72 books match the query 'Indian authors' and 5 start with r

cover of Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel

Red Land, Red Power

Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel

Sean Kicummah Teuton

Duke University Press, 2008

In lucid narrative prose, Sean Kicummah Teuton studies the stirring literature of “Red Power,” an era of Native American organizing that began in 1969 and expanded into the 1970s. Teuton challenges the claim that Red Power thinking relied on romantic longings for a pure Indigenous past and culture. He shows instead that the movement engaged historical memory and oral tradition to produce more enabling knowledge of American Indian lives and possibilities. Looking to the era’s moments and literature, he develops an alternative, “tribal realist” critical perspective to allow for more nuanced analyses of Native writing. In this approach, “knowledge” is not the unattainable product of disinterested observation. Rather it is the achievement of communally mediated, self-reflexive work openly engaged with the world, and as such it is revisable. For this tribal realist position, Teuton enlarges the concepts of Indigenous identity and tribal experience as intertwined sources of insight into a shared world.

While engaging a wide spectrum of Native American writing, Teuton focuses on three of the most canonized and, he contends, most misread novels of the era—N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Through his readings, he demonstrates the utility of tribal realism as an interpretive framework to explain social transformations in Indian Country during the Red Power era and today. Such transformations, Teuton maintains, were forged through a process of political awakening that grew from Indians’ rethought experience with tribal lands and oral traditions, the body and imprisonment, in literature and in life.

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cover of Red On Red: Native American Literary Separatism

Red On Red

Native American Literary Separatism

Craig S. Womack

University of Minnesota Press, 1999

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.

How can a square peg fit into a round hole? It can’t. How can a door be unlocked with a pencil? It can’t. How can Native literature be read applying conventional postmodern literary criticism? It can’t.That is Craig Womack’s argument in Red on Red. Indian communities have their own intellectual and cultural traditions that are well equipped to analyze Native literary production. These traditions should be the eyes through which the texts are viewed. To analyze a Native text with the methods currently dominant in the academy, according to the author, is like studying the stars with a magnifying glass.In an unconventional and piercingly humorous appeal, Womack creates a dialogue between essays on Native literature and fictional letters from Creek characters who comment on the essays. Through this conceit, Womack demonstrates an alternative approach to American Indian literature, with the letters serving as a “Creek chorus” that offers answers to the questions raised in his more traditional essays. Topics range from a comparison of contemporary oral versions of Creek stories and the translations of those stories dating back to the early twentieth century, to a queer reading of Cherokee author Lynn Riggs’s play The Cherokee Night.Womack argues that the meaning of works by Native peoples inevitably changes through evaluation by the dominant culture. Red on Red is a call for self-determination on the part of Native writers and a demonstration of an important new approach to studying Native works-one that engages not only the literature, but also the community from which the work grew.ISBN 0-8166-3022-4 Cloth £33.50 $47.95xxISBN 0-8166-3023-2 Paper £13.00 $18.95x288 Pages 5 7/8 x 9 November Translation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press
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cover of Red Weather

Red Weather

Janet McAdams

University of Arizona Press, 2012

This trip wasn’t about her, her need to escape. She had been too young when it happened. Too young to understand what could be worth risking everything for. Even now they seemed naïve, foolish in their belief that anything could change. They had tried to save a generation. If she couldn’t save them, she might find a way to finish their story.
 
Neva Greene is seeking answers.
 
The daughter of American Indian activists, Neva hasn’t seen or heard from her parents since they vanished a decade earlier, after planning an act of resistance that went terribly wrong. Discovering a long-overlooked clue to their disappearance, Neva follows their trail to Central America, leaving behind an uncaring husband, an estranged brother, and a life of lukewarm commitments.
 
Determined to solve the mystery of her parents’ disappearance, Neva finds work teaching English in the capital city of tiny Coatepeque, a country torn by its government’s escalating war on its Indigenous population. As the violence and political unrest grow around her, Neva meets a man whose tenderness toward her seems to contradict his shadowy political connections.
 
Against the backdrop of Central American politics, this suspenseful first novel from award-winning poet Janet McAdams explores an important chapter in American Indian history. Through finely drawn, compelling characters and lucidly beautiful prose, Red Weather explores the journey from loss to possibility, from the secrets of the past to the longings of the present.
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cover of Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers' Festival

Returning the Gift

Poetry and Prose from the First North American Native Writers' Festival

Edited by Joseph Bruchac

University of Arizona Press, 1994

An unprecedented gathering of more than 300 Native writers was held in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1992. The Returning the Gift Festival brought more Native writers together in one place than at any other time in history. "Returning the Gift," observes co-organizer Joseph Bruchac, "both demonstrated and validated our literature and our devotion to it, not just to the public, but to ourselves." In compiling this volume, Bruchac invited every writer who attended the festival to submit new, unpublished work; he then selected the best of the more than 200 submissions to create a collection that includes established writers like Duane Niatum, Simon Ortiz, Lance Henson, Elizabeth Woody, Linda Hogan, and Jeanette Armstrong, and also introduces such lesser-known or new voices as Tracy Bonneau, Jeanetta Calhoun, Kim Blaeser, and Chris Fleet.

The anthology includes works from every corner of the continent, representing a wide range of tribal affiliations, languages, and cultures. By taking their peoples' literature back to them in the form of stories and songs, these writers see themselves as returning the gift of storytelling, culture, and continuance to the source from which it came. In addition to contributions by 92 writers are two introductory chapters: Joseph Bruchac comments on the current state of Native literature and the significance of the festival, and Geary Hobson traces the evolution of the event itself.
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cover of Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala: The Insurgent Poetics of Contemporary Indigenous Literature

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala

The Insurgent Poetics of Contemporary Indigenous Literature

Hannah Burdette

University of Arizona Press, 2019

From the rise of the Pan-Maya Movement in Guatemala and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico to the Water and Gas Wars in Bolivia and the Idle No More movement in Canada, the turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed a notable surge in Indigenous political action as well as an outpouring of texts produced by Native authors and poets. Throughout the Americas—Abiayala, or the “Land of Plenitude and Maturity” in the Guna language of Panama—Indigenous people are raising their voices and reclaiming the right to represent themselves in politics as well as in creative writing.

Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala explores the intersections between Indigenous literature and social movements over the past thirty years through the lens of insurgent poetics. Author Hannah Burdette is interested in how Indigenous literature and social movements are intertwined and why these phenomena arise almost simultaneously in disparate contexts across the Americas.

Literature constitutes a key weapon in political struggles as it provides a means to render subjugated knowledge visible and to envision alternatives to modernity and coloniality. The surge in Indigenous literature and social movements is arguably one of the most significant occurrences of the twenty-first century, and yet it remains understudied. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala bridges that gap by using the concept of Abiayala as a powerful starting point for rethinking inter-American studies through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty.
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