James Ruppert – författare

Storytelling is a precious, vibrant tradition among the Native peoples of the Far North. Collected here for the first time are stories from the communities of interior Alaska and the Yukon Territory. These are the tales the people tell about themselves, their communities, and the world they inhabit.  Our Voices showcases twenty storytellers and writers who represent a full range of Athabaskan and related languages of Alaska and the Yukon. Both men and women recount popular tales of ancient times that describe the origins of social institutions and cultural values, as well as meaningful, sometimes intimate stories about their own lives and families or the history of their people. As representatives of an art transmitted through countless generations and now practiced with renewed interest and vigor by people reclaiming their cultural heritage, these narratives create a broad, brightly colored, richly detailed picture of the world of the Far North, present and past.

Mediation"" is the term James Ruppert uses to describe his theory of reading Native American fiction. Focusing on the novels of six major contemporary American writers - N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, D'Arcy McNickle, and Louise Erdrich - Ruppert analyzes the ways these writers draw upon their bicultural heritage, guiding Native and non-Native readers to different and expanded understandings of each other's worlds.          While Native American writers may criticize white society, revealing its past and present injustices, their emphasis, Ruppert argues, is on healing, survival, and continuance. Their fiction aims to produce cross-cultural understanding rather than divisiveness. To that end they articulate the perspectives and values of competing worldviews, creating characters who manifest what Ruppert calls ""multiple identities"" - determined by Native and non-Native perceptions of self.These writers might incorporate Native oral storytelling techniques, adapting them to written form, or they might reconstruct Native mythologies, investing them with new meaning by applying them to contemporary situations. As novelists, they also include characteristic features of western European writing - such as the omniscient narrator or the detective story plot.          Ruppert demonstrates how a rich blending of different traditions is producing extraordinary breadth and innovation in Native American literature.