Scholars Kali Tal and Cathy Caruth express the importance of trauma literature as "the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it "real" both to the victim and to the community," and to tell "a reality or truth that is not otherwise available." In "Solar Storms" Linda Hogan vividly recounts the consequences of…

Recently, when preparing course materials for English graduate students on the practical skills and theoretical dimensions of teaching literature, the author surveyed the literature on the "state of the field" of literary studies in English (and the entire concept of a liberal arts education), ranging from high-profile monographs to various…

This article presents the author's response to Sam McKegney's "Strategies for Ethical Engagement: An Open Letter Concerning Non-Native Scholars of Native Literatures." In his response to Sam's diagnosis of the malaise currently afflicting non-Aboriginal critics of this literature, the author attempts to consider the "cure" Sam offers (albeit…

Teaching American Indian literature with online resources can help diverse urban Indian and multicultural students connect with American Indian cultures, histories, and Nations. This online-enriched pedagogy adopts Susan Lobo's sense of the city as an "urban hub," or activist community center, an urban area linked to reservations in which Native…

It is difficult to overestimate the differences between Native American studies in Europe and the United States. In Europe there are no dedicated university programs in Native American studies; instead, disciplinary units such as American studies or departments such as English, history, development studies, and anthropology house teaching and…

Twenty-first-century skeptics would say that there are really no such things as beauty and truth and certainly not goodness. A Pueblo poet seemed to think there was--"the corn people have a song / it is very good"--and unless people think they know better, they'd better listen up. This article begins with a short piece, set down by the…

To speak about separatism as a Canadian is to use a loaded term, one that invokes a significant yet historically specific sociocultural moment. Winners and losers emerged, and in the process, the word "separatism" received a bad rap. Consequently, as a white Canadian who still believes in at least the optimism of the multiculturalist…

Louise Erdrich's early poem "The Strange People" portrays a dynamic understanding of gender echoed in many of her later fictive works. Narrated by a speaker who is half antelope, half woman, the poem details the relationship between a masculine hunter and his feminine prey. The poem suggests that gender is experienced as a wound, a site of…

In this article, the author explains what he sees as the ironically disabling impact of some critical postures characterized by careful, self-reflexive distance undertaken by non-Native critics and then suggests a possible alternative direction for future critical interventions. The article presents the most popular strategies of ethical…

In this paper, the author begins by saying how privileged he feels to be included in the celebration of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ) and to toast forty years of American Indian studies at UCLA. He looks back over the field of Native American literature and criticism, then peeks at the present, and last, makes some…

Despite the fact that more than two-thirds of American Indians live in urban areas, many readers and scholars of American Indian literature continue to associate Indigenous peoples with natural environments rather than urban ones. Highlighting literary texts written by Native authors that reflect the multifaceted dimensions of urban Indian life is…

Leslie Marmon Silko began her most recent work, "Gardens in the Dunes" (1999), intending to write a novel that would not be political. Following the publication of "Almanac of the Dead" (1992), which was simultaneously hailed as one of the most important books of the twentieth century and condemned for its angry self-righteousness, Silko…

American Indian cultures tend to be right hemispheric because of the ways in which they acquire knowledge. Over the thousands of years that American Indian peoples have lived in this hemisphere, strong visual rhetorics were developed, because of this tendency to engage in visual thinking and the socioeconomic need to communicate with others who…

Sherman Alexie's "Reservation Blues" has inspired both admiration and castigation. Critics such as Stephen Evans, Adrian C. Louis, Joseph Coulombe, and James Cox have praised Alexie's satiric upending of stereotypes about Native Americans, claiming that Alexie's work "uses stereotypes...of the...Indian, in new and entirely moral and ethical ways."…

William Bevis has argued that, whereas the classic American novel tells a story of "leaving," in which characters find growth and fulfillment away from the homes they grew up in, the typical Native American novel is based around "homing." In homing stories, the characters do not "find themselves" through independence but rather discover value and…