Overview of Native American Literature
(emphasis on the Pre-Renaissance Period)
Before the European “discovery” of North America, Native Americans performed songs,
ceremonies, prayers, and chants in what is called “the oral tradition” of Native American
literature. This literature is classified by categories such as creation stories, trickster and
hero stories, chants, ceremonies, and rituals. The oral tradition is the foundation for all
contemporary Native American writing in English.
The Mohegan minister Samson Occum published his sermons in 1772, and this is
considered the first published work by an Indian author. More Native American writers
began publishing literature in English in the mid nineteenth century.
The emergence of Native American published literature parallels whites’ conquest of
Indian lands and the subsequent education of Native children in boarding schools. Many
authors published protest literature and autobiographies in response to attempts to remove
Indians from their homelands and eradicate Indian culture.
The most effective Indian protest writer of the 1830s was William Apes, a Pequot. His
essay “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” attacks white prejudice against
Indians in Massachusetts. Apes’ autobiography A Son of the Forest (1829) was published
at the height of the debate over Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill and aimed to
sharply criticize white treatment of Indians at this crucial time.
Many Indian writers published autobiographies in the nineteenth century, and these were
often transcribed by non-Native editors and published in order to protest current
treatment of Native peoples. One of the most famous is The Life of Black Hawk (1833) by
the Sauk leader Black Hawk.
One of the most influential books to chronicle the impact of westward expansion on tribal
life is Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) by Sarah Winnemucca,
a Paiute. The text describes Winnemucca’s experiences negotiating between Indians and
whites during the Bannock War of 1876, and criticizes federal Indian policy for ignoring
the needs of Indian people as they lost their lands and resources.
John Rollin Ridge published the first novel by an Indian author in 1854, The Life and
Adventures of Joaquin Murieta. The novel portrays how whites’ unjust treatment of a
mixed-race protagonist causes him to seek revenge against the dominant culture and
become a “noble outlaw” in frontier California.
Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Sa, and Luther Standing Bear (all Sioux) were prominent
writers of the early twentieth century, who wrote about cultural struggles from an
assimilated perspective. These writers both promoted the virtues of assimilation for
Indians and emphasized the “civilized” aspects of traditional tribal life, in order to gain
respect for Indians within the dominant culture. Zitkala-Sa and Standing Bear were more
critical of the process of assimilation, with critiques of the ways in which boarding
schools in particular forbid Native children to speak their languages or practice tribal
customs.
D’Arcy McNickle (Cree/Flathead) is the most important Indian ethnohistorian to publish
in the early twentieth century. McNickle’s novel The Surrounded stands as a model for
much writing of the “Native American Renaissance” in its depiction of a mixed-blood
protagonist searching for his identity. The Surrounded has been celebrated as the most
polished novel by a Native author in the early twentieth century.
N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his modernist novel House Made
of Dawn, a moment that is often referred to as the beginning of the “Native American
Renaissance.” Momaday is credited with bringing Native American writing into
mainstream culture and his novel received much critical acclaim from the literary
establishment. In part because of Momaday’s success, other Native American authors
such as Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie
found increasingly receptive audiences and more publishing opportunities.
The Native American Renaissance also highlighted a theme that would characterize
much contemporary Native American literature: that of the alienated male protagonist
who returns to his reservation after living alone in the dominant society, and finds
himself caught between two worlds as he searches for a viable identity.
More recently, writers and critics have tried to move beyond the conflict (or false
dilemma) between tradition and assimilation that characterizes much writing of the
Native American Renaissance. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, Greg
Sarris, and Gerald Vizenor utilize postmodern strategies and themes such as hybridity
and fragmentation in order to explore new possibilities for Native American identity. A
debate has ensued over the benefits and drawbacks of maintaining a more separatist,
nationalistic Native identity versus emphasizing a hybrid, “mixed” identity that fuses
elements of Native and mainstream cultures.
Key Themes in Contemporary Native American Literature

a post-apocalyptic sense of life: after near extinction and destruction, Native
American writers often convey a sense that the apocalypse, or end of the world,
has already occurred

Tragic defeat and cultural destruction associated with the myth of the “vanishing
Indian”

Survival and continuance by adapting old stories and customs to new
circumstances

A sense of being caught between traditional tribal ways and modern, mainstream
American society

A sense of community and a communal sense of identity, based on notions of
kinship and interdependence

The power of language and stories to shape identity, both individual and
collective

A sense of the interconnectedness of all things, focusing on relationships between
animals, land, people, and language

An acute awareness of the loss of ancestral homelands or “the presence of
absence”; place, self, and community are so intimately linked that the loss of land
is a loss of psychic strength

a focus on specific places as opposed to “lighting out for the territory” and
migrating to new frontiers

a response to Euro-American stereotypes of savagery and primitivism, and to
romantic notions of the ecological and spiritual wisdom of Native peoples