David Treuer recommended this list of books assembled by Nancy Snyder. (She seems to be white if that matters to you. Treuer is half-white. I'm white.) I'm just noodling along here, free associating.
https://bookriot.com/classics-about-indigenous-people/“
I know "Ceremony" and "House Made of Dawn" as truly classic. The books are:
AS LONG AS GRASS GROWS: THE INDIGENOUS FIGHT FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, FROM COLONIZATION TO STANDING ROCK BY DINA GILIO-WHITAKER
BAD INDIANS: A TRIBAL MEMOIR BY DEBORAH A. MIRANDA
CEREMONY BY LESLIE MARMON SILKO
THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE: NATIVE AMERICAN FROM 1890 TO THE PRESENT BY DAVID TREUER
HOUSE MADE OF DAWN BY N. SCOTT MOMADAY
IN MAD LOVE AND WAR BY JOY HARJO
OUR HISTORY IS THE FUTURE: STANDING ROCK VERSUS THE DAKOTA ACCESS PIPELINE AND THE LONG TRADITION OF INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE BY NICK ESTES
PRISON WRITINGS: MY LIFE IS MY SUN DANCE BY LEONARD PELTIER
THERE THERE BY TOMMY ORANGE
WHEN MY BROTHER WAS AN AZTEC BY NATALIE DIAZ
WHERE THE DEAD SIT TALKING BY BRANDON HOBSON
None of these are about Blackfeet. One or two are poetry anthologies. What Blackfeet books could have been on this list? (I’m excluding Adolf Hungry Wolf and Hugh Dempsey because they are white but married to Blackfoot women, which is spelled differently because the Blackfeet are on the Montana side. It’s a silly distinction between sides of a single tribe, but it makes a difference in terms of publishing. Dempsey is Canadian. Hungry Wolf is Californian. (!) Style difference. I'm speaking here personally rather than academically.
James Welch, Jr. is, of course, the definitive “Blackfeet” writer though it was his father with the same name who grew up in Browning. James Jr. happened into the circle of Richard Hugo at the U of Montana just when the genre of “Montana writers” was at its peak at the same time as the "Native American Renaissance" was cresting. He was educated in Minneapolis and from a middle-class family with Cherokee roots. He was skilled and aware, but they still love him more in France than in the US.
Bob Scriver was a white childhood buddy of this writer’s father, who did not write but alternated between welding and medical administration. Bob was a sculptor successful enough to self-publish picture books about his portraits of Blackfeet. At first, just when I was about gone from the marriage in 1973, we sketched out four books meant to be paperbacks, but instead they became hardback picture books, two about the work and one about rodeo. “The Blackfeet Indians: Artists of the Northern Plains” is quite splendid, combining sculpture with artifacts.
Twenty years after Bob’s death, I wrote “Bronze Inside and Out” about him. It was published by the University of Calgary Press as part of a series contracted for as part of a confused and troubled “house” that soon decamped to Athabasca Press. They asked me to dump Calgary and go with them, but I did not.
Richard Lancaster’s “Piegan” purported to be authoritative and personal but no one knew him since he was Texan. His book is praised and won prizes — it is just what people expected a book about “Indians” to be. I would classified it with “Hanta Yo” by Ruth Beebe Hill who came every summer but fantasized about Lakota.
Lancaster developed his manuscript through pre-existing library materials, covert criminal behavior on the rez and lies about it. He broke up families and left with the pieces. I don’t know how he got to be published, but his agent had a lot to do with it. That just pushes back the question to how he got his agent, but it was the time of the “NA Renaissance” wave and the Sixties romance with the indigenous. These two authors show that a white person can exploit indigenous people. It depends upon timing, what is popular at that moment
Percy Bullchild’s “The Sun Also Rises” must have come from some similar source, recruited by some agent who wanted the action, but Percy knew what he was talking about. Not until the editing stage did the stereotype kick in.
As far as I know, there are no indigenous editors at publishing houses, unless you count Adrian Jawort who got tired of fooling around and started his own publishing business. He’s not Blackfeet. Most indigenous writers with books published come from journalism, like Jawort or academia like Deborah Magpie Earling who is not Blackfeet but started at the U of Montana after the death of Richard Hugo and the end of the “Montana writers” wave.
I can’t think of any Blackfeet writer who began from status or money on the rez. I’m not even aware of tribal people who have that kind of status, though in the oil drilling days some had money. Nor do I know anyone who began by taking MFA workshops and ended up with a book. Nice articles maybe.
An interesting case is Sidner Larson, Jim Welch’s cousin on his mother’s side at Fort Belknap. They often spent summer together but Sidner went to law school, owned a bar, became an academic and wrote two books, “Catch Colt” and “Captured in the Middle.” Not Blackfeet, not famous.
The recent apocalypse among academic minorities — as universities decommission them as quickly as they had hired them — slapped him hard. He has been one of the most inclusive of the “Indian” writers — not one who excluded people because of tribal status or whatever. Still grounded in “Indian law” which many people don’t realize exists, he has many papers at Academia.edu. In the Seventies he organized a NA lit conference in Eugene, Oregon, that included Joy Harjo and N. Scott Momaday plus many others. I attended.
Romantic novels about pre-contact days will always exist because people love them — this is a continuation of an affair with “nature” that came from Europe. They just won’t sell if they challenge the stereotype and much of the territory has been claimed by sci-fi. The justice angle persists. These are the prejudices of publishers and editors regardless of the authors involved. They try to control what they believe will sell, but the ultimate success of a book depends on the wave passing through the readers which publishers may not understand.
As you can see from the list at the top of this post, to the NA people themselves political books about the fates of tribes are still relevant as the resource seizures in Indian Country continue. The most outstanding of these for the Blackfeet is “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954” by Paul Rozier, academic but drawn from local archives of real documents. Not very romantic. No Blackfeet that I know of has tried to do this kind of thing. Too much work. Not useful for snagging. Movies work better.
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