For better or worse, representations abound of Native Americans as a people with an innate and special connection to the earth. This study looks at the challenges faced by Native American writers who ...confront stereotypical representations as they assert their own ethical relationship with the earth. Lee Schweninger considers a range of genres (memoirs, novels, stories, essays) by Native writers from various parts of the United States. Contextualizing these works within the origins, evolution, and perpetuation of the "green" labels imposed on American Indians, Schweninger shows how writers often find themselves denying some land ethic stereotypes while seeming to embrace others. Taken together, the time periods covered in Listening to the Land span more than a hundred years, from Luther Standing Bear's description of his late-nineteenth-century life on the prairie to Linda Hogan's account of a 1999 Makah hunt of a gray whale. Two-thirds of the writers Schweninger considers, however, are well-known voices from the second half of the twentieth century, including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Vine Deloria Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Louis Owens. Few ecocritical studies have focused on indigenous environmental attitudes, in comparison to related work done by historians and anthropologists. Listening to the Land will narrow this gap in the scholarship; moreover, it will add individual Native American perspectives to an understanding of what, to these writers, is a genuine Native American philosophy regarding the land.
In Indigenous North American film Native Americans tell their own stories and thereby challenge a range of political and historical contradictions, including egregious misrepresentations by ...Hollywood. Although Indians in film have long been studied, especially as characters in Hollywood westerns, Indian film itself has received relatively little scholarly attention. In Imagic Moments Lee Schweninger offers a much-needed corrective, examining films in which the major inspiration, the source material, and the acting are essentially Native. Schweninger looks at a selection of mostly narrative fiction films from the United States and Canada and places them in historical and generic contexts. Exploring films such as Powwow Highway, Smoke Signals, and Skins, he argues that in and of themselves these films constitute and in fact emphatically demonstrate forms of resistance and stories of survival as they talk back to Hollywood. Self-representation itself can be seen as a valid form of resistance and as an aspect of a cinema of sovereignty in which the Indigenous peoples represented are the same people who engage in the filming and who control the camera. Despite their low budgets and often nonprofessional acting, Indigenous films succeed in being all the more engaging in their own right and are indicative of the complexity, vibrancy, and survival of myriad contemporary Native cultures.
...filmically Daniel has a presence in that the viewer sees Elora contemplate a photograph of her dead friend; he also makes an actual appearance as Bear sees him in memory, from a distance, as he ...stands at the curb under a street lamp. Shortly before Daniel died, the viewer discovers in a flashback (episode 7) that he expressed to Elora his wish to travel to California; and therefore the four "Reservation Dogs" have decided to save their money-money they acquire by selling a stolen delivery truck and other stolen goods such as potato chips, copper wire, and meat pies made with stolen meat-and leave their hometown in Oklahoma, the fictional Okern, for California. Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, the creators of the series-a series remarkable for its Indigenous cast, directors, writers, and members of the crew-structure their two seasons (eighteen episodes) around the death of this friend/cousin of the four lead characters. ...in an essay on the uses of neo-naturalism in twenty-first-century American culture, Alan Gibbs argues that in television crime series texts such as The Wire, 24, and Dexter, "protagonists from marginalized groups-whether due to issues of class, race, gender, or a combination of those factors-find themselves overwhelmed by societal forces, very much in the manner of the protagonists of the 'classic' period of American naturalism, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (1047). If the viewer reads this character as a recognizable character from Hollywood-bare-chested, on horseback, wearing a bone breastplate-the same character can also be seen to ask that viewer to remember Native peoples' roles in and contributions to the Hollywood movie industry, especially in the context of countless Westerns in which their sole role and purpose (whether or not they were played by people of Native descent) was to serve as antagonist and fall off the horse and die.
Looking over the great prairie in the early 1880s, Nellie Buchanan said, "I knew I would never be contented until I had a home of our own in the wonderful West." Some were not so sanguine. Mary Cox ...described the prairie as "the most barren, forsaken country that we had ever seen." Like the others whose stories appear in this book, these women were describing their own thoughts and experiences traveling to and settling in what became Colorado. Sixty-seven of their original, first-person narratives, recounted to Civil Works Administration workers in 1933 and 1934, are gathered for the first time in this book.
The First We Can Rememberpresents richly detailed, vivid, and widely varied accounts by women pioneers during the late nineteenth century. Narratives of white American-born, European, and Native American women contending with very different circumstances and geographical challenges tell what it was like to settle during the rise of the smelting and mining industries or the gold rush era; to farm or ranch for the first time; to struggle with unfamiliar neighbors, food and water shortages, crop failure, or simply the intransigent land and unpredictable weather. Together, these narratives-historically and geographically framed by Lee Schweninger's detailed introduction-create a vibrant picture of women's experiences in the pioneering of the American West.
Gerald Vizenor is one of several American Indian writers who reflect on the place of objects as they are displayed for cultural consumption, questioning the role of museums particularly in housing ...and displaying those objects. In light of such works of literature the author argues that in different ways each of these writers presents a critique of museum culture and in so doing offers a form of American Indian self-representation that challenges mainstream European and European American accounts of history and identity through artifact. Although much has perhaps changed since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), according to several of these writers and other indigenous peoples, much remains the same. (Contains 67 notes.)
Coming into Contact Annie Ingram, Ian Marshall, Daniel Philippon, Adam Sweeting
01/2010
eBook
A snapshot of ecocriticism in action, Coming into Contact collects sixteen previously unpublished essays that explore some of the most promising new directions in the study of literature and the ...environment. They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, including the teaching of green design in composition classes, the restoration of damaged landscapes, the persuasive strategies of environmental activists, the practice of urban architecture, and the impact of human technologies on nature. The essays also put ecocriticism into greater contact with the natural sciences, including elements of evolutionary biology, biological taxonomy, and geology. Engaging both ecocritical theory and practice, these authors more closely align ecocriticism with the physical environment, with the wide range of texts and cultural practices that concern it, and with the growing scholarly conversation that surrounds this concern.
In this essay the authors make a two-fold argument. In the footsteps of several recent autobiography theorists, they argue, first, that in any autobiographical travel account the “self” or the “I” of ...the narrative is a construct, and this hypothesis allows them, second, to maintain that the constructed personas and resultant “characters” in the respective travel accounts of John and William Bartram render John’s son William a sort of sidekick on what is very much the father’s exploratory journey though the American Southeast.
According to Kirsten Knopf in her study Decolonizing the Lens of Power, these indigenous films "cannot undo constructed clichés, but they can offer autonomous images that subvert ... colonialist ...presentations" (358). The difference, of course, is that the filmmaker has intentionally fused or confused the two genres. Because of the multi-faceted baggage associated with over one hundred years of Hollywood's and anthropologists' depictions of American Indians, however, any filmic representation of Indians necessarily and immediately constitutes a heteroglot. ...the viewer enjoys acting performances by Wes Studi (Cherokee) who plays John Ridge, Wesley French (Anishinabek) who plays young Ridge, Carla-Rae Holland (Seneca/ Mohawk) who plays Suzanna Ridge, as well as Benjamin Bratt (Qechua) who narrates. First the viewer hears the actual voice of President Clinton, recorded from an actual 1999 visit to Pine Ridge: We're not coming from Washington to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it, we're coming from Washington to ask you what you want to do and tell you we will give you the tools and the support to get done what you want to do for your children and their future.
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