In this article, the author discusses two books ("Tales of Burning Love" and "Bingo Palace" by Louise Erdrich) that highlight location and family as the foundation of home. The two novels suggest that "home" must be revised to include, negotiate, and, at times, embrace tenets of Western ideology in order to find or secure one's home. While various…

In this article, the author discusses John Joseph Mathews and Indian internationalism. As an old man, Osage intellectual, writer, and historian, John Joseph Mathews recalled his expatriation from the United States during the 1920s. After growing up in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, seat of the Osage Nation, where he had been born in 1894 to a white mother…

Teaching an endangered language today requires extreme measures, and there is no guarantee of success. But the situation is dire and demands adaptive, creative survivance. Anishinaabemowin is one of twenty-seven Algonquian languages, the ancestral birthright of more than two hundred communities in the United States and Canada. Now used as a single…

In the spring of 2008, university students enrolled in courses at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and the University of Cyprus (UCY) participated in a cross-cultural e-learning project in which they studied American Indian literature and history. All students followed the same six-week syllabus, which included shared readings and…

Malea Powell has argued that Charles Alexander Eastman "imagined new possibilities for Native resistance and survival in the face of violent assimilation strategies." To Eastman, Natives had little choice but to acculturate to white society if they were going to resist white domination and survive. But gaining full equality in U.S. society proved…

At the close of Sherman Alexie's "Indian Killer," in a final chapter titled "Creation Story," a killer carries a backpack containing, among other things, "dozens of owl feathers, a scrapbook, and two bloody scalps in a plastic bag." Readers schooled in the psychopathologies of real and fictional serial killers will be familiar with the detail:…

William Apess is among a number of Native intellectuals from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to whom scholars have paid increasing attention over the past decade and more. Apess was raised in the crucible of Native New England, had been abused in various ways in it, and spent his adulthood giving voice to those who experienced the…

The author of this article revisits Simon Ortiz's poem, "From Sand Creek," in which the latter can in so few words convey both the horrific tragedy of conquest and colonization, while at the same time find a space for possibility, a means for recovery that is never about forgetting but always occurs as a kind of recuperative remembering. Ortiz…

In this article, the authors were asked by the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes to teach a one-week, three-credit-hour course in American Indian literatures to a group of mostly Cheyenne and Arapaho students in El Reno, Oklahoma, in association with Redlands Community College. Though they knew there would be grueling eight-hour days in the classroom,…

Reprints two Latin texts written by Harvard American Indian students in the seventeenth century with approximate English translations as well as observations on the form, structure, and grammar of the texts and their background in literary tradition. The "Honoratissimi Benefactores" is a letter of gratitude to the benefactors of Caleb…

Suggests that "contact" between mainstream American culture and northern Plains Indian cultures is a communication process with historical and ongoing parameters. Presents examples of adaptations to new situations and new neighbors in the creation stories and contemporary songs of the Hidatsa, Mandan, and Arikara peoples. Contains 17…

A non-Indian teacher at a Navajo Reservation high school relates his experiences using American Indian literature to convey to students some of the unspoken truths of American Indian history; and muses on the nature of truth and the etymological origins of the word "truth" in the word "tree." (SV)

This author, a teacher of American Indian and Alaskan Native literature at an all-native school, contends that suppression of Indigenous literary texts is an aspect of colonization, and that reclamation of Indigenous American literature is a critical component of cultural sovereignty. In her classes, she emphasizes the hybrid nature of…

Explores the differences between mainline feminism and Native feminism, the sparsity of information on Native women in history, the recent increase in the publication of female Canadian Native authors, the form of contemporary myths and legends, and the wisdom of elders as a source for writing. Includes excerpts from poetry and other literature.…

Discusses various definitions of the "testimonial" and characteristics that distinguish it from related literary genres. Examines autobiographical and testimonial literature by Native women of British Columbia, focusing on first-hand accounts of student experiences in Indian residential schools. Contains 29 references. (SV)