Assignment: Watch a 28-minute video on Resistance and Renewal in American Indian Literature. Be patient with the video. Watch five minutes at a time and take notes. When you are done, post your notes for each five-minute interval here. Your notes should explain what is being covered (ideas, topics, images) in each five-minute section. (You can get a copy of the video from Al Banan)
Before starting: Google one of the contemporary Native American authors mentioned below under "Points covered in the video" (example, Luci Tapahanso), read about the author and read a piece of her writing (example, "They are Silent and Quick").
What to think about while watching:
What are some of the characteristics of Navajo and Pueblo oral traditions? In what sense do these writers draw on native oral traditions and beliefs? How do they speak to the experience of being American Indian? What does their written literature hope to do or achieve?
Points covered in the video:
• American Indian oral traditions link people to the culture, myths, and land. Traditionally, the oral storyteller is a human individual who relates the mythological to others. Contemporary American Indian written literature draws on oral traditions even as it translates them into European forms. These stories are necessary for the culture to survive in the era after European contact. A kind of "cultural contact," this written literature deals with the interaction of Native and European cultures and identities. This video focuses on three Native American writers from the Southwest: Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo).
• Luci Tapahonso's poems "They Are Silent and Quick" and "A Breeze Swept Through" draw on and are a product of Navajo language, tradition, and landscape.
• Simon J. Ortiz's writing reflects a renewed transmission of Acoma Pueblo cultural memory, as in "My Mother and Sister." It also conveys the often fractured and besieged state of being a Native American today, as in his poem "8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH." These poems reflect the bicultural world of contemporary Native Americans.
• Like "8:50 AM Ft. Lyons VAH," Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony deals with the post-World War II experience of Native Americans. The novel attempts to reintegrate the shattered experience of its protagonist, Tayo, with the old stories and worldviews. The Laguna ceremonies must be adapted to cope with the current world, or else the old ways will die. In Storyteller, Silko demonstrates the ways in which language does not merely reflect the world, but can directly affect it.
• Native American literature is particular to tribal people in its invocation of the concrete power of language to heal and guide, but it is also like all American literature in probing what it means to be American.
Photo: George A. Addison, KIOWA GIRLS (1890) courtesy of Denver Public Library/ Western History Department.
This late 19th century photograph shows two young Kiowa women. Their dress is an example of bicultural production; they are wearing moccasins and European-style dresses, and have fringed blankets adorned with tribal designs around their waists. Writer N. Scott Momaday is of Kiowa ancestry, and spent most of his childhood growing up on reservations in New Mexico and Arizona. He was exposed to the rituals and traditions of tribal life, as well as the great social change caused by the influence of postwar material cultural, unemployment and alcoholism. His many works include HOUSE MADE OF DAWN, THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN, and THE NAMES: A MEMOIR.
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