"Luminous Literacies" shares examples of teachers and educators using local knowledge to illustrate literacy engagement and curriculum-making through scholarly accounts of experiences in teacher preparation courses, classrooms, and other community spaces in New Mexico. This edited collection includes chapters focusing on the teaching of…

In her novel "Power," Linda Hogan provides readers with a close look at how separatism and syncretism, or exclusion and inclusion, are complex ideologies that lead to complex decisions. A close look at the novel reveals that the tensions and sharp dichotomies between the traditional world of the Taiga elders and the European American world,…

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…

Many students the author has taught get frustrated when they read Leslie Silko's canonical Native American novel, "Ceremony". Not only do they struggle with Silko's disruptions of linear temporality and her collapsing of binary oppositions, but they also struggle with the novel's geographic and cultural location. To help students better…

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…

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…

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…

In this article, the author proposes a model educators can apply when teaching one text, Louise Erdrich's "The Bingo Palace"; while she emphasizes the particular concerns this text raises, she aims, simultaneously, to offer a more general approach to teaching American Indian literature responsibly. In an increasingly multicultural academic…

David Treuer's 1997 novel, "The Hiawatha," engages the traditional literary strategies employed by Native American writing, compares those strategies to earlier narratives (Native American and canonically American), offers a reassessment of indigenous novelistic structures, engages critical responses to tribal fiction, and does so in response to…

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:…

This essay is just one story in the ongoing conversation of how to approach teaching indigenous literatures in colonial educational institutions. Through sharing her experiences in teaching Richard Van Camp's "The Lesser Blessed," the author hopes to reveal the power of this particular text and the way its effects on students who…

Beidler defends "The Crown of Columbus" against criticisms of its best-seller qualities and applauds its universality, playfulness, and thought-provoking qualities. Hoy views the novel as revisionist history contained within a seemingly frivolous narrative, a polyvocal protean voyage of discovery with humor and self-referentiality as its…

In the novel Ceremony, Tayo suffers from flawed psychological vision, mainly as a result of being contaminated by certain preconceptions that he, like most Americans, has acquired from the social environment. In the beginning of the novel, Tayo suffers from physiological eyestrain.

Quilts have become a part of American Indian culture, and they are mentioned and even highlighted in certain works of contemporary Native American literature. Certain questions can be posed in regard to the inclusion of quilt references in contemporary American Indian novels. Do the quilts and the making of quilts have some type of metaphorical…

Discusses academic arguments over definitions of "trickster," who intrinsically disrupts classifications of any kind. Focuses on trickster's reemergence (particularly as female) in contemporary native American literature, which merges verbal art and tribal traditions with Anglo text forms to create a liminal literary space ideal for…