A Matter of Emphasis: Teaching the "Literature" in Native American Literature Courses

At one time I customarily introduced my Native American literature course with a quotation from The Autobiography of A Papago Woman. After singing a brief ceremonial song, Maria Chona, the subject, says, "The song is very short because we understand so much." Seeing such cultural ellipses manifested variously in Native American literature, I proceeded to teach as if the major attractions of such compositions were the challenge of decoding cultural allusions. Soon my course could have been more accurately styled "Literature as Ethnography and Ethnohistory" than by its actual title" American Indian Song, Story, Myth." At its worst this approach made the literature only folklore, the quaint representation of dead or moribund cultures. At its best the approach allowed my students instructive insights to Native American cultures. But as I taught I too learned. What I learned is the mainspring and thesis of this paper: A Native American literature course is best taught as a criticism of the literature. As demonstration of my thesis I will identify the units constituting such a course, treating as I do some major critical issues raised in this approach. It is through the lens of such topics, not only through that of ethnography/ethnohistory, that students best discover what characterizes Native American literature. By no means do I intend literary criticism to be the purpose of the course, but it is a significant enough purpose, I believe, to warrant major emphasis without neglecting other ends as well. Moreover, I do not dispute that some student audiences might require more ethnography/ethnohistory than I recommend. Nor do I deny that these are still a significant part of my course. And, finally, I am sensitive to the risk I run of seeming to advocate a perspective more consonant with the Anglo-American bias toward analysis classification than with the Native American's synthesizing world view