Culturalism and Its Discontents: An Essay Review of David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual

Year 2007, Issue: 26, 9 - 33, 01.10.2007

Arnold Krupat

Abstract

We usually date the beginnings of Native American fiction from John Rollin Ridge’s rather odd novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit published in 1854; the first Native American novel by a woman is S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema, a Child of the Forest 1891 . Just after the turn of the twentieth century, the body of Native American fiction is added to with the appearance of short fiction by Zitkala Sa, Pauline Johnson, and John Milton Oskison, who would later publish full length novels in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927, Mourning Dove, aided by or interfered with by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, published Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, a novel she had largely completed by 1916. Also from the 1930s comes fictional work by Francis La Flesche, John Joseph Mathews, and D’Arcy McNickle. Although Ella Cara Deloria had completed her novel, Waterlily by 1944, it was not published until 1988.

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