The Grandmother Language: Writing Community Process in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows

In Whispering in Shadows, Jeannette Armstrong deftly employs non-standard English phraseology to convey Okanagan perceptions of the world. The author enacts a decolonizing process in her writing, exploring ways to evoke a proximate (but ultimately limited) experience of an Okanagan orality and world view in English. Penny Jackson’s sensibilities, which synthesize perceptions of sound, colour, and linguistic images as organically interrelated, are the primary manifestation of this process. The author's symbiosis of land, language, and community produces a creative well-spring, which encourages community-centered creative practices in keeping with the metaphoric implications of En’owkin, an Okanagan conception rooted in the belief that nurturing voluntary cooperation is essential for everyday living

Growing the Green Unknown: Teaching Environmental Literature in Southeastern North Carolina

Walking to class, we're still lesson planning. Indeed, although we had thought about and discussed since we were hired in fall 2006 the idea of team-teaching an environmental literature class from the perspectives of our disciplinary specialties (American Indian Studies for Jane, African American literature for Scott), our class still was a work in progress. We were excited on this first day of our brand new course at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, “Literatures of Ecoliteracy and Environmental Justice,” the first ever of its kind here. Despite its evolving character, our collaboration was strong, for we were united in our convictions: respecting our students, their communities, and their heritages; enacting environmental justice; and reconnecting ourselves, our students, and our university to our shared world

Solemn laughter: Humor as subversion and resistance in the literature of Simon Ortiz and Carter Revard

Since earliest contact, Europeans have projected myriad qualities onto the being they erroneously named "Indian." Through text representations, Euramericans have constructed and reproduced profound distortions of indigenous peoples that have shaped political and material realities for Native Americans by reducing them to delimiting "types." Simultaneously, Native writers have a parallel history of representing whites as the embodiment of confusing and "uncivilized" strangeness. In writing which resists colonial definitions of externally imposed "Indianness," contemporary Native writers have increasingly recast historically racist representations by asserting authentic self-descriptions while depicting whiteness as "Other." This thesis examines the ways in which two contemporary Native writers---Simon Ortiz, Acoma, and Carter Revard, Osage---use humor as a literary strategy to subvert the Euramerican stereotypes of the "Indian" as "noble" or "wild savage" and "unscientific primitive" in order to reconstruct authentic Native identity from the true center, that lived by Native people themselves

The Grandmother Language: Writing Community Process in Jeannette Armstrong’s whispering in shadows

In whispering in shadows, Jeannette Armstrong deftly employs non-standard English phraseology to convey Okanagan perceptions of the world. The author enacts a decolonizing process in her writing, exploring ways to evoke a proximate (but ultimately limited) experience of an Okanagan orality and world view in English. Penny Jackson’s sensibilities, which synthesize perceptions of sound, colour, and linguistic images as organically interrelated, are the primary manifestation of this process. The author's symbiosis of land, language, and community produces a creative well-spring, which encourages community-centered creative practices in keeping with the metaphoric implications of En’owkin, an Okanagan conception rooted in the belief that nurturing voluntary cooperation is essential for everyday living

“It Just Seemed to Call to Me”: Debra Magpie Earling’s Self-Telling in Perma Red

Debra Magpie Earling, author of the 2002 novel Perma Red, does not appear as a named character in her text, which has been designated as a work of fiction. Yet the content and construction of the novel have been major forces both arising from and shaping Earling’s autobiographical experiences within her immediate biological family and as a member of the Salish-Kootenai community. Intertextual readings of the interviews, short stories, and personal dedications Earling has published before and since Perma Red’s publication powerfully articulate the autobiography embedded in this novel. Eighteen years in the making, Perma Red is an intricate, intimate expression of self-life narration that is Earling’s act of publicly honoring the Aunt Louise she never met but who has lived with Earling daily through family and community stories. Perma Red is set on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana in the 1940s, where turbulent Native-Anglo antagonisms continue to constrict social, educational, and economic spaces for the reservation’s Native inhabitants as part of the colonial legacy. In lush prose, with minimal dialogue, Earling describes Louise White Elk’s difficult, dangerous life and in doing so offers up an eloquent fictionalized eulogy to Earling’s actual Salish Aunt Louise, who died brutally and young on the Flathead Reservation in 1947. In rendering this fictionalized portrait of her biological aunt (whom I refer to exclusively as “Aunt Louise” in this essay, to distinguish her from the fictional “Louise White Elk” or “Louise”), Earling not only demonstrates her characters’ bonds of female kinship through memory as a site of empowerment, but Earling herself becomes a significant “cotagonist” through her storyteller’s memory and voice, constructing her own family history within the continuum of Bitterroot Salish community