ABSTRACT
Contemporary literary descriptions such as “world” or “global” do not normally call to mind the literatures of Native American peoples. This is an odd fact, to say the least, given the long-standing global reach and concern grounded in the lives and letters of so many prominent native North American authors: Charles Eastman, Joy Harjo, John Joseph Mathews, D’Arcy McNickle, Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and James Welch, to mention only a few of the more prominent. So why is broad institutional recognition of the international sweep of Native American literature so slow in coming? That this gross oversight in literary categorization still pertains is a matter of some obscurity. One contributing factor no doubt stems from the dogged colonial prejudice that sees anything Indian as parochialand this despite the unmistakable cosmopolitan ethic at the core of so many famous Indian life stories-Squanto, Pocahontas, and Sacajewea-stories that ironically still function as origin myths of American exceptionalism. Another likely suspect is the status of Native American literature as American literature, that is, the status of Native American literature as a multicultural literature of the United States-and this despite the longstanding political status of tribal nations as inherently sovereign entities on a government-togovernment footing with the United States.1 And a third cause-perhaps the most determinative-involves the particular politico-ideological history of tribal peoples in the Euroamerican imaginary, the complex, complicated, and contradictory set of associations that traps “Indians” in a pre-modern ethnographic present quite at odds with the imagery of modern travel and elite lifestyle associations one conjures with respect to cosmopolitan living.2
