Native American Literature
Native American literature encompasses the oral traditions, storytelling, and written works of the indigenous peoples of North America. It reflects the diverse cultures, histories, and experiences of Native American communities, often addressing themes of identity, tradition, and the impact of colonization. This literature includes a wide range of genres, from traditional myths and legends to contemporary novels and poetry.
3 Key excerpts on "Native American Literature"
- Richard J. Lane(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Contemporary Indigenous Literatures Narratives of Autonomy and Resistance Overview The oral narratives of Canada’s First Peoples are a living legacy, one that has been transmitted through the generations to the present day. During colonial times, this oral culture came under attack, through a whole host of degrading measures, including the appropriation of aboriginal land, the loss of political autonomy, the criminalization of religious practices and rituals, and the taking control of Aboriginal education, mainly through the residential school system. The colonial narrative of the “vanishing Indian” has since been revealed to be false, and in fact First Peoples have regained a significant measure of cultural and political autonomy, leading to a renaissance in indigenous arts and belief systems. In the late twentieth century, an exciting new hybrid form of Aboriginal writing brought together the techniques of oral, performance based culture with innovative modes of indigenous literary expression. Going from strength to strength, Aboriginal literature is now one of the most vibrant and successful art forms in Canada. New Venues, New Voices: Indigenous Publishing in the 1960s Part of the highly successful “moving away” from colonial systems and values involved finding new political and aesthetic voices. The 1960s were crucial years in the establishment of alternative venues of publication, seeing the launch of many newspapers and periodicals, including Indian Outlook (est. 1960), The Micmac News (est. 1965), Kainai News (est. 1968), Akwesasne News (est. 1969), The Indian Voice (est. 1969), The First Citizen (est. 1969), The Saskatchewan Indian (est. 1970), Tepatshimuwin (est. 1976) and The National Indian (est. 1977). While some of these publications were relatively short lived, they represent the beginnings of a new wave of Canadian indigenous writing in English, one in which orature and written texts cross-over and intersect...
eBook - ePubLanguage and Linguistic Diversity in the US
An Introduction
- Susan Tamasi, Lamont Antieau(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...134) For Native Americans, their languages thus serve as integral parts of their identities— as individuals, as members of tribes, and as Native Americans. In Coming to Light: The Edward S. Curtis Story (Makepeace & Makepeace, 2001), a documentary that focuses on an early photographer of Native American life, an interviewee from the Kwakiutl tribe, Stanley Hunt, says: I lost my language. Once you lose the language, you lose pretty much everything with it, because all our stories and everything, all our rules and regulations about life are in our language and if you don’t speak our language, then you’re kind of, you’re lost. 12.16 Thus, Native American languages, like all heritage languages, play an important role in establishing and maintaining the identities of those who use them as a language or whose ancestors used them as a native language. Use of these languages has other rewards as well; for instance, educational research has found that including heritage language instruction as part of curricula can instill a sense of pride among Native American students and improve academic performance (McCarty, 2002). The preservation of Native American languages is also important to linguists, for a variety of reasons. Every language provides insight into what is possible in language as a whole, and so any language that dies before it is at least documented represents a loss of valuable information concerning what is possible in human languages (Nettle & Romaine, 2000, p. 69). Native American languages hold a special place in this endeavor because of their diversity and their importance in conveying the history of America and the American people, and recognition of this usefulness and that these languages were being lost was part of the motivation for anthropologists and linguists to begin documenting Native American languages over a hundred years ago. Nettle and Romaine argue: Linguistic diversity, then, is a benchmark of cultural diversity...
eBook - ePub- David Stirrup(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...Where many, particularly early, studies of Erdrich’s work prioritise ideas of fragmentation, isolation, and dislocation, others attempt to navigate more empowering perspectives. This will be explored more specifically in Chapter 3 but it is important to note the ways in which these shifts echo the broader movements of Native American Studies. Bird (Spokane) speaks to the ‘decolonisation of the mind’ in Native texts and, by implication, through sympathetic scholarship. Rather than simply dwelling on a history of pain, Native writers must go further by identifying and isolating the source of the pain, to overcome its power (Bird 1998: 30). ‘Victim’ is not a useful term here, just as notions of assimilation and acculturation merely advance the cause of ‘critical colonialism’. Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) writes of ‘the creative ability of Indian people to gather in many forms of the socio-political colonizing force which beset them and to make them meaningful in their own terms (Ortiz 1981: 8). Deliberately shifting focus away from ‘binary conceptions’ of Native cultures, he continues: ‘And because in every case where European culture was cast upon Indian people of this nation there was similar creative response and development, it can be observed that this was the primary element of a nationalist impulse to make use of foreign ritual, ideas, and material in their own – Indian – terms’ (1981: 8). These latter ideas have been developed further by Craig Womack, Robert Warrior (Osage), and Jace Weaver (Cherokee), who respectively (and collectively) elaborate the terms of Native Literary Nationalism, indigenous intellectual histories, and ‘communitism’. But what of the relationship between the political ideal and the literary aesthetic? Notionally at least the aesthetics of tribal literary nationalism derive from their social and political – tribal – contexts...
