LIT 233: Native American Literature, Dr. Harsh Sharma: Selected Authors

Winner of the National Book Award, Alexie publishes his first new collection of poetry and short prose in six years.

The interviews ranging from 1993 to 2007 feature Alexie speaking candidly about the ideas and themes behind poetry collections (I Would Steal Horses, First Indian on the Moon), short story collections (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Ten Little Indians), novels (Indian Killer, Reservation Blues), and screenplays (Smoke Signals).

Eleven essays criticizing aid organizations, churches, and the US government, for their efforts to 'help' Native Americans, which often hinder rather than help progress. Deloria also objects to the efforts of anthropologists to understand Native Americans, devoting millions of dollars to the study of individual tribes that would help the tribes to advance themselves. The book advocates Native American religion, and encourages church groups to lay aside their theological differences and help the tribes whose members they sought to convert.

Of all of the works of N. Scott Momaday, The Names may be the most personal. A memoir of his boyhood in Oklahoma and the Southwest, it is also described by Momaday as "an act of the imagination. When I turn my mind to my early life, it is the imaginative part of it that comes first and irresistibly into reach, and of that part I take hold." Complete with family photos, The Names is a book that will captivate readers who wish to experience the Native American way of life.

Born a Kiowa in Oklahoma in the barren Dustbowl year of 1934, N. Scott Momaday was raised on reservations in the Southwest. Since receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his first novel, House Made of Dawn, he has had one of the most remarkable careers in 20th-century American letters. In the Bear's House, his first original work since 1989, passionately explores themes of loneliness, sacredness, and aggression through his depiction of bear, one of the greatest and most violated of North American animals.

An emotionally haunting contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture.

Winner of the National Book Award for fiction. It is an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family. It is a page-turning masterpiece of literary fiction--at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.

In this transcendent memoir, grounded in tribal myth and ancestry, music and poetry, Joy Harjo, one of our leading Native American voices, details her journey to becoming a poet.

Joy Harjo, one of our foremost Native American voices, melds memories, dream visions, myths, and stories from America's brutal history into a poetic whole.

In these poems, the joys and struggles of the everyday are played against the grinding politics of being human. Beginning in a hotel room in the dark of a distant city, we travel through history and follow the memory of the Trail of Tears from the bend in the Tallapoosa River to a place near the Arkansas River.

In Dead Voices Vizenor, using tales drawn from traditional tribal stories, illuminates the centuries of conflict between American Indians and Europeans, or "wordies."

In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale. The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors.

A combination of childhood idyll and bitter reality eloquently depicts the jungles of Brazil, and the great cities of the East. A child of an ancient Indian tribe, Indigo is orphaned when soldiers raid and destroy her town. She is adopted by an American family, but the white education forced upon her clashes with the centuries-old wisdom of her people. Her new family expects her to abandon the deep, instinctive knowledge that has become a part of her soul. But Indigo cannot forget her past -- and she will change all their lives before finally returning to her own.

Welch returns to the contemporary scene with the tale of a man whose ascent from a Montana reservation into upper-middle-class society has all the elements of a classic success story--including a fall from grace. By dint of talent and hard work, Sylvester Yellow Knife has escaped the fate of most of his fellow Blackfeet. A college basketball star and graduate of Stanford Law School, he is at 35 a highly regarded lawyer in a prestigious Helena firm, about to declare his candidacy for Congress, where he hopes to help his people and assuage his guilt over having abandoned their poverty-stricken world. But when the prison parole board of which he is a member denies parole to a wily man desperate to end his incarceration, Sylvester becomes the target of a blackmailing scheme. Welch underscores the ironies in his hero's rise from the reservation by counterpointing the ways in which the convict squandered his considerable opportunities and ran his life downhill. Sylvester's growing doubts about assimilation and his need to identify with his Native American roots are counterpoised to his realization that he may be deprived of the opportunity to make a contribution on a national scale.