ABSTRACT
Native American literature entered the academic literary canon in the late 1960s and the 1970s in conjunction with the social movements of feminism, African-American civil rights, Red Power, and protests by students on major urban campuses across the United States, who demanded a multicultural curriculum that was more relevant to their lives. Michael Dorris (Modoc) notes, however, that Native American literatures have always been a part of Native life: “During the past several thousand years, Native American people have produced literatures rich in diversity and imagery, ancient in tradition, and universal in significance” (“Native” 232). Dorris goes on to explain that there is not a singular Native American literature but many because of the diversity of cultural and linguistic groups in the pre-1942 western hemisphere: “More than three hundred cultures, each differentiated to a greater or lesser degree by language, custom, history, and life way, were resident north of the Rio Grande in 1492” (233). Joseph Bruchac (Abenaki) lists the extensive and complex oral traditions
of Native North America, “epic poems, religious liturgy, personal and communal songs, tribal and personal histories, legends and myths,” and notes their “great importance to the North American Native writers of the last hundred years, the period in which written literature by Natives has achieved its greatest audience” (xl).
