showing 3 related works from this author
Wordarrows: El poder representativo del lenguaje en la obra de no ficción de N. Scott Momaday
2012
This article focuses on two non-fiction works by Native American author N. Scott Momaday: his 1969 historical memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain and his essay collection The Man Made of Words. It specifically tackles performative conceptions of language in the Kiowa storytelling tradition, where words are experienced as speech acts that have the power to intervene in surrounding realities. Taking into account 20th century ethno-cultural and linguistic policies in the United States, the article also reflects on the role indigenous languages may play in contemporary Native American Literature, which has most often been written in English.
“Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things”: Revisiting Betonie’s Waste-Lands in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony
2014
This article explores the socio-political background that led to widespread Native American urban relocation in the period following World War II – a historical episode which is featured in Leslie Marmon Silko’s acclaimed novel Ceremony (1977). Through an analysis of the recycling, reinterpreting practices carried out by one of Ceremony’s memorable supporting characters, Navajo healer Betonie, Silko’s political aim to interrogate the state of things and to re-value Native traditions in a context of ongoing relations of coloniality is made most clear. In Silko’s novel, Betonie acts as an organic intellectual who is able to identify and challenge the 1950s neocolonial structure that forced Na…
Native Waterscapes in the Northern Borderlands: Restoring Traditional Environmental Knowledge in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms
2018
ABSTRACT: In her novel Solar Storms (1995) Chickasaw novelist and poet Linda Hogan foresees what political geographers today refer to as waterscapes, that is, water-based environments where a multiplicity of human and other-than-human forces interact with each other producing diverse forms of signification. This essay examines Indigenous experiences of water, geography, and social activism as they intersect in Hogan‘s waterscape narrative. I ground my analysis of this visionary novel in recent geographical studies that look at waterscapes from the perspective of cultural politics and which criticize rationalist conceptions of water that reduce it to the sole function of human commodity. Ch…