6. The Native novel

‘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.”

5. Native American literary studies

During the time of the Red Power movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, Native American students brought their visions of justice to college campuses to create what they began to describe as “Native American Studies.” Pressuring universities to accept a more diverse student body, Native scholars demanded that universities allow the production of knowledge by and for Native Americans. To succeed Native American Studies had to tear free of the “salvage anthropology” that shaped the European study of indigenous people from the first moments of contact. Native scholars accomplished an imaginative shift in self-conception: Native Americans are not helpless victims of colonial devastation, but instead the shrewd protectors of indigenous thought.

4. From artifact to intellectual

‘From artifact to intellectual’ describes the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the numerous Native American autobiographies that provide a glimpse into indigenous patterns of living, ways of knowing, and verbal art. These autobiographies also deliver a powerful counter-narrative of US entitlement to indigenous lands during Indian removal. In an era of reform, from around 1890 to 1934, Native and non-Native activists sought legislation to “uplift” the Indian, though reformers’ goals often conflicted. Natives and whites actively collaborated through the Society of American Indians (SAI) to influence federal Indian policy. The SAI helped save Native American writers for the twentieth century, scattering the cultural seeds for later Native literary flourishing.

3. To write in English

‘To write in English’ explains how the written word allowed Native Americans to more easily pass on the oral literature of their people and to be recognized as educated and rational agents. In 1815, Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith, single-handedly invented a written language, which was embraced by the Cherokee Nation. By the late 1820s, most Cherokees could write in Sequoyan and, with the eventual success of missionary schools, many could speak, read, and write English. In 1828, the first issue of North America’s first indigenous language newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, was published. The paper declared in English and Cherokee the vital role that American literacy would play in transforming Native people.

2. Oral literatures

Native Americans carefully trained their memories to record and transmit vast bodies of knowledge verbatim because, in an oral society, the known universe always stood only one generation from loss. ‘Oral literatures’ explains that indigenous tales instruct in ethics, ecology, religion, or governance, and record ancient migrations, catastrophes, battles, and heroism. Oral literatures grow from differing landscapes and forms of life, and still form the basis of modern Native American writing. Despite their differences, oral literatures usually communicate a wish to live intimately with a unique ancestral land and its creatures, a commitment to a proper relationship with that land and its broad community, and a belief in the power of story to achieve this accordance.

7. Indigenous futurity

‘Indigenous futurity’ considers how indigenous revivals might be viewed as expressions of “futurity,” operating in resistance to those assumptions that consign Native American peoples and lifeways to the past. It discusses a range of Native American poetry and theatre, including the work of Simon Ortiz, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, John Rollin Ridge, E. Pauline Johnson, Laura Tohe, and Joy Harjo. Whatever the form, contemporary Native poets look to oral literature and its long-held understanding of language as a source of change. Such poetry not only frees Native American voices, but confirms a spiritual awareness of ancestral land and community. Native American writers in all genres express an Indigenous world in all its complexity.

1. The man made of words

‘The man made of words’ describes the history of Native Americans, with a strong focus on the 16th-century European colonization period. To recover from nearly 500 years of conquest and disease that devastated indigenous peoples in North America, Native people had to revisit their history and reimagine themselves through literature. As Native American authors learned to write in English, they also mastered literary forms like the novel, adapting these genres to serve indigenous worldviews, and incorporating oral literatures. Despite numerous challenges and a Native American population decreasing rapidly during colonization, many Native American communities are growing their populations and economies, and are reinvesting in cultural and language revitalization.