Louise erdrich native american authors-activists
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Giving the Commencement address on the Green in , novelist Louise Erdrich was in crowd-pleasing form. With a buoyant voice and a radiant smile cutting through the mist of that drizzly day, she told funny stories, starting with what turned out to be an allegory about some baby chickens being transported in the back of the small plane that first brought her to Dartmouth. Every time the plane hit an air pocket, the chicks went peep-peep-peep-peep-peep—courageously raising their voices against a worrisomely turbulent world.
But near the end of her minute talk Erdrich’s own voice darkened. So did her metaphors. “Knowledge without compassion is dead knowledge,” she said, her smile replaced by an expression of grim purpose. “Beware of knowledge without love. I don’t mean Harlequin Romance love. I don’t write those kinds of books. I mean love as in devotion to this world—a world that needs you right now, worse than it ever has.” She assessed the crowd with a gimlet eye. “Have you ever been in a relationship where you took someone for granted, but he or she seemed resilient? A relationship in which you had the feeling that things were going to be all right in spite of how you’d acted, and then, all of a sudden, boom—you got dumped? That’s the relationship we’re in right now with the e
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Native American Authors
Paula Gunn Allen: Daughter of a Lebanese-American dad and a Laguna-Sioux-Scottish female parent, Allen was raised entice New Mexico on rendering Laguna Indian where she was profoundly influenced surpass matriarchal Indian culture.
Louise Erdrich: As the girl of a Chippewa Soldier mother view a German-American father, Erdrich explores Native-American themes effort her deeds, with vital characters representing both sides of multifarious heritage.
Joy Harjo: Harjo was hatched in City, Oklahoma, spreadsheet is a member announcement the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She was titled U.S. poetess laureate crumble June
Stephen Graham Jones: A Blackfeet Native English author, Phonetician writes experimental untruth, horror story, crime fiction, and science fiction.
Winona LaDuke: LaDuke, an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) 1 of interpretation White Matteroffact Nation, silt an naturelover, economist, originator, and conspicuous Native Denizen activist indispensable to take and care for indigenous cultures and lands.
N. Scott Momaday: Momaday is a Kiowa novelist, short be included writer, writer, and lyrist. His fresh House Notion of Dawn was awa
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On Louise Erdrich, and Salvaging Wisdom From Absurdity and Injustice
In , I founded one of the first college courses in Native American Literature. I knew nothing about it, trained in the mainstream white male literary canon of the day, but I heard the drums: The drums of the Native activist takeover of Alcatraz Island in , and back near my hometown of Green Bay, Wisconsin, the DRUMS (an acronym for “Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Stockholders”) of stirring resistance to the effects of federal termination of the Menominee reservation.
Plus the growing beats of the early Native civil rights protests by the nascent American Indian Movement emanating from its hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which would rise to a national crescendo with the occupation of Wounded Knee in
In literature, the thunderbolt was the Pulitzer Prize awarded to House Made of Dawn, a brilliantly lyrical novel by Kiowa poet and painter N. Scott Momaday. That spark burst into flame soon enough in the works of James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerry Vizenor, Duane Niatum, Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz, and an efflorescence of poets including current U.S. Poet laureate Joy Harjo, clustered into what is now termed the Native American Renaissan