Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape

by Lee Schweninger

Overview

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 on American 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 gray 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820330594
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	07/15/2008
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

LEE SCHWENINGER is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is the author or editor of numerous books including The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories and Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape (Georgia).

LEE SCHWENINGER is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is the author or editor of numerous books including The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories and Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape (Georgia).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction: An Ethical Regard for the Land     1
The Land Ethic Stereotype: American Indian Wisdom     16
Where the Buffalo Roam: Iconoclasts and Romantics     36
Between the People and the Land: Luther Standing Bear, Mother Earth, and Assimilation     57
Talking Back: John Joseph Mathews and Talking to the Moon     75
"She Gives Me a Metaphor": Survival and Louise Erdrich's The Blue Jay's Dance     96
Cultural Identity, Storytelling, Place: Revision and Return in Louis Owens's Wolfsong     113
"From the Land Itself": Momaday's Language, Landscape, and Land Ethic     131
Living with the Land: Deloria, Landscape, and Religion     149
Liberation and the Land: The Environmental Ethos of Gerald Vizenor     165
"Changed by the Wild": Linda Hogan's Spirit of Renewal     184
Killing the Whale: Sightings and the Makah Hunt     202
Works Cited     219
Index     233

Editorial Reviews

Listening to the Land should be read by anyone desiring a deeper understanding of Native peoples' relationship to place and the natural world. It argues that the environmental Indian stereotype is an inaccurate, oversimplified image that prevents real learning and real action.

MELUS

A thrilling exploration of Native American literary culture and tradition . . . written in a tight, smooth, flowing narrative.

Metro Spirit

This is the best book on the land ethic of Native American writers. Schweninger incisively describes the complexities of the concepts of Native Americans' relationship to the land as depicted by both Natives and non-Natives. His perceptive analyses illuminate the works of Vine Deloria Jr.; Louise Erdrich; Linda Hogan; John Joseph Mathews; Louis Owens; N. Scott Momaday; and Gerald Vizenor.

University of Illinois, Chicago - LaVonne Ruoff