That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American CommunityLoyalty to the community is the highest value in Native American cultures, argues Jace Weaver. In That the People Might Live, he explores a wide range of Native American literature from 1768 to the present, taking this sense of community as both a starting point and a lens. Weaver considers some of the best known Native American writers, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Vine Deloria, as well as many others who are receiving critical attention here for the first time. He contends that the single thing that most defines these authors' writings, and makes them deserving of study as a literature separate from the national literature of the United States, is their commitment to Native community and its survival. He terms this commitment "communitism"--a fusion of "community" and "activism." The Native American authors are engaged in an ongoing quest for community and write out of a passionate commitment to it. They write, literally, "that the People might live." Drawing upon the best Native and non-Native scholarship (including the emerging postcolonial discourse), as well as a close reading of the writings themselves, Weaver adds his own provocative insights to help readers to a richer understanding of these too often neglected texts. A scholar of religion, he also sets this literature in the context of Native cultures and religious traditions, and explores the tensions between these traditions and Christianity. |
Contents
| 3 | |
Occoms Razor and Ridges Masquerade 18th19th Century | 46 |
Assimilation Apocalypticism and Reform 19001967 | 86 |
Indian Literary Renaissance and the Continuing Search for Community 1968 | 121 |
Anger Times Imagination | 160 |
Notes | 169 |
Bibliography | 213 |
Index | 233 |
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Common terms and phrases
Amer-European American Indian American Indian Literatures Anishinaabe Apess autobiography blood Carmody century Christian Cogewea colonial communitism communitist Creek critical crossblood Dakota Destinies Earth Elias Boudinot Ella Cara Deloria Emphasis original English European fiction Fixico Forked Tongues Geary Hobson Gerald Vizenor Hobson human Ibid identity Indian Territory indigenous Jace Weaver John kinship Krupat land language Leslie Marmon Silko literary live Louis Owens Manifest Manners McPherson and Rabb missionary mother Mourning Mourning Dove Murray Native American Literature Native community Native cultures Native literature Native writers Ngugi Nieuwenhuys Noley non-Native Norman notes novel Occom Oklahoma Press oral tradition orature Paula Gunn Allen Pauline Johnson Peelman Peter Jones Petrone Posey published religion religious Robert Warrior Ruoff Ruppert Scott Momaday sense sovereignty speak stories Storyteller survival theology Thomas King tion Trafzer Tribal Secrets tribes trickster University of Oklahoma University Press Vine Deloria Jr Voice Western White worldview writes wrote York
Popular passages
Page 10 - What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre.
Page 12 - This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy: I always went back and forth between racial designations and designations from physics or other symbolic designations.
Page 39 - The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures.
Page 133 - fragile' was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web.
Page 56 - But the proper term which ought to be applied to our nation, to distinguish it from the rest of the human family, is that of "Natives" — and I humbly conceive that the natives of this country are the only people under heaven who have a just title to the name, inasmuch as we are the only people who retain the original complexion of our father Adam.
Page 43 - In communities that have too often been fractured and rendered dysfunctional by the effects of more than 500 years of colonialism, to promote communitist values means to participate in the healing of the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them.
Page 19 - natural," ie, evolutionary Time. It promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time — some upstream, others downstream.
Page 19 - Underneath all the conflicting images of the Indian one fundamental truth emerges — the white man knows that he is an alien and he knows that North America is Indian — and he will never let go of the Indian image because he thinks that by some clever manipulation he can achieve an authenticity that cannot ever be...
Page 12 - Culture embodies those moral, ethical and aestheticvalues, the set of spiritual eyeglasses, through which they come to view themselves and their place in the universe. Values are the basis of a people's identity, their sense of particularity as members oí the human race. All this is carried by language. Language as culture- is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history.