In 1492 the peoples of the North American continent spoke some two thousand languages and differed greatly in their economic, social, and political forms of organization. Some tribal nations developed complex hierarchical societies; others lived nomadically, relying on hunting and gathering for subsistence; still others lived in villages, dependent on wild and domesticated plants for survival. Their cosmologies were widely diverse as well, though all were radically different from Western or European religious philosophies. Unlike European settlers, who entrusted their histories and beliefs to the written word, Native Americans preserved their cultures through oral traditions.
The first American texts were the stories, songs, chants, or ceremonials of these first nations. This traditional literature was conceived as oral performance, a language more dependent on the ear than the eye for comprehension. Many of these oral texts have survived in translations of tribal creation stories, the Navajo Night Chant, the Winnebago Trickster Tale cycles, the Iroquois condolence rituals, and so on. From creation stories to the Plains Ghost Dance songs of the late nineteenth century, oral literature recorded, for future generations, the distinct cosmology of native nations and the history of those nations' conflicts.
With the invasion of America and the subsequent negotiations by tribal peoples for their land and peace, Indian oratory became an art of survival. The eloquence and importance of the spoken word can be seen in the oratories of Pontiac, Tecumseh, Chief Joseph, and other Native American leaders from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century. These speeches, dependent on tribal training and memory, were usually transcribed by nonnatives present at the councils between Indians and whites, and many accounts suffer from distortions common to the translation and transcription of oral materials. Also, as with all Native Americans documents, it is important to remember that such distortions often accommodated the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
In the nineteenth century the Indian autobiography became a popular literary form. However, even at the beginning of colonization there was an interest in collecting the personal narratives of Native Americans. Frontier and military expeditions, missionaries, historians, and then ethnographers attempted to record the presence and then the passing of indigenous cultures through the story of a single Indian. These autobiographies most often were the products of three authors: the Indian subject, the translator, and the writer/editor. Since few Native Americans were literate, the literary emphasis and content of the autobiography were determined by the Euro-American editor. Often, as in the autobiographies of defeated tribal leaders like Black Hawk, Geronimo, and Plenty Coups, these works served to reinforce the idea of the impending destruction and surrender of Indian nations.
Samson Occom (1723-92), William Apess (1798-1839), and Elias Boudinot (1804?-1839) were among the first Native American writers. Their writings, appearing from the late eighteenth until the mid-nineteenth century, were informed by their conversion to Christianity and their lives as Indians. Each served as a mediator between the nonliterate tribal worlds and the dominant political and social ideologies designed to destroy them. Some of these nineteenth-century writers attempted to conciliate white audiences and policies; others, like Apess and later Sarah Winnemucca, argued for the cultural and historical superiority of Native Americans. But, whatever the motives of their texts, their literacy was an important and defiant step in the reappropriation of native voices and histories.
The advent of the religious and government boarding schools for Indian children assisted the spread of literacy in Native America. Native children were taken from their homes, denied the expression of their cultures, and punished for speaking their native languages. As it had been for postcolonial intertribal interactions, English became the students' common language. Out of this tragic removal of children from their native homes and communities, contemporary Native American literature was born. The boarding schools produced not only the early writers but also the audience that would determine the content of their work.
In 1854, John Rollin Ridge published the first novel by a Native American. The subject of Ridge's first and only novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, was a Mexican American bandit. Thirty-seven years later, Sophia Alice Callahan wrote Wynema, the second novel by a Native American author. Between 1854 and 1891, however, the subject of Native American literature had changed drastically. Unlike the racial masquerade penned by Ridge, Callahan's novel chose not only to narrate the experiences of Native Americans but also to protest their absence from the literary canon. The education of her mixed-blood heroine includes references to Sitting Bull and Wounded Knee as well as to Shakespeare and Dickens.
At the turn of the century, Native American literature developed themes of cultural dislocation and alienation that would be revisited by writers for decades to come. Through the short stories of Zitkala 
a (1900) and Pauline Johnson (1913) and the single novel written by Mourning Dove (1927), the questions of race and gender were raised. These questions take on further complexity for these authors (as indeed they do for all Native Americans authors) because most protagonists in native literature are mixed bloods, never defined entirely by white or Indian blood or by cultural conventions. In the first novels of John Joseph Mathews (1934) and D'Arcy McNickle (1936), the discussion remains the place and the future of mixed bloods. In each of these novels the protagonist can live neither within nor outside of tribal culture, and the consequences of such a divided life are often tragic. These early native authors attempted to define, within Western literary traditions, the often contradictory and quickly changing nature of indigenous America.
The cornerstone of contemporary Native American literature is the Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, published in 1969. It was the first major novel by a Native American to appear after decades of silence, and its publication marked the beginning of a renaissance in Native American literature. For his novel Momaday was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The novel traces the return of Abel to his tribal community after World War II, his relocation to Los Angeles in the 1950s, and the healing process he must undergo in order to be able to return home again. It is a novel of existential exhaustion and personal and cultural division. The story of Abel's return is framed within an oral invocation to storytelling, producing a tension between oral and written literature, between traditional and assimilated lives, that inspires Abel's journey. Momaday's other prose works include The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Names: A Memoir (1976), and The Ancient Child (1989).
Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) was the first contemporary novel published by a Native American woman. Originating from the Laguna Pueblo, her work is primarily located in the Southwest. Like House Made of Dawn, Ceremony traces the postwar return of its protagonist, Tayo, and the consequences of his return for himself and the community. And Silko frames the written text by oral invocations as well. However, Silko's cosmology is inclusive: Tayo's sickness or alienation is a metaphor not for his mixed-blood heritage but for his exposure to evil, produced and perpetuated by all races. In Silko's cosmology the web of life is strained or broken by individual acts. Tayo's journey to recovery necessitates a discovery that he is connected to all things. He seeks a ceremony that contains both traditional and contemporary rituals and artifacts.
Silko's work combines tribal and Western historical and literary genres. Ceremony is told through prose, poetry, and oral materials. Silko's second work, Storyteller (1981), weaves autobiographical essays, short stories, poetry, and photography into a novel. In her third major novel, Almanac of the Dead (1991), Silko envisions a world dedicated to violence and self-destruction.
The works of Momaday and Silko have had a profound influence on the style and themes of Native American literature. They have inspired a generation of native writers, including James Welch, Louis Owens, Joy Harjo, and Thomas King.
Two Ojibwa writers, Gerald Vizenor and Louise Erdrich, have had an enormous impact on the content and popularity of Native American literature. Vizenor's comic brilliance in his satires of urban native experience and colonial history has inspired the works of Sherman Alexie and Adrian Louis. In Vizenor the mixed blood (or crossblood, as he reinvents the term) becomes a postmodern liberatory space in which contradictory histories and languages can create a trickster discourse. The intent of his fiction is to demythologize and destabilize conceits about identity and knowledge. He is the most prolific Native American writer, having produced over two dozen texts, and is often the most challenging. His novels include Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987), The Trickster of Liberty (1988), and The Heirs of Columbus (1991).
Though Momaday remains the only Native American writer to receive the Pulitzer Prize, few native authors have had the impact of Louise Erdrich. Her novels have received unrivaled critical and popular attention. Erdrich's first novel, Love Medicine (1984), outsold any novel by a Native American and received several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Together with Love Medicine, three of her other novels make up a quartet; they include Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), and Bingo Palace (1994), and have experienced similar successes. Literary critics have attributed her lyrical style and contained landscape to influences from the works of William Faulkner. Like Faulkner's work, Erdrich's novels weave people and place into interconnecting stories and genealogies. For Erdrich, as for most Native American writers, people and the land are inseparable, the land in her fiction being twentieth-century North Dakota. The mixed bloods in her novels are not so much haunted by the loss of a traditional tribal world as they are engaged in the art and acts of common survival—personal, familial, and cultural. In addition to writing short stories and poetry, Erdrich also collaborated with her husband, Michael Dorris, on a novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991).
Linda Hogan, a writer of poetry and prose, derives her inspiration from the red earth of Oklahoma. Like Erdrich, she returns to the land she loves and knows. And like the other writers discussed here, she is a mixed blood, a descendant of Nebraska pioneers and the Chickasaw Nation. Before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, it was Indian Territory, promised to the tribes forcefully removed from the southeastern United States. The removal and its consequences distinguish the writing that comes out of the tribal communities of Oklahoma from the literature produced by southwestern or northern native writers. Hogan depicts the repeated dispossession of Oklahoma Indians, their landless condition, and their stubborn survival. Her writing captures the land of removal, with its detritus of loss and adaptations, and the tight, never-ending weave of family and cultural histories from one generation to the next.
Hogan's first novel, Mean Spirit (1990), is based on the killing of the Osage people for their oil-rich land. In that novel she makes several departures from traditional beliefs about land and blood: her characters are finally dependent on the community, not the land, for continued survival, and the community is Pan-Indian, not tribally specific. Both departures are informed by Hogan's recognition of the heroism of the ordinary lives of Native Americans, fragmented and forever affected by extraordinary losses and yet maintaining continuity and affirmations of life. Her additional prose and poetry include Calling Myself Home (1978), Eclipse (1983), Book of Medicines: Poems (1993), and Dwellings (1995).
As Native American literature enters the twenty-first century, archival work and anthologies are increasing the availability of traditional and historical materials. The literature continues to develop and change to reflect the concerns and realities of late-twentieth-century tribal lives. However, Native American fiction and poetry are a literature of protest—the theft of land, language, heritage—and such protests will always be their defining characteristic. Given the current emphasis on the representation of all American cultures, Native American literature promises, in terms of content and reception, to become less isolated and marginalized in the future, to become, at last, the first of many literatures of the United States.
See also
Apess, William;
Arts, Contemporary (since 1960);
Boudinot, Elias;
Johnson, Pauline;
Mathews, John Joseph;
McNickle, D'Arcy;
Mourning Dove;
Occom, Samson;
Ridge, John Rollin (Yellow Bird);
Winnemucca, Sarah;
Zitkala a (Gertrude Bonnin).
Paula Gunn Allen, ed., Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (New York: Modern Language Association, 1983); Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, eds., Redefining American Literary History (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990).
Betty Louise Bell
University of Michigan
