The Man Made Of Words

Collects the author's writings on sacred geography, Billy the Kid, actor Jay Silverheels, ecological ethics, Navajo place names, and old ways of knowing.

When his first novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969, N. Scott Momaday was virtually unknown. Today he is the most acclaimed Native American writer, working at the peak of his creative power and gaining stature also as an important painter. His first retrospective was held in 1993 at the Wheel-wright Museum in Santa Fe. The son of a Kiowa artist and a Cherokee-Anglo mother, Momaday synthesizes multiple cultural influences in his writing and painting. While much of his attention focuses on the challenging task of reconciling ancient traditions with modern reality, his work itself is an example of how the best of the Indian and non-Indian worlds can be arranged into a startling mosaic of seemingly contradictory cultural and artistic elements. Momaday sees his writings as one long, continuous story, a working out of his evolving identity as a modern Kiowa. It is a story grounded in the oral tradition of his ancestors and told in the modes of the traditional storyteller and the modern novelist-poet who is steeped in the best writings of American and European literature. The interviews in this volume span the period from 1970 to 1993. Momaday responds candidly to questions relating to his multicultural background, his views on the place of the Indian in American literature and society, his concern for conservation and an American land ethic, his theory of language and the imagination, the influences on his artistic and academic development, and his comments on specific works he has written. The reader who joins these conversations will meet in N. Scott Momaday a careful listener and an engaging, often humorous speaker whose commentaries provide a deeper vision for those interested in his life and work.

Gives a sampling of the work of contemporary young American Indian writers.

Education for Tomorrow A Biocentric, Student-Focused Approach to Education Reform Michael Risku University of the Incarnate Word, USA and Letitia Harding University of the Incarnate Word, USA There are many books on the market which discuss indigenous ways of knowing, and bemoan western society’s seeming lack of interest in anything other than scientific fact-based knowledge. Equally plentiful are the writings of critical theorists who consider today’s public education system to be divisive, and manipulated by those in power to ensure that their children have the educational advantages needed to maintain the elite hierarchical status quo. Education for Tomorrow is unique in that it brings both of these approaches together first by examining the ways that indigenous people and women of all cultures acquire and pass on knowledge, and the deleterious effects that enforced Eurocentric systems have had on that process. The authors then turn to public schools to explore the influences, both good and bad, that today’s programs have on the distribution of opportunities afforded to all children in the United States. Finally, they offer suggestions for a revolutionary education system which highlights the need for all students to have the encouragement and freedom to look critically and rationally at their lives and at their relationship with the natural world. This can be achieved by looking back to the pedagogical methods of our indigenous ancestors, and forward to a time when all children, regardless of ethnic or socio-economic heritage, are taught in such a way that every aspect of their lives is addressed, nurtured, valued, and enhanced.

The research presented in this book is authored by scholars coming from as distant regions as South Africa, the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Italy, Belarus, the Balkans. Needless to say that one of the good things about this international cooperation is that owing to their different socio-cultural backgrounds, these scholars have contributed to producing an extremely varied picture of ways of approaching the challenge of a changing world. The papers on literature and culture collected in this book contribute a further element of rigour into the discussion of numerous and always varying and changing borders of convention in a literary text, literary genre, and literary theory, as well as in general culture and everyday paths of life. Starting with oral cultures, over the classic literary masters, modernist and postmodernist textual and theoretical phenomena, the twentieth century flouting of numerous social and gender convention, through painting, film, dance, contemporary music, as well as graffiti, We have sought to stress that what is most noticeable from the evidence of their studies is that scholars today concern these issues through a dynamic global process and beyond any preconceived design, or any strict set of theoretical prescriptions, which would otherwise lead them to ignore the ever-shifting borders in literature and culture, as well as in global socio-cultural reality in general. The variety and complexity of these essays offer fresh views to the problem posed in the title of the book. Therefore, we trust that they will stimulate intellectual confrontation and circulation of ideas within the field of literature and cultural studies.

Table of contents

Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada collects 26 seminal critical essays indispensable to our understanding of the rapidly growing field of Indigenous literatures. The texts gathered in this collection, selected after extensive consultation with experts in the field, trace the development of Indigenous literatures while highlighting major trends and themes, including appropriation, stereotyping, language, land, spirituality, orality, colonialism, residential schools, reconciliation, gender, resistance, and ethical scholarship.