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

cover of We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World

We Are Meant to Rise

Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World

Carolyn Holbrook

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A brilliant and rich gathering of voices on the American experience of this past year and beyond, from Indigenous writers and writers of color from Minnesota
 

In this significant collection, Indigenous writers and writers of color bear witness to one of the most unsettling years in the history of the United States. Essays and poems vividly reflect and comment on the traumas we endured in 2020, beginning with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, deepened by the blatant murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the uprisings that immersed our city into the epicenter of passionate, worldwide demands for justice. In inspired and incisive writing these contributors speak unvarnished truths not only to the original and pernicious racism threaded through the American experience but also to the deeply personal, in essays about family, loss, food culture, economic security, and mental health. Their call and response is united here to rise and be heard. 

We Are Meant to Rise lifts up the astonishing variety of BIPOC writers in Minnesota. From authors with international reputations to newly emerging voices, it features people from many cultures, including Indigenous Dakota and Anishinaabe, African American, Hmong, Somali, Afghani, Lebanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Mexican, transracial adoptees, mixed race, and LGBTQ+ perspectives. Most of the contributors have participated in More Than a Single Story, a popular and insightful conversation series in Minneapolis that features Indigenous and people of color speaking on what most concerns their communities. 

We Are Meant to Rise meets the events of the day, the year, the centuries before, again and again, with powerful testament to the intrinsic and unique value of the human voice.

Contributors: Suleiman Adan, Mary Moore Easter, Louise Erdrich, Anika Fajardo, Safy-Hallan Farah, Said Farah, Sherrie Fernandez-Williams, Pamela R. Fletcher Bush, Shannon Gibney, Kathryn Haddad, Tish Jones, Ezekiel Joubert III, Douglas Kearney, Ed Bok Lee, Ricardo Levins Morales, Arleta Little, Resmaa Menakem, Tess Montgomery, Ahmad Qais Munhazim, Melissa Olson, Alexs Pate, Bao Phi, Mona Susan Power, Samantha Sencer-Mura, Said Shaiye, Erin Sharkey, Sun Yung Shin, Michael Torres, Diane Wilson, Kao Kalia Yang, and Kevin Yang.

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cover of When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: AFRICAN-NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote

AFRICAN-NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE

Edited by Jonathan Brennan

University of Illinois Press, 2003

An exploration of the literature, history, and culture of people of mixed African American and Native American descent, When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote is the first book to theorize an African-Native American literary tradition. In examining this overlooked tradition, the book prompts a reconsideration of interracial relations in American history and literature.
 
Jonathan Brennan, in a sweeping historical and analytical introduction to this collection of essays, surveys several centuries of literature in the context of the historical and cultural exchange and development of distinct African-Native American traditions. Positing a new African-Native American literary theory, he illuminates the roles subjectivity, situational identities, and strategic discourse play in defining African-Native American literatures.
 
Brennan provides a thorough background to the literary tradition and a valuable overview to topics discussed in the essays. He examines African-Native American political and historical texts, travel narratives, and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, suggesting that this evolving oral tradition parallels the development of numerous Black Indian literary traditions in the United States and Latin America.
 
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cover of Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice

Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays

A Tribal Voice

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

This provocative collection of essays reveals the passionate voice of a Native American feminist intellectual. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a poet and literary scholar, grapples with issues she encountered as a Native American in academia. She asks questions of critical importance to tribal people:  who is telling their stories, where does cultural authority lie, and most important, how is it possible to develop an authentic tribal literary voice within the academic community?
    In the title essay, “Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner,” Cook-Lynn objects to Stegner’s portrayal of the American West in his fiction, contending that no other author has been more successful in serving the interests of the nation’s fantasy about itself. When Stegner writes that “Western history sort of stopped at 1890,” and when he claims the American West as his native land, Cook-Lynn argues, he negates the whole past, present, and future of the native peoples of the continent. Her other essays include discussion of such Native American writers as Michael Dorris, Ray Young Bear, and N. Scott Momaday; the importance of a tribal voice in academia, the risks to American Indian women in current law practices, the future of Indian Nationalism, and the defense of the land.
    Cook-Lynn emphasizes that her essays move beyond the narrowly autobiographical, not just about gender and power, not just focused on multiculturalism and diversity, but are about intellectual and political issues that engage readers and writers in Native American studies. Studying the “Indian,” Cook-Lynn reminds us, is not just an academic exercise but a matter of survival for the lifeways of tribal peoples. Her goal in these essays is to open conversations that can make tribal life and academic life more responsive to one another.

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cover of Wisconsin Indian Literature: Anthology of Native Voices

Wisconsin Indian Literature

Anthology of Native Voices

Edited by Kathleen Tigerman; Foreward by Jim Ottery

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Literature of the Indian Nations of Wisconsin is a unique anthology that presents the oral traditions, legends, speeches, myths, histories, literature, and historically significant documents of the current twelve independent bands and Indian Nations of Wisconsin. Kathleen Tigerman sought input from tribe elders and educators to provide an accurate chronological portrait of each nation, including the Siouan Ho-Chunk; the Algonquian Menominee, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi; and three groups originally from what is now New York State: the Iroquoian Oneida, the Stockbridge-Munsee band of the Mohican Nations, and the Brothertown Nation.
    Some of these works feature a cultural hero or refer to very ancient times—more than six thousand years ago—and others are contemporary. These pieces focus on issues of Wisconsin Native communities by sharing Native knowledge and dialogue about sovereignty, decolonization, cultural genocide, forced removals, assimilation, and other concerns.
    This anthology introduces us to a vivid and unforgettable group of voices, enhanced by many maps, photographs, and chronologies. Literature of the Indian Nations of Wisconsin fosters cross-cultural understanding among non-Native readers and the people of the First Nations.

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cover of Writing Home: Indigenous Narratives of Resistance

Writing Home

Indigenous Narratives of Resistance

Michael D. Wilson

Michigan State University Press, 2008

In Writing Home, Michael Wilson demonstrates that the use of acceptable Western literary forms by indigenous peoples, while sometimes effective, has frequently distorted essential truths about their cultures. Sermons, for instance, have provided some indigenous authors with a means to criticize colonialism; but ultimately this institutional form, by its very nature, expresses a hierarchical relationship between Christian religions and indigenous beliefs and practices. Similarly, autobiographies are useful vehicles for explaining the cultural practices of a particular tribal group—or personalizing the destructive forces of colonialism—yet the autobiographical form itself suggests an ethos of individualism entirely contrary to a vision of communal identity central to many indigenous groups. Short fiction and novels are often built around conflict. Although indigenous writers have used this thematic approach with considerable artistry to express the clash between indigenous societies and the forces of colonialism, for many indigenous people the idea of conflict as the basis of cultural expression may be antithetical to a relational, perhaps familial, attitude toward the world and other people.
    Writing Home explores the ways that indigenous writers use ideas and structures from primarily oral traditions to resist, for example, colonial metanarratives that legitimize and even demand the disappearance of indigenous peoples—Manifest Destiny, Social Darwinism, and the inevitable plight of the tragic "mixed blood." To this end, Wilson examines selected works by Mourning Dove (Humishuma), Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, and Ray Young Bear. In the effort to create a mimetic form of representation that is appropriate to their cultures, these writers, Wilson finds, confront issues of authenticity, identity, and society. Ultimately, Wilson’s investigation reminds us of the difficulty and ingenuity required to rescue an authentic written representation of a culture from the distortions caused by the colonialist’s "accepted" representational structures.
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