Louis Owens

In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe "Indian Territory" that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial "Territory" is what Owens defines as "Frontier," a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge. Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D'Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental — as well as cultural—survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy explores the wide-ranging oeuvre of this seminal author, examining Owens's work and his importance in literature and Native studies. Of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish American descent, Owens's work includes mysteries, novels, literary scholarship, and autobiographical essays. Louis Owens offers a critical introduction and thirteen essays arranged into three sections: "Owens and the World," "Owens and California," and "The Novels." The essays present an excellent assessment of Owens's literary legacy, noting his contributions to American literature, ethnic literature, and Native American literature and highlighting his contributions to a variety of theories and genres. The collection concludes with a coda of personal poetic reflections on Owens by Diane Glancy and Kimberly Blaeser. Libraries, students, scholars, and the general public interested in Native American literature and the landscape of contemporary US literature will welcome this reflective volume that analyzes a vast range of Louis Owens's imaginative fictions, personal accounts, and critical work.

Louis Owens (1948–2002) achieved worldwide recognition with his humorous and fearless novels that explored themes close to Owens’s own upbringing as a mixed-blood Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish-American. His critical works were equally substantive. Readers of his criticism find his work challenging, and casual readers find his fiction highly enjoyable—a remarkable combination that speaks well of Owens’s intellectual and creative abilities. In a new collection of essays, Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work, editor Jacquelyn Kilpatrick and eleven other contributors examine Owens’s fiction and nonfiction from widely varying viewpoints to address issues such as identity, place, literary theory, trickster motifs, and the environment. This text aids the reader in understanding the theories Owens articulated and how he followed those theories in his own writing. Also included is the last interview Owens gave, appearing in print for the first time, which provides insights into this complex man’s personal life.

This first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks at the novels of John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Gerald Vizenor. These authors are mixedbloods who, in their writing, try to come to terms with the marginalization both of mixed-bloods and fullbloods and of their cultures in American society. Their novels are complex and sophisticated narratives of cultural survival - and survival guides for fullbloods and mixedbloods in modern America. Rejecting the stereotypes and cliches long attached to the word Indian, they appropriate and adapt the colonizers language, English, to describe the Indian experience. These novels embody the American Indian point of view; the non-Indian is required to assume the role of "other". In his analysis Owens draws on a broad range of literary theory: myth and folklore, structuralism, modernism, poststructuralism, and, particularly, postmodernism. At the same time he argues that although recent American Indian fiction incorporates a number of significant elements often identified with postmodern writing, it contradicts the primary impulse of postmodernism. That is, instead of celebrating fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaos, these authors insistupon a cultural center that is intact and recoverable, upon immutable values and ecological truths. Other Destinies provides a new critical approach to novels by American Indians. It also offers a comprehensive introduction to the novels, helping teachers bring this important fiction to the classroom.

Cole McCurtain, a professor of Indian Studies at Santa Cruz, investigates a series of murders with a connection to ecological diasaster

In 1936 athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics and, two years later, boxer Joe Louis won a crushing victory to become heavyweight champion of the world. Despite their fame and success, both men would find themselves barred from certain hotels and would have to eat outside restaurants because of the colour of their skin. However. by their example, they gave hope to millions of black people around the world as they became the first black superstars. In Donald McRae's William Hill prize-winning dual biography, he compiles a brilliant portrait of the two men, who became close friends despite their very different career paths: within days of Olympic glory, Owens was banned from competing again, and was forced to spend his days racing against horses to earn a living before becoming a spokesman for the sporting ideal. Meanwhile Louis won and lost a fortune, eventually battling with drug addiction and mental illness. His vivid account of their lives away from the public eye, and the era in which they lived, is compelling and tragic.

30 in American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series Jacob Nashoba's journey has taken him from his Choctaw homeland in Mississippi to Vietnam and finally to a small reservation in the mountains of eastern Arizona. A tribal ranger, he lives among people far different from any he has known. Balanced precariously between isolation and community, he is drawn to both the fastness of a remote river canyon and the Apaches who have come to be the only family he has. Nashoba's world is peopled by, among others, a bright young man who sells vision quests to romantic tourists, a determined elder whose power makes her a force to be reckoned with on the reservation, a resident anthropologist more "native" than the natives, a corrupt tribal chairman, a former Hollywood extra who shouts at reservation women the scraps of Italian he learned from other "Indian" actors, and the ranger's estranged wife. Confusion and violence follow their encounter with a right-wing militia group training secretly on tribal land. The contrast between these Rambo types and the various Native American characters typifies the sardonic humor running throughout this novel of contemporary Indian identity. Louis Owens, who is of Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish descent, is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of several books, including Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel and the novels The Sharpest Sight and Bone Game, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

In this innovative collection, Louis Owens blends autobiography, short fiction, and literary criticism to reflect on his experiences as a mixedblood Indian in America. In sophisticated prose, Owens reveals the many timbres of his voice--humor, humility,love, joy, struggle, confusion, and clarity. We join him in the fields, farms, and ranches of California. We follow his search for a lost brother and contemplate along with him old family photographs from Indian Territory and early Oklahoma. In a final section, Owens reflects on the work and theories of other writers, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gerald Vizenor, Michael Dorris, and Louise Erdrich. Volume 40 in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series