American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Although recently some material has been published on the relationship between Western theories of literary criticism and Native American literature in general (oral traditions more specifically), little has been written about that same relationship specific to contemporary written Native American literature. Vine Deloria's chapter "Indians in America," in God is Red, is useful in reiterating all the basic assumptions that have formed a basis for defining contemporary written American Indian literature: that it be both by and about American Indians, that it be sensitive to the traditional aspects of native populations, and that it include as part of its definition a relationship with an ongoing oral tradition as well. This position has been expanded through well-written articles by Sayre, Lewis, and Evers. None of these deals at any length, however, with a methodological approach to the criticism of this literature. This past fall, I again taught a course in contemporary written American Indian literature in which I spent a substantial amount of time dealing with the literature written by N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko. In thinking about what both Momaday and Silko have to say about the art of storytelling, I discovered that the working definition, as presented by Deloria and others, is valid as far as it goes and helpful particularly to the critic or teacher interested in comparative literature, but it does not adequately represent the underlying attitudes that make this literature as American Indian literature unique. Because of the diverse nature of the American Indian population, it is difficult to generalize about the nature of this literature; still, in looking at this material with the perspectives presented by Silko, Momaday, and others, certain patterns do seem to emerge, suggesting a uniqueness to most, if not all, of the written American Indian literatures.