Review of Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape By Lee Schweninger

Authors

Kelli Lyon Johnson, Miami University Hamilton

Date of this Version

2010

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 30:1 (Winter 2010)

Comments

Copyright 2013 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In Listening to the Land, Lee Schweninger demonstrates a Native American connection to Mother Earth to be a prevailing stereotype in cultural representations of Indigenous peoples in literature, television, and film. While refusing to dismiss "an indigenous relationship to, appreciation for, awareness of, or understanding of the land that is significantly different from non-Indian relationships," Schweninger analyzes the complicated portrayal of the landscape in Native American literature in the context of this stereotype, which he calls the "Land Ethic Stereotype," the framework with which he begins his study of a wide range of twentieth-century Native writers from a number of Native nations.