Black Elk

Contrasting the views of Native Americans and European Americans, this book provides a fresh look at the rhetoric behind the westward movement of the American frontier. From George Armstrong Custer and Andrew Jackson to Helen Hunt Jackson, the volume gives the views of well-known Anglo-Americans and contrasts them with views of such well-known Native Americans as Metacom, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, and Black Hawk. Organized around major subthemes regarding the land, who should own it, and what ownership means, the book traces the rhetoric of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, then covers current issues in the words of Oren Lyons, Vine Deloria Jr., and Senator Slade Gorton.

This volume provides a sourcebook for the study of American religious conversion narratives. It includes chapters, arranged alphabetically, on 30 significant writers of conversion narratives including early colonial writers, such as Mary Rowlandson, 19th-century women writers, such as Carry Nation, 20th-century social gospel writers, such as Dorothy Day, writers from the age of televangelism, such as Jim Bakker, and writers from outside the mainstream of American culture, such as Frederick Douglass, Eldridge Cleaver, and Piri Thomas. Each entry provides a short biography, discussions of the narrative and the critical response, and a bibliography.

Influenced by her rich Cherokee heritage & Christian faith, this author's writing, like her multicultural background, is simultaneously liminal & transcendent. Being a "marginal voice in several worlds" does not victimize her but empowers her "to tell several stories at once." She describes this migratory process of Native storytelling & the narrative multivocality it produces as a "cold-&-hunger dance." The Cold-&-Hunger Dance, her boldest & most stimulating collection of essays to date, is an imaginative & honest account of journeys to & from the margins of memory, everyday life, & different cultural worlds. Along the way, familiar images & concepts are juxtaposed to create a literary terrain both engaging & unsettling: the Bible & Black Elk Speaks converse; the author's dispute with a local bakery is played out as if on a world stage of warring nations; eggs & cultural identity implicate each other; lost Native languages speak powerfully through their silences to modern Native writers. The creative twists & darting metaphoric excursions engendered by this journey provide an intimate glimpse into the process & problematics of language for modern Native authors.

This work explores the "authority" of autobiography in several related senses: first, the idea that autobiography is authoritative writing because it is presumably verifiable; second, the idea that one's life is one's exclusive textual domain; third, the idea that, because of the apparent congruence between the implicit ideology of the genre and that of the nation, autobiography has a special prestige in America. Aware of the recent critiques of the notion of autobiography as issuing from, determined by, or referring to a pre-existing self, Couser examines the ways in which the authority of particular texts is called into question--for example, because they involve pseudonymity (Mark Twain), the revision of a presumably spontaneous form (Mary Chesnut's Civil War "diaries"), bilingual authorship (Richard Rodriguez and Maxine Hong Kingston), collaborative production (Black Elk), or outright fraud (Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes). Couser examines both the way in which canonical autobiographers may playfully and purposely undermine their own narrative authority and the way in which minority writers' control of their lives may be compromised. Autobiography, then, is portrayed here as an arena in which individuals struggle for self-possession and self-expression against the constraints of language, genre, and society.

John Carlos Rowe, considered one of the most eminent and progressive critics of American literature, has in recent years become instrumental in shaping the path of American studies. His latest book examines literary responses to U.S. imperialism from the late eighteenth century to the 1940s. Interpreting texts by Charles Brockden Brown, Poe, Melville, John Rollin Ridge, Twain, Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Neihardt, Nick Black Elk, and Zora Neale Hurston, Rowe argues that U.S. literature has a long tradition of responding critically or contributing to our imperialist ventures. Following in the critical footsteps of Richard Slotkin and Edward Said, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism is particularly innovative in taking account of the public and cultural response to imperialism. In this sense it could not be more relevant to what is happening in the scholarship, and should be vital reading for scholars and students of American literature and culture.

I was at my grandfather's house, and he was sitting down, getting his pipe ready early in the morning, and here was Father Sialm knocking on the door. They opened the door, and he came in, and he saw my grandfather with the pipe. Father Sialm grabbed the pipe and said, "This is the work of the devil!" And he took it and threw it out the door on the ground.

My grandfather didn't say a word. He got up and took the priest's prayer book and threw it out on the ground. Then they both looked at each other, and nobody said one word that whole time.