13. Greg Sarris - Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts

[pauraque]

This book isn't long, but it took me a long time to read and a long time to digest. It's an academic work, not a popular one. Literary theory isn't my field, and some of the sections were too dense for me to understand, making heavy use of concepts I was unfamiliar with. But I believe Sarris's core message got through to me, and it was a message that moved and excited me greatly: When you hear or read a text, you are conversing with that text. You and the author are conversing. Your experiences and your cultures are conversing. Your reading/hearing experience is itself a creative act.

He expresses and illustrates this central theme through his own experiences of cultural intersection, starting with the Pomo women who raised him (his father was Miwok and Pomo, and his mother was white, but he never knew them), and the attempts of white academia to study these women, his family -- their storytelling, particularly.

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tags: a: Sarris Greg, Miwok, Pomo, genre: non-fiction, subject: American Indian literature, literary theory