Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape

Lee Schweninger

Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape
Format
Hardback
Publisher
University of Georgia Press
Country
United States
Published
15 July 2008
Pages
224
ISBN
9780820330587

Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape

Lee Schweninger

This is a representation versus reality in Native American literary presentations of a land ethic.For better or worse, representations abound of Native Americans as a people with an innate and special connection to the earth. This study looks at the challenges faced by Native American writers who confront stereotypical representations as they assert their own ethical relationship with the earth. Lee Schweninger considers a range of genres (memoirs, novels, stories, essays) by Native writers from various parts of the United States. Contextualizing these works within the origins, evolution, and perpetuation of the
green
labels imposed upon Indians, Schweninger shows how writers often find themselves denying some land ethic stereotypes while seeming to embrace others.Taken together, the time periods covered in Listening to the Land span more than a hundred years, from Luther Standing Bear’s description of his late-nineteenth-century life on the prairie to Linda Hogan’s account of a 1999 Makah hunt of a grey whale. Two-thirds of the writers Schweninger considers, however, are well-known voices from the second half of the twentieth century, including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Vine Deloria Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Louis Owens.Few ecocritical studies have focused on indigenous environmental attitudes, in comparison to related work done by historians and anthropologists.
Listening to the Land
will narrow this gap in the scholarship; moreover, it will add individual Native American perspectives to an understanding of what, to these writers, is a genuine Native American philosophy regarding the land.

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