Native American Literature/That's What She Said
Weidman, Bette S.
In Brief NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE, by Andrew Wiget, Twayne Publishers, $15.95, 147 pp. THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID: CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND FICTION BY NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN, edited by Rayna...
...He then discusses early non-fiction, autobiography, poetry, and fiction produced by native Americans from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, when popular wisdom expected "the Indian" to vanish...
...Wiget's book helps us to place the writers represented in That's What She Said, an anthology of short fiction and poetry by seventeen American Indian women...
...to defend in fiery political essays...
...ARTHUR A. COHEN Many victims Maspeth, N.Y...
...Now Andrew Wiget has written a short but satisfying introduction to this rewarding field of study...
...Extensive evidence supports the estimate that nearly ten million other innocent victims were killed with the six million Jews...
...The Holocaust cannot be studied historically, logically, or morally as an event unrelated to the Nazi atrocities throughout Eastern Europe...
...Simon Wiesenthal has said that the Nazi atrocities were directed against many more than the Jewish people...
...I oppose many ideas of this world, but I wish to obliterate no person holding them...
...There can be civility even in enmity...
...Two recent landmarks in American Indian literary study are Dell Hymes's In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics, retranslations of Clackamas Chinook tales, and John Bierhorst's Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature...
...The real panic which my position engenders is that it insists upon a hermeneutic of enmity without postulating an inevitable descent into violence...
...To the Editors: While I agree with the position taken by Judith Banki and Alan L. Mittleman that the Holocaust deserves much more attention than the brief reference made by the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews in its recently released "Notes," I take strong exception to the implicit assumption of the authors and the Vatican Commission that the Holocaust was an exclusively Jewish experience...
...Instead of the church tergiversating, sending contradictory signals to the Jews, mistaking the realia of Jewish existence and the Jews being saddened and disappointed, if only it were possible for us to speak truthfully out of the animus of theological and historical opposition, but always with the civil courage and respect for human persons that obviates violence...
...there is communication even out of the most profound disagreement...
...Joseph Goebbels noted in his diaries that Hitler was "completely anti-Christian...
...Work in native languages, in the restoration of old translations, and in the fuller understanding of the political, economic, and social position of American Indians has been proceeding quietly for generations...
...A photograph of each woman, brief biographies, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, and a full bibliography of works by and about native American women writers make this book a pleasure to use...
...THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID: CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND FICTION BY NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN, edited by Rayna Green, Indiana University Press, $29.95, 329 pp...
...Now we are coming into the harvest, beginning to be able to see how the work of daughters and sons builds on the efforts of those who have gone before as, in a favorite example, Ella DeLoria's Dakota Texts preserves a tradition for Vine DeLoria Jr...
...Here is cause for celebration: two books that prove that the revival of interest in American Indian literatures is no sentimental trend, but a substantial development in contemporary culture...
...The Presidential Commission on the Holocaust, in its report to President Jimmy Carter, noted that, "There is evidence indicating that the Nazis intended ultimately to wipe out the Slavs and other peoples...
...In her introduction, Rayna Green provides a tender composite portrait of the writers for whom this book seeks attention...
...STANISLAUS J. MARKIEWICZ / November 1985: 623...
...On the contrary, in the twentieth century there has been a burst of fiction and poetry written in English by native AmerCommonweal: 622 icans, among them D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz and many others whose work Wiget describes with tact ahd care...
...They face social and political realities and private suffering, use their memories of old myths and images, give evidence in every word of their authenticity and liveliness...
...They have not only claimed their cultures, but made something new out of their own relations to a world they know as fruitful and terrible...
...Nazism was as fundamentally opposed to Christians as it was to Jews...
...It is a branch of the Jewish race.'' Millions of Christians died as a result of the genocide generated by the Gestapo...
...The difficulty for the church lies in the fact that it continues to believe that it deserves to be victorious over the Jews...
...BETTE S. WEIDMAN Correspondence (Continued from page 596) Christians — with all their suspicion and unknowingness about Jews and Judaism — would have the courage to oppose us without wishing to destroy us...
...there may be clarity to emerge without expecting the church to dismantle its millennial structure of opposition to Jewish unbelief...
...As Elie Wiesel has stated so often, while the Jews were the first to be murdered by the Nazis, they were not the only victims...
...He views Christianity as a symptom of decay...
...Wiget begins with two chapters that describe various types of oral narrative — earth-diver, emergence and trickster stories — and oratory and oral poetry, some of it still performed, some known through the efforts of linguists and anthropologists...
...It is this hidden persuasion that leaves me limp with rage against its presumption...
Vol. 112 • November 1985 • No. 19
