National Humanities Medalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo examines the power of words and how poetry summons us toward justice and healing

Her enduring message--that writing can be redemptive--resonates: 'To write is to make a mark in the world, to assert I am.' The result is a rousing testament to the power of storytelling.--Publishers Weekly

Harjo writes as if the creative journey has been the destination all along.--Kirkus Reviews

In this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her fifty years as a poet. Composed of intimate vignettes that take us through the author's life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory--in both the private, individual journey and as a vehicle for prophetic, public witness.

Harjo insists that the most meaningful poetry is birthed through cracks in history from what is broken and unseen. At the crossroads of this brokenness, she calls us to watch and listen for the songs of justice for all those America has denied. This is an homage to the power of words to defy erasure--to inscribe the story, again and again, of who we have been, who we are, and who we can be.

Asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples. Challenges readers to critically consider & rethink assumptions about Indigenous literature, history, and politics, never forgetting the emotional connections of our shared humanity & the transformative power of story.

A hypnotic and mystifying exploration of land and legacy, investigating what it means to be an intergenerational, Indigenous survivor of Residential Schools

A singular, incantatory work. . . . The book feels as though forest itself is speaking, sky itself, river itself.--Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

Jordan Abel's new work grows out of the groundbreaking visual expression in his recently published NISHGA, a book that combined nonfiction with photography, concrete poetry, and literary inquiry. Whereas NISHGA integrated descriptions of the landscape from James Fenimore Cooper's settler classic The Last of the Mohicans into visual pieces, Empty Spaces reinscribes those words on the page itself, and in doing so subjects them to bold rewritings.

Reimagining the nineteenth-century text from the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisga'a person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge and spiritual traditions was severed by colonial violence, Abel attempts to answer his research question of what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory. Engaging the land through fiction and metaphor, Abel creates an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America.

The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing. Rather than turning to characters and dialogue to explore truth, Abel invites us to instead understand that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as the world lurches toward uncertainty.

This long-awaited anthology celebrates the experience of Native American women and is at once an important contribution to our literature and an historical document. It is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind to collect poetry, fiction, prayer, and memoir from Native American women. Over eighty writers are represented from nearly fifty nations, including such nationally known writers as Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lee Maracle, Janet Campbell Hale, and Luci Tapahonso; others -- Wilma Mankiller, Winona LaDuke, and Bea Medicine -- who are known primarily for their contributions to tribal communities; and some who are published here for the first time in this landmark volume.

For centuries the American Indian literary tradition was primarily an oral one. Since written languages were rare among native North and South American cultures, all literature-myth, legend, story, poetry-was passed along the generations through memory and the spoken word. Herbert Joseph Spinden collected these at a time-around 1933-when the Indian poetic voice was a nameless one. The songs included here are of that period and his translations of Tewa ritual and secular songs are remarkable for their sensitivity to and consonance with Tewa (Pueblo) thought. This copyrighted edition includes an early introductory essay and scholarly notes by Dr. Spinden, early photographs of the Tewa from the collection of Mrs. Spinden, and a preface by Alice Marriott.

Volume 59 in American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series The outpouring of Native American literature that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn in 1968 continues unabated. Fiction and poetry, autobiography and discursive writing from such writers as James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko constitute what critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983 termed the Native American Renaissance. This collection of essays takes the measure of that efflorescence. The contributors scrutinize writers from Momaday to Sherman Alexie, analyzing works by Native women, First Nations Canadian writers, postmodernists, and such theorists as Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. Weaver's own examination of the development of Native literary criticism since 1968 focuses on Native American literary nationalism. Alan R. Velie turns to the achievement of Momaday to examine the ways Native novelists have influenced one another. Post-renaissance and postmodern writers are discussed in company with newer writers such as Gordon Henry, Jr., and D. L. Birchfield. Critical essays discuss the poetry of Simon Ortiz, Kimberly Blaeser, Diane Glancy, Luci Tapahonso, and Ray A. Young Bear, as well as the life writings of Janet Campbell Hale, Carter Revard, and Jim Barnes. An essay on Native drama examines the work of Hanay Geiogamah, the Native American Theater Ensemble, and Spider Woman Theatre. In the volume's concluding essay, Kenneth Lincoln reflects on the history of the Native American Renaissance up to and beyond his seminal work, and discusses Native literature's legacy and future. The essays collected here underscore the vitality of Native American literature and the need for debate on theory and ideology. Alan R. Velie is Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and author of American Indian Literature: An Anthology, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. A. Robert Lee is retired as Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan, and is the author or editor of numerous books, including Native American Writing and Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a, and Asian American Fictions, which won the 2004 American Book Award.

An entirely new approach to reading, understanding, and enjoying Native American fiction

This book has been written with the narrow conviction that if Native American literature is worth thinking about at all, it is worth thinking about as literature. The vast majority of thought that has been poured out onto Native American literature has puddled, for the most part, on how the texts are positioned in relation to history or culture.

Rather than create a comprehensive cultural and historical genealogy for Native American literature, David Treuer investigates a selection of the most important Native American novels and, with a novelist's eye and a critic's mind, examines the intricate process of understanding literature on its own terms.

Native American Fiction: A User's Manual is speculative, witty, engaging, and written for the inquisitive reader. These essays--on Sherman Alexie, Forrest Carter, James Fenimore Cooper, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch--are rallying cries for the need to read literature as literature and, ultimately, reassert the importance and primacy of the word.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

Addressing the history, impacts, and legacies of the Indian Residential School system, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission is one of the few commissions to have been established in a long-standing Western liberal-democratic reality such as Canada's. It thus becomes paramount to examine the extent to which the TRC's core principles of truth-telling, restorative justice, and reconciliation engage in productive dialogue with the settler-colonialcontext of Canada and, particularly, with Indigenous philosophies and epistemologies. Good Medicine Stories does exactly that through the lens of ¬ fiction. Interweaving Indigenous, settler-colonial, trauma, and gender studies on the one hand and intersecting literary, political, historical, and cultural approaches on the other, Good Medicine Stories explores the capacities of Indigenous ¬fiction for challenging and amplifying the work carried out by the Canadian TRC. Through analysis of a unique selection of Indigenous contemporary literary texts that were produced during and after the completion of the Canadian Commission, the book shows the role of ¬ fiction in keeping the dialogue on truth, justice, and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples open and relevant to our present and our future. It also demonstrates the role of Indigenous ¬fiction in foregrounding Indigenous healing, spiritual regeneration, and resurgence.

Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahuas conceptualized their futures in the early colonial period. Scholar Ezekiel G. Stear delves deeply into canonical texts such as the Florentine Codex and the Crónica mexicayotl as well as understudied texts such as the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, the Tira de Tepechpan, and the Anales de Juan Bautista. The study does more than describe how Nahuas conceived of their own futures: it also shows their specific plans for moving into the coming years.

The book examines how Nahua writers in Central Mexico and other Mesoamerican voices in colonial Spanish America played an active, decisive role in shaping culture, using writing to persuade their communities to mold their own destinies, even amid colonial upheaval. This work opens up new directions for research and teaching, shifting inquiry from how Nahuas preserved cultural continuity to how they envisioned their roles as pathfinders toward times to come.

Nahua Horizons challenges the notion that the Spanish erased Nahua culture. The book emphasizes the ways people kept sovereignty over the futures they envisioned for themselves and their communities. Stear's bold new approach follows the paths that Nahuas forged ahead into unknown times.

The vivid imagination, robust humor, and profound sense of place of the Indians of Oregon are revealed in this anthology, which gathers together hitherto scattered and often inaccessible legends originally transcribed and translated by scholars such as Archie Phinney, Melville Jacobs, and Franz Boas.

This volume presents ancient Mexican myths and sacred hymns, lyric poetry, rituals, drama, and various forms of prose, accompanied by informed criticism and comment. The selections come from the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Mixtecs and Zapotecs of Oaxaca, the Tarascans of Michoacan, the Otomís of central Mexico, and others. They have come down to us from inscriptions on stone, the codices, and accounts written, after the coming of Europeans, of oral traditions.

It is Miguel León-Portilla's intention to bring to contemporary readers an understanding of the marvelous world of symbolism which is the very substance of these early literatures. That he has succeeded is obvious to every reader.

Nahua Horizons: Writing, Persuasion, and Futurities in Colonial Mexico investigates how Nahuas conceptualized their futures in the early colonial period. Scholar Ezekiel G. Stear delves deeply into canonical texts such as the Florentine Codex and the Crónica mexicayotl as well as understudied texts such as the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, the Tira de Tepechpan, and the Anales de Juan Bautista. The study does more than describe how Nahuas conceived of their own futures: it also shows their specific plans for moving into the coming years.

The book examines how Nahua writers in Central Mexico and other Mesoamerican voices in colonial Spanish America played an active, decisive role in shaping culture, using writing to persuade their communities to mold their own destinies, even amid colonial upheaval. This work opens up new directions for research and teaching, shifting inquiry from how Nahuas preserved cultural continuity to how they envisioned their roles as pathfinders toward times to come.

Nahua Horizons challenges the notion that the Spanish erased Nahua culture. The book emphasizes the ways people kept sovereignty over the futures they envisioned for themselves and their communities. Stear's bold new approach follows the paths that Nahuas forged ahead into unknown times.

When it was first released in 1982, When It Rains was one of the earliest published literary works in the O'odham language. Speakers from across generations shared poems that showcased the aesthetic of the written word and aimed to spread interest in reading and writing in O'odham.

The poems capture brief moments of beauty, the loving bond between family members, and a deep appreciation of Tohono O'odham culture and traditions, as well as reverent feelings about the landscape and wildlife native to the Southwest. A motif of rain and water is woven throughout the poetry in When It Rains, tying in the collection's title to the importance of this life-giving and sustaining resource to the Tohono O'odham people. With the poems in both O'odham and English, the volume serves as an important reminder of the beauty and changeability of the O'odham language.

The themes and experiences expressed by the language educators in this volume capture still-rural community life: children are still bussed for miles to school, and parents still have hours-long daily commutes to work. The Sonoran Desert also remains an important part of daily life--seasons, rain on desert plants, and sacred mountains serve as important markers.

In a new foreword to the volume, Sun Tracks editor Ofelia Zepeda reflects on how meaningful this volume was when it was first published and its continued importance. Things have changed but many things remain the same, writes Zepeda. The pieces in this collection will be meaningful to many still.

Violence against Indigenous women in Canada is an ongoing crisis. This book explores how Indigenous women writers and storytellers are addressing the problem. Analyzing the work of poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and fiction-writers, Hargreaves examines how contemporary literature illuminates new pathways toward action.

Draws on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.

The Serpent's Plumes analyzes contemporary Nahua cultural production, principally bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish xochitlajtoli, or poetry, written from the 1980s to the present. Adam W. Coon draws on Nahua perspectives as a decolonizing theoretical framework to argue that Nahua writers deploy unique worldviews-namely, ixtlamatilistli (knowledge with the face, which highlights the value of personal experiences); yoltlajlamikilistli (knowledge with the heart, which underscores the importance of affective intelligence); and tlaixpan (that which is in front, which presents the past as lying ahead of a subject rather than behind). The views of ixtlamatilistli, yoltlajlamikilistli, and tlaixpan are key in Nahua struggles and effectively challenge those who attempt to marginalize Native knowledge production.

Draws on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.

The Serpent's Plumes analyzes contemporary Nahua cultural production, principally bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish xochitlajtoli, or poetry, written from the 1980s to the present. Adam W. Coon draws on Nahua perspectives as a decolonizing theoretical framework to argue that Nahua writers deploy unique worldviews-namely, ixtlamatilistli (knowledge with the face, which highlights the value of personal experiences); yoltlajlamikilistli (knowledge with the heart, which underscores the importance of affective intelligence); and tlaixpan (that which is in front, which presents the past as lying ahead of a subject rather than behind). The views of ixtlamatilistli, yoltlajlamikilistli, and tlaixpan are key in Nahua struggles and effectively challenge those who attempt to marginalize Native knowledge production.

Totkv Mocvse/New Fire presents the work of Earnest Gouge, an important early Creek (Muskogee) author, and makes available for the first time-in Creel and English--the myths and legends of a major American Indian tribe.

In 1915, Earnest Gouge was encouraged by ethnographer John Reed Swanton to record Creek legends and myths. Gouge's manuscript lay in the National Anthropological Archives for eighty-five years until two Creek-speaking sisters, Margaret McKane Mauldin and Juanita McGirt, and linguist Jack B. Martin, began translating and editing the document. In Totkv Mocvse/New Fire, Gouge's stories appear in parallel format, with the Creek text alongside the English translation.

The stories cover many themes, from the humorous allegories of Rabbit, Wolf, and other personified animals, to hunting stories designed to frighten a nighttime audience in the woods. An insightful foreword by Craig Womack and Jack Martin's introduction frame the stories within Creek literature and history. Martin and Mauldin also provide brief introductions to each story, highlighting key elements of Creek culture.

A literal translation that preserves the poem's original structure This second volume provides a literal, line-by-line English translation of the Popol Vuh, capturing the beauty, subtlety, and high poetic language characteristic of K'iche'-Maya sacred writings. By arranging the work according to its poetic structure, Christenson preserves the poem's original phraseology and grammar, allowing subtle nuances of meaning to emerge.

Mary Austin was one of the first to recognize that Native American myths and culture were in danger of being eroded and lost. She then took upon herself the duty of tracking down American Indian songs and poems, saying that she was not giving a translation of the original but what she preferred to call a re-expression which she referred to as reëxpressions. It was her belief that the life and environment of the person who made up the words was an important part of understanding the rhythm and meaning of the work. She considered tribal dancing an essential part of the sung or spoken words and her extensive research led first to lectures and later to the publication of The American Rhythm. It was her work in this field that resulted in Austin being named an Associate in Native American Literature by the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The Anishinaabe, otherwise named the Ojibwe or Chippewa, are famous for their lyric songs and stories, particularly because of their compassionate trickster, naanabozbo, and the healing rituals still practiced today in the society of the Midewiwin. The poems and tales, interpreted and reexpressed here by the distinguished Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, were first transcribed more than a century ago by pioneering ethnographer Frances Densmore and Theodore Hudson Beaulieu, a newspaper editor on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.

This superb anthology, illustrated with tribal pictomyths and helpfully annotated, includes translations and a glossary of the Anishinaabe words in which the poems and stories originally were spoken.