Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 1998, pp. 81.
Abstract
In the introduction to this volume, Alan Velie and Gerald Vizenor claim that these essays, by both native and non-native authors, represent "American Indian perspectives." By making this claim they indicate that particular American Indian perspectives exist while acknowledging that they are not limited to tribal members. The volume brings together articles previously published in the journal Genre and Volume 19 of the University of Oklahoma's American Indian Literature and Critical Studies. This fine collection of essays presents scholarship that is sympathetic to Native experiences and foregrounds problems of American identity.
The essays cover a range of contemporary Native American issues and literature and also represent recent important works in Native American studies. Robert Allen Warrior's analysis of Vine Deloria Jr.'s work in "'Temporary Visibility': Deloria on Sovereignty and AIM" presents one aspect of the larger argument he makes in his recent book Tribal Secrets. James Ruppert's "Mediation in Contemporary Native American Writing" is similar to the theoretical introductory chapter of his survey, Mediation in Native American Fiction. Kimberly M. Blaeser's analysis of Gerald Vizenor's work in "The New 'Frontier' of Native American Literature: Dis-Arming History with Tribal Humor" is a good introduction to her recent literary biography, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in Oral Tradition.
Vizenor's writings and his "shadow plays" are also discussed by Juana Marie Rodriguez. Additionally, the collection includes a pair of essays by well-established critics of Native American Literature, Helen Jaskoski and Alan Velie. Velie offers an historical analysis of James Welch's Fools Crow and Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus while Jaskoski discusses "autoethnography" in "Andrew Blackbird's Smallpox Story." Kurt Peters offers an oral history discussion of Lagunas working for the Santa Fe railroad.
Perhaps the weakest essay in the collection is Robert Berner's "American Myth: Old, New, Yet Untold." By suggesting that Native Americans have appropriated language of genocide and holocaust, Berner dismisses much of contemporary criticism that uses such language to explain the enormity of destruction that has occurred to native peoples on this continent.
The final and provocative essay, "Native American Indian Identities: Autoinscriptions and the Cultures of Names," is by Vizenor. Here he unmasks "post Indian" pretenders like Jamake Highwater who have appropriated Indianness into literatures of dominance. This concluding essay reaffirms the central importance of American Indian perspectives. Vizenor advocates the literature of survivance. The selected essays in this volume likewise reject literatures of dominance while demonstrating Native American survivance.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln