For better or worse, representations abound of
Native Americans as a people with an innate and special connection to
the earth. This study looks at the challenges faced by Native American
writers who confront stereotypical representations as they assert their
own ethical relationship with the earth. Lee Schweninger considers a
range of genres (memoirs, novels, stories, essays) by Native writers
from various parts of the United States. Contextualizing these works
within the origins, evolution, and perpetuation of the "green" labels
imposed upon Indians, Schweninger shows how writers often find
themselves denying some land ethic stereotypes while seeming to embrace
others.
Taken together, the time periods covered in Listening to
the Land span more than a hundred years, from Luther
Standing Bear's description of his late-nineteenth-century life on the
prairie to Linda Hogan's account of a 1999 Makah hunt of a grey whale.
Two-thirds of the writers Schweninger considers, however, are
well-known voices from the second half of the twentieth century,
including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Vine Deloria Jr., Gerald
Vizenor, and Louis Owens.
Few ecocritical studies have focused on indigenous environmental
attitudes, in comparison to related work done by historians and
anthropologists. Listening to
the Land will narrow this gap in the scholarship;
moreover, it will add individual Native American perspectives to an
understanding of what, to these writers, is a genuine Native American
philosophy regarding the land. |
Listening to the Land
Native American Literary
Responses to the Landscape
by Lee Schweninger
University of Georgia Press,
2008
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