Native American Studies

[sanguinity]

(I'm at least six months behind in my count, and I've been nominally counting from IBARW to IBARW, which didn't happen this year. In short, my count is wholly borked. I'm just going to continue this count until the new year, and reset to zero then.)


27. Clara Sue Kidwell, Native American Studies.

Yes, it's a textbook. :-) I am told this is the Native Studies text used in the U.S.; the definitive Canadian text, I am likewise told, is Olive Patricia Dickason's Canada's First Nations.

A number of my classmates were apparently expecting a history-focused class, running from Columbus and/or Jamestown to Wounded Knee, and were discomfited to discover that the text and class were mostly about more contemporary matters. For the most part, the text tends to focus on the 1930s to the present, only going farther back when the topic requires it.

Chapters are devoted issues of land and identity, sovereignty, literature, art, native studies itself, and the like. Discussions of each are almost telegraphically brief, but capture the highlights for each topic, giving the broad outlines of the relevant history as well as the major themes and disputes. It's fairly readable, especially for a textbook, and serves as a decent (but whirlwind!) introduction to some of the major things that have been happening in Indian Country post-1890. I've quoted from the text in my journal a few times now (and have been tempted even more times!), mostly because it sums issues so succinctly.


...and because this is 50books_poc, I thought y'all might appreciate a list of the works discussed in the chapter on American Indian literature.

Early American Indian literature:

Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Clebrated California Bandit, 1854. (First American Indian novel.)

John Joseph Matthews (Osage), Sundown, 1934.

D'Arcy McNickle (Cree/Metis, enrolled Salish), The Surrounded, 1936.

Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), Green Grow the Lilacs, 1930. (Play on which the musical Oklahoma! was based.)


American Indian Renaissance:

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968.
—, The Way to Rainy Mountain, 1968. (memoir)
—, The Ancient Child, 1989.

James Welch (Blackfeet), Winter in the Blood, 1974.

Leslie Silko (Laguna), Ceremony, 1977.

Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, 1978.

Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), The Bingo Palace, 1993.

Louis Owens (Choctaw / Cherokee), Bone Game, 1994. (contains characters from the novels of Momaday, Welch, Silko, Vizenor, and Erdrich)


Lit Crit and other Meta (from Suggested Further Reading)

Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo), Studies in American Indian Literature.

Craig Womack (Creek / Cherokee), Red on Red.

Greg Sarris (Pomo / Miwok), Keeping Slug Woman Alive.

Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), Narrative Chance.

Comments

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

A number of my classmates were apparently expecting a history-focused class, running from Columbus and/or Jamestown to Wounded Knee, and were discomfited to discover that the text and class were mostly about more contemporary matters. For the most part, the text tends to focus on the 1930s to the present, only going farther back when the topic requires it.

Still here then? Good. Carry on... and on... and on....

It's so much easier for some people to feel they're on the side of the Romantic! Historical! colonised people when the same colonised people aren't sitting next to them in the classroom (or being directly quoted in their textbooks).

/snark

I haven't had time to comment much recently but I'm rly appreciating your posts here (and I don't care ?/50). :-)

[sanguinity]

For some in the room, I think there was an idea that post-1890 can be effectively summarized in the word "plight", thus there was nothing much that could/should/needed to be said. But hey, they came to class and they learned otherwise! Yay, school!

And oh, good! I endeavor to give satisfaction. :-)

[kosarin.livejournal.com]

I saw somewhere that minisinoo claimed she has met students at her university who chose to take Native American studies (I think they are required to take a class on the Other)... Because they thought all Native American people were gone, and they wouldn't have to deal with any of the current stuff that comes up when discussing women or African American people. Apparently they are quite affronted by the existence of the Native American professor of the class.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

I can only wish I was surprised. ::wryface::

[livii.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for the list of literature - will look into some of these!

And yes, Dr. Dickason's textbook is the gold standard for Canada. I used it in an excellent Native Studies class in the early 2000s (where most of my fellow students thought it was going to be a bird course...the more things change...)

[sanguinity]

...a bird course? I, what?

Although that almost makes sense against the title story of what I was gonna review next, Thomas King's A Short History of Indians in Canada.

[livii.livejournal.com]

Haha, sorry. "Bird course" is, as I just discovered searching, Canadian slang that I just assumed was universal. It means an easy course, a joke of a class that you can skate through. Yeah, Native Studies 4xx is going to be just a breeze, right? So many people complained that there was work to do. Imagine those Aborginals, being all complicated and bringing up issues, for shame.

ETA: Looking forward to the King review - embarrassingly, I only read my first King for this challenge, but it was "Green Grass, Running Water" and I am so in love with him now. I had heard his radio show!

[sanguinity]

That makes much more sense! I thought you meant it was a class about native species of birds or something. And I was having trouble imagining that level of cluelessness. ;-)

Hah, I've been wanting to read Dickason's book because not only do I know jack about what's been going down on the Canadian side of the border, these things that I do not know jack about are apparently also complicated enough that I'm going to need a textbook to figure it out. Because reading blogs and applying Google hasn't been cutting it.

...well, then, I should get on that!