10 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
The Native American Renaissance
An issue of much debate and contention is how to refer to people whose heritage
goes back to pre-Columbian times on the North and South American continents.
The term Indian is based on Christopher Columbus’s mistaken belief that he
had reached the West Indies, and many people object to it on those grounds;
it also has a history of being used derogatorily. Native American came into use
a few decades ago as a remedy, but it raises objections as yet another example
of an enforced label—American is derived from the name of the Italian naviga-
tor Amerigo Vespucci—and as an example of “political correctness.” The most
widely accepted and respectful practice is to refer to people by their tribe of
origin—Cherokee, Ojibwa, Sioux, Pueblo, and so forth. If that information is
unknown, or if one is referring to members of more than one tribe, a reasonable
choice is to alternate between American Indian and Native American. (In Canada,
the preferred collective term is First Nations.)
The emergence of a body of Native American literature and art significant
enough to be designated a “renaissance” was signaled by three distinct occur-
rences. The first was the escalation of activism by the American Indian Move-
ment (AIM) in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing inspiration from the African
American Civil Rights movement, and in protest of the loss of 3.3 million acres of
land between 1948 and 1957 owing to reservation-termination policies, Ameri-
can Indians began organizing and staging demonstrations, land takeovers, and
occupations of federal buildings. The most famous of these events were the 1969
takeover of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the former site of the infamous
prison, which lasted for nineteen months, and the 1973 standoff at Wounded
Knee, South Dakota, on the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, when
for ten weeks national television news showed AIM protesters surrounded by
heavily armed soldiers. The awareness raised by these protests was bolstered by
the publication of two nonfiction works: Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your
Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which dissected stereotypes of American Indi-
ans and called for acknowledgment of the negative ramifications of American
“Manifest Destiny” on indigenous populations, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart
at Wounded Knee (1970), a history of the American West from an Indian perspec-
tive. For many Americans who thought of native culture and people as part of
America’s past, these events brought a new awareness of the existence and living
conditions of American Indians—rates of unemployment, infant mortality, alco-
holism, homelessness, and poverty all much higher than national averages, result-
ing in an average lifespan of forty years. For many peoples of native heritage, they
brought a renewed urge toward self-expression.
The other two signals of a Native American Renaissance were more spe-
cifically literary in character. In 1969 N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, received the
Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel House Made of Dawn (1968)—the first major
national honor for a literary work by a Native American. The third signal came fif-
teen years later: in 1983 Kenneth Lincoln published Native American Renaissance,
which recognized in the previous two decades “a written renewal of oral traditions
translated into Western literary forms... transitional continuities emerging from