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This Introduction makes available for both student, instructor, and affcianado a refined set of tools for decolonizing our approaches prior to entering the unfamiliar landscape of Native American literatures. This book will introduce indigenous perspectives and traditions as articulated by indigenous authors whose voices have been a vital, if often overlooked, component of the American dialogue for more than 400 years. Paramount to this consideration of Native-centered reading is the understandi...

A collection of poems, explaining the elements of nature, from various American Indian tribes including Iroquois, Micmac, and Shoshoni.

A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary look at Native American literature through non-narrative texts like lists, albums, recipes, and scrapbooks "An intricate history of Native textual production, use, and circulation that reshapes how we think about relationships between Native materials and settler-colonial collections."-Rose Miron, D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry Library Kelly Wisecup offers a sweeping account of early Native American liter...

The half-blood -- half Indian, half white -- is a frequent figure in the popular fiction of nineteenth-century America, for he (or sometimes she) served to symbolize many of the conflicting cultural values with which American society was then wrestling. In literature, as in real life the half-blood was a product of the frontier, embodying the conflict between wilderness and civilization that haunted and stirred the American imagination. What was his identity? Was he indeed "half Indian, half whi...

This second volume provides a literal, line-by-line English translation of the Popol Vuh, capturing the beauty, subtlety, and high poetic language characteristic of K'iche'-Maya sacred writings. By arranging the work according to its poetic structure, Christenson preserves the poem's original phraseology and grammar, allowing subtle nuances of meaning to emerge.

"Mediation" is the term James Ruppert uses to describe his theory of reading Native American fiction. Focusing on the novels of six major contemporary American writers--N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, D'Arcy McNickle, and Louise Erdrich--Ruppert analyzes the ways these writers draw upon their bicultural heritage, guiding Native and non-Native readers to different and expanded understandings of each other's worlds. While Native American writers may criticize white so...

In "Understanding James Welch", Ron McFarland offers analysis and critical commentary on the works of the renowned Blackfoot-Gros Ventre writer whose first novel, "Winter in the Blood" has become a classic in Native American fiction and who book of poems, "Riding the Earthboy 40", has remained in print since its initial publication in 1971. McFarland offers close readings of Welch's poems, four novels and recent book, "Killing Custer", which tells the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn fr...

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book Cheyfitz charts the course of American imperialism from the arrival of Europeans in a New World open for material and rhetorical cultivation to the violent foreign ventures of twentieth-century America in a Third World judged equally in need of cultural translation. Passionately and provocatively, he reads James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Rice Burroughs within and against the imperial framewor...

In Understanding Louise Erdrich, Kurup, Seema offers a comprehensive analysis of this critically acclaimed Native American novelist whose work stands as a testament to the struggle of the Ojibwe people to survive colonization and contemporary reservation life. Kurup traces in Erdrich's oeuvre the theme of colonization, both historical and cultural, and its lasting effects, starting with the various novels of the Love Medicine epic, the National Book Award-winning The Round House, The Birchbark H...

In this text, Farrell challenges the leading radical literary critics of the 1930s, such as Michael Gold and Granville Hicks, reconsidering issues including the relative autonomy of literature from society and economics; the role of tradition in literary creation; the relation of literature to propaganda; and the nature of aesthetic value.

This introduction to contemporary Native American literature is suitable for students with little or no knowledge of the subject, or of Native American culture or history. It examines influential texts in the context of the historical moment of their production, with reference to significant literary developments. Most importantly, Native literature is assessed within the wider socio-political context of American colonialism, the history of Federal-Indian relations and policies, popular percept...

With the publication of her first novel, Shell Shaker (2001), Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe quickly emerged as a crucial voice in twenty-first-century American literature. Her innovative, award-winning works of fiction, poetry, drama, and criticism capture the complexities of Native American life and interrogate histories of both cultural and linguistic oppression throughout the United States. In the first monograph to consider Howe's entire body of work, LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southe...

A stunning combination of master storytelling and deft translation, with a foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder.

Scholars and readers continue to wrestle with how best to understand and appreciate the wealth of oral and written literatures created by the Native communities of North America. Are critical frameworks developed by non-Natives applicable across cultures, or do they reinforce colonialist power and perspectives? Is it appropriate and useful to downplay tribal differences and instead generalize about Native writing and storytelling as a whole? Focusing on Dakota writers and storytellers, Seneca c...

Toward a Native American Critical Theory articulates the foundations and boundaries of a distinctive Native American critical theory in this postcolonial era. In the first book-length study devoted to this subject, Elvira Pulitano offers a survey of the theoretical underpinnings of works by noted Native writers Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Greg Sarris, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor. In her analysis Pulitano confronts key issues and questions: Is a distinctive way of reading...

This book offers an introduction to the radical Native American writer's complex vocabulary and vision. Winner of the 1988 American Book Award for his novel ""Griever: An American Monkey King in China"", Gerald Vizenor is a radical, even revolutionary, voice among contemporary Native American writers. Deborah L. Madsen offers a comprehensive overview of Vizenor's work in all literary genres as she explores the themes, images, and stylistic devices that define Vizenor's challenging and significan...

Langston Hughes never knew of an America where lynching was absent from the cultural landscape. Jason Miller investigates the nearly three dozen poems written by Hughes on the subject of lynching to explore its varying effects on survivors, victims, and accomplices as they resisted, accepted, and executed this brutal form of sadistic torture. Starting from Hughes's life as a teenager during the Red Summer of 1919 and moving through the civil rights movement that took place toward the end of Hug...