Diving Home

From Mourning Dove's bleak image of Native Americans as surrounded by a corral fence often scaled by the soulless creatures who have ever preyed upon [them] (Cogewea, 283), to Leslie Marmon Silko's picture of a young Native American who is able to resist the evil around him and understand that came out of this land and we are hers (Ceremony, 255), Indians have assumed a variety of roles within the literature written both by and about them. However, as William Bevis points out, most Native American novels are 'incentric', centripetal, converging, contracting. The hero comes home (Novels, 582). This homecoming is often marked by an effort, either conscious as in the case of Tayo in Ceremony or unconscious as in the case of Abel in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn toward some sort of understanding of the self and the self's relationship to the universe, a type of centering, if you will. The history of the displacement of Native Americans, both physical and social, is all too familiar. Gerald Vizenor vividly describes the effects of the colonization of the New World in Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

• Blood Legacies

  Open Access•Stuart Christie•Plural Sovereignties and…•2009

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• Manifest manners

  Gerald Robert Vizenor•Manifest manners•1999

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