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72 books match the query 'Indian authors' and 14 start with t

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The Colonial Construction of Indian Country

Native American Literatures and Federal Indian Law

Eric Cheyfitz

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

A guide to the colonization and projected decolonization of Native America

In The Colonial Construction of Indian Country, Eric Cheyfitz mounts a pointed historical critique of colonialism through careful analysis of the dialogue between Native American literatures and federal Indian law. Illuminating how these literatures indict colonial practices, he argues that if the decolonization of Indian country is to be achieved, then federal Indian law must be erased and replaced with independent Native nation sovereignty—because subordinate sovereignty, the historical regime, is not sovereignty at all.

At the same time, Cheyfitz argues that Native American literatures, specifically U.S. American Indian literatures, cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of U.S. federal Indian law: the matrix of colonialism in Indian country. Providing intersectional readings of a range of literary and legal texts, he discusses such authors as Louise Erdrich, Frances Washburn, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, and others. Cheyfitz examines how American Indian writers and critics have responded to the impact of law on Native life, revealing recent trends in Native writing that build upon traditional modes of storytelling and governance.

With a focus on resistance to the colonial regime of federal Indian law, The Colonial Construction of Indian Country not only elucidates how Native American literatures and federal Indian law are each crucial to any reading of the other, it also guides readers to better understand the genocidal assault on Indigenous peoples by Western structures of literacy, politics, and law.

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The Diné Reader

An Anthology of Navajo Literature

Edited by Esther G. Belin, Jeff Berglund, Connie A. Jacobs, and Anthony K. Webster; Foreword by Sherwin Bitsui

University of Arizona Press, 2021

2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Winner

The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature is unprecedented. It showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose.This wide-ranging anthology brings together writers who offer perspectives that span generations and perspectives on life and Diné history. The collected works display a rich variety of and creativity in themes: home and history; contemporary concerns about identity, historical trauma, and loss of language; and economic and environmental inequalities.

The Diné Reader developed as a way to demonstrate both the power of Diné literary artistry and the persistence of the Navajo people. The volume opens with a foreword by poet Sherwin Bitsui, who offers insight into the importance of writing to the Navajo people. The editors then introduce the volume by detailing the literary history of the Diné people, establishing the context for the tremendous diversity of the works that follow, which includes free verse, sestinas, limericks, haiku, prose poems, creative nonfiction, mixed genres, and oral traditions reshaped into the written word.

This volume combines an array of literature with illuminating interviews, biographies, and photographs of the featured Diné writers and artists. A valuable resource to educators, literature enthusiasts, and beyond, this anthology is a much-needed showcase of Diné writers and their compelling work. The volume also includes a chronology of important dates in Diné history by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, as well as resources for teachers, students, and general readers by Michael Thompson. The Diné Reader is an exciting convergence of Navajo writers and artists with scholars and educators.

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The Heart as a Drum

Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry

Robin Riley Fast

University of Michigan Press, 2000

The Heart as a Drum celebrates poetry by a range of contemporary Native American writers, illuminating the poets' shared commitments and distinctive approaches to political resistance and cultural survival. The poetry reflects an awareness of the divisions and conflicts inherited from colonization and a commitment to traditional beliefs about the relatedness of all beings. This double perception engenders poetry that emphasizes resistance and continuance and poetry that makes creative and unique use of language. The book elucidates these aspects of the work through cultural and historical readings of poetry written by both urban- and reservation-identified Indians from varied geographic and tribal origins.

The book's focus is on the major themes in contemporary Native American literature: community and audience, the meanings of place and history, spiritual experiences, the nature of language, and the roles and varieties of storytelling. The poets whose works are discussed include Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Maurice Kenny, Simon J. Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Elizabeth Woody, and Ray Young Bear.

The first critical book dedicated to contemporary Native American poetry, The Heart as a Drum will be useful to students, teachers, and critics of American Indian cultures and literatures, and to all readers of contemporary American poetry.

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The People and the Word

Reading Native Nonfiction

Robert Warrior

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

Much literary scholarship has been devoted to the flowering of Native American fiction and poetry in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, Robert Warrior argues, nonfiction has been the primary form used by American Indians in developing a relationship with the written word, one that reaches back much further in Native history and culture.

Focusing on autobiographical writings and critical essays, as well as communally authored and political documents, The People and the Word explores how the Native tradition of nonfiction has both encompassed and dissected Native experiences. Warrior begins by tracing a history of American Indian writing from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, then considers four particular moments: Pequot intellectual William Apess’s autobiographical writings from the 1820s and 1830s; the Osage Constitution of 1881; narratives from American Indian student experiences, including accounts of boarding school in the late 1880s; and modern Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday’s essay “The Man Made of Words,” penned during the politically charged 1970s. Warrior’s discussion of Apess’s work looks unflinchingly at his unconventional life and death; he recognizes resistance to assimilation in the products of the student print shop at the Santee Normal Training School; and in the Osage Constitution, as well as in Momaday’s writing, Warrior sees reflections of their turbulent times as well as guidance for our own.

Taking a cue from Momaday’s essay, which gives voice to an imaginary female ancestor, Ko-Sahn, Warrior applies both critical skills and literary imagination to the texts. In doing so, The People and the Word provides a rich foundation for Native intellectuals’ critical work, deeply entwined with their unique experiences.

Robert Warrior is professor of English and Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minnesota, 1994) and coauthor, with Paul Chaat Smith, of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee.

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The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History

James H. Cox

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans

The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context.

Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics

Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.

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The Red Land to the South

American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico

James H. Cox

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

The forty years of American Indian literature taken up by James H. Cox—the decades between 1920 and 1960—have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, Cox identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico—and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era.

By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, Cox reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is generally acknowledged. The writers he focuses on—Todd Downing (Choctaw), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D’Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai)—are shown to be on par with writers of the preceding Progressive and the succeeding Red Power and Native American literary renaissance eras.

Arguing that American Indian literary history of this period actually coheres in exciting ways with the literature of the Native American literary renaissance, Cox repudiates the intellectual and political border that has emerged between the two eras.

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The Sound of Rattles and Clappers

A Collection of New California Indian Writing

Edited by Greg Sarris

University of Arizona Press, 1994

In this anthology of poetry and fiction, ten Native Americans of California Indian ancestry illuminate aspects of their respective native cultures in works characterized by a profound love of place and people, as well as by anger over political oppression and social problems

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The Spiral of Memory

Interviews

Joy Harjo

University of Michigan Press, 1995

With the recently-published The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, Joy Harjo has emerged as one of the most powerful Native American voices of her generation. Over the past two decades, Harjo has refined and perfected a unique poetic voice that speaks her multifaceted experience as Native American, woman and Westerner in twentieth-century society.

The Spiral of Memory gathers the conversations in which Harjo has articulated her singular yet universal perspective on the world and her poetry. She reflects upon the nuances and development of her art, the importance of her origins, the arduous reconstruction of the tribal past, the dramatic confrontation between Native American and Anglo civilizations, the existential and artistic itinerary through present-day America, and other provocative and profoundly human themes.

Joy Harjo is the author of several volumes of poetry. She received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America. She is Professor of English, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Laura Coltelli is Associate Professor of American Literature, University of Pisa.

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The Truth About Stories

A Native Narrative

Thomas King

University of Minnesota Press, 2005

"Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous." In The Truth About Stories, Native novelist and scholar Thomas King explores how stories shape who we are and how we understand and interact with other people. From creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native literature, King probes Native culture's deep ties to storytelling. With wry humor, King deftly weaves events from his own life as a child in California, an academic in Canada, and a Native North American with a wide-ranging discussion of stories told by and about Indians. So many stories have been told about Indians, King comments, that "there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations." That imaginative Indian that North Americans hold dear has been challenged by Native writers - N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, Robert Alexie, and others - who provide alternative narratives of the Native experience that question, create a present, and imagine a future. King reminds the reader, Native and non-Native, that storytelling carries with it social and moral responsibilties. "Don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now."

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The Tutor'd Mind

Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America

Bernd C. Peyer

University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Part historical narrative, part textual analysis, this book traces the development of American Indian literature from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War. Bernd C. Peyer focuses on the lives and writings of four prominent Indian missionaries—Samson Occom of the Mohegans, William Apess of the Pequots, Elias Boudinot of the Cherokees, and George Copway of the Ojibwa—each of whom struggled to negotiate a secure place between the imperatives of colonial rule and the rights of native peoples.

In the view of the English colonists and their descendants, Indian converts to Christianity were expected to repudiate native traditions and affirm the superiority of European civilization, to serve as role models, and to spread the gospel far into the wilderness. Yet as Bernd C. Peyer shows, Indian missionaries did not always fulfill the expectations of those who trained them. Once the Indians recognized that conversion alone did not guarantee protection from discrimination, they devised a variety of strategies, theological as well as practical, to resist assimilation into the dominant white culture. Making effective use of their literacy and education, they called attention to the discrepancy between the Protestant ideals they had been taught and the Anglo-American practices to which native people were subjected.

By uncovering this subtext of dissent and resistance, Peyer at once alters and enriches our understanding of the evolution of the American Indian literary tradition.

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The World Is One Place

Native American Poets Visit the Middle East

Diane Glancy

BkMk Press, 2017

This anthology explores how the Middle East has captured the imaginations of a significant group of Native American poets, most of whom have traveled to the Middle East (broadly defined to include the Arab world, Israel, Turkey, Afghanistan). What qualities of the region drew them there? What did they see? How did their cultural perspectives as Native Americans inform their reactions and insights? Three thematic sections—Place, People, Spirit—feature poems and notes inspired by the poets' experiences of Middle Eastern cultures. Contributors include Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Natalie Diaz, Diane Glancy, Joy Harjo, Allison Hedge Coke, Travis Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan, LeAnne Howe, Bojan Louis, Craig Santos Perez, Linda Rodriguez, Kim Shuck, and James Thomas Stevens.

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Trans-Indigenous

Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies

Chadwick Allen

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

What might be gained from reading Native literatures from global rather than exclusively local perspectives of Indigenous struggle? In Trans-Indigenous, Chadwick Allen proposes methodologies for a global Native literary studies based on focused comparisons of diverse texts, contexts, and traditions in order to foreground the richness of Indigenous self-representation and the complexity of Indigenous agency.

Through demonstrations of distinct forms of juxtaposition—across historical periods and geographical borders, across tribes and nations, across the Indigenous–settler binary, across genre and media—Allen reclaims aspects of the Indigenous archive from North America, Hawaii, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia that have been largely left out of the scholarly conversation. He engages systems of Indigenous aesthetics—such as the pictographic discourse of Plains Indian winter counts, the semiotics of Navajo weaving, and Maori carving traditions, as well as Indigenous technologies like large-scale North American earthworks and Polynesian ocean-voyaging waka—for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts. The result is a provocative reorienting of the call for Native intellectual, artistic, and literary sovereignty that fully prioritizes the global Indigenous.

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