Native American literature is literature, both oral and written, produced by Native Americans in what is now the United States (as distinct from First Nations writers in Canada), 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.
Native American pieces of literature come out of a rich set of oral traditions from before European contact and/or the later adoption of European writing practices. Oral traditions include not only narrative story-telling, but also the songs, chants, and poetry used for rituals and ceremonies. Many of these stories and songs were transcribed by anthropologists, but often with significant conflict with the tribes and often with significant misinterpretation and/or mistranslation. [1]
Many early Native American writers were political and/or autobiographical, which was often also political in that it was meant to persuade readers to push for better treatment of Native Americans. Samson Occom (Mohegan) was a Christian preacher who wrote not only his autobiography, A Short Narrative of My Life , but also many hymns. William Apess (Pequot) wrote his autobiography, A Son of the Forest, as well as a public lecture/eulogy of King Philip. Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute) wrote about her tribe's first interactions with European Americans in Life Among the Piutes , and John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee) wrote what is considered the first novel by a Native American, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta , about the infamous California bandit.
In the early 1900s, as white American audiences became interested in reading about the lives and cultures of Native Americans, Native American writers began transcribing the stories of their cultures, such as Charles Eastman's Old Indian Days and Mourning Dove's Coyote Tales. Others began to write fiction, for example, Mourning Dove's novel Cogewea and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded . Other novelists include John Joseph Mathews and John Milton Oskison. Perhaps the best known Native American work from this period is Green Grow the Lilacs , a play by Cherokee author Lynn Riggs that became the basis for the musical Oklahoma! Many of these authors blended autobiography, traditional stories, fiction, and essays, as can be seen in Zitkala-Sa's (Dakota) American Indian Stories .
The term "Native American Renaissance" was coined in 1983 by Kenneth Lincoln [2] to describe the flowering of literary work by Native American writers [3] in the late 1960s through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The focal point for the "arrival" of Native American literature as a significant literary event came with the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a Native author, N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) for his novel House Made of Dawn .
The 1970s saw important fiction by James Welch (Blackfeet and A-aninin), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna descent), and Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), and poetry by Joy Harjo (Muscogee), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma), and Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok). Many authors have done significant work in both genres, such as Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki).
The 1980s saw many of the writers listed above continuing to produce new literature. New voices included Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Michael Dorris, and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo).
The 1990s introduced several works of poetry and of prose fiction by Spokane/Coeur D'Alene author Sherman Alexie. Chickasaw author Linda Hogan's Mean Spirit was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [4]
In 2021, Louise Erdrich was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner for The Night Watchman. [5]
In 2019, Joy Harjo (Muscogee Nation) became the first Native American to hold the post of United States Poet Laureate.
Also in 2019, Tommy Orange's (Cheyenne & Arapaho) novel about urban Indian life in California, There There , was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [6]
Articles on Native American writers in Western American Literature
Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
Leslie Marmon Silko is an American writer. A woman of Laguna Pueblo descent, she is one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
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.
House Made of Dawn is a 1968 novel by N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and has also been noted for its significance in Native American anthropology.
James Phillip Welch Jr., who grew up within the Blackfeet and A'aninin cultures of his parents, was a Native American novelist and poet, considered a founding author of the Native American Renaissance. His novel Fools Crow (1986) received several national literary awards, and his debut novel Winter in the Blood (1974) was adapted as a film by the same name, released in 2013.
Paula Gunn Allen was an American poet, literary critic, activist, professor, and novelist. Of mixed-race European-American, Arab-American, and Native American descent, she identified with her mother's people, the Laguna Pueblo. Gunn Allen wrote numerous essays, stories and poetry with Native American and feminist themes, and two biographies of Native American women. She edited four collections of Native American traditional stories and contemporary writing.
The Native American Renaissance is a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln in the 1983 book Native American Renaissance to categorise the significant increase in production of literary works by Native Americans in the United States in the late 1960s and onwards. A. Robert Lee and Alan Velie note that the book's title "quickly gained currency as a term to describe the efflorescence on literary works that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968". Momaday's novel garnered critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
Luci Tapahonso is a Navajo poet and a lecturer in Native American Studies. She is the first poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, succeeded by Laura Tohe.
Navarre Scotte Momaday was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and is considered the first major work of the Native American Renaissance.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Adrian C. Louis was an American author. Hailing from Nevada, Louis was a member of Lovelock Paiute tribe who lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He has taught at Oglala Lakota College.
Storyteller is a collection of works, including photographs, poetry, and short stories by Leslie Marmon Silko. It is her second published book, following Ceremony. The work is a combination of stories and poetry inspired by traditional Laguna Pueblo storytelling. Silko's writings in Storyteller are influenced by her upbringing in Laguna, New Mexico, where she was surrounded by traditional Laguna Pueblo values but was also educated in a Euro-American system. Her education began with kindergarten at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school called the Laguna Day School "where the speaking of the Laguna language was punished."
The Native Writers' Circle of the Americas (NWCA) is an organization of writers who identify as being Native American, First Nations, or of Native American ancestry.
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".
Linda LeGarde Grover is an Anishinaabe novelist and short story writer. An enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, she is a professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, as well as a columnist for the Duluth News Tribune.
Grace L. Dillon is an American academic and author. She is a professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program, in the School of Gender, Race, and Nations, at Portland State University. She received her PhD in literary studies with an emphasis in sixteenth-century literature, and her recent research regards science fiction studies.
Kinsale Drake is an American poet, playwright, performer, and writer. Drake is Diné and a citizen of the Navajo Nation. In September 2023, Drake was one of five winners of the 2023 National Poetry Series for her debut poetry collection The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket.
In the throes of the colonial onslaught, anthropologists often failed to recognize or otherwise acknowledge the historical and cultural validity and richness of Amerindian oral traditions and thereby dismissed them as myth or as the useless meanderings of primitive minds. Others proved guilty, by virtue of intent or disregard, or disseminating esoteric and sacred knowledge or traditional ceremonies without tribal consent or consideration.
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