Description
Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse
If white settlers landing in the New World brought with them smallpox, oppression, and Christianity, they also conveyed the cultural practice of writing. Adopters of this technology from within Native America and First Nations Canada began to adapt their own vast resources of spoken tribal literatures to this new modenovels, stories, poetry, and drama, as well as autobiography. How did this sumptuous oral tradition, creation stories, coyote, and other trickster mythologies, a whole fund of story-telling humour, become scriptural, generating a proliferation of texts whose luminous modern authors include N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Luci Tapahonso, Tom King and Beth Brant? More particularly, how have Native American writers understood and addressed fundamental issues such as: tribal identity; the politics of sovereignty and land claims; mixed-blood heritage; memo