Mixedblood Messages

Mixedblood Messages PDF Author: Louis Owens
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806133812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe "Indian Territory" that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial "Territory" is what Owens defines as "Frontier," a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge. Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D'Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental — as well as cultural—survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

Mixedblood Messages

Mixedblood Messages PDF Author: Louis Owens
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806133812
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe "Indian Territory" that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial "Territory" is what Owens defines as "Frontier," a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge. Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D'Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental — as well as cultural—survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

I Hear the Train

I Hear the Train PDF Author: Louis Owens
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806133546
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In this innovative collection, Louis Owens blends autobiography, short fiction, and literary criticism to reflect on his experiences as a mixedblood Indian in America. In sophisticated prose, Owens reveals the many timbres of his voice--humor, humility,love, joy, struggle, confusion, and clarity. We join him in the fields, farms, and ranches of California. We follow his search for a lost brother and contemplate along with him old family photographs from Indian Territory and early Oklahoma. In a final section, Owens reflects on the work and theories of other writers, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gerald Vizenor, Michael Dorris, and Louise Erdrich. Volume 40 in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series

Louis Owens

Louis Owens PDF Author: Joe Lockard
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 082636098X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy explores the wide-ranging oeuvre of this seminal author, examining Owens's work and his importance in literature and Native studies. Of Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish American descent, Owens's work includes mysteries, novels, literary scholarship, and autobiographical essays. Louis Owens offers a critical introduction and thirteen essays arranged into three sections: "Owens and the World," "Owens and California," and "The Novels." The essays present an excellent assessment of Owens's literary legacy, noting his contributions to American literature, ethnic literature, and Native American literature and highlighting his contributions to a variety of theories and genres. The collection concludes with a coda of personal poetic reflections on Owens by Diane Glancy and Kimberly Blaeser. Libraries, students, scholars, and the general public interested in Native American literature and the landscape of contemporary US literature will welcome this reflective volume that analyzes a vast range of Louis Owens's imaginative fictions, personal accounts, and critical work.

Wolfsong

Wolfsong PDF Author: Louis Owens
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806127378
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In the Cascade Range of northwest Washington, Tom Joseph, a young Indian who had gone south to attend college, returns for his uncle's funeral and finds himself caught up in the old man’s fight to save the wilderness from destruction. In his first novel, Louis Owens exposes the raw edge of the current American land-rights controversy and poses questions about authenticity and the common bonds that American Indians, of very different or mixed backgrounds, are in the process of discovering today.

Louis Owens

Louis Owens PDF Author: Jacquelyn Kilpatrick
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806135878
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Louis Owens (1948–2002) achieved worldwide recognition with his humorous and fearless novels that explored themes close to Owens’s own upbringing as a mixed-blood Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish-American. His critical works were equally substantive. Readers of his criticism find his work challenging, and casual readers find his fiction highly enjoyable—a remarkable combination that speaks well of Owens’s intellectual and creative abilities. In a new collection of essays, Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work, editor Jacquelyn Kilpatrick and eleven other contributors examine Owens’s fiction and nonfiction from widely varying viewpoints to address issues such as identity, place, literary theory, trickster motifs, and the environment. This text aids the reader in understanding the theories Owens articulated and how he followed those theories in his own writing. Also included is the last interview Owens gave, appearing in print for the first time, which provides insights into this complex man’s personal life.

John Steinbeck's Re-vision of America

John Steinbeck's Re-vision of America PDF Author: Louis Owens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


In Black And White

In Black And White PDF Author: Donald McRae
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1471134725
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
In 1936 athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics and, two years later, boxer Joe Louis won a crushing victory to become heavyweight champion of the world. Despite their fame and success, both men would find themselves barred from certain hotels and would have to eat outside restaurants because of the colour of their skin. However. by their example, they gave hope to millions of black people around the world as they became the first black superstars. In Donald McRae's William Hill prize-winning dual biography, he compiles a brilliant portrait of the two men, who became close friends despite their very different career paths: within days of Olympic glory, Owens was banned from competing again, and was forced to spend his days racing against horses to earn a living before becoming a spokesman for the sporting ideal. Meanwhile Louis won and lost a fortune, eventually battling with drug addiction and mental illness. His vivid account of their lives away from the public eye, and the era in which they lived, is compelling and tragic.

Listening to the Land

Listening to the Land PDF Author: Lee Schweninger
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
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 on American Indians, Schweninger shows how writers often find themselves denying some land ethic stereotypes while seeming to embrace others. Taken together, the time periods covered inListening to the Landspan 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 gray 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 Landwill 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.

Heroes Without a Country

Heroes Without a Country PDF Author: Donald McRae
Publisher: Ecco
ISBN: 9780060002282
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"Black men look like they rule sport in America today. It was nothing like that in the 1930s. America was white and that was that. It didn't do you no good to dream of making it to the big time. It was impossible. And then, y'know, along came Jesse and along came Joe." -- Ruth Owens, Jesse's late wife n the summer of 1935, within weeks of each other, Joe Louis and Jesse Owens emerged as the first black superstars of world sport, and their subsequent political and social impact on America was nothing short of sensational. To fans (and even critics) the world over, they seemed larger than life, and yet in their endeavors they were unfailingly human: as vulnerable as they were courageous; as troubled as they were brilliant; as unsettled in themselves as they are now fixed in history. Scrupulously researched and written in spare, eloquent prose, Heroes Without a Country vividly re-creates some of the most dramatic sporting events of the past century. In August 1936, in front of Hitler and an imposing phalanx of Nazi commanders, Jesse Owens, "the fastest man on earth," won an unprecedented four medals at the Olympic Games in Berlin. Two years later, in "the fight of the century," his great friend Joe Louis crushed Germany's Max Schmeling to signal the end of white supremacy in boxing. Like Jesse, Joe had been born to black sharecropping parents in a country demeaned by racism; together their victories became a rallying point for the disenfranchised black population of America. Idolized across the world, they were two young men at the pinnacle of their careers who overcame prejudice and fear to achieve their goals. Yet for both of them, success brought its own perils. In 1938, two years after winning his gold medals in Berlin, Owens was hounded out of amateur sports by the infamously tyrannical Olympic boss "Slavery Avery" Brundage and, facing financial ruin, he was reduced to running for money against dogs, horses, and even his friend Joe Louis. Later the two would be subjected to FBI investigations, harassed by the IRS, and beleaguered by debt and despair. Jesse watched Joe slip into drug addiction and mental illness. In Heroes Without a Country, award-winning writer Donald McRae captures the uncanny coincidences and intertwined events that bound these men together -- through both triumph and tragedy -- and provides an intimate and thought-provoking dual portrait of two of the most important athletes of the twentieth century.

American Indian Culture [2 volumes]

American Indian Culture [2 volumes] PDF Author: Bruce E. Johansen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440828741
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
This invaluable resource provides a comprehensive historical and demographic overview of American Indians along with more than 100 cross-referenced entries on American Indian culture, exploring everything from arts, literature, music, and dance to food, family, housing, and spirituality. American Indian Culture: From Counting Coup to Wampum is organized by cultural form (Arts; Family, Education, and Community; Food; Language and Literature; Media and Popular Culture; Music and Dance; Spirituality; and Transportation and Housing). Examples of topics covered include icons of Native culture, such as pow wows, Indian dancing, and tipi dwellings; Native art forms such as pottery, rock art, sandpainting, silverwork, tattooing, and totem poles; foods such as corn, frybread, and wild rice; and Native Americans in popular culture. The extensive introductory section, breadth of topics, accessibly written text, and range of perspectives from the many contributors make this work a must-have resource for high school and undergraduate audiences.