The Men in the Bar Feared Her : The Power of Ayah in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Lullaby

Leslie Marmon Silko, who is of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white ancestry, states her political agenda: I feel it is more effective to write a story like Lullaby than to rant and rave. I think it is more effective in reaching people (Seyersted, Two Interviews 24), In the short story Lullaby, which is among the most often reprinted stories in American Indian literature, Silko draws on Navajo (Dine) characters (Graulich 19). First published in 1974 in both Chicago Review and Yardbird Reader, Lullaby was later selected by Martha Foley as one of twenty works for The Best American Short Stories of 1975. Silko then included it in Storyteller (1981). Writing outside of her own Laguna Pueblo tradition in Lullaby presents the challenge to the reader of having to be aware of not only Silko\u27s tribal heritage but also that of the Navajo

Stretching Sexual Boundaries in Sherman Alexie’s ‘Indian Country

Implementing many of the most cutting-edge trends in contemporary indigenous studies, these seventeen original essays tackle indigenous identity, cultural perseverance, economic development, and urbanization in a wide array of American Indian and First Nations populations. The authors present and preserve indigenous voices and carefully consider native worldviews throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and also address mainstream policies that influenced Native peoples in various eras and locales. The essays range from the specific—single peoples living in well-defined spaces during discrete time periods, to the expansive—broad comparative and international discussions. Yet the volume’s diversity extends beyond its topical breadth. The contributors themselves—many of whom are Native Americans or members of other First Nations—peer through scholarly lenses polished in Canada, Denmark, Finland, England, Sweden, and the United States. The ensuing synthesis helps to clarify the modern complexities of analyzing indigenous pasts

The Old Lady Trill, the Victory Yell: The Power of Women in Native American Literature

The political ramifications of gender complementarity for women in Native American literature result in strong female characters in the works of Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), and Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’ Alene). These authors create powerful females who live autonomous lives. Considering the tribal constructs of gender relations when examining the female characters helps explain why these women are politically empowered, whereas using a Western theoretical framework, for example, white feminism, will not produce the same kind of reading or explain as well why these female figures are so impressive

The Strength of Native Women in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood

Female characters in the literature of James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre) sometimes seem overshadowed by the principal male characters, and often the titles of the novels are about the male protagonists: the nameless protagonist in Winter in the Blood (1976), The Death of Jim Loney (1979), White Man’s Dog in Fools Crow (1986), Sylvester Yellow Calf in The Indian Lawyer (1990), and Charging Elk in The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000). However, in Welch’s novels the women hold important places and are necessary for the narratives. This essay looks at how the strength of the Native women are an integral part of the tribal context in which, to borrow Stephen Tatum’s phrase, Welch’s “I” exists (74)

The Voices Still Are Singing’: Osage/Ponca Continuance in the Poetry of Carter Revard

The Salt Companion to Carter Revard is a groundbreaking collection of critical essays on the poetry and scholarship of one of Native America’s most loved and respected poets. Carter Revard, Osage poet, Rhodes scholar, and professor of medieval English literature, grew up among Osage and Ponca relations on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. His complex, elegantly crafted poetry ranges from lyrical evocations of his rural childhood and traditional lifeways to reflections on academic life in Oxford and St. Louis, global politics, and postmodern science; from narrative poems about family bootleggers and AIM activists, tornados and rainbows, to adaptations of Anglo-Saxon riddle poems. In precise and gorgeous language, Revard weaves the varied songs of his multiple heritages and experiences into a symphony of celebration of the large and small miracles of the universe. Revard’s blending of Western literary and Native oral traditions demand multilayered critical approaches. The thirteen critical essays gathered in this volume, written by leading scholars of Native American literature, explore Revard’s poetry from multiple perspectives, offering biographical and cultural contexts, thematic considerations, and close readings of individual poems. Two essays break exciting new ground by examining interrelationships between Revard’s medieval scholarship and American Indian storytelling traditions. Like Revard’s poems and scholarship, the essays are both erudite and warmly personal, filled with good stories that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers alike

First Impressions of A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff as an Author

In January 1996 I enrolled in my first course in American Indian literatures. As a neophyte in the field, I searched for texts that could help me with the new concepts I was learning, ideas that would enhance my understanding of native authors and their works. One of the first books I purchased was American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography, by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff (1990). A blurb on the back cover by SAIL summarizes my first impressions of the book, which I read from cover to cover, underlining, highlighting, and annotating: “The first thing likely to strike the reader upon opening LaVonne Ruoff’s new volume is the range, variety, and richness of American Indian Literatures. . . . Well conceived and well executed, [the book] will be welcomed by students and teachers who are approaching the subject for the first time.” As both student and teacher, I appreciated the comprehensive introduction that Ruoff provides in this work. For someone who was at the beginning of the learning curve, the book was a welcome resource. In fact, I kept hoping that she would eventually publish a new edition of this work, bringing it up to date with the wealth of publications that have followed since its first appearance

The Lord and the Center of the Farthest : Ezol’s Journal as Tribalography in LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story

In the documentary Playing Pastime, Choctaw author LeAnne Howe says, “For two centuries American Indians fought genocide, negotiated Indian identity, and struggled against cultural assimilation, all the while playing ball in the fields of their ancestors. How did American Indians become the mascots for a sport they may have invented? This is the story of playing pastime” (Fortier and Howe). Comparable themes run through Howe’s novel Miko Kings, a story of Indian Territory baseball set in Ada, Oklahoma, covering a nonlinear period from 1888 through 2007

Resistance and Continuance through Cultural Connections in Simon Ortiz’s Out There Somewhere

Simon J. Ortiz explains that the title of his 2002 collection of poetry, Out There Somewhere, is intended to mean “out there somewhere in everyday experience somewhere in America” (ix). He adds, “But while I have physically been away from my home area, I have never been away in any absolute way” (ix). The poems in Out There Somewhere attest to the cultural connections that Ortiz maintains even though he might be in some location other than the Acoma Pueblo. The resistance one finds in the poems—against mainstream political, social, and economic forces—results in continuance of Ortiz’s Acoma heritage. That natives can still be natives when they are away from their tribal homelands speaks to those who are urban natives, which is over two-thirds of the native population in the United States: those natives who have left the reservation for economic reasons; those native tribes who have no land base; those natives who have no federal recognition as official native tribes; and those natives who for reasons of patrilineal or matrilineal descent have no tribal affiliation. Although they are “out there somewhere,” they continue to be native, as Ortiz so deftly demonstrates. A political thread runs through Ortiz’s earlier poetry collections, and this essay looks at a few of the poems in Out There Somewhere to see how this literature of resistance continues through cultural connections