Native American Renaissance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Native American Renaissance was a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln in his 1983 book of the same title.

Lincoln’s goal was to explore the explosion in production of literary works by Native Americans in the decade and a half since N. Scott Momaday had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for House Made of Dawn. Before that time, few Native Americans had published fiction. Writers such as William Apess and Simon Pokagon in the nineteenth century, and John Joseph Mathews and D’Arcy McNickle in the years before WWII had not inspired other Natives to follow in their footsteps.

Lincoln pointed out that in the late-1960s and early-1970s, a generation of Native Americans were coming of age who were the first of their tribe to receive a substantial education. Conditions for Native people, while still very harsh, had moved beyond the survival conditions of the early half of the century. Moreover, the beginnings of a project of historical revisionism, which attempted to document from a Native perspective the history of the invasion and colonization of the North American continent (and particularly the period referred to as the Wild West), had inspired a great deal of public interest in Native cultures.

From these suddenly favourable conditions, a group of Native writers emerged, both poets and novelists, who in only a few years expanded the Native American canon hugely. At the same time, the sudden increase in materials, and the setting up of Native American Studies departments at several universities, lead to the foundations of scholarly journals such as ‘’SAIL (Studies in American Indian Literature)’’ and ‘’Wicazo Sa’’, and publishing imprints such as the Native American Publishing Programme (Harper and Row), all of which further increased the interest in and chances to be published of new Native American voices.

Writers normally considered within this movement include:

The phrase “Native American Renaissance” has been criticised on a number of points. It has been argued that the term unfairly separates writers from 1968 onwards from their forebears. Also, some critics have argued that it privileges the written over the oral tradition, or that it implies that only acceptance by white (possibly racist) publishers is important in Native American writing. Nevertheless, the term continues to be frequently invoked in scholarly criticism.