Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 3, Summer 1984, pp. 185-86.
Abstract
Some of today's best writing is by Native American authors. That fact is not as widely known as it should be for two reasons: the majority culture tends to compartmentalize writing by and about Native Americans as "Indian" literature, and the traditions out of which such writing comes are different in many respects from European traditions, causing it to be undervalued and/or misunderstood. There is a strong need for bridge building between literary cultures in this country, and an equally strong need to break down the tendency to restrict Native American literature to ethnic categories.
Alan R. Velie's Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor addresses those needs. A crisply written introduction to the works of leading Native American writers, the book not only explains those writers in terms of their own cultural traditions but also places them in the larger context of the literary traditions of the world.
Velie's introduction concisely and effectively emphasizes the complexity of Native American cultures and literatures and is an appropriate cornerstone for the essays that follow. Of those essays, the strongest are on the poetry of Momaday and welch. He connects their poems to an interesting variety of European and American traditions, and identifies their Native American aspects in the process. Another strong essay is "The Search For Identity," which is at once a fairly detailed explanation of Momaday's development as an artist and a dramatization of the complexity of multicultural origins.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln