Preface

Summary

I may surprise you yet, James LaGrinder! even if I am a “squaw” as you call me … I may use the pen!

Mourning Dove, Cogewea

This declaration by the protagonist early in Cogewea follows on her resolve to record “the woof of her people's philosophy,” the traditional wisdom that she sees passing away with the loss of elders like her grandmother. Such in fact was the work that Cogewea's creator, Mourning Dove, herself undertook, later publishing a collection of traditional Okanogan stories. Cogewea might be a fictional model as well for many of the writers whose works are examined in this volume, as they also frequently expressed the intention of preserving a wisdom that they saw as dying away. The passage also reflects the adversity under which so many of these writers labored. Addressing an audience at best insensitive and all too often hostile, they undertook a labor that enjoyed little support from any source and was generally unrewarded. Against such odds, these authors made a unique contribution to American culture.

There is a theory that considers American Indian literature to be only those texts (oral and written) produced by Native people and addressed primarily to a Native audience; it is a comparative theory, and it offers a rewarding basis for studying those texts that it canonizes. Such a formulation, however, excludes the authors considered in this volume, for all of them wrote in European languages, and most of them directed their words to an audience of non-Native people. The works examined in the essays collected here must be seen, rather, as always involved in a dynamic negotiation across many boundaries, barriers, gaps, and silences characterizing the discourseof the emergent nation.