Other Destinies

Description

"This first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks at the novels of John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Gerald Vizenor. These authors are mixedbloods who, in their writing, try to come to terms with the marginalization both of mixed-bloods and fullbloods and of their cultures in American society. Their novels are complex and sophisticated narratives of cultural survival--and survival guides for fullbloods and mixedbloods in modern America. Rejecting the stereotypes and clichés long attached to the word Indian, they appropriate and adapt the colonizers language, English, to describe the Indian experience. These novels embody the American Indian point of view; the non-Indian is required to assume the role of "other." In his analysis Owens draws on a broad range of literary theory: myth and folklore, structuralism, modernism, poststructuralism, and, particularly, postmodernism. At the same time he argues that although recent American Indian fiction incorporates a number of significant elements often identified with postmodern writing, it contradicts the primary impulse of postmodernism. That is, instead of celebrating fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaos, these authors insist upon a cultural center that is intact and recoverable, upon immutable values and ecological truths. Other Destinies provides a new critical approach to novels by American Indians. It also offers a comprehensive introduction to the novels, helping teachers bring this important fiction to the classroom."--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

To begin to write about something called "the American Indian novel" is to enter a slippery and uncertain terrain.

Description

A fictionalized account of the massacre by the U.S. Army of a Cheyenne village after it had raised the white flag. The event occurred in 1864 in Colorado. The commander, Colonel John Chivington, was never brought to justice, while Captain Silas Soule, who with his company refused to participate, was killed as a traitor. Five hundred people died. By the author of The Dark Fire.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Other destinies: understanding the American Indian novelUniversity of Oklahoma Press1992-01-01
• Other DestiniesPaperbackUniversity of Oklahoma Press1994-09-01
• Other DestiniesUniversity of Oklahoma Press1994-01-01
• Other destinies