Tag Archive | Ruppert

Paper #3: Native American Objects of Study: Issues of Legitimacy, Authenticity, and Power

In every field of study, there are object(s) of study (or OoS), or the material that must be identified and analyzed in order to generate knowledge in and about that field. Though each field’s OoS present their own difficulties and challenges, Native American (NA) literary and cultural OoS present particularly difficult challenges to scholars, due to struggles in legitimacy, authenticity, and power.

OoS, of course, depend on the discipline; many fields actively study Native American (NA) objects, including anthropology, ethnography, sociology, law, science, history, art, and religion. For example, to scholar Willard Johnson, NA prophecy is his OoS in his 1996 work for The Journal of American Academy of Religion, “Contemporary Native American Prophecy in Historical Perspective.” His article provides an extensive overview of the elements of NA prophecy from 1970 to the mid-1990s, particularly studying NA prophecy in the New Age movement. As a field, English, and in particular literary and cultural studies within English, tends to transverse and pull from all of the disciplines listed above (for better or worse, as discussed below), and therefore literature and culture studies scholars study quite a range of NA objects, whether or not they are textual in nature. Oftentimes literary and cultural studies scholars have done the work of recovery, or have critiqued recovery in other disciplines, such as critiquing the approaches anthropologists may take to NA OoS or NA communities.

The reach of English as a discipline over a range of NA OoS has been both fruitful and challenging. “Challenging” might even be a euphemism, as prominent NA scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, in her 1997 article “Who Stole Native American Studies?,” has outright called the sub-discipline of Native American literary studies a “disaster,” particularly when NA OoS are taught or used in a college course “as a way of subverting the Euro-American canon” (14). Cook-Lynn unfortunately is far from alone in her frustration with the academy. Consequently, as David Murray acknowledges in his 2005 article “Translation and Mediation” regarding scholarship on NA materials, “what we see, then, is a very complicated situation in which every term seems contested” (80).

Establishing that understanding of complications is the first step to studying NA materials. The next step is to start at the beginning of those materials, and see where those complications arise. As might be expected, there is an absolute wealth of oral material available to literary and cultural scholars. Many NA oral OoS have been translated into textual forms, and now with the advantage of technology, many can even be heard or viewed. Though NA oral OoS are now widely available in multiple forms—or perhaps because these OoS are available in multiple forms—there are major hurdles in western approaches to studying NA oral OoS.

As Dr. Drew Lopenzina insightfully pointed out to me in a personal interview, western scholars and students still have trouble accepting oral OoS as reliable, credible, or strong material to study. As Lopenzina argues, oral material is often denigrated to the western label of “pre-history,” meaning that if the material not archival or in textual form, it’s ephemeral and therefore not as strong. Modern and critical readers of archival or historical work should already know that even when something is written down, material is still incredibly unreliable and biased, yet there is still a pervasive view that oral OoS are somehow less truthful or academic.

Interestingly, I noticed after my conversation with Dr. Lopenzina that the 2005 Cambridge Companion To Native American Literature does not really offer any focus on oral materials (though authors do mention them, as does Murray in his article from this same volume). As we can see from its table of contents, the editors and authors in this volume do examine historical and cultural contexts, and the issues that arise from those contexts. We see however much more focus on textual OoS, such as non-fiction prose, autobiography, poetry, fiction, theatre, and the work of specific and highly influential modern NA writers.

Besides the fact that there is a millennia’s worth of NA oral OoS to analyze, the most significant point to always keep in mind is that the oral materials contain and have shaped—and continue to shape—the epistemologies, sacred and secular traditions, rites, beliefs, practices, and languages of NA communities today. It is essential then that non-NA students and readers attempt to understand NA oral Oos through a tribally-centered epistemology, and not a western one. This, of course, is much easier said than done, particularly with a room full of undergraduates who have barely been exposed to western literature, let alone non-Western literature. Thankfully, Dr. Lopenzina kindly shared his process for introducing NA oral OoS into his classroom and his scholarship. He starts every semester with creation myths and other NA OoS, and takes half of the course—not a week or twoto explain the means of generation, production, translation and mediation to his students: where the oral piece (often a narrative) comes from, who can tell it and under what circumstances, while still stressing that piece’s multiple versions, and finally, who has translated and published that piece, for what reason. Dr. Lopenzina will spend half of his semester on oral OoS, because he rightly believes that to truly and fairly study NA literature, culture, material, a student has to have a strong understanding of the foundational material of these communities—material produced and revised eons before the western preference for written sources.

Similarly, James Ruppert, in his 1999 article “The Old Wisdom: Introducing Native American Materials,” stresses to his audience that there is no easy approach to introducing NA oral OoS to unfamiliar readers: the histories, epistemologies, and even styles are completely unexpected and vastly different from western texts. Nevertheless, he argues that teaching NA oral materials “may take a little more time in preparation, but the rewards are great” (24). Throughout his work, Ruppert provides an excellent synthesis of these oral materials and the issues to keep in mind when studying them, which is no easy task, as North American NA oral OoS can:

  • represent the influence of up to three hundred different tribal cultures, in over two hundred distinct languages;
  • fall into four inclusive genres, including oratory (such as speeches), song, narrative, and religious expression, which can all be sacred or secular (with the exception of religious expression, which is always sacred);
  • be guided by a completely different (to non-Natives) notion of chronology;
  • perform different functions (such as a sacred explanation of a tribe’s origin, or a secular explanation of what time of the year to hunt for deer);
  • have vastly different (to non-Natives) styles and often include performance of some kind, which means the reader should ideally be a present listener to the speaker;

Though the above concepts can be very difficult for western audiences to understand, Lopenzina and Ruppert argue that it’s essential for western readers understand them, as textual NA OoS—dating from the 1700s to present day—are also based on the concepts listed above.

In regards to NA literary or textual OoS, the connected problems of authenticity and power are huge, and shall always remain highly contested, as scholars such as Susan Hegeman and Murray point out. When scholars begin to label anything, standards of authenticity—or measures for how to identify or evaluate those OoS—come into play. Hegeman, in her 1989 article “Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problems of Authenticity,” provides an excellent analysis of the problematic concept of “authenticity” in identifying and studying NA OoS, particularly through concentrating on the polemical and competing representations of the “authentic” in NA ceremonies recorded by nineteenth and twentieth century non-Native American ethnographers and anthropologists, who attempted to make these materials more “literary” to a western audience. The academic debate, then, historically erupted over the degree of tampering a scholar would undertake in translating NA OoS, which would mean tampering with the “authenticity” of the OoS. As Hegeman explains, “‘Authenticity’ has always been a category of value in our culture, opposed to the copy, the fake, the derivative. The claim to authenticity in the context of native American works can apply to a whole range of problems regarding translation and the extent to which other aspects of the original oral, dramatic, ritual performances are presented in textual form—or, it simply grounds its evaluative assumptions by relating the work to an ‘authentic’ creator” (268). Furthermore, to equate the authentic with “good” literature “seems to derive not only from Romantic notions of poetic inspiration, [but] stereotypes of Indians as close to nature, instinctual, naïve, and given to bursts of oratory” (269). Hegeman presents a review of some of the most problematic approaches to studying NA OoS, and argues that at the close of the twentieth century, a “plurality of approaches to Native American texts” seems to be the best approach. Above all, we now live in a period where Native American writers and scholars should have the greatest input in “their own constructions of their cultural heritage” (282).

Echoing concerns raised by Hegeman, in his work “Translation and Mediation,” Murray questions if it’s even right to label NA literature, or textual NA OoS, as NA, and therefore label it as other. Many scholars question why we do this, and Murray opens his article by explaining that the very concept of a NA “literature,” separate from other literatures, is unusual, and should cause us to question “what is at stake for outsiders and insiders in establishing lines of difference between Indian and other literatures, as this is related not only to larger questions of cultural difference but also to the independent and sovereign political status of Indians” (69). For example, Murray points out that one obvious problem with defining Native American literature as authentically Native American is the textual nature of literature; if students and scholars are properly aware of the vast oral tradition of NA communities, does a NA text become less “Native American” if it’s textual and not oral (69)? Of course, Murray points out that to believe that there is “only one way of being Indian” is ridiculous (69); however, this paradox—the ongoing issues of authenticity, representation, and power—lead scholars like Murray to conclude that western audiences, in studying, analyzing, and reading NA OoS, “are always dealing with a process of mediation and translation” (69).

Even NA writers and scholars struggle in the process of mediation in the academy, particularly when it comes to deciding what should be published and widely distributed (and thus become an OoS in NA studies). In discussing which pieces and authors were selected for Gloria Bird and Joy Harjo’s 1997 anthology Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America, Bird writes that she had to “confront my own internalized views on what constituted literature and recognize the learned preference of written over oral literatures in academia…we often reject other authentic stories and voices every time we judge their worth through conventional Euro-American standards of what constitutes good literature” (28). To complicate matters even further, Harjo and Bird both explain in their introduction that “to write is often still suspect in our tribal communities, and understandably so. It is through writing in the colonizer’s languages that our lands have been stolen, children taken away. We have often been betrayed by those who first learned to write and to speak the language of the occupier of our lands. Yet to speak well in our communities in whatever form is still respected. This is a dichotomy we will always deal with as long as our cultures are predominately expressed in oral literatures” (20). In other words, NA scholars who seek to publish have to mediate between their voices and goals in their communities, and the rigorous and very western expectations the academy sets.

As the quest for the “authentic” NA OoS will, most likely, always endure, it is useful to identify the major theme or message present in the most common NA OoS today. Harjo and Bird best sum up the major contemporary theme of most contemporary NA OoS in the introduction to their work: survival. In the introduction to their own anthology, they are argue that themes of survival are widespread throughout all NA OoS, including oratory, ceremony, song, performance, narrative, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, etc.. In their own work, Harjo and Bird see their anthology divided into the four parts of a survival story, including genesis, struggle, transformation, and the returning (29). Similarly, Dr. Lopenzina, in his 2012 publication Red Ink: Native Americans Pick up the Pen in the Colonial Period, titles and focuses his introduction on “Survival Writing: Contesting the ‘Pen and Ink Work’ of Colonialism.”

In my interview with Lopenzina about his 2012 work, he revealed that his major goal was to create awareness of the fact that many tribes were, in fact, engaged in both oral and textual traditions—in the colonizers’ languages—early on. Most significantly, he wanted to do the scholarly work of presenting the Native American perspective on sovereignty—sovereignty in political terms, and sovereignty in textual identity. Currently Dr. Lopenzina is working on a biography of William Apess, the first NA writer (beginning of the nineteenth century) to publish six books on NA life, history, and activism. Apess was an activist during the Cherokee removal, and used narrative as a way to protest the destruction of NA tribes. Survival, as a theme, concept, agenda, and message, has been present in NA materials since colonization began, but really has only been analyzed in NA OoS in the academy since the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The focus on survival and “the returning” (Harjo and Bird 29), otherwise known as sovereignty (Cook-Lynn et al.), will continue long into the future of the discipline.

But who makes that decision? Who decides which NA OoS, and what to analyze or study within those OoS? The answer should seem obvious, but it’s not. As mentioned above, it wasn’t until the Native American Literary Renaissance (when M. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1968 for House Made of Dawn) that universities began actively seeking to hire Native American scholars, writers, and teachers; consequently, it wasn’t until the 1970-80s that Native American scholars finally had real voice and representation in their own OoS. Dr. Lopenzina also answered this question for the discipline in 2014: the general decision-making process of what gets taught in NA literary and cultural studies occurs at academic conferences, through dialogue and then consensus. Since Cook-Lynn’s call in the 1990s for a return to the original mission of promoting sovereignty through NA studies as a discipline, Womack’s supporting 1999 publication Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, and after the ensuing decade of dialogue and debate in the 2000s around tribal-centered approaches and criticism, Dr. Lopenzina informed me that the most widely accepted praxis and theory now in the field is Native-centered, generated by Native writers and scholars (with a handful of white writers), who then choose the OoS and control the applied criticism and theory.

It has taken roughly 600 years for Native Americans to gain their rightful place in the academy: to control their own OoS, to translate and mediate those OoS, to ask questions of and evaluate those OoS, to produce scholarship about their own OoS. Still, the fight for that power, for their own rightful representation as they determine it, continues. In 2005, in the consortium gathering of the Wicazo-Sa Review, Cook-Lynn, Tom Holm, John Red Horse, James Riding In, weigh in on the issue of sovereignty in the academy, in “First Panel: Reclaiming American Indian Studies.” The panel was intended as an update to Cook-Lynn’s 1997 piece “Who Stole Native American Studies?,” and James Riding In echoes her early sentiment in the following introduction:

Many of us in attendance today are committed to the development of AIS as a discipline, not as a stepchild of anthropology, history, English, social work, or sociology, among others. Our status as members of distinct political entities and the future of our respective nations is too significantly great to accept the practices, theories, methodologies, and canons of others. We cannot forsake meaningful service to our nations. American Indian studies must never function as the handmaiden of colonialism. The intellectual information we gather, analyze, and synthesize must be for the collective purpose of defending sovereignty, lands, economic well- being, human rights, and religious freedom of our peoples and our nations. Our careers in academia in any event are secondary to this goal. (169)

To Riding In, Cook-Lynn, Holm, Red Horse, and countless other scholars in the field of Native American studies, the only objective worth pursuing is sovereignty, and the only objects of study worth analyzing are those that directly support sovereignty. Through the goal of sovereignty—political, cultural, spiritual, environmental—we see new OoS emerging every day, including recovery of “lost” textual attempts at freedom (such as the scholarship Dr. Lopenzina is pursuing), the recovery and revitalization of tribal languages, and the reviewing and critiquing of legal texts and settlements.

To close, I will echo what those in the field have rightfully demanded: no matter the object of study today, our analysis of that object should ask and answer questions about sovereignty and sovereign representation; an analysis should give power back to the community that generated the object of study in the first place.

Works Cited

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “Who Stole Native American Studies?” Wicazo Sa Review 12.1 (1997): 9-28. Web. 10 October 2014.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, Tom Holm, John Red Horse, James Riding In. “First Panel: Reclaiming American Indian Studies.” Wicazo Sa Review 20.1 (2005): 169-177. Web. 10 October 2014.

Harjo, Joy and Gloria Bird, eds. Introduction. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. By Harjo and Bird. Norton: New York, 1997. 19-31. Print.

Hegeman, Susan. “Native American ‘Texts’ and the Problem of Authenticity.” American Quarterly 41.2 (1989): 265-283. Web. 10 October 2014.

Johnson, Willard. “Contemporary Native American Prophecy in Historical Perspective.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64.3 (1996): 575-612. Web. 10 October 2014.

Lopenzina, Drew. Personal Interview. 9 Oct. 2014.

—. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. New York: SUNY P, 2012. Print.

Murray, David. “Translation and Mediation.” The Cambridge Companion to Native American               Literature. Eds. Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 69-83. Print.

Porter, Joy and Kenneth M. Roemer. Table of Contents. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. vii-viii. Print.

Ruppert, James. “The Old Wisdom: Introducing Native American Materials.” Teaching the Literatures of Early America: MLA Options in Teaching Series. Ed. Carla Mulford. New York: MLA, 1999. 11-26. Print.

Womack, Craig. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Nook File.

PAB Entry #3 (Ruppert)

Ruppert, James. “The Old Wisdom: Introducing Native American Materials.” Teaching the Literatures of             Early America. MLA Options in Teaching Series. Ed. Carla Mulford. New York: MLA, 1999. 11-26.              Print.

In his article “The Old Wisdom: Introducing Native American Materials,” Ruppert presents a thorough overview of the issues that arise when first introducing Native American oral materials to a classroom of students unfamiliar with Native American materials and epistemology. To begin, Ruppert shares three points to keep in mind:

  • “an exploration of cultural values and worldviews seems essential;”
  • “the dynamics of possession, resistance, trade, and war, central to the colonial attempt to define the uniqueness of the American experience;”
  • “Native American oral literary traditions can challenge and illuminate the variety of human creative and literary expression that forms the groundwork of all meaning construction” (11).

As Ruppert notes, it is impossible to provide a complete overview of all Native American oral materials and traditions in one article, as there were well over three hundred different tribal cultures and over two hundred languages in the United States during the period of European exploration. Therefore, he divides his overview into these useful (though still broad) categories: Genre, Spectrum of Oral Narrative Types, Functions of Oral Narratives, Performance, Oral Style, Narrative Expectations for Typical Readers Today, Finding Meaning, and Historic Native American Materials.

Genre

Many NA oral objects of study are available in written form, and Ruppert notes that the tradition can be divided into the following genres: oral narratives, oratory, song, and religious expressions. However, he points out that these genres are anything but mutually exclusive. Interestingly, Ruppert points out that the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama—because of their relative contemporary nature in the long history of NA materials—are not as useful in studying the long-established epistemologies and cultures of Native America. The author additionally stresses that NA oral materials are often misrepresented as past or dead, and he chooses to break that academic tradition by stressing the significant, ongoing tradition of oral materials in still existing communities.

Ruppert briefly explains the following genres:

  • Oral narratives can consist of sacred or secular stories, and that designation determines who in the tribe (or who outside of the tribe) can hear which stories, at what age, and what time of the year.
  • Oratory, particularly in the form of historical and political speeches by historical or important leaders in the community, has recently generated particular interest in the academy, but has always been important to the NA community.
  • Songs can be also be of sacred or secular importance to a tribe, and many NA tribal songs in the past have been mis-anthologized as poetry, thus downplaying “the musical dimension” and context of the song (14).
  • Religious Expression, as Ruppert notes, can “range from dance dramas staged as public ritual” to the “personal vision songs of the Papago” (14). While oral narratives, oratory, and songs can be sacred or religious in nature, religious expression (as an oral genre) deals strictly with the sacred rites, rituals, and prayers of certain tribes; much of this particular genre outsiders of the tribe are not privy to.

To complicate issues related to genre further, the author rightly points out that the above genres were established by western scholars and academics; Native Americans can and have defined their own genres within their own communities. For example, tribal distant-time stories are one genre, and tribal historical narratives are another.

Spectrum of Oral Narrative Types

Ruppert provides a useful figure in this particular section of his article, which helps students the “spacious reach” of NA oral narratives (14):

Origin Era               Transformation Era             Historical Era
___I___________________I_______________________I_______________
Distant Time    Movement toward social forms        Personal and communal memory
(Flux)                                                                          (Fixed Natures)

As Ruppert explains, on the left is the Origin Era, which contain origin stories, in which things are constantly in “creative flux, where the essential nature of things can change. It is usually inhabited by characters who are both animal and humans” (15). During the Transformation Era, things in the world become more “fixed and stable,” but “the relations among humans, animals, and the spiritual powers of the world have not yet been formalized” (15). Stories in the Transformation Era define how humans can and should “behave towards animals and spiritual powers.” The Historical Era contains stories and memories from the near-distant past, and “their function is to carry on the process of developing and defining the nature of people’s experience in the world” (16).

Perhaps the most important point to note is that “In Native American communities…the distinction is made not between the truth and falsehood but between distant time and recent time. The world was different back then; different rules governed the interactions among beings” (16). This means that students should not understand NA oral materials in terms of a western epistemological understanding of “cultural progress from an animal world to human culture or of a fall from an idealized paradise” (16-17), but rather as materials that explain how the world has transitioned into what it is today.

Functions of Oral Narratives

As he explains, the typical western narratives (parables, fables, fairy tales) are poor choices for comparison to which NA materials, particularly because of function. NA stories have three main functions in their communities, according to Ruppert, which include entertainment, instruction, and the creation of “harmony between a community and the sacred processes of the world” (17).

Ruppert writes that in stories, “vital elements of a worldview are also explored,” as “social wisdom is part of the instructional function” (18). Additionally, stories would often incorporate useful information on traditional practices, geography, or significant natural phenomena. However, the hardest concept of narratives for western audiences to understand is that storytelling in the community “heal, reestablish spiritual-human balance, and foster hunting luck” (19); therefore, the act of storytelling, in and of itself, is necessary and vital for the community.

Performance

Ruppert addresses the fact that when oral materials appear on the page, audiences are only experiencing part of the piece. An entire oral piece of any kind always includes the aspect of performance, meaning every piece is only performed in a certain way, by a certain member of a certain clan, in a certain part of the year; we miss these essential elements then when oral materials are translated into text.

Oral Style

In older anthologized translations of oral materials, Ruppert points out that the element of style was often left out. While there are many elements of style to consider across cultures, he notes that repetition (particularly in sets of fours or fives), as well as questions, indirect address, and code switching are just some common elements that occur across many oral materials.

Narrative Expectations for Typical Readers Today

Many modern, western readers tend to rely on and expect elements of realism (particularly in terms of chronology), reasonable motivation on the part of characters, and the typical elements of plot; but these conventions don’t really hold in NA oral materials. Ruppert reports that when teaching these materials to his students, he “must talk as much about what the stories are not as about what they are” (22).

Finding Meaning

Due to the difficult challenges western students and readers face, Ruppert offers the metaphor he gives his students when considering NA oral objects of study. Storytelling can be thought of “as a map across a narrative terrain,” which “consists of the diverse culturally moral subjects encoded by the story.” The storyteller then essentially chooses the path of the narrative, and “as one explores the motion of the narrative, one’s intent should be to understand the oral communal goals of the narrative” (23). This metaphor shows that readers have to be willing to follow the storyteller, and think beyond individual understanding and meaning to what the story may mean to the entire tribe.

Historic Native American Materials

Ruppert ends his article by focusing on historical publications, such as speeches, autobiographies, tribal histories, and sermons, which can show readers “the confluence of Native American and European values” (23). What is important to understand is that though these historic materials may seem “old” to Euro-American students and readers, these historical oral documents are actually some of the most contemporary materials to most NA tribes. Some examples of these kinds of materials are the works of Samson Occom, William Apess, Elias Boudinot, and George Copway, which Ruppert (and other scholars) demonstrate reveal “a complex interface between two competing value systems, two forms of communication, and two worldviews” (23).

To close his article, Ruppert stresses that there is no simple, easy approach or strategy to introducing NA oral materials to a class of unfamiliar readers and students: the histories, epistemologies, and even styles are completely unexpected and vastly different from western texts. Nevertheless (and I wholeheartedly agree with Ruppert here), “using these materials may take a little more time in preparation, but the rewards are great” (24).

Paper #1: A Brief History of American Indian Literary Studies

N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize Winner for House Made of Dawn (1969)

As many scholars of American Indian literary studies will argue, a vast and diverse body of indigenous works–in the form of songs, ceremonies, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, oral, written–existed long before most literature departments did.  However, as Kenneth Roemer notes in the introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, it was not until the Civil Rights and Feminist movements of the 1960s, and the accompanying academic movements of Ethnic and Women’s studies, that American Indian Literature(s) found a real entrance into academia. These historical movements, along with a rise in publications from Native American authors, the 1969 publication of Vine Deloria, Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins, and the awarding of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for fiction to Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday for House Made of Dawn, paved the entrance for American Indian literary studies into the academy, as a subdiscipline to literature and American Indian Studies (an emerging discipline itself in the 1970s) (Roemer 2).

Indeed, it’s difficult to trace or study the emergence of the subdiscipline of Native American literary studies, as this field tends to be labeled as an emphasis in literature within English departments, or becomes a part of the interdisciplinary work of an American Indian Studies scholar. Though many English departments have created a specialization in Native American Literature since the 1970s, and though many universities have created interdisciplinary Native American Studies programs, there are a few universities which can distinctly lay claim to developing or supporting a niche for Native American literary studies.

The American Literary Studies program within the English department of the University of New Mexico (Albuquerque) holds the significant claim of being the central hub of the Native American Literary Renaissance of the late sixties and seventies. Though “renaissance” is a somewhat problematic term (see below), UNM has produced undeniably significant alumni who are central to the First Wave of the field, including: N. Scott Momaday (who is currently a visiting professor in the UNM English department), Native-Feminist critic Paula Gunn Allen, and writer Leslie Marmon Silko.

However, it is the University of Oklahoma English Department that asserts it was the first in the country (in 1969) to teach a Native American Literature course. The university now offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in this literary emphasis, but since 1994, over 100 hundred students have graduated from OU’s Native American Studies program, a department completely separate from English.

Similarly, UCLA’s English department does offer an emphasis in Native American Literary studies, but it is the UCLA American Indian Studies Interdepartmental program, which was created after student and faculty petitioning in 1969, that “strives to merge the concerns of the academy with research aims of the Native community” and “advocates a holistic framework for studying American Indian society, transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries.” Additionally, the UCLA American Indian Studies Center has published The American Indian Culture and Research Journal since 1971.

Due to the demands of the 1969 campus group the Third World Liberation Front, UC Berkeley created the Department of Ethnic Studies, which, as is written in its mission statement, “encourages the comparative study of racialization in the Americas, with a focus on the histories, literatures, and politics of Asian Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, Native American Indians, and African Americans.”

In 1974, a number of academic journals were established to support the growing need for critical scholarship in the field. The University of Nebraska Press began publishing the now prominent academic journal Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAILs), which began as a newsletter and went on to become “the only journal in America that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures.” The U of Nebraska Press also publishes the journal American Indian Quarterly (AIQ).

As Kroemer asserts in the introduction to his anthology, the emergence of Native American Literary Studies was in response to the cultural and Civil Rights movements of the sixties and seventies, and its emergence in higher education could not have been possible without the pressures applied first by civil rights activists and feminists. Nevertheless, the guiding movement was the American Indian Movement (AIM), which demanded recognition of and aid in the struggles of real American Indians and their respective communities. As James Ruppert notes in his essay “Fiction: 1968 to the Present,” it was the Indian activist demonstrations and sit-ins at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington and of Wounded Knee in 1973 that “brought Native social criticism to the television,” and brought the resulting demand for more criticism, scholarship, study, and programs based around American Indian literature and perspectives to the academy (174).

This time period–specifically starting with Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn–has been termed the Native American Renaissance. Rupport notes, however, this term is problematic, “because it might imply that Native writers were not producing significant work before that time or that these writers sprang up without longstanding community and tribal roots” (173). But, he goes on to note that “there is no question but at this time, the landscape of Native American literature changed” (173), for there was an enormous increase in publishing of Native American writers  between Momaday’s novel and Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony. With the rise in publications and social pressure, the need and desire for scholarship in the discipline had never been greater (whereas before, it barely existed). Thus, the First Wave of American Indian literature began, and most scholars will agree, is quickly reaching a Fourth Wave.

As David Treuer notes in his 2011 conference talk “The Cultural Twilight” at the fortieth anniversary celebration of American Indian Studies at UCLA,  the First Wave of Native American Literary Studies “united activism and legitimization because Native American studies were seen as derived from and interfaced with Native American communities and cultures,” and that scholars of the First Wave “argued, rather counter to mainstream critical practices, that its subject and method was other, different, because its subject was its method” (48). Treuer praises the writers, artists, scholars, and literary critics of the First Wave in his speech, but uses the majority of his speech to call for the emergence of the Fourth Wave, a call which most modern literary critics in the field seem to echo. Though much was accomplished over the past fifty years in higher education, Treuer and others note there is much to be done, and he asks specifically that the field consider how specific tribal “language and cultural revitalization” become the “new activism” that ignites American Indian literary studies (53).

Works Cited

American Indian Quarterly. U of Nebraska P. n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

American Indians Study Center Press. UCLA. 2014. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

American Literary Studies Program. U of New Mexico (Albuquerque). n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

Department of Ethnic Studies. UC Berkeley. 2009. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

Interdepartmental Program in American Indian Studies. UCLA. 2014. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

Native American Literary Studies, Department of English. U of Oklahoma. n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

Native American Studies Program. U of Oklahoma. 2014. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

Roemer, Kenneth M. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Introduction. Eds. Joy            Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 1-35. Print.

Ruppert, James. “Fiction: 1968 to Present.” The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature.             Introduction. Eds. Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 173-188. Print.

Studies in American Indian Literatures. U of Nebraska P. n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

Treuer, David. “The Cultural Twilight.” University of California in Los Angeles. UCLA American Indian               Studies Center, Los Angeles, CA. Gathering Native Scholars and Artists–A Celebration of Forty Years. 22       Oct. 2009. Conference Speaker.

Works Consulted

Baym, Nina and Robert S. Levine, Eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2: 1865-                  Present. 8th Ed. New York: Norton, 2013. Print.

Bloom, Harold. Ed. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Native American Writers–New Edition. New York:                Infobase Publishing, 2010.  Print.

Krupat, Arnold. “Native American Literature and the Canon.” Critical Inquiry 10.1  (1983): 145-171. Web. 7        Sept. 2014.