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…

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…

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…

One of the best-studied, least-discussed texts of Native American oral literature is a long Mojave "epic" taken down from a man named Inyo-kutavere by Alfred Kroeber in 1902 and published in 1951. The text was published in twenty-nine pages along with forty-eight pages of commentary and twenty-five pages of notes. In 1999, Arthur Hatto, an…

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…

In this article, the authors offer a series of strategies to help teachers integrate literature into their history and social studies classrooms without losing the flavor or essence of either the literature they are using or the history they are trying to teach. None of the presented approaches is mutually exclusive of the others, and several may…

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…

Petroglyphs can help students confront the challenges of cross-cultural interpretation, the "perilous venture" the author and his students will face in their Native American Literature course. Cultural artifacts, carved in rock or printed on paper, are a part of particular discursive systems. In this article, the author wants his…

These seven tales were collected in Davis Inlet, Labrador, during 1987-88 from the Naskapi, the most traditional of the Algonquin-speaking Indians. The tales describe origins or illuminate morals, several feature Tchakapesh, a hero-trickster. (SV)