Despite his having been credited with multiple literary firsts, uated in American Indian and Cherokee literary histories. The critical cused on his California- based writings and his biographical details. In both cases, analyses have been conducted through the lens of assimilation versus tradition, which fails to appreciate the density of Cherokee culpoem published by Ridge in 1847, suggests that the beliefs that formed Ridge's unique cultural- political identity first took shape in the works he authored while in Arkansas during his nascent literary career. Specificalabout Cherokee identity in the United States following Removal and, further, that his ambiguous position in the study of American Indian literature stems from those very beliefs.
This essay reads George Copway's autobiography, The Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847), in terms of a series of dramatic sociopolitical and environmental changes that shape the text, including the arrival of Protestant religious cultures in the Great Lakes region, the decline of the fur trade, the beginning of an American timber and mineral boom, and, most significantly, the emergence of the Ojibwe Nation as a collective political entity. Faced with these interconnected disturbances to established ways of living and being, Copway turned to literary travel writing as a means of navigating a changing world. Reading this text as a travel narrative, the author concludes, offers an important window into Copway's historical experiences and his use of literary writing as a resource for nineteenth-century life. Copway's sense of homesickness ultimately suggests a tribally specific, place-based response to colonialism and the rupture of his established ways of being and moving about in the world.
This essay reads Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead alongside U.S. Code 18, which sets out the federal definition of "Indian Country," in order to claim that the novel presents an alternative imaginary in which all North and South American land is Indigenous land. The novel achieves this reimagining in two primary ways: first, through a rejection of colonial time in favor of a longer dur & eacute;e marked as Indigenous time; and, second, through a remapping of colonial space through the figure of the novel's almanac, described as a "500 year map." The author demonstrates that through these crucial reorientations Silko challenges the colonial assumptions federal Indian law and produces a reimagined temporal-spatial arrangement that undermines the law's authority to administer Indian land.
As the title suggests, the analysis in this article uses literary forms of rematriation to specifically discuss the significance of The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero as Told to Florence Shipek (1970) and its translation back into Tiipay Aa (southern people's talk). Florence Connelly Shipek's work with Delfina Cuero shapes the discursive and linguistic terrain of translation from a dominant, non-Native cultural lens. In the (auto)biography Shipek raises awareness about significant Native issues about land tenure, citizenship, and treaty rights that impact Cuero's desire to be repatriated from a Kumeyaay village in Baja, California, Mexico to the Campo Indian Reservation in San Diego, California. The intended outcome of a literary rematriation critique is to retranslate and interpret her story in the Tiipay language-"to bring her [Delfina's] voice back to her homeland." Literary rematriation is a practice to return stories to their original, Native language. The essay provides a methodological model of literary rematriation while also expanding and de-engendering the discourse of repatriation.
Leanne Howe's concept of tribalography, the idea that Indigenous authors integrate various aspects of their tribal experiences into their work, applies to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, a novel that captures Indigenous veterans' experiences during the post-World War II era. While Silko's work predated the use of the term "settler colonialism," Ceremony interrogates the imperialistic structures in American society that Indigenous veterans navigated. Her book views the history of the American West through an Indigenous lens and reevaluates the history of Puebloan peoples. Simultaneously, the novel's publication in the aftermath of the Vietnam War reveals the issues Indigenous veterans faced as they reintegrated into a society built upon Indigenous dispossession during a time Indigenous peoples embraced self-determination. Silko reaffirms the credibility of Indigenous sacred knowledge and community by recreating healing experiences that defied Western medicine and confirmed the legitimacy of Native epistemologies and sovereignty.
