Shaking The Pumpkin

'This book represents a major effort to bring Amerindian poetry to the reader in such a way that the total poetry, the dance, the vowel changes, the pauses, the movement, the interaction between speaker and audience is made evident...' -John Demos, Library Journal

For more than four centuries, Europeans and Euroamericans have been making written records of the spoken words of American Indians. While some commentators have assumed that these records provide absolutely reliable information about the nature of Native American oral expression, even its esthetic qualities, others have dismissed them as inherently unreliable. In Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts, William Clements offers a comprehensive treatment of the intellectual and cultural constructs that have colored the textualization of Native American verbal art. Clements presents six case studies of important moments, individuals, and movements in this history. He recounts the work of the Jesuits who missionized in New France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and textualized and theorized about the verbal expressions of the Iroquoians and Algonquians to whom they were spreading Christianity. He examines in depth Henry TimberlakeÕs 1765 translation of a Cherokee war song that was probably the first printed English rendering of a Native American "poem." He discusses early-nineteenth-century textualizers and translators who saw in Native American verbal art a literature manquŽ that they could transform into a fully realized literature, with particular attention to the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent and pioneer field collector who developed this approach to its fullest. He discusses the "scientific" textualizers of the late nineteenth century who viewed Native American discourse as a data source for historical, ethnographic, and linguistic information, and he examines the work of Natalie Curtis, whose field research among the Hopis helped to launch a wave of interest in Native Americans and their verbal art that continues to the present. In addition, Clements addresses theoretical issues in the textualization, translation, and anthologizing of American Indian oral expression. In many cases the past records of Native American expression represent all we have left of an entire verbal heritage; in most cases they are all that we have of a particular heritage at a particular point in history. Covering a broad range of materials and their historical contexts, Native American Verbal Art identifies the agendas that have informed these records and helps the reader to determine what remains useful in them. It will be a welcome addition to the fields of Native American studies and folklore.

There exists an area of overlap where language and nature meet, and this book, first published in 1980, illuminates that fascinating territory. When real-world things, such as plants, are used in literature or language as symbols, these special signs have a double allegiance. They function as language but derive their meaning from nature. The authors trace the consequences of this, and show how it affects the character of the relevant areas of language and literature. Original and entertaining, this study cuts across a number of traditional disciplines. It should appeal not only to those interested in literature, language and semiotics, but also to students of philosophy, anthropology, classics, pictorial art, religion and folklore.

Explores a little-known history of exchange between Anishinaabe and American writers, showing how literature has long been an important venue for debates over settler colonial policy and indigenous rights. For the Anishinaabeg—the indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes—literary writing has long been an important means of asserting their continued existence as a nation, with its own culture, history, and sovereignty. At the same time, literature has also offered American writers a way to make the Anishinaabe Nation disappear, often by relegating it to a distant past. In this book, Adam Spry puts these two traditions in conversation with one another, showing how novels, poetry, and drama have been the ground upon which Anishinaabeg and Americans have clashed as representatives of two nations contentiously occupying the same land. Focusing on moments of contact, appropriation, and exchange, Spry examines a diverse range of texts in order to reveal a complex historical network of Native and non-Native writers who read and adapted each other’s work across the boundaries of nation, culture, and time. By reconceiving the relationship between the United States and the Anishinaabeg as one of transnational exchange, Our War Paint Is Writers’ Ink offers a new methodology for the study of Native American literatures, capable of addressing a long history of mutual cultural influence while simultaneously arguing for the legitimacy, and continued necessity, of indigenous nationhood. In addition, the author reexamines several critical assumptions—about authenticity, identity, and nationhood itself—that have become common wisdom in both Native American and US literary studies. Adam Spry is Assistant Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

Anthropology is a kind of debate between human possibilities—a dialectical movement between the anthropologist as a modern man and the primitive peoples he studies. In Search of the Primitive is a tough-minded book containing chapters ranging from encounters in the field to essays on the nature of law, schizophrenia and civilization, and the evolution of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Above all it is reflective and self-critical, critical of the discipline of anthropology and of the civilization that produced that discipline. Diamond views the anthropologist who refuses to become a searching critic of his own civilizations as not merely irresponsible, but a tool of Western civilization. He rejects the associations which have been made in the ideology of our civilization, consciously or unconsciously, between Western dominance and progress, imperialism and evolution, evolution and progress.

Marksblackpot.com is one of the longest running Dutch oven blogs on the Internet. Now in book form, Best of the Black Pot: Must-Have Dutch Oven Favorites brings the latest and greatest in Dutch oven cooking. With chapters on breads, desserts, and side dishes to complement the traditional main meats, as well a special chapter on healthier Dutch ovening, this book is truly the Best of the Black Pot.

Wide-ranging poetry anthology by one of America’s most distinguished literary translators.

The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 is the first major volume of its kind to focus on Native literatures in a postcolonial context. Written by a team of noted Native and non-Native scholars, these essays consider the complex social and political influences that have shaped American Indian literatures in the second half of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on core themes of identity, sovereignty, and land. In his essay comprising part I of the volume, Eric Cheyfitz argues persuasively for the necessary conjunction of Indian literatures and federal Indian law from Apess to Alexie. Part II is a comprehensive survey of five genres of literature: fiction (Arnold Krupat and Michael Elliott), poetry (Kimberly Blaeser), drama (Shari Huhndorf), nonfiction (David Murray), and autobiography (Kendall Johnson), and discusses the work of Vine Deloria Jr., N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Sherman Alexie, among many others. Drawing on historical and theoretical frameworks, the contributors examine how American Indian writers and critics have responded to major developments in American Indian life and how recent trends in Native writing build upon and integrate traditional modes of storytelling. Sure to be considered a groundbreaking contribution to the field, The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 offers both a rich critique of history and a wealth of new information and insight.