1. Native American Literature

2. Native American cultures and their respective literatures are not ornamental and historical artifacts of America‘s past, but are both ancient and ongoing – and as complicated as those of any other of the world‘s peoples.
Michael Dorris

3. Native American Lit – Pre-Renaissance
Oral traditions: creation stories, trickster and hero stories, chants, ceremonies, rituals
Oral tradition foundation of contemporary written lit.
Written Literature – autobiographies in the 18th century: Mohegan minister Samson Occum published his sermons in 1772
Other autobiographical and protest writing calling for better treatment of Indians.
William Apes (Pequot) “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man”

4. The Life of Black Hawk (1833) by Black Hawk
is Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1882) by Sarah Winnemucca
John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee) The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854) – considered as the first Native American novel.
S. Alice Callahan (Creek) Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891)
Hum-Ishu-Ma Mourning Dove (Okanogan) Cogewea the Half-Blood
D‘Arcy McNickle (Cree/Flathead) The Surrounded (1936) model for writing of the NA renaissance.

5. Themes of Early Native American Writing
Losing cultural identity and consequences of assimilation
Sense of being caught between traditional ways and modern, mainstream American society
Protest against racism and stereotypes
Awareness of the loss of ancestral homelands
Using stories to shape individual and collective identity.
Survival and continuance by adapting oral traditions and old customs to deal with new circumstances.