Contents Introduction Chapter I native American Renaissance, its beginning and main representatives of the period

Chapter I Native American Renaissance, its beginning and main representatives of the period.
1.1. The history of “Native American Renaissance”.
The Native American Renaissance (post-1968)
The phrase “Native American Renaissance” was coined by the critic Kenneth Lincoln in 1983. The “renaissance” refers to the increasing visibility and prominence of Native American literature within the world of mainstream publishing since Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for House Made of Dawn. Before that time, Native writers did not receive widespread attention for their work, even though notable literature was produced by writers such as William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, Charles Eastman, Zitkala Sa, D’Arcy McNickle, and John Joseph Mathews prior to World War Two.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a generation of Native Americans who were the first to receive an education in universities outside of the Indian boarding schools began to publish their work. Since the 1950s conditions for Native people, while still very difficult, had moved beyond the conditions of the early half of the century in which Native people had to struggle to simply survive, or prove that they were worthy of assimilation into white society. The Termination policy of the 1950s, which sought to end federal recognition and support of Indian tribes and relocate Indians to urban areas, continued a pattern of breaking up tribal customs and dislocating Native people from reservations. Yet with the changing political climate of the 1960s, which included the rise of the American Indian Movement and its attempts to increase awareness of Native American struggles, some Native writers began to assert a sense of pride in tribal traditions and cultures, and began writing more critically about colonization and racism in American culture.
Beginning in the late 1960s, many writers began to rewrite dominant versions of history, in order to represent the history of the invasion and colonization of the North American continent from a Native American perspective (most notably Vine Deloria, Jr.). In addition, the Civil Rights, environmental, and counter-cultural movements of the 1960s shifted public opinion toward Native Americans, and not only increased sympathy among the general public for the struggles of Native Americans, but also led to a kind of reversal in American attitudes toward Natives. This new attitude, based in part on a romantic stereotype, led many (middle class) white Americans to try to emulate and appropriate Native American spiritual and cultural traditions, in a phenomenon known as “going native.” This Euroamerican image of Native American culture as ecological, wise, and infinitely superior to a more crass American society, became a new source of inspiration for white Americans who were increasingly critical of the materialism and consumerism of post-World War Two America, as well as the violent war in Vietnam.
During this time of cultural conflict and change, a group of Native writers expanded the Native American literary canon tremendously. At the same time, Native American Studies departments were established at several universities. In addition, scholarly journals such as SAIL (Studies in American Indian Literatures), American Indian Quarterly, and Wicazo Sa Review further increased publishing opportunities for new Native American writers.
The writers who are frequently associated with the Native American Renaissance include:

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  Louise Erdrich
  
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  Joy Harjo
  
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  N. Scott Momaday
  
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  Simon J. Ortiz
  
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  Leslie Marmon Silko
  
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  Gerald Vizenor
  
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  James Welch
  

The category “Native American Renaissance” has been criticized for various reasons. As James Ruppert notes, “scholars hesitate to use the phrase because it might imply that Native writers were not producing significant work before that time, or that these writers sprang up without longstanding community and tribal roots. Indeed, if this was a rebirth, what was the original birth?” (“Fiction-1968-Present”). Other critics argue that the term dismisses the literary value of the oral tradition. Still others criticize the tendency in works of the Native American Renaissance to focus on an alienated male protagonist who is often tragically caught between two worlds, and therefore trapped in a futile clash between tradition and assimilation; these critics note that this conflict reproduces the “tragic” image of the “vanishing Indian.”
Even so, the “Native American Renaissance” increased the general public’s understanding of Native American history and culture, and provided an opening for Native American literature to enter the mainstream American literary canon. It is perhaps because of this movement that works of Native American literature are included in anthologies of American literature today, and assigned in college English classes.
Thirty years after Kenneth Lincoln's The Native American Renaissance, which pronounced and characterized the "resurrection" of indigenous narrating inside a developing assortment of composed work, editors Velie and Lee present an accumulation of papers outlining that writing's progressing development (the review is a piece of an arrangement from the University of Oklahoma Press, with the following volume turning from scholarly expression to the visual expressions, including film). That such a venture could just appropriately be imagined now as an aggregate undertaking—including numerous creators who wrangle about the centrality of a staggering scope of writings, and in addition different hypothetical framings of them—addresses the field's unprecedented development. On the off chance that Lincoln needed to contend for the authenticity of his subject in 1983, the test now is to evaluate its imperative, dynamic range.
Various unmistakable voices in Native American abstract feedback contribute papers here, from Velie and Lee themselves, to Jace Weaver, Rebecca Tillett, Kimberley M. Blaeser, David Stirrup, and Lincoln (who gives us the accumulation's last exposition, a reflection all alone milestone work's beginning, impact, and relationship to the field's proceeding with changes). The initial two expositions, by Weaver and James Mackay, skillfully verbalize the shapes of a squeezing wrangle in Native American reviews: the part of "patriotism," or a privileging of the points of view and thoughts of indigenous people groups, in basic ways to deal with the subject. The staying sixteen articles cover the works of settled figures (N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, Louis Owens, and Sherman Alexie) and offer more extensive contemplations of late Native American verse, life composing, [End Page 179] and theater, and also First Nations composing and its relationship to writing south of the Canadian outskirt.
Among the most driven and adroit expositions included here are Tillett's "On the Cutting Edge," which analyzes Silko's prosecution of the environmentally destructive presumptions of European American belief systems, and Kathryn Hume's "Gerald Vizenor and Imagination," which coaxes out, from the multifaceted oeuvre of Native America's most prominent abstract secret, striking bits of knowledge into the creator's confining (and contentions for the freeing force) of individual and shared mythopoeia. Two different expositions emerge, additionally, for their lighting up commitments to particular subfields that were undertheorized by Lincoln three decades back. Gina Valentino's "Theater Renaissance: Resituating the Place of Drama in the Native American Renaissance" deftly highlights the disregard of Native American dramatic creations in meanings of the "renaissance" period while outlining the "rise of dramatization in such locales as the Institute for American Indian Arts, the Native American Theater Ensemble, and Spiderwoman Theater" (296). In "Perusing around the Dotted Line: From the Contact Zones to the Heartlands of First Nations/Canadian Literatures," Stirrup aptly investigates the courses in which indigenous Anglophone scholars in Canada arrange tribal and national characters.
An unfortunate weakness of this accumulation, given its enthusiasm for evaluating the essentialness of, as the presentation puts it, "the flowering of abstract works that took after the distribution of Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968" (3), is the nonattendance of an engaged, amplified investigation (by somebody other than Lincoln himself) of the setting in which a Native American "renaissance" apparently started and the ramifications of the period's artistic creation being characterized as it seemed to be. Velie and Lee portray out these subjects in their short presentation, and different donors connect with them in passing, yet the accumulation may have done a great deal more as far as surrounding the topic of why and how, precisely, a solitary content rose to and kept up such exceptional conspicuousness. (Velie's exposition on House may likewise have gone further as far as following the novel's impact on ensuing writers; he offers an educated close perusing of its utilization of myth yet just addresses the mind boggling courses in which Momaday catalyzed real figures, for example, Welch, Silko, Erdrich, and Vizenor.)