American Indian literary nationalism is the name of an intellectual and activist movement within Native American literary studies.

Origins

Simon Ortiz Simon J. Ortiz (born May 27, 1941) is a Native American writer, poet, and enrolled member of the Pueblo of Acoma. Ortiz is one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the Native American Renaissance. Ortiz's commitment t ...

's 1981 essay "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism" is generally held to be the most significant precursor of the movement. They build their justification for an American Indian Literary Nationalism on Kimberly Blaeser's argument for a critical approach to Indigenous literature that begins with the meaning a text itself produces.

Definition

American Indian literary nationalists hold that American Indian literature is best studied through the lens of American Indian cultural and philosophical traditions. When the earliest works now categorized as nationalist were first published, this "grounded" approach ran counter both to the ethnologically inflected literary criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s, and also to the

postmodern Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...

critical methods that had largely succeeded these in the 1990s. The nationalists saw the first of these approaches as an attempt to keep Native cultures primarily as the object of Anglo-American study, while the second relied heavily on Eurowestern models and thus again served to deprive Native peoples of a legitimate voice. Nationalist criticism, by contrast, would keep crucial political issues such as

tribal sovereignty Tribal sovereignty in the United States is the concept of the inherent authority of indigenous tribes to govern themselves within the borders of the United States. Originally, the U.S. federal government recognized American Indian trib ...

at the forefront. Rather than being another ethnic literature within the American canon, American Indian literatures should be seen as the product of separate nations, and studied as such.

Key works

Robert Allen Warrior Robert Warrior (born 1963, Osage), is a scholar and Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. With Paul Chaat Smith, he co-authored ''Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded K ...

's book ''Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Traditions'' was the first full-length work of nationalist criticism. In it, he discusses the

Osage The Osage Nation, a Native American tribe in the United States, is the source of most other terms containing the word "osage". Osage can also refer to: * Osage language, a Dhaegin language traditionally spoken by the Osage Nation * Osage (Unicode b ...

novelist

John Joseph Mathews John Joseph Mathews (November 16, 1894 – June 16, 1979) (Osage) became one of the Osage Nation's most important spokespeople and writers, and served on the Osage Tribal Council during the 1930s. He studied at the University of Oklahoma, Oxf ...

and the

Standing Rock Sioux The Standing Rock Reservation ( lkt, Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) lies across the border between North and South Dakota in the United States, and is inhabited by ethnic " Hunkpapa and Sihasapa bands of Lakota Oyate and the Ihunktuwona and Pabaks ...

philosopher

Vine Deloria, Jr. Vine Victor Deloria Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005, Standing Rock Sioux) was an author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights. He was widely known for his book '' Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto ...

, placing both in a specifically American Indian intellectual context. This book was followed by Jace Weaver's ''That the People May Live'', which proposes an ethic of "communitism" as a key way to understand tribal literatures. Finally, Craig Womack's ''Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism'' completed the emergence of the three key thinkers of the movement. Womack's book was the first full-length monograph to concentrate on the literary output of a single

tribal nation In the United States, an American Indian tribe, Native American tribe, Alaska Native village, tribal nation, or similar concept is any extant or historical clan, Tribe (Native American)#Other uses, tribe, Tribe (Native American), band, nation, ...

, leading some to label it "tribalcentric".Elvira Pulitano, ''Toward a Native American Critical Theory'' (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2003) p. 13 After the publication of Elvira Pulitano's ''Toward a Native American Critical Theory'' in 2003, which made multiple statements about the work of Warrior and Womack that all three major nationalists held to be inaccurate, Weaver, Warrior and Womack collaborated (along with

Abenaki The Abenaki (Abenaki: ''Wαpánahki'') are an Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada and the United States. They are an Algonquian-speaking people and part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. The Eastern Abenaki language was predom ...

scholar

Lisa Brooks Lisa Brooks is an historian, writer, and professor of English and American studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts where she specializes in the history of Native American and European interactions from the American colonial period to the pr ...

) on ''American Indian Literary Nationalism'', probably the clearest positional statement of the nationalist cause.

References

{{reflist Native American literature Native American nationalism Native American studies 20th-century American literature

Origins

Definition

Key works

See also

References