Literature collection comprehensive

Page 15

REVIEW

Native North American Literature

Janet Witalec, Editor

Gale Research, Inc.

700 pages; $99 U.S.

North American Aboriginal literature is hardly new- storytellers, singers and poets of the various First Nations were plying their trade long before the first Europeans came ashore.

But as with African-American writing and other minority literatures, it's been smothered under the weight of the "Dead White Guys" English canon until very recently. It wasn't until Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his novel House Made of Dawn that the mainstream literary community woke up and took notice.

Today, of course, many First Nations writers have adapted the European forms of the short story and novel to produce hybrids of the old and new. Oral storytelling is now examined as authentic literature, and translations are often made by Aboriginal writers sensitive to its nuances and rhythms.

With the renaissance of interest in Aboriginal writing, the publication of Native North American Literature by Gale Research serves as a handy (if hefty) compendium

of biographical and critical information. With overviews of the stories, myths, songs, speeches and autobiographies that make up pre-twentieth century Native literature, and surveys of some 70 modern writers, indexed by title, genre, and tribal affiliation. NNAL aims to become the standard reference source.

If nothing else, the volume serves to show the difficulty of deciding exactly what Native North American literature is. How "Native' must a writer be too qualify? NNAL decides at last that some Native ancestry is necessary, but that identification with an acceptance by the tribal community is also significant.

Yet in their survey of modern writers, the editors tend to err on the liberal side, including writes like the half-Yaqui Martin Cruz Smith (author of Gorky Park and other thrillers), who despite their ancestry, rarely dwell on stereotypically "Native" concerns.

The information on oral literature, mostly taken from earlier studies, is not new, but it is fairly comprehensive and interesting.

The bulk of the book is devoted to its selection of modern writers, ranging from the famous (Erdrich, King, Momaday) to the obscure (Joy Harjo, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Sam Blowsnake) to the marginal (Martin Cruz Smith, Will Rogers).

Sadly, the average browser may find little of interest in this cornucopia of data. Samples of the various authors' work - poems, short stories, excerpts from novels - would have added greatly to the book's general appeal.

But for academic and dedicated researchers, NNAL collects a great deal of helpful information between its covers.