There are several great Native American Writers that can be mentioned for great American writings. That are much underrepresented in the main stream. We don’t nearly give enough credit to their work. This blog will do just that by giving a variety of different Native American writers, with works of poetry, to short stories, to full length novels. It will help fellow Native American find reading materials about them and their struggles that only other natives will truly understand and relate too. Now at the beginning it will be just a few and some common to the already main streamed Native American Studies programs.
Authors James Welch - Was born in Browning, Montana in 1940 to a Blackfeet father and a Gros-Ventre mother. Welch went to schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations and began studying as a graduate student under influential poet Richard Hugo at The University of Montana in the 1960s. Welch said that during the first quarter his poems had no focus and no location. Finally, Hugo pulled Welch aside for some private counsel. What Hugo told him was that his poetry needed roots, so he should write what he knew about. Write about Indians and Indian culture. Write about home. Soon after Welch began telling the world about life on the Hi-Line and on the Reservation. Before, Welch thought publishers wouldn’t be interested in either Indians or Montana and no one would want to read about Native Americans, the Reservation, and the landscape along the Hi-Line. Welch could not have been more wrong “The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions.”- James Welch
Louise Erdrich - is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."-Louise Erdich
Vine Deloria - (March 26, 1933–November 13, 2005) throughout his life and works promoted a cohesive understanding of Native American culture and history. He graduated from Iowa State University in 1958, in 1963 he received a Theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois, and in 1970 he received a Law Degree from the University of Colorado. It was not until 1978 that he came to the University of Arizona and established the first Master’s Degree program for American Indian Studies in the United States. He also taught in the College of Law for the University of Arizona. Deloria wrote over twenty books in his lifetime, his most famous being Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian manifesto in 1969. He also received many high honors such as Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award for his work Spirit and Reason in 1999, the Wallace Stegner award from the Center of the American West in 2002, as well as the American Indian Festival of Words Author Award in 2003 “Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.” - Vine Deloria Jr.