Southwestern American Indian Literature

Southwestern American Indian Literature: In the Classroom and Beyond addresses several challenges that teaching Southwestern American Indian literature presents, and suggests innovative ways of teaching the material. Drawing on the author's experiences teaching literature - both in the classroom and in the canyons of the Southwest - the book covers works ranging from the famous (Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony) to the underappreciated (George Webb's A Pima Remembers). One chapter discusses teaching Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals along with Silko's Yellow Woman as world literature; another functions as a guide to organizing a travel seminar that will enable students to experience American Indian literature and culture in potentially life-changing ways. This book provides a practical approach to the teaching of Southwestern American Indian literature without simplifying its inherent challenges.

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest—among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel. Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.

This focuses on the history, costume, and material culture of the native peoples of North America. It was in the Southwest – modern Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California and other neighboring states – that the first major clashes took place between 16th-century Spanish conquistadors and the indigenous peoples of North America. This history of contact, conflict, and coexistence with first the Spanish, then their Mexican settlers, and finally the Americans, gives a special flavor to the region. Despite nearly 500 years of white settlement and pressure, the traditional cultures of the peoples of the Southwest survive today more strongly than in any other region. The best-known clashes between the whites and the Indians of this region are the series of Apache wars, particularly between the early 1860s and the late 1880s. However, there were other important regional campaigns over the centuries – for example, Coronado's battle against the Zuni at Hawikuh in 1540, during his search for the legendary “Seven Cities of Cibola”; the Pueblo Revolt of 1680; and the Taos Revolt of 1847 – and warriors of all of these are described and illustrated in this book.

American Indians have produced some of the most powerful and lyrical literature ever written in North America. Encyclopedia of American Indian Literature covers the field from the earliest recorded works to some of today's most exciting writers. Th

Introduction to the Native peoples of the American Southwest.

This book studies Native American and Chicano/a writers of the American Southwest as a coherent cultural group with common features and distinct efforts to deal with and to resist the dominant Euro-American culture.

This book studies Native American and Chicano/a writers of the American Southwest as a coherent cultural group with common features and distinct efforts to deal with and to resist the dominant Euro-American culture.

Describes the history and culture of the Native peoples of the regions on either side of the border with Mexico

Describes the history, culture, and social structure of the Pueblo, Navajo, Apache, Ute, and Paiute Indian tribes.

The accompanying CD provides excerpts from the interviews with the authors.

Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature challenges readers’ understanding of where the mythic Southwest and ecological consciousness meet. The book establishes conceptual connections between literature, ecocriticism, and feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theory to recover the creative imagination in redemptive figurations of the Southwest that may help foster environmental responsibility.

The Blackwell Companion to American Regional Literature is the most comprehensive resource yet published for study of this popular field. The most inclusive survey yet published of American regional literature. Represents a wide variety of theoretical and historical approaches. Surveys the literature of specific regions from California to New England and from Alaska to Hawaii. Discusses authors and groups who have been important in defining regional American literature.

This book studies Native American and Chicano/a writers of the American Southwest as a coherent cultural group with common features and distinct efforts to deal with and to resist the dominant Euro-American culture.

Bringing fresh insight to a century of writing by Native Americans The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History challenges conventional views of the past one hundred years of Native American writing, bringing Native American Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers into conversation with their predecessors. Addressing the political positions such writers have adopted, explored, and debated in their work, James H. Cox counters what he considers a “flattening” of the politics of American Indian literary expression and sets forth a new method of reading Native literature in a vexingly politicized context. Examining both canonical and lesser-known writers, Cox proposes that scholars approach these texts as “political arrays”: confounding but also generative collisions of conservative, moderate, and progressive ideas that together constitute the rich political landscape of American Indian literary history. Reviewing a broad range of genres including journalism, short fiction, drama, screenplays, personal letters, and detective fiction—by Lynn Riggs, Will Rogers, Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Winona LaDuke, Carole laFavor, and N. Scott Momaday—he demonstrates that Native texts resist efforts to be read as advocating a particular set of politics Meticulously researched, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History represents a compelling case for reconceptualizing the Native American Renaissance as a literary–historical constellation. By focusing on post-1968 Native writers and texts, argues Cox, critics have often missed how earlier writers were similarly entangled, hopeful, frustrated, contradictory, and unpredictable in their political engagements.

The accompanying CD provides excerpts from the interviews with the authors.