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Josh Henneha has always been a traveler, drowning in dreams, burning with desires. As a young boy growing up within the Muskogee Creek Nation in rural Oklahoma, Josh experiences a yearning for something he cannot tame. Quiet and skinny and shy, he feels out of place, at once inflamed and ashamed by his attraction to other boys. Driven by a need to understand himself and his history, Josh struggles to reconcile the conflicting voices he hearsÑfrom the messages of sin and scorn of the non-Indian Christian churches his parents attend in order to assimilate, to the powerful stories of his older Creek relatives, which have been the center of his upbringing, memory, and ongoing experience. In his...
How can a square peg fit into a round hole? It can't. How can a door be unlocked with a pencil? It can't. How can Native literature be read applying conventional postmodern literary criticism? It can't. That is Craig Womack's argument in Red on Red. Indian communities have their own intellectual and cultural traditions that are well equipped to analyze Native literary production. These traditions should be the eyes through which the texts are viewed. To analyze a Native text with the methods currently dominant in the academy, according to the author, is like studying the stars with a magnifying glass. In an unconventional and piercingly humorous appeal, Womack creates a dialogue between essa...
Pick up a work of typical literary criticism and you know what to expect: prose that is dry, pedantic, well-meaning but tedious—slow-going and essentially humorless. But why should that be so? Why can’t more literary criticism have a political edge and be engaging and fast-paced? Why can’t it include drama, personal narrative, and even humor? Why can’t criticism become an artistic performance, rather than just a discussion of art? Art as Performance, Story as Criticism is Craig Womack’s answer to these questions. Inventive and often outrageous, the book turns traditional literary criticism on its head, rejecting distanced, purely theoretical argumentation for intimate engagement wi...
A study of Native literature from the perspective of national sovereignty and self-determination.
A paradigm shift in American Indian literary criticism.
"Unlike Western interpretations of Native American literatures and cultures in which external critical methodologies are imposed on Native texts, ultimately silencing the primary voices of the texts themselves, Pulitano's work examines critical material generated from within the Native contexts to propose a different approach to Native literature. Pulitano argues that the distinctiveness of Native American critical theory can be found in its aggressive blending and reimagining of oral tradition and Native epistemologies on the written page - a powerful, complex mediation that can stand on its own yet effectively subsume and transform non-Native critical theoretical strategies."--BOOK JACKET.
Written from a contemporary Cherokee, Queer, and mixed-race experience, Walking with Ghosts: Poems confronts the legacy of land-theft, genocide, and forced removal of Cherokees from their homelands while simultaneously resisting ongoing attacks on both Indigenous and Gay/ Lesbian/ Bisexual /Transgender (GLBT) communities. The debut work of Qwo-Li Driskill, a young Cherokee poet also of African, Irish, Lenape, Lumbee, and Osage ancestries, these poems move across Cherokee history. From the infamous Trail of Tears and the Allotment Act to the Indian boarding school system and contemporary manifestations of racism, these poems reach into Cherokee collective memory asking its readers to not only...
Struggles over space and resistance to geographic displacement gave birth to much of Chicano history and culture. In this pathfinding book, Raúl Villa explores how California Chicano/a activists, journalists, writers, artists, and musicians have used expressive culture to oppose the community-destroying forces of urban renewal programs and massive freeway development and to create and defend a sense of Chicano place-identity. Villa opens with a historical overview that shows how Chicano communities and culture have grown in response to conflicts over space ever since the United States' annexation of Mexican territory in the 1840s. Then, turning to the work of contemporary members of the Chicano intelligentsia such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Ron Arias, and Lorna Dee Cervantes, Villa demonstrates how their expressive practices re-imagine and re-create the dominant urban space as a community enabling place. In doing so, he illuminates the endless interplay in which cultural texts and practices are shaped by and act upon their social and political contexts.
‘Wynema’ (1891) is a novel by Native American writer Sophia Alice Callahan. Occupying the position as the first-ever novel written by a Native American woman, it is an important and gripping account of the hardships suffered by Native Americans, and further covers the infamous ‘Massacre at Wounded Knee’. When a married couple hears of the horrors at the battle of Wounded Knee, they decide to adopt a Native American orphan girl. But raising a Lakota girl in a white town influenced by Western values and Christianity inevitably leads to a clash of cultures. ́Wynema ́ is perfect for those interested in Native American history, as well as those familiar with Zitkala-Ša's ́American Indian Stories ́. Sophia Alice Callahan (1868 –1894) was a Native American novelist and teacher, best known for her novel, ‘Wynema’ (1891), which is the first novel written by a Native American woman. The book details the horrors of the battle at Wounded Knee and the treatment of Native Americans in 1890’s United States society. It has been declared a work of great historical importance and has been studied by scholars.
In Cheryl Savageauâe(tm)s new book of poetry, Mother/Land, she radically re-maps New England as Native American space. Savageau retells and re-imagines creation stories, revealing a landscape of trees, ponds, rivers and mountains rich in meaning for Abenaki people, and weaves traditional, personal and family stories, with stories of colonization and resistance. Savageauâe(tm)s âeoeunhistoryâe tells the stories of her people without privileging the moment of contact with Europe as the defining moment for viewing the culture.Mother/Land is beaded with gems from her motherâe(tm)s jewel boxâe"poems that tell stories of her motherâe(tm)s life, and the complexities of survival and love in a family of mixed heritage.Savageauâe(tm)s work signals the reemergence of a people who have been described as âeoehiding in plain sight.âe In contrast to stereotypical associations of Native Americans with âeoeMother Earth,âe this poetry highlights the bittersweet complexities of the relationship between a woman and her homeland, whose bodies seem to be constantly under siege.