Contemporary Native American Fiction

Begins October 6 until December 15, no meeting November 24
10-week session

Join the Indigenous Studies Literature and History Group for a 10-week study of several award-winning contemporary Native American novelists. We will begin with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony followed by Louise Erdrich’s Plague of Doves and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer.

We will give attention to uniquely Native themes, such as ceremony and ritual, land loss and relocation, rural and urban indigenous differences, tribal and gender politics, and what Alexie calls “reservation blues”— rage and survival strategies on the modern-day reservation in response to centuries of occupation, massacre, and corporate take-over. Literary criticism by Native scholars Vine Deloria, Jr. and Paula Gunn Allen will be provided for context. Participants are encouraged to share favorite Native poems to complement the primary texts.

The Indigenous Peoples’ Literature and History Group began following a stirring presentation by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz September of 2014. Her pioneering work, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, rightly condemns the history of the colonial setter state that the US was as founded and remains. The means by which capital inherently forms colonial settler states that depend upon the relentless exploitation and removal of indigenous peoples of North America and other continents of the world has formed the basis of our various thematic studies.