American Indian Literature and the Southwest

by Anderson, Eric Gary

• ISBN13: 9780292704886
• ISBN10: 0292704887
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-01-01
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest--among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel. Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Migration and Displacement in the American Southwest

Mobile Homes: Migration and Resistance in American Indian Literature

Unsettling Frontiers: Billy the Kid and the Outlaw Southwest

Outlawing Apaches: Geronimo and Jason Betzinez

Photography as Resistance in Almanac of the Dead

Indian Detours, or, Where the Indians Aren't: Management and Preservation in the Euro-American Southwest

Driven to Extraction: McTeague in the Desert

Mary Austin, Sarah Winnemucca, and the Problems of Authority

Cleaning out the House: Tom Outland, Dead Indians, and the First World War

Krazy Kat I: Contexts and Crossings

Krazy Kat II: Navajo Aesthetics

Conclusion: Cross-Purposes and Purposeful Crossings

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