AML 3285 Sec 2333: Native American’s (in) Literature
T 4; R 4-5 (T 10:40-11:30; R 10:40-12:35)
Associate Professor S.A. Smith
Office: 4348 Turlington Hall     392-6650 x253
Office Hours: R 1:00-4:00

                                                                                                                                       

The first peoples of the North American continent spoke hundreds of different languages, had rich and various cultural practices, and were, almost all of these first peoples, almost annihilated by Europeans from the 16th to the 19th century. Despite the harrowing and genocidal history of these people, many did not perish, and have labored both as tribes and as individuals to not just survive but to thrive and to maintain their cultural traditions.

Although most of the literature we call “Native American” is recent, a tradition of story-telling and story-tellers is integral to most, if not all, aboriginal peoples who have inhabited and continue to inhabit the land now known as the United States. This course is designed as an introduction to the wealth of stories and story telling of these various peoples, a dip merely into a vast ocean of tales as we weave back and forth between present-day cultural productions such as Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart and the oral tradition that preceded written productions, such as the transcribed “Creation and the Origin of Corn” Zuñi tale (transcribed in 1884).
 (http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/zuni/cushing/cush07.htm)

In a course such as this, which is introductory at best, it would be impossible to do justice to the many voices and traditions gathered under the misnomer “Native American Literature.” Instead, what this class will do is to examine, in brief, both the way in which first peoples were represented in “American Literature,” and the ways in which Native writers represented themselves in order to construct a somewhat (I hope!) complex picture of traditions in conflict and in concert. Because although Native writers use narrative and structural elements curried from an aboriginal heritage, most have had really no choice but to voice themselves in what was, after all, the language of conquest in North America: English.

Many contemporary writers borrow from what has become an “American” idiom and tradition in both poetry and prose, while at the same time altering that heritage to express their own histories, inheritance and political views. What this course will do is offer a slice of this often neglected part of American literature.

Requirements:
Reading responses, a mid-term project and a final paper.

Equinox  by Joy Harjo  (Mvskoke/Creek)

I must keep from breaking into the story by force
for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand

and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun,
your nation dead beside you.


I keep walking away though it has been an eternity
and from each drop of blood
springs up sons and daughters, trees,
a mountain of sorrows, of songs.


I tell you this from the dusk of a small city in the north
not far from the birthplace of cars and industry.
Geese are returning to mate and crocuses have
broken through the frozen earth.


Soon they will come for me and I will make my stand
before the jury of destiny. Yes, I will answer in the clatter
of the new world, I have broken my addiction to war
and desire. Yes, I will reply, I have buried the dead

and made songs of the blood, the marrow.


 Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1951. Her books of poetry include How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002); A Map to the Next World: Poems (2000); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; Secrets from the Center of the World (1989); She Had Some Horses (1983); and What Moon Drove Me to This? (1979). She also performs her poetry and plays saxophone with her band, Poetic Justice. Her many honors include The American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Hawaii.

Red Moonwalking Woman by  Diane Glancy (Cherokee)
 
Grandmother said her grandmother
 unwrapped the knives & forks each meal,
 backward-walking to the cabin she left.
 She remembered her dishes on the shelf,
 a book, her feather bed.
 The way sun dusted the floor.
 Soldiers could come again & push her
 on a trail in the dead of winter.
 After the removal
 she started again from nothing —
 a twig to stir the stew rations.
 Old Lot's wife,
 salt pillar of the field.
 It took years to collect bowls & kettles again.
 Grandmother wiped the serving spoons,
 closed them in a drawer.
 The potato-sack curtains
 trudged in the wind,
 the spotted wallpaper, the long trail they marched.
 It was more than a hundred years
 but we sat in the kitchen
 waiting for the squeak of the back door,
 old shawl around our shoulders,
 the bundle of supper in our belly.

Copyright © Diane Glancy

 
Diane Glancy was born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri, of a Cherokee father and an English/German mother. Her B.A. was received from the University of Missouri in 1964. She was married for 19 years to Dwane Glancy and has a son, David, born in 1964 and a daughter, Jennifer, born in 1967. From 1980 to 1986 Diane was Artist-in-Residence for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma. Several of her books come from that experience. In 1987, she attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and subsequently obtained her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1988. The following year she began teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is now a Professor in the English Dept. In Creative Writing, she teaches poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and scriptwriting. She also teaches a Native American Literature course and a seminar in Native American Literature. She has also taught in the Bread Loaf School of English M.A. program on the campus of the Native American Preparatory School in Rowe, New Mexico, in 1999.

Readings
The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (Porter & Roemer)
The Moccasin Maker (Johnson—Tekahionwake—Mohawk). This text is available free online, at the Gutenberg project, listed below.
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~pjohnson/bib.html
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6600
Stone Heart (Glancy--Cherokee) http://www.hanksville.org/storytellers/glancy/index.html
The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper)
Hobomok (Child)
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (Alexie—Spokane/Couer d’Alene)
Love Medicine (Erdrich—Turtle Mountain Ojibwe)
Ceremony (Silko--Laguna)
House Made of Dawn (Momaday--Kiowa)

Mohawk (http://www.wampumchronicles.com/)
Cherokee (http://www.tolatsga.org/Cherokee1.html)
Spokane (http://www.wellpinit.wednet.edu/sal-cos/cos_toc.php)
Couer d’Alene (http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/bin/browse.pl/t20)
Ojibwe (http://www.tolatsga.org/ojib.html)
Mohican (http://www.native-languages.org/mohican_culture.htm)
Laguna (http://www2005.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~krkvls/laguna.html)
Kiowa (http://www.nativeamericans.com/Kiowa.htm)
Huron (http://www.tolatsga.org/hur.html)

All hand-outs by instructor; instructor reserves the right to alter readings, as necessary, or to add as necessary.