Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
Jamake Mamake Highwater, also known as "J Marks", was an American writer and journalist of Eastern European Jewish ancestry who mispresented himself as Cherokee.
Kimberly M. Blaeser is a Native American poet and writer enrolled in the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe. She was the Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015–16.
Medicine River is a novel written by author Thomas King. It was first published by Viking Canada in 1989. The book was later adapted (1993) into a television movie starring Graham Greene and Tom Jackson.
Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich's debut novel, first published in 1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel in subsequent 1993 and 2009 editions. The book follows the lives of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on fictional reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The collection of short stories in the book spans six decades from the 1930s to the 1980s. Love Medicine garnered critical praise and won numerous awards, including the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.
The traditional narratives of Native California are the folklore and mythology of the native people of California. For many historic nations of California, there is only a fragmentary record of their traditions. Spanish missions in California from the 18th century Christianized many of these traditions, and the remaining groups were mostly assimilated to US culture by the early 20th century. While there are sparse records from the 18th century, most material was collected during the 19th and the early 20th centuries.
Survivance is a critical term in Native American studies.
The frontier myth or myth of the West is one of the influential myths in American culture. The frontier is the concept of a place that exists at the edge of a civilization, particularly during a period of expansion. The American frontier occurred throughout the 17th to 20th centuries as European Americans colonized and expanded across North America. This period of time became romanticized and idealized in literature and art to form a myth. Richard Slotkin, a prominent scholar on the subject, defines the myth of the frontier as "America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top."
Shell Shaker (2001) is a novel by American LeAnne Howe. The novel's plot revolves around two tales of murder involving historical Choctaw political leaders. Set over a 200-year period, it focuses on several generations of the fictional Billy family, who try to keep the peace. It won the 2002 Before Columbus American Book Award.
Characterization or characterisation is the representation of characters in narrative and dramatic works. The term character development is sometimes used as a synonym. This representation may include direct methods like the attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect methods inviting readers to infer qualities from characters' actions, dialogue, or appearance. Such a personage is called a character. Character is a literary element.
In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior.
Green Grass, Running Water is a 1993 novel by Thomas King, a writer of Cherokee and Greek/German-American descent, and United States and Canadian dual citizenship. He was born and grew up in the United States, and has lived in Canada since 1980. The novel is set in a contemporary First Nations Blackfoot community in Alberta, Canada. It gained attention due to its unique use of structure, narrative, and the fusion of oral and written literary traditions. The novel is rife with humor and satire, particularly regarding Judeo-Christian beliefs as well as Western government and society. Green Grass, Running Water was a finalist for the 1993 Governor General's Award in Fiction.
Griever: An American Monkey King in China is a 1986 novel by Gerald Vizenor. It won the 1986 New York Fiction Collective Award and the 1988 American Book Award. The book is important both because it establishes the trickster figure of Griever de Hocus, whom Vizenor had created in his 1985 story "Luminous Thighs" and whom he would use again in The Trickster of Liberty, and because Vizenor takes Native American stories and themes outside the Americas and into China, establishing a connection to Chinese trickster figures, most notably Sun Wukong the Monkey King.
The Heirs of Columbus is a 1991 novel by Gerald Vizenor that, in the face of the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in America, inverts the historical record by re-imagining Columbus as a descendant of Mayans and Sephardic Jews who now wants to return home, that is, to America. Meanwhile, his modern-day descendants, the heirs of the title, are trying to bring his bones home. Critic Louis Owens considers this novel to be Vizenor "[i]n his best trickster-satirist mode" as he accomplishes "a brilliant appropriation of the master symbol of Euroamerican history".
The Trickster of Liberty is a 1988 novel by Gerald Vizenor that acts as a prequel to his earlier novels Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles and Griever: An American Monkey King in China. The novel is a collection of stories about the mixedblood descendants of Luster Browne and their lives on the White Earth Indian Reservation. The novel continues Vizenor's focus on mixedbloods and tricksters and includes characters from the previous novels, including Griever de Hocus and China Brown from Griever and Eternal Flame from Bearheart.
Native American literature is literature, both oral and written, produced by Native Americans in what is now the United States, from pre-Columbian times through to today. Famous authors include N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, D'Arcy McNickle, James Welch, Charles Eastman, Mourning Dove, Zitkala-Sa, John Rollin Ridge, Lynn Riggs, Hanay Geiogamah, William Apess, Samson Occom, and Stephen Graham Jones. Importantly, it is not "a" literature, but a set of literatures, since every tribe has its own cultural traditions. Since the 1960s, it has also become a significant field of literary studies, with academic journals, departments, and conferences devoted to the subject.
Eric Gansworth is a Haudenosaunee novelist, poet and visual artist from New York. He is a citizen of the Onondaga Nation and Tuscarora descendant.
Harold of Orange is a comedy short film directed by Richard Weise and produced by Dianne Brennan, with a screenplay by Gerald Vizenor.
The Light People is a 1994 novel written by Gordon Henry. The book won the American Book Award in 1995. The Light People is a work of Native American fiction, composed of many distinct but ultimately interconnected stories happening in and around an Ojibwe village in northern Minnesota, and the Twin Cities.
Erma Jean Vizenor is an Ojibwe politician and educator. She served as the tribal chair of the White Earth Nation from 2004 to 2016. Under her leadership, White Earth adopted a new tribal constitution. She served as an educator in the White Earth Indian Reservation for 20 years. Vizenor was president of Leech Lake Tribal College in 2016.
