Drew Lopenzina – författare

This Introduction makes available for both student, instructor, and affcianado a refined set of tools for decolonizing our approaches prior to entering the unfamiliar landscape of Native American literatures. This book will introduce indigenous perspectives and traditions as articulated by indigenous authors whose voices have been a vital, if often overlooked, component of the American dialogue for more than 400 years. Paramount to this consideration of Native-centered reading is the understanding that literature was not something bestowed upon Native peoples by the settler culture, either through benevolent interventions or violent programs of forced assimilation. Native literature precedes colonization, and Native stories and traditions have their roots in both the precolonized and the decolonizing worlds. As this far-reaching survey of Native literary contributions will demostrate, almost without fail, when indigenous writers elected to enter into the world of western letters, they did so with the intention of maintaining indigenous culture and community. Writing was and always remains a strategy for survival.

This Introduction makes available for both student, instructor, and affcianado a refined set of tools for decolonizing our approaches prior to entering the unfamiliar landscape of Native American literatures. This book will introduce indigenous perspectives and traditions as articulated by indigenous authors whose voices have been a vital, if often overlooked, component of the American dialogue for more than 400 years. Paramount to this consideration of Native-centered reading is the understanding that literature was not something bestowed upon Native peoples by the settler culture, either through benevolent interventions or violent programs of forced assimilation. Native literature precedes colonization, and Native stories and traditions have their roots in both the precolonized and the decolonizing worlds. As this far-reaching survey of Native literary contributions will demostrate, almost without fail, when indigenous writers elected to enter into the world of western letters, they did so with the intention of maintaining indigenous culture and community. Writing was and always remains a strategy for survival.

The 1829 memoir A Son of the Forest, by Pequot author, activist, and Methodist minister William Apess, was the first published book-length memoir written by a Native American. The text offers a firsthand account of the intrinsic moral worth and adaptability of Indigenous peoples, penned by a dynamic Native figure, a preacher and an intellectual, who was not reluctant to highlight the political and economic disparities maintained between settler and Indigenous cultures or bring attention to ongoing settler-colonial injustices. This new edition includes a rich selection of appendices, including Apess’s other writings, works relating to the Pequot War, and other literature by Native and African American writers of the period. The edition situates Apess among the greatest writers of his day—a voice as important for our own times as it was for nineteenth-century audiences.