AIIS 4625 - Contemporary Native American Fiction

(crosslisted) AMST 4627, ENGL 4625
(CA-AG, LA-AG)

Fall. 3 credits. Student option grading.

E. Cheyfitz.

If you haven’t read contemporary U.S. American Indian fiction, then it might be fair to ask how much you know about the United States, its origins and its current condition. Since the 1960s, American Indians have been producing a significant body of award-wining novels and short stories. In 1969, for example, N. Scott Momaday, from the Kiowa nation, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and in 2012 Louise Erdrich, who is Anishinaabe, won the National Book Award for her novel The Round House. In between these two notable moments and since we can list an impressive number of Native storytellers whose work is aesthetically powerful, offering us a narrative of the United States that counters the official history. Centrally the course will focus on the various formal approaches Native writers take from surrealism to realism in representing the (post)colonial situation of Indian country and the ongoing resistance in Indian country to the U.S. legal and political regime.

Outcome 1: Identify contemporary Indigenous writer and the genders they are writing in.

Outcome 2: Communicate the main theme in the discussed novels that relate to contemporary and historical issues in Indigenous communities, such as land rights, child welfare, protection of Indigenous women, Indigenous governance systems, construction of racial and colonial regimes, etc.

Outcome 3: Analyze historical and legal trends in Indigenous-federal relations.