Overview
Novelist and scholar Louis Owens remarks that there is a learning curve when approaching American Indian literature, as the art of storytelling, tribal, historical or ceremonial knowledge is necessary to fully understand the nuances of this particular genre. Additionally, American Indian literature is complicated in its own contexts, as there is a tension between expression of American Indians by non-Indians and the history of representational encounters by American Indians themselves within public consciousness. Owens explains:
For American Indians, the problem of identity comprehends centuries of colonial and postcolonial displacement, often brutally enforced peripherality, cultural denigration – including especially as harsh privileging of English of tribal languages – and systematic oppression by the monocentric “westering” impulse in America.1
In addition to analysis of the novels Winter in the Blood by James Welch, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, this unit examines the historical background of each, deciphering the complexity of the genre of American Indian Literature. Relevant historical information from two non-fiction texts, Like a Hurricane and Blood Struggle, anchor the novels’ historicity to two waves of Native American writing. It is crucial to understand the contemporary history of American Indian policy in order to understand the contexts in which these texts were written.
Specifically, my unit analyzes the two novels, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and Winter in the Blood by James Welch, comparatively with the contemporary text; Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True-Diary of a Part Time Indian. These texts will collectively suggest that Contemporary American Indian literature spans identifiable waves: A First Wave is the return to reservation life and tradition, ceremony and ritual of tribal peoples; a Second Wave acknowledges the struggle of identity in America, but also asserts the need for life and interaction outside of the reservation as means to complete one’s identity. The First Wave finds and satisfies a deficiency of identity; the second signals a need for integrated experience to fully form that same identity. Students will complete reading analysis and other formative assessments during their reading of these novels which will help them connect the historical themes introduced at the beginning of the unit. This unit combines visual and textual narratives as response to the racialized public misunderstandings about American Indian life and identity in our contemporary era.
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