Class Schedule

Tentative Schedule -- Dates/Readings Subject to Change-- Come Here Often and Check your email

Tuesday 8/26
Introduction to the course and each other

Questions We'll Consider this semester:
* "Indians," Native Americans," "First Nations," "indigenous" ?
* What are Indians' legal status in the United States?
* How do many Native peoples' sense of place, time, space and identity differ from non-Natives?
* What is the significance of stories to indigenous peoples?
* What is the oral tradition?
* How is it present in written literature?
* How long have Indians been writing in English?
* How have U.S. policies affected Indians and what they write?
* Do Indians tend to write out of a sense of individuality or community or both?
* How do Native people/writers respond to their colonization and stereotyping by the dominant culture?
* What do or what should non-Indians do when we feel under attack by Indian writers? Get angry, defensive, feel guilty? What do Indians want non-Indians to feel and do?
* What is colonialism? What are the effects of colonialism on the colonized? Are Indians still colonized?
* Understanding colonialism and its lasting effects on Indians helps us realize that colonialism is what Native writers are critiquing, not individual non-Native people. We're all in this together, and we can all work to improve Native-nonNative relations and to decolonize our country and ourselves.

Essential Understandings in Native American History and Literature (button at left)

Video (30 min): Native Voices: Resistance and Renewal in American Indian Literature (includes Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Greg Sarris, and Lucy Tapahanso
Resources for the Video (American Passages)

Assignment 1: Write a 1-2 page (typed, double-spaced) response to an idea or author in Native Voices that particularly affected you. Due Tuesday.

NBT (Nothing But the Truth): Introduction, 1-14

Guiding Questions: What do each of the following three essays convey about Indian ways of seeing and being in the world that strike you as important? Choose a short passage from each essay that you find particularly significant and be prepared to explain your response to it in class.

Brian Swann, "Introduction: Only the Beginning" 172-189
Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo, Sioux), "The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective, 62-82

Guiding Question: What do these writers have to say about the relationship between language, place, identity and the nature of reality?

Choose a short passage from each essay that you find particularly important and/or intriguing and be prepared to share your ideas in class.

Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective," 159-165
N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), "The Man Made of Words," 82-93

Carter Revard (Osage), "History, Myth, and Identity Among Osages and Other Peoples" 126-140
How does Revard describe Geronimo's identity?
In comparison, describe Jason Betzinez's identity. He is Apache but went to a US government boarding school and has an identity quite different from Geronimo's.
Revard claims, ". . . Americans have untied their names and individual histories from place and nation to an astonishing extend in the last five hundered years--precisely since the terms individualism, self, identity, and civilize came into the English language in their current meanings." What does Revard mean here, and what does he infer is his concern about this phenomena?

Greg Sarris (Miwok-Pomo), "The Woman Who Loved a Snake" 141-158
What are some of the important points about cross-cultural situations?
About oral rather literate discourse?

Thursday 9/04
Humor in Native America

Guiding Question:
What are the traditional and post-colonial functions of humor in Native societies? What are the advantages of employing humor in difficult contexts?

Deloria (Lakota), "Indian Humor" 39-53
Click on the "Indian Humor" button above left side of the screen and read . . .

Video clips from: On and Off the Res' with Charlie Hill and youtube

Tuesday 9/09
Indian Humor Exhibit at Smithsonian
Writing assignment #2:
* Choose a piece at the Smithsonian site and explain what issue(s) it addresses and why you like it. Type, double-spaced and include a graphic of the piece. 1-2 pages
* Volunteer to present your choice and analysis to the class

Thursday 9/11
Guiding Question: Explain how Ortiz's essay seems to speak from and to a political/historical context although with a spiritual dimension, while Moore's essay seems to tell us more about the epistemology and worldviews of Native people and how they are revealed in literature?

Colonialism: what is it? where is it? how does it work?

Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism" 120-125
1. Explain the ceremonies of Acquemeh and how they are "authentically" Indian.
2. How have Native people responded to colonialism, according to Ortiz?
3. What quality or qualities, for Ortiz, most characterizes NA literature and people/communities?

Moore, "Decolonializing Criticism: Reading Dialectics and Dialogics in Native American Literatures" 93-119
1. Para 1: explain Moore's concern here with ethics and NA literature.
2. P2: Epistemology: a theory of the nature of knowledge (how we know the world); How are our ethics connected to our epistemology? What does Moore mean: Colonial cognitive structures underlie cultural definitions of race and ethnicity, embedded as those definitions are in the economics of colonial history."
3. P3: Explain the "dualistic episteme" of absorption or resistance.
4. P4: "Dualistic, dialectic and dialogic ways of thinking; "Those ways of thinking echo ethical and then political ways of interacting" (95). Explain.
5. P5: Moore says that Native texts are tied to land-based and pan-tribal communities. Explain the major points of this paragraph.
6. P6: "What is an epistemology of exchange"?
7. P9: "An examination o f dialogic ways of eluding dialectic systems." The dialogic never erases the dialectic, though the dialectic ignores the dialogic. The dialectic ignores the dialogic by reducing issues to binaries, while the dialogic continues to "dialogue" with he dialectic by opening up more than binaryr possibilities." Discuss the examples of binary, dialectic thinking/history in this paragraph and the dialogic history/reality that exists that dialectical thinking doesn't see.
8. See footnote p. 99. Heteroglossia in language/communication, primacy of context; "Similarly, efforts to reduce cultural contact to monocultural domination are doomed to failure, as cultures engage necessarily in a nexus of dialogue" 99).
9. Explain (p.103): "A postcolonial rather than neocolonial critique must by definition be non-oppositional and heteroglossic, because colonial hegemonies are based on dualistic oppositions."
10. Explain "nexus of exchange."
11. How does Moore suggest we as readers (and participants) of NA literature engage in a "nexus of exchange" and how does he return us to the ethical dimension of readers/critics of NA literature?

Distribute take-home essay exam #1 (due 9/18)

Historical Trauma and Healing in Native America
(click on button at top left)

Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, "The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Unresolved Grief" (starts on p.60)
Lisa Poupart, "The Familiar Face of Genocide: Internalized Oppression Among Native Americans"

What are the main concepts of Brave Heart and Poupart's essays?
Define the important terms, such as historical, unresolved grief and internalized oppression.

According to Lisa Poupart's article,
* How have Native people become complicit in their own oppression?
* What are some of the social ills plaguing Native America as a result of Western imperialism, assimilation and Indian identification with the dominant culture's codes, according to Poupart?
* In paragraph 6 Poupart describes strategies the dominant culture has used to justify Native peoples' disempowerment, such as __________________________--
* define "historical unresolved grief," "internalized oppression," and "disenfranchised grief"
* Poupart says in paragraph 4 that Indians have a sort of "cultural double consciousness" due to the preservation of traditional ways that lets them know they "have not deserved a history violence and genocide," and which provides an alternative interpretation of the harms inflicted by white society. In her conclusion she makes recommendations for Native people and non-Native people who want to change the system and start the healing. What are they?

Video: American Holocaust: When It's All Over I'll Still Be Indian
AM HOLO

Website for Navajo removal/relocation and Sen. John McCain's bill mentioned in American Holocaust.

Thursday 9/18
Exam One (Nonfiction) Due

NBT, 190-193 (Intro to fiction)
Beth Brant (Mohawk), "Swimming Upstream" 212
Silko (Pueblo), "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," 358
Carter Revard (Osage), "Report to the Nation: Repossessing Europe" 333

For discussion: How do historical trauma and attempts to heal from the legacy of genocide and colonization play a role in Native American literature?
and
The introduction to fiction introduces Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor's term "survivance": survival, endurance, and the repudiation of dominance." We will strive to read Native literatures from a Native, non-colonial point of view, so I want you to ask yourself how "survivance" applies to Brant, Silko, and Revard's stories. You have learned much already about the realities of American Indian history and present experience, as well as worldview and values. What of these realities, worldviews and values to you see in Brant's story, "Swimming Upstream." Images, issues, themes?

Choose a specific passage(s) from each story to support your response.

For Revard: What seems to be his purpose here and how does he achieve it? What is the effect(s) when he moves between continents?

Tuesday 9/23
"The Killing of a New Mexican State Trooper: Ways of Telling a Historical Event," Lawrence Evers
"Undermining Narrative Stereotypes in Simon Ortiz's "The Killing of a State Cop," Brewster Fitz

Simon Ortiz, "The Killing of a State Cop" 321
Leslie Marmon Silko, "Tony's Story," 362
Discussion questions:

1. Why do you think both Silko and Ortiz chose to apply their imagination to an historical event?
2. What are the major differences between the stories and what effect(s) do these differences have?
3. Choose a passage from each story that represents for you one of the author's major concerns/themes.
4. What are the main differences between Lawrence Evers and Brewster Fitz's essays on these stories?
5. Which story--Silko or Ortiz's--did you most enjoy and why?

some of Brewster Fitz's claims in "Undermining Stereotypes in . . . "The Killing"
"My hypothesis is that Ortiz's test comprises the retelling of a narrative confession in which a series of reversals occur as the characters move a long the linear itinerary from town towards the 'heart of the reservation.' Owing to these reversal the linear and telic structure of the narrative is attenuated as the pursuer becomes the pursued, the hunter the hunted, and victimizer the victim, the will to kill the will to die. These reversal cont4ribute tot a blurring of stereotypical character oppositions such as god guy/bad guy, oppressor/oppressed. . "

The telos of the narrative, I will argue, is not the 'truth' about the murder of the Mexican trooper from an Anglo-European legal point of view, namely, the verdict of guilty or not guilty based on the murderer's intention motives and mental state, but a specular point in the text at which the reader can figuratively see the murderer and the victim as they fail to see themselves, namely as doubles. This story is a retold 'confession' of the conflicted, suicidal 'stupidity' and 'craziness' in persons from two cultural groups, Pueblo and Mexican, both marginalized to different degrees by dominant Anglo-European culture" (106).

"Felipe's hatred of racist hatred mirrors Baca's racist hatred in its extremity" 107

Paradoxically, when Felipe breaks the proscription that he not consume alcohol because he is an Indian, he affirms the 'values' which include racism and the religion of that culture in which he hates not only the scofflaws but also the law. . . 108

Felipe is a rebel, not without a cause, but with a cause he does not understand 109

"Here, perhaps rather than wanting to 'win' the game of chicken without the ultimate face-off, Felipe wants Baca to acknowledge the fear that binds them, just as he and his younger brother were bound by the fear that pretended not to feel when as kids they played with rattlesnakes. Yet Felipe's ignoring his own motive amounts to his not being able to see both his and Baca's courses as identically suicidal, in his not being able to see that the logic of chicken is such that by definition the winner is a loser: if the point of playing chicken is s to prove that one is not afraid of fear, then both players paradoxically prove they are afraid upon entering into the game and upon refusing to stop the game. Felipe and Baca are bound by fear of showing rear and by blindness to this fear" 113

These circles of form turn continually toward this 'something' which can only be glimpsed as the reader sees that Baca and Felipe should be compadres, and would be compadres, could they but see that they do not have to be trapped in the stereotypes that inform the linear narrative of Hollywood, racist law, history, or the interpretation of rigid and intolerant theological doctrine" 119.

In this story Ortiz repeatedly questions himself and persons from different ethnic backgrounds who tend to be blinded and trapped by narrative stereotypes. In undermining these stereotypes, he shows paradoxically that in being and American writer, he has best realized his commitment to be Aaacquemeh hahtrudzai, "a native American of his homeland and people (119).

Can you relate the above claim to Ortiz's essay on Indian Nationalism?

Thursday 9/25
continue discussion of Ortiz and Silko stories
The Boarding School Experience
About Indian Boarding Schools
A Photo Gallery of the Indian Boarding School
Video: A Century of Genocide: The Residential School Experience (18 min)

Tuesday 9/30
"American Indian Boarding School Experiences: Recent Native Perspectives"

For discussion: The boarding school system certainly contributed to intergenerational trauma, but how did boarding school experiences actually facilitate cultural persistence in a number of unintended ways?

(NBT) Pauline Johnson, "As It Was in the Beginning," n(1917) p. 282
1. choose the passage you find most powerful in the story
2. explore the animal imagery and how it is used in this story
3. consider the first line of the story and the final two lines, "They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin. They seem to have forgotten I am a woman" (288).
4. what are the major themes of the story, and perhaps Johnson's "message"?
5. does the story resonate in any ways with the boarding school essay above?

Yellow Woman Stories
Told by the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest, Yellow Woman stories dramatize how humans interact with spirits in the world once it has been created. Although there is always variation, Yellow Woman stories often involve a young married woman who wanders beyond her village and has a sexual encounter with a spirit-man; sometimes she is killed, but usually she returns to her family and tribe having grown spiritually, and therefore has an empowering influence on the people in general. In her influential essay "Kochinnenako in Academe," Paula Gunn Allen points out that Yellow Woman stories are "female-centered, always told from the Yellow Woman's point of view," and that they generally highlight "her alienation from the people," but that her apparently transgressive acts "often have happy outcomes for Kochinnenako [Yellow Woman] and her people." This suggests, Allen argues, "that the behavior of women, at least at certain times or under certain circumstances, must be improper or nonconformist for the greater good of the whole." Like many Native American stories, these narratives have the communal function of both drawing socially important boundary lines and observing where they sometimes need to be transgressed. In particular, according to Allen, they emphasize "the central role that woman plays in the orderly life of the people." Leslie Marmon Silko frequently draws from the Yellow Woman tradition when she writes of empowered (especially sexually empowered) and empowering women like the spirit-being Ts'eh.

(NBT) Lucy Tapahanso (Navajo), "All the Colors of Sunset" 391

For discussion: Create a list of cultural markers in this story. How is place significant to the story? What does the title suggest to you?

Tapahanso Overview and Activities

Video: In the Light of Reverence (www.sacredland.org) (excerpt) NOW ON RESERVE
www.sacred-sites.org
www.ienearth.org (Indigenous Environmental Network)
Take home exam on short fiction, Exam #2

Tuesday 10/07
Intro to James Welch (Blackfoot/Gros Ventre) and 19th Century Northern Plain culture/history

Thursday 10/09
FOOLS CROW Parts 1, 2 and 3
For Discussion:
1. What are the setting, situation and point of view or the narrator? Describe our two protagonists. What are some of the Blackfeet values communicated in this early part of the novel?
2. What are some of the names for the animals Welch has named and why do you think he chose to this language? What effect do these names have on you?
3. What evidence is there within the novel that the buffalo economy of the Pikuni is changing? What is their response to the change?
4. What are the expectations for young Blackfeet men in terms of being accepted as adults in the community? What skills, values and behaviors demonstrate male maturity? What defines success and status? How does White Man's Dog meet or not meet these expectation? How does Fast Horse meet or not meet these expectations?
5. How do the Pikuni define and acquire material wealth? How does this influence their behavior toward other tribes? Toward traders? Settlers? How do the settlers define and acquire material wealth? How does this influence their behavior toward the tribes? Toward the traders?
6. What role do different perceptions of land ownership play in the conflicting economies of the Pikuni and the settlers?
7. Explain a "vow" and its value to the Blackfeet.
8. What are the expectations for young Blackfeet women in terms of being accepted as adults in the community? What skills, values, and behaviors demonstrate female maturity? What defines success and status?
9. Discuss gender roles and division of labor in Pikuni society?
10. What is the purpose of the Sun Dance ceremony? Is it analogous to traditions in other cultures?
11. How do the Pikuni define warfare? What are their goals? What is permissible and impermissible in their acts of war? Why did the Blackfeet war against the Crow?

Commons 11-3: booth with t-shirts and information
Native Student Center: Indian tacos for sale

On Monday, October 13^th, the University of Idaho Native American Student Center will be hosting Charmaine White Face (Oglala Band of the Tetuwin Oceti Sakowin). The event will be held at 7pm in the Aurora Room (4^th floor) of the Commons. Charmaine’s lecture will cover the meaning of Columbus Day for American Indians and the negative impact his arrival has had on the Indigenous peoples and the eco-system. The event is free.

Charmaine is an Native American activist from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and is the founder of the Defender of the Black Hills (http://www.defendblackhills.org/). Her current work seeks to recognize the legality of treaties made between Native American nations and the US, and the protection and restoration of the environment, particularly the Upper Great Plains area. In Nov. 2007, Defenders was awarded the International Nuclear Free Future Award in the category of Resistance in Salzburg, Austria, only 1 of 3 awards that are given worldwide.

"Columbus Day" poem by Jimmie Durham (Cherokee)

Tuesday 10/14
Note: I've added two more events to the CAMPUS EVENTS button
Exam 2 Due
FOOLS CROW Parts 4 and 5

12. What is the significance of the conversation between Raven and Fools Crow? In terms of worldview, what does Welch suggest through the relationships the Pikuni have with animals?
13. Why does Welch call whites "Napikwans" and how has the Pikuni's attitude toward them changed from the beginning of the novel?
14. What statement is the novel making about justice? What does Kipp mean when he thinks, "These people have not changed, but the world they live in has" (252)?
15. In chapters 21 and 22, what are the different chiefs and their philosophical position on the conflict with the Napikwans. What would you advise in the council meeting?
16. Where does Fools Crow journey? What is the symbolism of the turnips?
Who is Feather woman and what does Fools Crow learn from her? How are they similar?
What is honor to Blackfeet?
Where is the hope in chapters 25-32?

"Hummingbird and Fly" story: Silko's Hummingbird story reveals how, after the shamans inappropriately begin practicing magic, Nau'ts'ity'i shows her disfavor by taking the land and grass away (in Silko's version the people trigger Nau'ts'ity'is's disfavor by neglecting the corn, though in her Story of Ck'o'you magic, the shamans are at fault). The people turn to Hummingbird and Fly to intercede with Nau'ts'ity'i. They go to her to ask for forgiveness, and she asks that they perform a healing ceremony that requires much travel. As the narrator of Ceremony puts it, "It is not easy." Rocky and Tayo appear to connect with the actions of Hummingbird and Fly, and thus you'll see that reenactment of old stories are a central element of Silko's novel.

The story makes clear that Nau'ts'ity'i, while loving , has clear expectations for behavior and responsibility and that there will be consequences for misbehavior. Indeed, when a few people misbehave, the whole community pays a price. This direct connection between actions and consequences pervades Ceremony, with Tayo convinced that his actions during the war are the cause of the drought.

Significantly, the healing ceremony requires a communal and cooperative response. The people must work together to determine what is wrong, to enact the ceremony, and to seek assistance from Fly and Hummingbird. In this way, the process of ceremony helps rebuild the broken community.

Tuesday 10/21
Video: Hopi: Songs of the Fourth World (30min)
Questions for video:
1. According to the video, what is the relationship between the cardinal directions (North-West-South-East), color, and the natural world?
2. How do the Hopi define gender roles and child rearing?
3. What is the relationship between traditional Hopi beliefs and the beliefs of U.S. society at large?
4. Who are the katchinas?

CEREMONY pp 1-167
1. Why is Tayo sick? What is done to heal him?
2. What is Auntie's attitude toward Tayo? Toward Rocky?
3. The novel could be a demonstration of Josiah's lesson to Tayo: "Nothing was all good or all bad either: it all depended" (10). Look for events, characters, and themes in the novel to which this can be applied. Look for people who seem to not have learned this lesson.
4. In the jungle, after Rocky dies, Tayo "damned the rain until the words were a chant" (11). From what we know of Pueblo cultures, what makes this a significant event? How does this set other events in motion?
5. One of Tayo's Army friends says "Here's the Indian's mother earth! Old dried-up thing!" (23). What does this tell us about his friend's character and his friend's relationship to his tribal culture?
6. Tayo's dilemma is one of "There was no place left for him" (32). How does he look for his place, and what answers does he find?:
7. When/where do you become confused about the chronology of events?
8. "Emo grew from each killing" (56) What does this tell us about Emo, and what conflict does this create for Tayo?
9. Tayo thinks at one point: "Jesus Christ was not like the Mother" (63). What changes might Christianity have brought to the Pueblo community? How might these changes not be welcomed by all?
10. At one point Auntie tells Tayo a story about his mother's misbehavior. She says, ". . . she was your mother, and you have to understand" (65). What does Auntie feel Tayo must understand about his mother? What effect might such a story have on him?
11. Look for signs of competing cultures in Tayo's mind or life. For instance, what do we see going on with Tayo's science teacher on page 94?
12. Why are Josiah's cattle so important?
13. Why is Tayo sent to Betonie? Why don't people completely trust Betonie? Why does Tayo think to himself "this would be the end of him" (112)?
14. Why does Auntie dislike Josiah's visit to the Night Swan?
15. Keep in mind that Tayo visits Night Swan before he goes off to the war and returns sick. But Night Swan seems to know or sense something about him. How she might be important in his education in general and in his future healing process? What do you think Josiah's note told her? Night Swan tells Tayo, "You are a part of it now (92)". What is he a part of?
16. Betonie says, "you see, in many ways, the ceremonies have always been changing" (116). How does this prove to be a recurring theme in the novel and how is it important for Tayo's healing?

Thursday 10/23

compare/contrast women in Ceremony (print out handout above)
compare sacred stories/characters (print out handout above)

17. How do the poems parallel the novel's events? Pay close attention to the story of the witch people (122-128).
18. What do Tayo, Night Swan, Betonie, and Josiah's cattle have in common with Betonie's grandparents (134-141)?
19. How do "poems" continue to parallel Tayo's story? Look for moments at which the poems appear in the text. Are these important juxtapositions?
20. A minor character (Helen Jean) thinks of the Indian veterans she meets: "But these Indians got fooled when they thought it would last" (153). What won't last? Why not? What does Helen Jean contribute to the novel?
21. What evidence do you find that Tayo is getting better? Look at his actions and his thoughts. Look for images that are associated with him as the novel progresses. Where does he express confidence and happiness? Where does he relapse into fear, sickness, and self=loathing?
22. On page 177, Tayo tells himself that "he had learned the lie by heart." What lie is this? Similarly, he says the whites had believed a lie. What is the lie that they have learned by heart?
23. Why does Tayo decide NOT to kill Emo (235)?
24. Where does Tayo end the novel?
Choose a passage that you feel best articulates a major theme of the novel.

See "Requirements" button for Project Proposal assignment and "Final Project" button for directions for final project: Literary Research Essay or Multimedia Group Project

Tuesday 10/28
Conclude discussion of Ceremony

Have FLIGHT read on Thursday for discussion/ be sure to read the interview with Alexie below

Tuesday 11/04 BE SURE TO VOTE! HELP MAKE HISTORY TODAY!
FLIGHT
1. How does the narrator define himself?
2. How is shame at the heart of dislocated Indians? What kinds of shame, besides his "ugliness" does Zits suffer from? How does the physical stigma serve as a metaphor for larger cultural deprivations? For the human condition? Can you think of other figures in literature for whom one oddity or deformity is emblematic of greater dilemmas?
3. Zits has had twenty foster families by the time he is fifteen, and he starts running away from them at age eight. What is the picture of foster parents he conveys?
4. "My mother loved me more than any of you will ever know" (p. 3). Is this the boy's talisman? Is it the core of him that might ultimately provide a way out of his cycling nightmares, real and imagined? He also thinks his mother got cancer from grieving at her loss of his father. How did his own grief make him even more vulnerable to the repeated abuses of his childhood?
5. Why does Justice refer to the Ghost Dance? How does it relate to the bank scene?
6. How is history and historical events explored through FLIGHT? Give specific examples.
7. How does FLIGHT explore the issue of power? GIve examples
8. How might FLIGHT be read as a trauma narrative?
9. What would you characterize the novel's conclusion? What seems to be the message? Does it work for you? Do you imagine a preferred alternate ending?

Discuss project Proposals and final Projects

Check the "Campus Events" button for numerous NDN events; check out the Indian Student Support conference (free for students) coming up 11/19 and 20.

Thursday 11/06
GUEST SPEAKER/WRITER: Jeanette Weaskus (Nez Perce)
from her Memoir Never Dirty, Mostly Clean
or her novel in progress
Jeanette received an MFA in Creative Writing at UI, and is now working on a PhD in English at WSU --be sure to be on time and please ask her questions

Assign Exam #3: Long Fiction

Final Paper/Project Proposal Due next Thursday: Follow instructions at bottom of "Final Project" button carefully!

INTRODUCING Richard Van Camp
read his bio here on Nativewiki, hear him read poetry, learn what he's up to--
The Lesser Blessed will soon be released as a movie!
Richard Van Camp,The Lesser Blessed
what do you like most about this novel?
how would you characterize the style?
what are the novel's major themes?
what will you most remember about the novel?

Thursday 11/13
Final Paper/Project Proposal Due: Follow instructions for this document carefully! (see Final Project button for Proposal instructions)

Unit 3: Poetry - Guest Poet Tiffany Midge today (see below)

Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe), NBT: "The Possibilities of a Native Poetics" 412-415

Contemporary Native American poetics are "infused with echoes of the song poems and ceremonial literatures of the tribes, born out of the indigenous revolution, filled with the dialogues of inter-textuality, sometimes linked to the cadence and construction of 'an-other' language, frequently self-conscious, and often resistant to genre distinctions and formal structures" (412).

Recognizable facets of Indian-authored poetry:
1) a significant spiritual and physical landscape
2) an investment in political struggle (they carry history)
3) a search for or an attempt to articulate connections with the individual, tribal or pan-Indian legacy
4) connections to the oral tradition
5) engages in framing a response to the perceived expectations of Native literature, and/or how non-Natives have represented Indians.

"One function of American Indian poetry has been to 'resist cultural erasure' to question the dominant narrative, and to remember our histories clearly as a way to resist both amnesia and nostalgia."

"Literacy in English has not prevented Indian writers from exploring the possibilities for articulating the truth of their own visions through poetry. These visions come out of an exploration of what it means to be Indian and what it means to come from a cultural and historical past that is unique within American experience."

"Poetry often serves to tell us about the places we've been as a people or about the places we wish to be. What we admire about it, or about the poets who make it, are the ways poetry may succinctly distill and render human experience into language. Language is a vehicle of ceremony [and healing]. " poet Janice Gould (Maidu)

Why Indians write?
sacred political survival healing to re-express traditions.

GUEST POET Tiffany Midge (Standing Rock Sioux), MFA (UI)

A selection of Tiffany's poems
be sure to read "The Woman Who Married a Bear" and "After Viewing the Holocaust Museum's Room of Shoes . . . "

Tuesday 11/18
EXAM 3 DUE

The Ghost Dance
Massacre at Wounded Knee

Native American Graves Repatriation Act (1990)
Nez Perce Repatriation Notice

Wendy Rose, Wendy Rose (background/bio)
"I Expected My Blood to Ripen. . ." 531
"Three Thousand Dollar Death Song" 533
N. Scott Momaday, "December 29, 1890: Wounded Knee Creek" (529)
Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe) "Indian Boarding School: The Runaways," "Dear John Wayne"
"The Strange People" (handout)
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, "Mt. Rushmore" (handout)
Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d' Alene), (in NBT) "13/16," "The Business of Fancydancing,"
"Capital Punishment," "How to Write the Great Native American Novel"

That teacher gave me a new name. . . again.
She never even had feasts or a giveaway!

Still I do not know what “George” means:
and now she calls me “Phillip.”

Two Flocks of Geese Lighting Upon Still Waters
must be a name too hard to remember.

Like many Grandfathers before me,
I spear Salmon: splashing, flapping.
These echoing waters no longer your home.
Up Celilo Falls you will dance no more.
Cleansed, Grandmother will weave
willows into your needle-boned flesh.
Beside night fires you will roast—
Fat oozing, dripping, sizzling.
My people will not go hungry.
We fast. We sing. We feast.
May your spirit always live, my friend,
if even in the Moon of High Waters.
From saltwaters you swim upstream to die.
We remember: “Return home to die.”

Black Bear sang, drumming on a log:
“Come, bring your biggest baskets
To the best berry patches.
I’ll show you.”

“If you maidens get lost—
Just follow my dung,
Just follow my dung.”
Black Bear sang, drumming on a log.

Tuesday 11/25 and 11/27 Fall Recess

Tuesday 12/02
5-7 minute presentations of your final paper; be prepared to tell us:
-the title of your paper
-the topic of your paper, including your broad idea and the primary source(s) in your paper
-your thesis--your major claim
-an example of how you support your claim
-why your paper is important

Jennifer Jensen
Brian Marceau

Thursday 12/04
5-7 minute presentations of your final paper; be prepared to tell us:
-the title of your paper
-the topic of your paper, including your broad idea and the primary source(s) in your paper
-your thesis--your major claim
-an example of how you support your claim
-why your paper is important

Emily Crook                                    Erin McCall
Aaron Short/Josh Nishimoto                    Lauren Lepinski
Dustin Fleener                                  Christine Sorenson (?)

Exam 4 Due

Tuesday 12/09
5-7 minute presentations of your final paper; be prepared to tell us:
-the title of your paper
-the topic of your paper, including your broad idea and the primary source(s) in your paper
-your thesis--your major claim
-an example of how you support your claim
-why your paper is important
Tierney Busse                                       Anisah El-Mansouri
Kyle Miller                                         Brian M/Jamie Hill
Jeremy McCullough                                Jessica Wilson

Thursday 12/11
5-7 minute presentations of your final paper; be prepared to tell us:
-the title of your paper
-the topic of your paper, including your broad idea and the primary source(s) in your paper
-your thesis--your major claim
-an example of how you support your claim
-why your paper is important

Rolo Villalobos                                        Allison Bahn
Nick Klassen                                         Sean S/Kristin V.
Jamie Dalvini                                          Amber Strait