American Indian literature and critical studies series

Seventeen short stories on life as an Indian in today's America. In An Incident in a Tour Among the Natives, an Indian writer is coveted by a white woman seeking a sexual experience with a savage, while in A City Indian Goes to School, an Indian teenager succeeds in overcoming alcoholism.

Gerald Vizenor gives life to traditional tribal stories by presenting them in a new perspective: he challenges the idyllic perception of rural life, offering in its stead an unusual vision of survival in the cities--the sanctuaries for humans and animals. It is a tribal vision, a quest for liberation from forces that would deny the full realization of human possibilities. In this modern world his characters insist upon survival through an imaginative affirmation of the self. In Dead Voices Vizenor, using tales drawn from traditional tribal stories, illuminates the centuries of conflict between American Indians and Europeans, or "wordies." Bagese, a tribal woman transformed into a bear, has discovered a new urban world, and in a cycle of tales she describes this world from the perspective of animals--fleas, squirrels, mantis, crows, beavers, and finally Trickster, Vizenor's central and unifying figure. The stories reveal unpleasant aspects of the dominant culture and American Indian culture such as the fur trade, the educational system, tribal gambling, reservation life, and in each the animals, who represent crossbloods, connect with their tribal traditions, often in comic fashion. As in his other fiction, Vizenor upsets our ideas of what fiction should be. His plot is fantastic; his story line is a roller-coaster ride requiring that we accept the idea of transformation, a key element in all his work. Unlike other Indian novelists, who use the novel as a means of cultural recovery, Vizenor finds the crossblood a cause for celebration.

"Centered on the volatile issue of the repatriation of Native American skeletal remains, Chancers follows a group of student Solar Dancers who set out to resurrect native remains housed in the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.". "Possessed by the demonic wiindigoo, a mythic monster, the Solar Dancers, in a gruesome ritual, sacrifice faculty and administrators associated with the collection and storage of native remains. The Dancers replace stored native skulls with those of the academics, and the resurrected natives become the Chancers.". "The Round Dancers, humane and erotic trickster figures, are natural opponents of the morbid Solar Dancers. The war between the two groups comes to a comic conclusion at a graduation ceremony attended by Pocahontas; Phoebe Hearst; Alfred Kroeber, the anthropologist; Ishi, the native who actually lived and worked in the university museum; and many Chancers."--BOOK JACKET.

As one of the earliest and strongest voices in contemporary American Indian literature, Maurice Kenny has proved himself to be very much a "high-steel" Iroquois - a Mohawk famed for scaling the heights of New York City and forging a contemporary Native American identity known nationwide. This latest collection includes old and new favorites in poetry, fiction, criticism, and political commentary, plus an unusual literary memoir of New York in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s - upstate, Manhattan, and Brooklyn - from a Native American poet's point of view.

xv, 220 p. : ports. ; 22 cm

Focusing on published works by novelists N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, D'Arcy McNickle, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and other Native American authors, the critical essays in this collection examine translation and representation in tribal literatures, comic and tragic world views, and trickster discourse.

Native American Perspectives on Literature and History is a volume of essays by Indian and white scholars on issues such as ethnic identity, Indians in American mythology, how Indians write about Indians, and Indian crime and punishment. James Ruppert explores the bicultural nature of Indian writers and discusses strategies they employ in addressing several audiences at once: their tribe, other Indians, and other Americans. Helen Jaskoski analyzes the genre of autoethnography, or Indian historical writing, in an Ottawa writer's account of a smallpox epidemic. Kimberly Blaeser, a Chippewa, writes about how Indian writers reappropriate their history and stories of their land and people. Robert Allen Warrior, an Osage, examines the ideas of the leading Indian philosopher in America, Vine Deloria, Jr., who calls for a return to traditional tribal religions. Robert Berner exposes the incomplete myths and false legends pervading Indian views of American history. Alan Velie discusses the issue of historical objectivity in two Indian historical novels, James Welch's Fools Crow and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus. Kurt M. Peters relates how Laguna Indians retained their culture and identity while living in the boxcars of the Santa Fe Railroad Indian Village at Richmond, California. Juana Maria Rodriguez examines power relations in Gerald Vizenor's narrative of a Dakota Indian accused of murder in 1967, "Thomas White Hawk." Finally, Gerald Vizenor, a Chippewa, discusses Indian conceptions of identity in contemporary America, including simulations he calls "postindian identity.". Editor Alan Velie, with Gerald Vizenor, provides an introduction to this volume of essays by the country's leading Indian and white scholars of Indian literature and history. It will be essential reading for those seeking to understand Native American approaches to fiction and history.