An issue of much debate and contention is how to refer to people whose heritage goes back to pre-Columbian times on the North and South American continents. The term Indian is based on Christopher Columbus’s mistaken belief that he had reached the West Indies, and many people object to it on those grounds; it also has a history of being used derogatorily. Native American came into use a few decades ago as a remedy, but it raises objections as yet another example of an enforced label—American is derived from the name of the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci—and as an example of “political correctness.”

The most widely accepted and respectful practice is to refer to people by their tribe of origin—Cherokee, Ojibwa, Sioux, Pueblo, and so forth. If that information is unknown, or if one is referring to members of more than one tribe, a reasonable choice is to alternate between American Indian and Native American. (In Canada, the preferred collective term is First Nations.)

The emergence of a body of Native American literature and art significant enough to be designated a “renaissance” was signaled by three distinct occurrences. The first was the escalation of activism by the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing inspiration from the African American Civil Rights movement, and in protest of the loss of 3.3 million acres of land between 1948 and 1957 owing to reservation-termination policies, American Indians began organizing and staging demonstrations, land takeovers, and occupations of federal buildings.

The most famous of these events were the 1969 takeover of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the former site of the infamous prison, which lasted for nineteen months, and the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, when for ten weeks national television news showed AIM protesters surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. The awareness raised by these protests was bolstered by the publication of two nonfiction works: Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which dissected stereotypes of American Indians and called for acknowledgment of the negative ramifications of American “Manifest Destiny” on indigenous populations, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), a history of the American West from an Indian perspective.

For many Americans who thought of native culture and people as part of America’s past, these events brought a new awareness of the existence and living conditions of American Indians—rates of unemployment, infant mortality, alcoholism, homelessness, and poverty all much higher than national averages, resulting in an average lifespan of forty years. For many peoples of native heritage, they brought a renewed urge toward self-expression.

N. Scott Momaday

The other two signals of a Native American Renaissance were more specifically literary in character. In 1969 N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel House Made of Dawn (1968)—the first major national honor for a literary work by a Native American.

The third signal came fifteen years later: in 1983 Kenneth Lincoln published Native American Renaissance, which recognized in the previous two decades “a written renewal of oral traditions translated into Western literary forms . . . transitional continuities emerging from the old.” In addition to the writings of Momaday, Lincoln discussed those of James Welch (Blackfoot/Gros Ventre), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). Although not treated in Native American Renaissance, the Paiute poet Adrian Louis and the Pueblo scholar and poet Paula Gunn Allen may also be considered early voices in the Native American Renaissance.

Lincoln also noted several anthologies of Native American literature that had been published in the 1970s and early 1980s and the contemporaneous establishment of journals focused on Native American studies, including SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literature (1977), the American Indian Quarterly (1977), and the Wíazo Ša Review (1985).

Lincoln added a preface to the 1985 paperback edition of his text in which he discussed the Ojibwa (also known as Anishinaabe or Chippewa) Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, which had been published the previous year; his excitement about the novel is palpable.

As the first best seller by an American Indian, it ushered in a second generation of writers to follow those Lincoln had recognized. In addition to Erdrich, this generation includes Joy Harjo (Creek), Michael Dorris (Modoc), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Greg Sarris (Coastal Miwok/Pomo), Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), Susan Power (Sioux), and David Treuer (Ojibwa).

Momaday commands virtually unanimous respect among American Indian writers as the founder of the Native American Renaissance. House Made of Dawn combines the spiritual beliefs of the Kiowa with the conditions faced by a young Kiowa veteran after World War II. Its depiction of the characters’ relationships to the land and their tribal heritage, as well its blending of oral and written traditions, inspired methods and themes in many later works.

Momaday followed House Made of Dawn with The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and The Names: A Memoir (1976), volumes that weave together memoir, illustrations, photographs, and poetry in an innovative, highly structured form. The Names directly influenced Silko’s Storyteller (1981), a combination of family photographs, family history, tribal stories, fiction, and poetry. Readers will also find Momaday’s collection The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (1997) a rich selection of ruminations on language and voice, land ethics, hatred of American Indians, place and the sacred, and storytelling and storytellers.

Like the fiction of Momaday and Silko, Welch’s novels Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney (1979) explore traditional spiritual beliefs and rituals within a harsh landscape of contemporary Blackfoot problems of poverty and lack of regard by the majority community. Welch’s fiction highlights a feature that is also prominent in the work of many later American Indian writers: a strong, if dark, sense of humor.

Many consider his greatest work to be Fools Crow (1986), a historical novel set in the 1870s, when the Blackfeet were facing extinction because of smallpox and attacks by U.S. troops. Like the fiction writers, the prominent poets of the early years of the Native American Renaissance, Rose (who was an AIM activist in the 1970s) and Ortiz combine an interest in traditional native spirituality with attentiveness to social issues and problems facing contemporary Native Americans. Ortiz, in particular, demonstrates a deep awareness of geography and its interrelationship with history. Both poets have a habit of adding epigraphs, which often contain disturbing historical information, to sections of their poems.

On 21 April 1997 The New York Times published an article by Dinitia Smith, “The Indian in Literature Is Catching Up,” in which Sarris is quoted as delineating a major difference in the generations of Native American writers: “Momaday and Silko were very spiritual. But Erdrich was dealing with the drinking and funkiness we all know from everyday life. Before then, Indian writers didn’t want to think of Indians as fooling around, cheating on each other, the way everyone else does.”

While they are heavily influenced by Momaday, Silko, Welch, Ortiz, and Rose, the later writers are less likely to set their works on reservations (Erdrich is a notable exception) and are more likely to include pop-culture references and to pepper their work with humor of all sorts—satire, farce, dark comedy, and belly laughs—a practice that reaches back many centuries in traditional American Indian storytelling.

Native American writers also experiment with techniques often associated with Postmodernism. While employing many native tropes and themes, especially the use of tricksters, the work of the Ojibwa poet and novelist Gerald Vizenor is also markedly Postmodernist—playful and ironic as it dismantles the concept of, and stereotypes surrounding, the idea of Indian.

Vizenor’s earliest novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (revised as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, 1990)—one of the few science-fiction novels by a native writer—appeared in 1978, but he only began to receive significant attention for his fiction in the 1990s. He has also published several works of literary criticism, typically from a mixed Postmodernist and Native American perspective.

Other writers have combined activism for Native American rights with other movements for social justice. Hogan, for example, in novels such as Mean Spirit (1990), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Solar Storms (1995); in volumes of poetry such as Seeing through the Sun (1985), an American Book Award winner; in the essays in Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995); and in her memoir, The Woman Who Watches over the World (2001), writes from a feminist perspective on women’s roles, environmental issues, and poverty.

Among the younger writers, Sarris has spent time as a street-gang member, a model, an actor (his best-known role was on the television series CHiPs), an academic who earned tenure at UCLA in one year, and a tribal chief. His scholarly books, such as Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993), combine personal narrative with academic critique. In Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream (1994) he tells the story of a Pomo healer and basket maker who had several works on display in the Smithsonian Institution but also peeled apples six days a week at a cannery during harvest season.

Sarris followed Mabel McKay with two novels, Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories (1994), which was adapted as a highly rated HBO miniseries in 1996, and Watermelon Nights (1998). Also of this generation is Power; her The Grass Dancer (1995), which received the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first fiction, is more traditional in many respects than the novels of her contemporaries, with a strong emphasis on Sioux spirituality.

Several of the fiction writers—Erdrich, Hogan, Alexie, Silko, and Welch—have also published poetry. Alexie frequently cites the Paiute poet Louis as an important influence: Alexie’s poetry, like Louis’s, is known for its sharp satire. Tapahonso, acclaimed as a storyteller and performance poet, grounds much of her poetry in Navajo history and systems of belief. Perhaps the most acclaimed poet is Harjo, who cites Ortiz and Silko as major influences.

Harjo combines the realistic and social—poverty, time spent in bars, substandard housing, and relationships strained by lack of material necessities—with mythic conceptions of the moon, femininity and masculinity, and the power of land. She also plays saxophone and flute and performs her poetry with the band Poetic Justice, which has released several CDs.

One of the thorniest controversies in Native American literature centers on issues of authenticity: who is entitled to speak for whom. In “An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in Two Parts: Part One—Imitation ‘Indian’ Poems/Part Two—Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island” (1979), Silko accused Snyder and other white poets of appropriating native material without truly understanding it.

Silko also published a highly critical review of Erdrich’s The Beet Queen (1986), arguing that Erdrich’s writing was skillful and poetic but that the novel focused too little on the racism Native Americans face. In a Los Angeles Times book review (23 January 2000) Alexie castigated Ian Frazier’s best-selling On the Rez (2000): Frazier had spent months researching the history of the Pine Ridge Reservation and conditions there, but Alexie claimed that the writer had no right to tell these stories because he had not lived on or near a reservation and had no Indian heritage. These sentiments were echoed by many others.

In some of her prose writings Rose discusses whiteshamanism; the term, which was coined by the Quapaw/Cherokee/Chickasaw writer Geary Hobson, refers to non-Indians adopting a literary “shaman” identity and claiming a fundamental knowledge they do not possess and to which they have no right. Rose sees the taking on of the voice of someone from a different culture as inherently exploitative and unjust.

In her collection Bone Dance (1994) she explains that whiteshamanism represents a lack of ability to speak from one’s own position and thus is unworthy as an artistic stance. Alexie takes up a similar theme in his novel Indian Killer (1996).

Stereotypes and the most effective response to them pose another point of contention and challenge. The two extreme stereotypes—the stoic noble savage always “in tune” with nature and the lazy, dissolute primitive—stretch back to first contact experiences, with traces of their beginnings to be found in Columbus’s journals.

Contemporary writers often confront these stereotypes but sometimes find themselves misunderstood or criticized for doing so. For instance, Erdrich and Alexie have been criticized for the number of alcoholic native characters in their works; Alexie responds that he writes about what he witnessed growing up on the Spokane reservation. He also tries to dispel the notion that American Indians have an automatic spiritual connection to nature and the land.

While traditional Native American concepts of land, nature, and ownership are different from those of European Americans, to view this difference as an inherent spiritual one overidealizes natives and refuses to see them as fully-faceted human beings. The literature that has come out of the Native American Renaissance works to dispel stereotypes while acknowledging real problems, and to deepen understandings between and among cultures of the United States while offering inventive formal creations and, often, vivid storytelling.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH

1. Many contemporary American Indian writers confront the traditional version of American history in their stories, especially the concept of Manifest Destiny—the belief held by white eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans that the United States and people of Anglo-European heritage were destined and ordained by God to expand across the North American continent. Often unexpressed in mainstream histories is the resultant decline in Native American populations, land, and cultures.

Historical references in native literary works may include incidents such as the biological warfare carried out through the “gift” of smallpox-infected blankets, wars carried out against native tribes, government policies (for instance, the General Allotment, or Dawes, Act) that steadily eroded the native land base, and the plethora of treaties never honored by the U.S. government. Such references can be found especially in the work of Sherman Alexie, James Welch, Adrian C. Louis, and Simon J. Ortiz and in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Gardens in the Dunes (1999).

More specific instances include Silko’s Ceremony and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, which focus on the circumstances of American Indian soldiers who fought for the United States in World War II but on their return were met with the same prejudice they had always experienced. Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit uncovers the history of ruthless oil speculators who married Osage women and discarded them after gaining control of their mineral rights. Alexie discusses Colonel George Wright’s 1858 massacre of Spokanes and more than eight hundred of their horses in “A Drug Called Tradition” and “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” both included in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), as well as in many of his poems.

Students can read any of these authors for their historical references and ask such questions as: how do the writers revise standard versions of American history by presenting it from a native perspective? What previously “hidden” history do they help bring to light? How effective are their strategies? Silko’s and Momaday’s depictions of fictional veterans might be compared to the true stories of the Iwo Jima veteran Ira Hays or the World War II Navajo code talkers.

Peter Nabokov’s Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000 (1999) would be an invaluable resource for any of these undertakings: it provides primary resources, as well as useful overviews of Native American history. Students interested in pre-Columbian Native American history should consult Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005), while those who want to investigate contemporary history will find Joane Nagel’s American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (1996) useful. The first three essays in Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer’s The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005) also offer historical context.

2. A classic theme in American literature is the intersection of individual identity with the needs and identity of the community. In many examples this intersection becomes a conflict, with a protagonist asserting his or her individual identity and desires by pushing against those of the community.

Students will find that this theme often takes a different shape in writing by American Indians, such as almost any of Momaday’s works, Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) or The Plague of Doves (2008), Greg Sarris’s Grand Avenue (1994), Jay Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), or Joy Harjo’s poems “The Deer Dancer” and “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window.”

Students might consider any of those texts with these questions in mind: to what extent is the community privileged over the individual? When, where, and why is the individual as individual asserted and valued? How are individual and community needs balanced?

A similar theme, focusing on individual needs in conflict with family rather than community pressures, could be explored in Michael Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) or Erdrich’s Tales of Burning Love (1996) or Love Medicine. For secondary sources, both of the books by Kenneth Lincoln, as well as those by Louis Owens, James Ruppert, and Jace Weaver, would provide helpful analysis to support this topic. Part 4 of The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945 (2006) looks at self and community in Native American autobiographies.

3. In “‘The Grace That Remains’: American Indian Women’s Literature” (Book Forum: An International Transdisciplinary Quarterly, 5, no. 3 [1981]: 376–382) Paula Gunn Allen notes that “A sense of familiarity with what is strange, a willingness to face, to articulate what is beyond belief, to make it seem frightening and natural at the same time lies in much of the writing of American Indian women.”

The same could also be said of much writing by American Indian men: dreams, myths, and magic play an important role in many Native American texts. Students might choose one or two works in which these features are prominent and consider the extent to which they may or may not be considered magical realism: the mingling of the marvelous and inexplicable with the mundane.

Magical realism immerses readers in the experience of what it is like to live in the world with magic as part of one’s reality, and a part that is not necessarily frightening or disruptive. Strong candidates for such analysis include any of Erdrich’s novels; The Grass Dancer (1994) by Susan Power (Sioux); Silko’s Ceremony or short stories or poems in her collection Storyteller, including “Lullaby” and “Yellow Woman”; Sarris’s nonfictional Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream; Welch’s Fools Crow; and Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain.

Stuart Cochran discusses supernatural and spiritual elements in poetry by Simon J. Ortiz (for instance, “From Sand Creek”) and in Silko’s Ceremony. Those wishing to focus on poetry could investigate Harjo’s “The Deer Dancer” or The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, or works by Luci Tapahonso or Linda Hogan.

In these texts, does the presence of magic or the inexplicable grow out of cultural beliefs? Does it arise, as does much Latin American magical realism, from the clash of preindustrial with industrialized cultures? Beyond the issue of the literary mode of magical realism, students may wish to explore the role of dreams, magic, and the supernatural in these texts.

In addition to Cochran, useful secondary sources include Ruppert’s Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (1995), which discusses the roles of tangible and intangible realms in American Indian writing, and Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986).

4. The concept of hybridity is important in Native American literature on several levels. The exigencies of history have made insistence on full-blood status next to impossible; yet, people of mixed blood nevertheless find themselves stigmatized, often by both white and native cultures. Many of the major novels of the Native American Renaissance have explored what it means for one’s personal and communal identity to be of mixed blood; characters who deal with this issue include Tayo in Silko’s Ceremony, the title character of Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney, John Smith in Alexie’s Indian Killer, and Pauline in Erdrich’s Tracks.

Another form of hybridity involves growing up on a reservation in the midst of the United States. These issues are explored in Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Students might examine any of these works and ask: What conflicts arise because of mixed heritage or mixed cultures? What does mixed status or hybridity mean for the character’s personal identity, and what does it mean for communal identity? In what ways is it depicted as a strength, and in what ways as a weakness? In the examples involving living in two overlapping cultures, what role does U.S. popular culture play in the formation of identity? How are characters expected to demonstrate allegiance to the different cultures in which they partake, and what conflicts arise from these expectations? Lincoln’s Native American Renaissance and the works by Nagel, Ruppert, and James H. Cox can provide useful insights for exploring aspects of hybridity and mixed-blood status.

5. Students could compare a traditional story with a contemporary one through any of several elements that have historically been important to Native American storytelling: the relationship to oral traditions, the use of tricksters, and the role of humor. Allen’s Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989) offers juxtapositions of traditional with contemporary stories; John L. Purdy and Ruppert’s Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature (2001) might also be consulted. Silko’s frequently anthologized “Yellow Woman” could be compared to the Pueblo legends about Yellow Woman. Lincoln’s Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (1993) would be useful for topics exploring tricksters or humor. The interviews in Laura Coltelli’s Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (1990) address oral traditions and humor. Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez also deals with the oral tradition.
6. Students interested in literary history might wish to compare the Native American Renaissance to other American literary “renaissances,” such as the American Renaissance of the 1850s, in which Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman came to prominence; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, highlighted by such figures as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; or the Southern Renaissance of the mid-twentieth century, which included William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. Specific topics that might be pursued include a comparison of the social forces that generated the movements or the extent to which each group saw itself as a literary movement in its own time. Lincoln’s Native American Renaissance would be most useful for this undertaking.

RESOURCES
Primary Works

Paula Gunn Allen, ed., Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (Boston: Beacon, 1989).
Juxtaposes traditional tales with contemporary stories by such writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Linda Hogan and includes a useful introduction.

Laura Coltelli, ed., Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
Interviews conducted in 1985 with eleven native writers—Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and James Welch—some of whom had not yet come to prominence. Each discusses the oral tradition and its impact on written literature, the role of humor, and his or her own creative process.

Mimi D’Aponte, ed., Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999).
Seven plays from the contemporary era by Kiowa, Choctaw, Kuna/Rappahanock, Ojibwa, Assiniboine/Nakota, Hawaiian, and Cherokee authors, including Hanay Geiogamah’s Body Indian (1972), notable as one of the first to depict contemporary native lives in a drama, and Diane Glancy’s The Woman Who Was a Red Deer Dressed for the Deer Dance (1995).

John L. Purdy and James Ruppert, eds., Nothing but the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2001).
Comprises twelve nonfiction essays and works of literary criticism, followed by generous selections of fiction and poetry, mostly by contemporary writers, and a play by Gerald Vizenor. It is probably the best selection currently available.

Criticism

Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1986).
Examines the female rituals, traditions, and figures of strength across various Native American traditions and their incarnations in contemporary literatures.

Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999).
Argues for becoming “listener-readers,” active participants in written stories in order to comprehend the oral dimensions of works by Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee/Otoe-Missouria), Della Frank (Navajo), Lee Maracle (Salish/Cree), and Louis Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee and Irish American).

Susan Pérez Castillo, “Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy,” Massachusetts Review, 32 (1991): 285–294 (also available in the anthology edited by Purdy and Ruppert, pp. 15–22).
A careful analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s criticisms of Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen. The article is also useful for its discussion of the relationship of Postmodernism and Native American writing.

Eric Cheyfitz, ed., The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Considers Native American literatures in a postcolonial context, focusing on issues of identity, sovereignty, and land.

Stuart Cochran, “The Ethnic Implications of Stories, Spirits, and the Land in Native American Pueblo and Aztlán Writing,” MELUS, 20 (Summer 1995): 69–91.
Discusses the relationship to land and the conception of a spirit world in the writing of Native American authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon J. Ortiz, and Jimmy Santíago Baca (Apache and Chicano) and the Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya.

James H. Cox, Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions, American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, volume 51 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).
Excellent close readings of works by Gerald Vizenor, Thomas King, and Sherman Alexie, demonstrating how they resist and revise colonialist ideas.

Kathleen M. Donovan, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998).
Looks at Native American literature and feminist literary theory as areas with many common concerns, including the question “who in a society can speak, and under what circumstances?”

Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Covers five hundred years of Indian humor to challenge the stereotypes of American Indians as “wooden” and “stoic.”

Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
Landmark study that laid the groundwork for understanding the major issues, themes, and forms that have characterized the Native American Renaissance.

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (New York: Random House, 2005).
In-depth reportage of the past thirty years of scholarship.

Peter Nabokov, ed., Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492–2000, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 1999).
Invaluable collection of passages from stories, legends, letters, memoirs, personal accounts, manifestos, and histories.

Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Although not about literature, a good resource for understanding ethnicity and culture.

Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, volume 3 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).
Readings focusing on themes of self-discovery and cultural recovery.

Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Excellent collection with essays on various contexts and genres.

James Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, volume 15 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).
Demonstrates how writers aim for cross-cultural understanding while respecting difference.

Leslie Marmon Silko, “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf,” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures, first series, 10 (Fall 1986): 178–184.
Highly critical review of Louise Erdrich’s second novel.

Dinitia Smith, “The Indian in Literature is Catching Up,” New York Times, 21 April 1997, pp. B1, B4.
Discusses a generational shift in Native American literature.

David Treuer, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2006).
Considers Native American literary works as literature rather than as cultural expressions.

Jace Weaver, That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Surveys works from 1768 to the 1990s, emphasizing community survival.

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