This article outlines a framework the authors have used to infuse sustainability study into humanities teaching at the middle school level. Native American tribal elders can act as co-teachers in such classrooms, and the place-based stories that shaped their views of the environment can serve as important classroom texts to investigate sustainable…

This article explores the benefits of verbal conflicts--contested storied spaces--in a Native American literature classroom composed of a multi-tribal and multicultural urban student body. Students in this course engage in whole-class verbal discussions focusing on contemporary and historical issues concerning Native American tribes and…

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…

Reviews life and literature of Zitkala Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), Sioux Indian born in 1876 on Yankton Reservation (South Dakota), educated at Quaker schools and Earlham College (Indiana), accomplished orator, author of autobiographical essays and short stories, worker for Indian reform, lecturer, and founder of National Council of American…

In this essay, the author begins by acknowledging the necessity of teaching Native American and other indigenous literatures both alongside and independent of Western texts. Instructors should teach these works by listening to the Native authors' worldviews and literary traditions. However, when instructors try to teach Native literatures…

Focusing on the natural world, the use of myth and ritual in the novel, and the formal design of the work, symposium papers present and analyze crucial themes and forms in Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony," a novel distinctively Indian in narrative technique, thematic content, and structure. (CM)

In Osage writer Carter Revard's short story, "Report to the Nation: Claiming Europe," the narrator claims much of England, France, Spain, Italy, and Greece for the Osage Nation. After asserting his claim, the narrator questions whether or not the French actually understood that their country therefore belonged to the Osage Nation. When…

Following his own advice that elders of the tribe share their knowledge so that "the way of the Indians would come back to the children of today," Pete Beaverhead (1899-1975) tells of the traditions of respect and honor surrounding the eagle feather in a booklet illustrated with black and white drawings. The eagle is an Indian symbol of…

Contains citations for 24 published monographs dating from 1772 to 1972 and covers Native American prose from the 17th century to 1972. Introduction is by a graduate fellow of Native American literature. (AN)

The past decade featured contributions by Indian novelists, short story writers, and poets that have the potential of becoming true national Indian literature. Article comments on some of the more prominent works by Indian writers in the 1970s. (DS)

Provides bibliographic citations for 53 works by Ojibwe author and satirist, Gerald Vizenor, published from 1966 to 1983: 15 books, 12 short fiction, 2 dramas, 6 poems in anthologies, and 18 articles, editorials, and essays. Includes titles, dates, and places of publication in each entry. (NEC)

In the early 1970s James Welch enters American literature as an Indian postmodernist, a fractured classicist of the West, drawing fragments from both sides of the Buckskin Curtain. Reading the likes of Cesar Vallejo and early modernists from Ezra Pound to Theodore Roethke and decreationists such as Ray Carver (through Richard Hugo's tutelage at…

The works of four Native American poets, E. Pauline Johnson, Alexander Posey, John Rollin Ridge, and Gertrude Bonnin, are discussed with reference to the late 19th-century federal assimilation policies which were designed to absorb Native Americans into the mainstream of American life. (AN)

These four books provide curricular materials for the study of North Dakota Indians at primary through high school levels. Issued on the occasion of the North Dakota centennial, they provide information about Indians that can be integrated into the school curriculum. The books at all levels begin with study of the centennial logo, pictured on the…

One in a series of stories of the Blackfeet Indians, this short novel is set in the late 1800's when the life of the Blackfeet centered around horses and buffalo, and they were one of the most powerful tribes on the northern plains. The novel consists of 12 chapters, each with a full-page illustration, and tells the story of Lame Bear, a boy who…