Listening to the Land

Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape

Lee Schweninger

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780820330594, 9780820330587
• eBook ISBN: 9780820336374
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For better or worse, representations abound of Native Americans as a people with an innate and special connection to the earth. This study looks at the challenges faced by Native American writers who confront stereotypical representations as they assert their own ethical relationship with the earth. Lee Schweninger considers a range of genres (memoirs, novels, stories, essays) by Native writers from various parts of the United States. Contextualizing these works within the origins, evolution, and perpetuation of the "green" labels imposed on American Indians, Schweninger shows how writers often find themselves denying some land ethic stereotypes while seeming to embrace others.

Taken together, the time periods covered in Listening to the Land span more than a hundred years, from Luther Standing Bear's description of his late-nineteenth-century life on the prairie to Linda Hogan's account of a 1999 Makah hunt of a gray whale. Two-thirds of the writers Schweninger considers, however, are well-known voices from the second half of the twentieth century, including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Vine Deloria Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Louis Owens.

Few ecocritical studies have focused on indigenous environmental attitudes, in comparison to related work done by historians and anthropologists. Listening to the Land will narrow this gap in the scholarship; moreover, it will add individual Native American perspectives to an understanding of what, to these writers, is a genuine Native American philosophy regarding the land.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Ethical Regard for the Land
• One. The Land Ethic Stereotype: American Indian Wisdom
• Two. Where the Buffalo Roam: Iconoclasts and Romantics
• Three. Between the People and the Land: Luther Standing Bear, Mother Earth, and Assimilation
• Four. Talking Back: John Joseph Mathews and Talking to the Moon
• Five. “She Gives Me a Metaphor”: Survival and Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance
• Six. Cultural Identity, Storytelling, Place: Revision and Return in Louis Owens’s Wolfsong
• Seven. “From the Land Itself”: Momaday’s Language, Landscape, and Land Ethic
• Eight. Living with the Land: Deloria, Landscape, and Religion
• Nine. Liberation and the Land: The Environmental Ethos of Gerald Vizenor
• Ten. “Changed by the Wild”: Linda Hogan’s Spirit of Renewal
• Eleven. Killing the Whale: Sightings and the Makah Hunt
• Works Cited
• Index