ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century American Indian Literature has repeatedly borne witness to the permeability of genre boundaries in literary works which defy simple categorization: N. Scott Momaday’s multi-genre The Way to Rainy Mountain, Leslie Silko and Joy Harjo’s prose poetry and landscape photography collections (Sacred Water and Secrets from the Center of the World, respectively), Linda Hogan’s blending of history, legal discourse, and fiction in her novel Mean Spirit, Mourning Dove’s negotiation of sentimental and romance novel traditions, conversion testimony, and anthropology in Cogewea are only a few cases in point. This rich literary tradition’s origins in oral expressive forms such as myths, legends, stories, songs, and rituals makes for fertile ground to explore the nexus between literature and ethnography. Arnold Krupat in his historical overview of this link, “Ethnography and Literature,” observes that scholars had to make a conscious effort to separate the two, “to distinguish between art and science, the imagined and the real, fact and fiction,” a constructed difference he locates in the eighteenth century (with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia) (pp. 62-3).
