Module Information

This module aims:

1. to investigate the histories and cultures of North American Indians, paying particular attention to how differences between Indian and non-Indian world views, themes, genres, and techniques are articulated in American Indian literature;

2. to examine the great diversity of Native American oral and written storytelling. To this end we will read creation myths, traditional oral narratives and songs, collaborative autobiographies, and poetry and fiction;

3. to understand the unique place of Native Americans in U.S. society as indigenous peoples and as an ethnic and cultural minority in a polyglot nation.

In her poem 'Anchorage', Creek poet Joy Harjo speaks of 'the fantastic and terrible story of all our survival', while in 'The Significance of a Veteran's Day', Acoma poet Simon Ortiz has written: 'I am talking about how we have been able/ to survive insignificance'. Harjo and Ortiz are two among a growing number of contemporary Native American writers who have used autobiography, poetry and fiction to investigate what it means to be 'Indian' in the late twentieth-century United States. Through the semester we shall consider how both contemporary and historical Native American writers have dramatised cultural survival and questions of individual and tribal identity through a variety of literary forms.

We begin the course by examining the complex and dynamic relationships between Native Americans and the natural world as they are expressed through oral narratives, songs, chants, and ceremonies. We proceed by exploring a variety of textual forms through which American Indian voices were represented from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century. These forms include oratory, sermons, life histories, poetry, collaborative autobiography, and novels.

In the latter half of the course we will critique literature by a variety of contemporary authors and poets.

_PROGRAMME

_Seminar 1: Introduction

_Seminars 2 & 3: Oral Literatures

• Required reading: 'Introduction', 'Tales', 'Songs' and 'Oratory' sections from Velie (3-151). Pay particular attention to 'The Origin Myth of Acoma', 'The Winnebago Trickster Cycle', and 'Walam Olum'.

_Seminar 4: Autobiography

• Required reading: Black Elk and John G. Neihardt (ed.), Black Elk Speaks (1933)

_Seminar 5: The Early Twentieth Century in Recent Native American Fiction

• Required reading: Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

_Seminar 6: 'Native American Renaissance'

• Required reading: N Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1986)

_Seminar 7: Storytelling

• Required reading: Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (1981)

_Seminar 8: Critical voices of North American Literature

• Required viewing: Imagining Indians (Dir. Victor Masayesva Jr, 1996)
• Required reading: Selection of online essays

_Seminar 9: Contemporary Native American Literature and Film

• Required reading: Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)
• Required viewing: Smoke Signals (dir. Chris Eyre, 1998)

_Seminar 10: Poetry

• Required reading: Poetry selections from Velie