This document provides an overview of American Indian literature. It discusses the oral tradition of Native Americans and how their traditions were impacted by European colonization. It then summarizes some of the key early Native American authors who wrote about native rights and culture from the 19th to early 20th centuries such as Samson Occom, Yellow Bird, and Simon Pokagnon. The document notes that the late 1960s saw a renaissance in Native American fiction and poetry sparked by writers like N. Scott Momaday and James Welch. It discusses how authors in the 1970s like Louise Erdrich became major literary figures, helping give voice to indigenous histories and cultures.

1. Topic
American Indian Literature
NAME: JANKIBA K. RANA
PAPER NO: 8C
CULTURAL STUDIES
M.A. SEM – II ROLL NO: 09
YEAR 2014-2015
SUBMITTED TO:
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI
BHAVNAGAR

2. AMERICAN MULTICULTURALISM:
African American Writers
Latina writers
American Indian Literatures
Asian American writers
Culturalism:
Abridged Red Indians also called Americans Indian.
Their Tradition:
Oral Tradition
Folk Tradition
It get destroyed or get’s new tradition.

3. Over powering of whites means European
• And changes came into tribal tradition.
• Contribution to literature:
The earliest mainstream Indian author in the
anthologies is
Samson Occom,
A Mohegan School master, who published as
early as 1772.

4. • Later writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, such as
– Yellow Bird
– Simon Pokagnon
– Sara Winnemucca Hopkins
– D’Arcy Mcnickle
– Mourning Dove
Dealt with native rights, the duplicates of U.S.
government and military leaders, racial ambivalence
creation myths, trickster human and tribal constancy in
face of repeated assaults.

5. • N.Scott “House made of Dawn”,
which had won the Pulitzer prize for
fiction in 1968 and his memoir, the way
to Rainy Mountain (1969) beginning a
renaissance of Indian fiction and poetry.
• James Welch’s Novel, “Winters in the
blood”.
• After that, it got more difficult.
• The anthology “The man to send Rain Clouds”
had been published in 1974. Several anthologies
of natives American poetry had also been
published in the early 70s “Voice of Rainbow”
carriers of the dream wheel and come to power,
many of the writers were dealing with the kinds of
issues of identity, social, political, cultural and
metaphysical that Silko’s book raisd.

6. • Louis Owens, a writer of “Choctaw
Cherokee” descent who is both a scholar of
native American literature and a novelist
himself, has asserted that prior to 1968 there
had only been 9 novels published by American
Indian writers, beginning in 1854
• Louise, Erdrich, Joy Harjo and others became
major literary figures, making little known but
historically rich sections of the country speak of
their Indian past and present.
• Erdrich’s novel “Love Medicine” – 1984
“The Best Queen” – 1986
“Tracks” – 1988
• Follow the fortunes of several North Dakota
Indian families in an epic unsparing in its satiric
revelations of their venality, libidinousness and
grotesquerie.