‘The Native novel’ outlines the first Native American novels— John Rollin Ridge’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) and Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891). It then goes on to describe the novels of Cherokee writer John Milton Oskison, Osage writer John Joseph Mathews, Salish writer D’Arcy McNickle, and Mourning Dove as well as the Red Power writing of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the first two novels, Native writers have used the form to test various responses to North American colonialism, from violent resistance to passive acceptance. The Native American novelist seeks to mediate, often subversively, between the “novel of resistance” and the “novel of assimilation.”