specific literary criticism include Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews by Penelope Kelsey (Seneca) and The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, by Lisa Brooks (Abenaki). In the former, chapters on frequently taught early writers such as Charles Eastman and Zitkala-Sa as well as contemporary Dakota writers like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Philip Red Eagle model readings grounded in Dakota language, values, and epistemologies. Brooks also breaks new ground in recovering the long- suppressed writing of Native New England, which she argues was used as strategic tool “to reclaim lands and reconstruct communities.” Using indigenous concepts based in Abenaki and other Northeastern indigenous nations, Brooks restores a kinship network of peoples and writers in a region that exemplifies the U.S. belief in the “vanishing Indian.” Like Womack, Brooks innovates the form of her scholarship in that the book enacts her paradigm of mapping, or “place-worlds.” Maps throughout the book place readers in the regional areas under discussion; she works to place the multiple audiences-- historians, literary scholars, Native community members--in the world of indigenous New England. As an act of recovery--of indigenous writing and mapping systems, of networks of communities, of indigenous political thought--The Common Pot exemplifies the transformative shifts toward regional and indigenous specificity in Native literary studies.
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Indigenous Methodologies in Literary Criticism
Brooks and Womack are not the first to produce innovative texts that model indigenous values and knowledge, to produce works in forms that are unconventional by the standards of literary criticism. Pomo scholar and writer Greg Sarris’s influential Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993) offers an early example of such an approach: in alternating essays of autobiography and theory, Sarris shows “how criticism can move closer to that which it studies.” Through both a “performative” and “expository” style, Sarris addresses relationships across cultures and forms of communication, bringing in lessons drawn from Pomo baskets, oral stories, kinship, and his own classroom experiences.
This conversational approach, like the oral narratives so closely identified with indigenous contexts, characterizes the work of many Native and non-Native scholars and writers. Most of those discussed in this essay reject impersonal, objective viewpoints and most typically preface or interlace their work with personal narrative. For example, Kenneth Lincoln’s fluid, “performative” Speak like Singing: Classics of Native American Literature embodies his focus on “intercultural fusion” and “fusion of poetry and prose” in Native literature. And in Writing Indian, Native Conversations, John Purdy draws on his decades in the field to revisit the formative 1970s-90s in Native literature and scholarship. Using conversation as his format, Purdy weaves interviews with major writers (Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Louis Owens, Sherman Alexie, Paula Gunn Allen) with close readings of texts. His four-part schema for reading Native literary texts--differentiation, investigation, affirmation, continuance--demonstrates shared concerns among diverse Native writers. In Notebooks of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Cook-Lynn meshes poetry, essay, reflections, and searing critiques of the United States as occupier of indigenous lands. These works stand alongside Womack’s, which combines short stories and critical essays in addressing Muscogee writing, Native gay and lesbian writers, and broad questions of Native aesthetics.
Womack’s solo effort, in Art as Performance, Story as Criticism (discussed earlier), to reinvent literary criticism, is mirrored in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, by Janet Acoose and eleven other Native scholars (among them the volume's three editors, Womack, Justice, and Christopher Teuton). All twelve contributors are considered the book's authors, and their individual essays are designed as interactive conversations with one another. Unlike most edited collections, this volume explicitly works to “perform community” through a challenging peer drafting and editing process. Womack’s lengthy opening essay, “A Single Decade: Book-Length Native Literary Criticism between 1986 and 1997,” gives a historically situated analysis of the development of Native literary criticism since the 1970s. Ranging from Cheryl Suzack's treatment of indigenous feminism and Phillip Carroll Morgan’s essay on Choctaw literary criticism to Teuton’s discussion of “applying oral concepts to written traditions” and Tol Foster’s turn to regionalism in Native literary studies, the chapters address the question of an “ethical Native literary criticism” and related issues of approach, undeveloped areas of inquiry, and theoretical models.
Comparative Indigenous Studies
Reasoning Together reflects the tendency of Native writers to cross borders of genres and styles. It also suggests the importance of comparative and relational readings. Although indigenous literary studies in the settler nations of Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand are outside the scope of this essay, some bear mention. For example, in the United States, Chadwick Allen’s Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts has led the way in conceptualizing comparative indigenous literary studies. A comparative study of Maori and American Indian literary and 19
political activism from the World War II era to the present, Blood Narrative uses three interlinked concepts of indigenous experience--“blood/land/memory”--to delineate narrative strategies that assert continuing claims to specific lands. Allen effectively identifies the centrality of treaties in indigenous studies because “the discourse of treaties stands out as a distinguishing feature of the discursive relationship between indigenous peoples and settler-invaders.” Along with helpful discussions of relevant terminology (indigenous; “fourth world”), Allen provides an “integrated timeline” from World War II to 1980 of “conjunctions and coalitions among indigenous minority peoples that occurred during this period at the local, national and global levels.”
In Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture, Shari Huhndorf (Yup’ik) explores the “possibilities and the limits of indigenous nationalism and transnationalism” through Native cultural production (fiction, performance, film, photography) in the contemporary era. In her introduction, Huhndorf intervenes in both American Indian literary nationalism and the “post- national” shift in American studies. For the former, she cites its neglect of indigenous feminisms and its delimited focus on a treaty-based paradigm that does not fit a range of indigenous contexts; for the latter she cites neglect of Native America, even as American studies foregrounds the imperial excesses of the United States beyond its borders. Huhndorf takes a cross-border approach to Native aesthetics, looking not only at Canada and the United States but also at the understudied Arctic region. In Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature, Stuart Christie also discusses the northern hemisphere, offering engaging readings of First Nation (Canadian) and Native American novels. Mark Rifkin heads in another direction in his nuanced Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space, examining nonfiction writings that resist Indian removal and the annexation of Texas and California.
Gerald Vizenor and “Survivance”
Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) writer/critic Gerald Vizenor stands as a central figure in Native literary studies. His countless works--haiku, drama, epic poetry, journalism, novels, tribal history, essays--have had far- reaching influence on the field. His engagement with theories such as postmodernism and his experimental, often-challenging prose have placed him in opposition to the “nationalist” school. Though the prolific Vizenor defies labels, his command of multiple genres and his sustained attention to a spectrum of concerns--ranging from the very term “indian” to New Age appropriations of Native cultures, from casinos to repatriation of indigenous human remains--make his work essential to Native studies. The title of one of his most important books, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, reveals his neologisms and adapted words--terms that have become ubiquitous in Native literary scholarship.
As he does in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence and in his other essay collections, Vizenor works to liberate Native peoples from representations and discourses that have defined them as tragic victims, vanished and vanquished, or absent from the present day. “Survivance,” like sovereignty, has become a keyword of Native literary studies, frequently cited in scholarship. Vizenor introduces his edited collection Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence with an essay titled “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” in which he describes the term "survivance" as an “active sense of presence over absence, deracination and oblivion” and survivance stories as “renunciations of dominance ... the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry.” The seventeen contributors to this volume extend Vizenor’s central concept in readings of his work and other Native texts. Valuable books about Vizenor include Postindian Conversations, in which Vizenor and interviewer A. Robert Lee address his major works, genres, and philosophies; Gerald 20
Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, in which fellow White Earth Ojibwe Kimberly Blaeser gives a clear overview of Vizenor’s challenging writings, including his use of tribal tricksters and Ojibwe dream songs; and Deborah Madsen’s Understanding Gerald Vizenor, which offers an accessible introduction to key contexts, genres, and representative texts.
Transnational and Transatlantic Approaches
Vizenor’s interest in engaging with European theorists, intellectuals, and writers aligns with scholarship that examines cross-cultural dynamics of Native literatures in English more broadly. A founding scholar in the field, Arnold Krupat has forcefully considered the relationship between Native literature and “cosmopolitan” theories such as postmodernism. In Red Matters: Native American Studies, Krupat joins the heated debate over the status of Native literature and the relevance of non-Native critical frameworks. He identifies three critical perspectives in Native literary criticism that work against continuing U.S. colonialism in Native America: nationalism, indigenism, and cosmopolitanism. In the wide-ranging essays comprising All That Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression, Krupat explores questions of aesthetic value and social function and structures of resistance embedded in Native forms of writing and representation. Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies, edited by Deborah Madsen, features a range of internationally informed, critical perspectives on Native American, Native Hawai'ian, and First Nations literary texts. And Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures, edited by Elvira Pulitano, emphasizes transnational and cross-cultural approaches to Native North American literatures. That the fourteen contributors to this volume are European highlights the growth of Native American literary studies scholarship in Europe.
Storytelling as Methodology
Like Vizenor, many Native scholars are also creative writers; Blaeser; Justice; and Womack are just three examples. They privilege the structures and values of oral storytelling, using multiple genres and stories to present Native worldviews. Various works address the tendency of non-Native scholars to reify oral literature and performance as the “authentic” voice of Native cultures, among them Womack's Red on Red, Krupat’s All That Remains, Robert Dale Parker’s The Invention of Native American Literature, and other works. Given the tendency of non-Natives to simplify Native orality and storytelling, many contemporary Native writers use storytelling as a methodology of cross-cultural communication. This is evident in two of Louis Owens's accessible collections--Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place and I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions--both of which bring together autobiography, fiction, popular cultural commentary, and Native literary criticism. In these books, Owens (Cherokee/Choctaw) examines questions of identity, place, popular culture, and literature. Owens's emphasis on story is shared by acclaimed Cherokee writer Thomas King, whose humorous, conversational The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative launches a wide-ranging education on popular cultural stereotypes about Indians. King’s understated wit scrutinizes the relationship between non-Native and Native peoples.
Paul Chaat Smith (Comanche), associate curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, uses irony and sardonic humor in the stories comprising Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong, a collection of essays on “why Indians, and Indian issues, are so often overlooked, misunderstood, misrepresented.” Like King and Owens, he brings humor to much-needed insights on popular American culture, visual culture, Native art, and indigenous activism. Indian humor is often overlooked by non- Natives, and those interested in a helpful overview of this approach will find it in Eva Gruber's Humor in 21
Contemporary Native North American Literature. Scholars of Native literary studies frequently address the complex narrative, political, and aesthetic functions of storytelling in Native American writing. The contributors to Stories through Theories/Theories through Stories: North American Indian Writing, Storytelling, and Critique, edited by Gordon D. Henry Jr. (Anishinaabe), Nieves Pascual Soler, and Silvia Martíínez-Falquina, provide diverse examples of engaging with “story” in Native texts and theory.
Representations of U.S. Popular Culture
The continuing power of popular cultural representations of American Indians informs much critical inquiry in the field. The essays in Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations, edited by Gretchen Bataille, assess the history and legacy of such representations. In Playing Indian, historian Philip Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) examines similar cultural acts and practices, from the Boston Tea Party to the Boy Scouts, showing how acts of “playing Indian” assert “authentic” American national and cultural identity. Shari Huhndorf also contributes to this discussion in Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination the title of which refers to how members of the dominant society have imitated Native peoples as a means of self- and national identification.
Broader Interdisciplinary Contexts: Film, Feminism, Ecocriticism
Film and television are indeed tenacious stereotypers, and Native Americans (among many other groups) have suffered from the images these media have created and furthered. Native literary texts frequently engage in parodying, critiquing, and overturning such stereotypes. In Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (Cherokee) charts the history of American Indians in film, from the silent movies to the rise of Native filmmaking in the 1990s. In Wiping the War Paint off the Lens: Native American Film and Video, Tewa and Navajo filmmaker Beverly Singer approaches Native people’s experiences in the film industry while charting the development of indigenous cinema. Those interested in indigenous film will want to be aware of the University of Nebraska Press's new "Indigenous Films" series," which publishes guides to influential Native films. The first volume, Michael Robert Evans’s The Fast Runner, looks at director Zacharias Kunuk's award-winning film Atanarjuat (2001); forthcoming at this writing is a book on Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, for which Sherman Alexie wrote the screenplay.
While Native studies scholars such as Andrea Smith, Devon Mihesuah, Renya Ramirez, Audra Simpson, and Lisa Hall have addressed the formation of indigenous feminisms, studies focused solely on Native American women writers remain limited. However, one can find worthy work in this area, including some of the titles already discussed: Cheryl Suzack’s “Mapping of Indigenous Feminism,” one of the essays in Reasoning Together; Shari Huhndorf’s Mapping the Americas; and Molly McGlennen’s essay “Ignatia Broker’s Lived Feminism: Toward a Native Women’s Theory” in Stories through Theories/Theories through Stories. One should add to these several other titles. Patrice Hollrah’s “The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell": The Power of Women in Native American Literature reframes the study of selected twentieth-century American Indian texts through tribal values of gender complementarity. The essays in Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations, edited by Inéés Hernáández-Avila, emphasize both the transnational, border-crossing aspect of indigenous women’s experiences and the rich interdisciplinary range of the field. Cari Carpenter’s Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians adds a new dimension to literary studies by looking at early Native women writers whose work was recovered and reprinted in the 1980s and 1990s. Carpenter reclaims the “sentimental” writings of S. Alice Callahan, Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca, locating 22
critically unacknowledged yet productive connections between anger, literary form, and Native resistance. An earlier, recuperative study by Siobhan Senier, Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard, addresses white and Native women writers whose work intervened in national efforts to domesticate and dispossess Native peoples in the late nineteenth century.
Although the field of environmental literary studies has seen tremendous growth since the 1990s, the few who have engaged with indigenous critical perspectives on the land have limited their interest to Leslie Silko and Linda Hogan. A notable exception is Joni Adamson, whose influential American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place considers the limits of mainstream environmentalism along with ecocritical approaches to Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Simon Oritz, and Leslie Silko. In emphasizing the problems of environmental justice and racism, Adamson argues for a more inclusive environmental movement.
Recoveries: The Literatures of Early American Indians, Boarding Schools, and the Progressive and Modernist Eras
LaVonne Ruoff, a founding scholar of Native literatures, made possible the field’s expansion in the 1980s because her bibliographic research brought early works, long out of print, back into view. Scholarly attention to the recovery of writings from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century continues, as evidenced by diverse collections such as American Indian Fiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s- 1930s, edited by Bernd Peyer; The Fus Fixico Letters: A Creek Humorist in Early Oklahoma, edited by Daniel Littlefield and Carol Hunter, which reprints the journalism and satire of Muscogee writer Alexander Posey; and the recovery of one of the earliest Native women writers, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, with The Sound the Stars Make Rushing through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, edited by Robert Dale Parker. A powerful model of cross-cultural collaboration in the recovery of early Native writing is The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, a Penobscot narrative by Joseph Nicolar first published in 1893. An enhanced edition appeared in 2007, edited, annotated, and with a history of the Penobscot Nation and an introduction by Annette Kolodny. This volume also features a preface by Nicolar's grandson, Charles Norman Shay, and an afterword by Bonnie Newsom, former director of the Penobscot Nation's Department of Cultural and Historic Preservation. In Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology edited by Kristina Bross and Hilary Wyss, the recovery of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts and images extends definitions of Native “literacies.” The anthology pairs critical contextualizing essays with texts such as sermons, petitions, wills, and pictographs produced by Algonquian peoples of southern New England.
A shared experience across Native America over generations was the trauma of boarding schools, where students were removed from their families, forbidden to speak their languages or practice their beliefs, and indoctrinated in American cultural values and educational models. Boarding schools have long been a subject of Native writing throughout the twentieth century, from Gertrude Bonnin’s (i.e., Zitkala-Sa's) memoir of boarding school experience--most commonly available in the 1985 edition of Zitkala-Sa's American Indian Stories--to current explorations of their intergenerational effects on families.5 In her White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation, Jacqueline Fear-Segal presents an exhaustive study of the ideological origins of the boarding school movement, with detailed accounts of two major off-reservation schools--Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian School--and their legacies. Amelia Katanski’s Learning to Write “Indian”: The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature examines early literary accounts of the boarding schools, positing their role in the development of American Indian literature. In America’s Second Tongue: American Indian Education 23
and the Ownership of English, 1860-1900, Ruth Spack focuses on issues of “linguistic ownership” through a historically nuanced analysis of language policy in assimilative education of Native children.
One can find a number of resources on Native intellectuals and performers in the progressive and modernist eras. Two bear special mention. In Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform, Lucy Maddox considers the generation of American Indian intellectuals, graduates of the boarding schools, who used their “education” as a tool for public advocacy, forming, for example, the Society of American Indians (in 1911). And Philip Deloria's engaging and accessible Indians in Unexpected Places recovers the “secret histories” of Indian people engaging in "modernity": driving cars, working as professional athletes, performing music, and acting and directing in the nascent film industry. In doing so, he reframes the story of United States modernity, shifting Native peoples from a primitivist, vanishing state into the heart of the era’s cultural and technological transformations.
Studies of Genre: Novel, Poetry, Autobiography, Drama
Like Thomas King (author of The Truth about Stories, discussed above), James Cox focuses on the cultural and historical power of stories about Native Americans generated by the dominant culture. In Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions, Cox looks at the complex interventions of Native novelists such as King, Alexie, and Vizenor, and provides “red readings” of Euro-American literary history, charting the genealogy of still-prevalent discourses about Indians. Sean Kiccumah Teuton’s (Cherokee) Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel recasts novels in the Native canon through the lens of the Red Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and what he calls “tribal realism”: “an alternative theoretical position drawn from indigenous oral philosophy.” This historically situated analysis includes a chapter on the role of oral tradition for American Indian prisoners. Michael Wilson (Choctaw) is similarly interested in Native writing as political resistance. In Writing Home: Indigenous Narratives of Resistance, he examines how twentieth-century Native writers harness oral traditions to create resistance literature. Robert Dale Parker’s The Invention of Native American Literature (discussed above in connection with storytelling) identifies overlooked issues of gender, sexuality, labor, and economics in selected twentieth-century texts. Like Wilson (Writing Home), Neil Schmitz (White Robe’s Dilemma: Tribal History in American Literature), and Gordon Henry Jr. and Rob Appleford (in their contributions to Stories through Theories/Theories through Stories), Parker brings welcome attention to a critically neglected yet major contemporary Native writer, Meskwaki (Mesquakie) poet/novelist Ray Young Bear. David Treuer (Leech Lake Ojibwe) joins Parker in pursuing aesthetic questions shaping Native literature, but his controversial Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual offers a polemic against reading Native literature as an index of cultural context or authorial background. He privileges New Critical (formalist) approaches to the literary texts he examines and makes the pronouncement that Native literature does not exist (a stance belied by the book’s title).
Though Native poets abound, one can find very few book-length studies devoted to Native poetry. Notable exceptions include Robin Riley Fast’s foundational The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry, edited by Dean Rader and Janet Gould. The latter highlights interaction as methodology: a conversation between the two editors opens the collection, and “classic” essays on Native poetry by some of its most influential practitioners alternate with new scholarly perspectives. The list of further reading serves as a valuable resource. 24
Studies of American Indian autobiography dominated the field in the 1980s and 1990s, but autobiography has not received significant critical attention in recent years. Essays in The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature and The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945 (discussed below) offer notable exceptions. H. David Brumble’s American Indian Autobiography, published in an annotated (second) edition in 2008, looks at this popular but vexed genre of Native self-representation and at questions of editing, mediation, authorial control, and audience.
By contrast, Native drama has made a relatively recent appearance in the literature on Native genres. In addition to essay overviews in all encompassing collections such as discussed immediately below--for example, The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature and The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945--those interested in this genre will benefit from American Indian Theater in Performance, a reader edited by Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa) and Jaye Darby.
Anthologies, Reference, and Teaching Guides
Crucial resources for undergraduates and faculty include The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945, edited by Eric Cheyfitz, and The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, edited by Joy Porter and Kenneth Roemer (Roemer also edited Native American Writers of the United States [in the DLB]). In the latter volume, introductory essays on historical and cultural contexts identify major debates in the field. Contributors address questions of translation and mediation, gender, and genre, including “pre-1968 and post-1968 fiction” but also such overlooked genres as nonfiction prose and drama. The Cambridge collection also looks at key figures in the Native American canon: Alexie, Vizenor, Harjo, Silko, Erdrich, Welch, Momaday, Ortiz. A time line that juxtaposes Native and non-Native texts pivotal in shaping stereotypes about Native Americans, “bio-bibliographies” of selected writers from the eighteenth century to the present, and a list of further reading make this volume particularly useful.
Equally helpful but aimed at more advanced undergraduate students, The Columbia Guide comprises a lengthy introductory essay by Cheyfitz on the interrelationship of U.S. federal Indian law and American Indian literatures, and essays on, fiction, poetry, drama, nonfiction, and autobiography. This indispensable volume is most useful for its thorough overview of the field, and particularly the “paradigmatic shift” of the 1990s, away from what Cheyfitz characterizes as the “ethnographic-formal” approach toward colonial and postcolonial perspectives. Central to the volume as a whole is the relevance of Indian law to the development of Native literature, which cannot be understood apart from such issues as blood quantum, enrollment, allotment, and other aspects of U.S. Indian policy. Particularly noteworthy in this volume is Kimberly Blaeser’s “Cannons and Canonization: American Indian Poetries through Autonomy, Colonization, Nationalism, and Decolonization,” which corrects limited critical attention given to Native poetry and includes a list of writers, their tribal affiliations, and texts. Arnold Krupat and Michael Elliott survey Native fiction engaged in decolonization; Shari Huhndorf considers drama, a genre that is receiving increasing critical attention. Each essay delineates questions of form, audience, and the limitations of the major genres.
Other resources offer broader context. Clara Sue Kidwell (White Earth Ojibwe/Choctaw) and Alan Velie’s Native American Studies introduces readers to the intellectual background and constitutive concerns in the field. A Companion to American Indian History, edited by Philip Deloria and Neal Salisbury (and released in the "Blackwell Companions to American History" series), is an essential resource and includes a chapters on Native American literatures (P. Jane Hafen [Taos Pueblo]); gender 25
(Betty Bell [Cherokee]); American Indian education (K. Tsianina Lomawaima [Creek]); and sovereignty (Taiaiake Alfred [Kahnawáá:ke in the Mohawk Nation]).
Anthologies of literature are also important to American Indian studies. Whereas major anthologies of American literature--for example, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, general editor Paul Lauter (now in its fifth edition), and The Norton Anthology of American Literature, general editor Nina Baym (now in its seventh edition)--include Native literary texts, editors John Purdy and James Ruppert dedicated their anthology, Nothing but the Truth, exclusively to Native writers. The first section includes a range of critical essays--for example Vine Deloria’s seminal "Indian Humor," N. Scott Momaday’s influential “The Man Made of Words,” and Leslie Silko’s landmark “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Perspective"--followed by a richly diverse selection of poetry and fiction and Gerald Vizenor's screenplay Harold of Orange. Important anthologies of women’s writing include Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community, edited by Heid Erdrich and Laura Tohe, and Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America, edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird.
The second edition of I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, and originally published in 1987, presents invaluable perspectives from eighteen authors, many of whom are leading voices in the field. Other worthy anthologies of essays by Native writers, artists, and activists include Genocide of the Mind, edited by Marijo Moore, and its follow-up, Sovereign Bones, edited by Eric Gansworth. Taken together, these two volumes emphasize diverse Native perspectives on identity, language revitalization, and contemporary visual and literary expressions. In all of these anthologies, editors are careful to include writers who have not received as much attention as those predominantly taught in the classroom.
Guides to Individual Authors
Although many Native writers, especially poets, remain understudied, writers in the so-called Native American canon have received considerable attention. Resources on Leslie Silko include Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook, edited by Allan Chavkin, featuring a variety of critical approaches, and Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, edited by Ellen Arnold, which is especially helpful given the paucity of interviews Silko has granted (the interviews span 1976 to 1998). N. Scott Momaday receives excellent treatment in Phyllis Morgan’s N. Scott Momaday: Remembering Ancestors, Earth, and Traditions: An Annotated Bio-bibliography, which features an introduction by Kenneth Lincoln, and in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, edited by Matthias Schubnell. Those approaching the work of Louise Erdrich will want Peter Beidler and Gay Barton's A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, which steers readers through Erdrich’s first six novels, providing family trees, maps, a dictionary, index of characters, and bibliography. And though aimed particularly at those who teach Erdrich, the MLA's Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich, edited by Greg Sarris, includes crucial essays on her work, including her poetry that will be valuable to a broad audience. In addition to Sherman Alexie’s official Web site, ShermanAlexie.com (also known as www.fallsapart.com), a rich resource that includes a bibliographic section for students, two introductions will prove particularly useful: Daniel Grassian’s Understanding Sherman Alexie and Alexie's Conversations with Sherman Alexie, edited by Nancy J. Peterson. Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance, an extensive collection edited by Susan Berry Brill de Ramíírez and Evelina Lucero (Isleta/San Juan Pueblo), is especially noteworthy because it comprises critical essays, poems, creative nonfiction, interviews, and reflective pieces by Silko and Harjo, among others. 26
Other volumes of critical essays on single authors include Louis Owens, Literary Reflections on His Life and Work, edited by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, and From the Center of Tradition: Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan, edited by Barbara Cook. Although the situation is changing, to date too few collections and teaching guides have treated the work of other Native authors. That said, one British publisher, Salt Publishing, has been producing important collections on major, but less often taught, writers: The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes, edited by A. Robert Lee; The Salt Companion to Carter Revard, edited by Ellen Arnold; and The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy, edited by James Mackay. And Salt's "Earthworks Series," under the general editorship of Janet McAdams, publishes the work of numerous indigenous writers.
Children’s and Young Adult Literatures
Since perceptions of American Indians are codified, in the United States, in early-childhood curricula, picture books, and popular works (Lynne Reid Banks's Indian in a Cupboard, Carol Ryrie Brink's Caddie Woodlawn, the Laura Ingalls Wilder volumes), those interested in the intersection of Native literatures and literature for the young will appreciate Debbie Reese's blog American Indians in Children’s Literature, which addresses historical and ongoing misrepresentations of Native peoples in children’s and young adult literature and popular culture and also promotes the work of contemporary Native writers, educators, and artists.
Links on the home page direct readers to articles on pedagogy; curricular resources; Web sites and blogs of tribal nations, Native writers, and Native artists; audio and video interviews with Native writers; Native publishers; and Native professional associations and journals. Since most students in the United States receive little to no education about Native American history or contemporary Native experiences, this accessible site is crucial. Another invaluable resource for children's literature is A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children, edited by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin. This book evaluates hundreds of children’s books from the twentieth century, and interspersed are essays, stories, and poems by Native contributors who “write back” against this devastating legacy, underscoring the demonstrable effects of these books, especially in terms of cultural appropriation.
Internet Resources
Joining the more directed Web sites already discussed is the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures' Web site, ASAIL, which provides access to the journal in the United States dedicated to the study of Native literature. The Web site includes links to syllabi, bibliographies, and essays from the journal. Another helpful Internet resource is Sequoyah Research Center/American Native Press Archives which offers the largest archive of Native journalism from the early nineteenth century to the present and an online bibliography of Native writing.
Conclusion
The field of Native American literary studies is in constant motion. The recovery of out-of-print and forgotten texts, the turn for inspiration to earlier eras of political activism and resistance, the formation of methodologies premised on specific tribal traditions and epistemologies, the ongoing innovations in genre--all these indicate the field’s vitality. As what Kenneth Roemer, in the introduction to the Cambridge Companion, calls “America’s oldest and newest literature,” Native American literature engages in historical, political, aesthetic, cultural, and national questions generated by the continuing presence, even “survivance,” of indigenous peoples more than 500 years after Columbus’s act of 27
misnaming. The study of Native literature thus confronts a history of traumatic violence whose legacy continues amid the contentious relationship between Native nations and the United States federal government. Much remains to be done--on region, specific writers, communities, and contexts (including urban Indian experiences, indigenous new media, and indigenous feminisms). Forthcoming work by Native scholars such as Tol Foster, Michelle Raheja, Penelope Kelsey, Jill Doerfler, Mishuana Goeman, and Christopher B. Teuton promises to continue to reshape the field in transformative ways.
Notes
1. For a helpful definition of “indigenous,” see Chadwick Allen's Blood Narrative. For a clear summary of the controversies and challenges of naming, labels, and identifications, see Michael Yellow Bird's “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples' Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 23 (Summer 1999): 1-21. 2. Simon Ortiz's "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism" was first published in MELUS 8.2 (Summer 1981). 3. Oral literatures in Native languages--and the complex history and issues of translation, mediation, editing, authorship, audience, and authenticity that surround oral literatures--lie outside the scope of this essay. 4. Although outside the scope of this essay, the area of Hawaiian indigenous studies is burgeoning, especially in areas of language revitalization, land claims, legal challenges, and race/identity. See, for example, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (University of Hawaii Press, 1999); and Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From 'South Pacific' to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). And Noenoe Silva’s Aloha Betrayed uncovers a vast, largely unnoted Hawai'ian language archive of newspapers, petitions, and books from the late nineteenth century that reveal local resistance to the 1898 U.S. annexation of the islands. 5. Zitkala-Ka's memoir appeared first as three serialized pieces in The Atlantic Monthly in 1900 and then in book form in 1921.
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Web Sites
AIQ: American Indian Quarterly http://www.unm.edu/~aiq/
American Indians in Children’s Literature, by Debbie Reese. http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/
ASAIL: Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures http://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~rnelson/asail/
Sequoyah Research Center/American Native Press Archives http://www.anpa.ualr.edu/
ShermanAlexie.com http://www.fallsapart.com/
Wicazo-Sa Review http://www.upress.umn.edu/journals/wsr/default.html
Compiled by Stephen Perry (Please Note: the Bibliographic Essay in Appendix One was written by Professor Susan Bernardin and was published November 2010 in CHOICE MAGAZINE.)
E-MAIL: [email protected] LAST REVISED: September 25, 2012
More resources at the Research WIKI: http://tinyurl.com/6dfaxn