One of Momaday’s best-known works is The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), his history of the last days of the Kiowa people.
Momaday’s childhood on the Jemez reservation and at Shiprock in the Navajo country is hauntingly recounted in The Names, published in 1976. More than a memoir, it blends genealogy and folklore with personal reminiscences.
Like Abel, the protagonist of the novel Ceremony (1977) is also a Native American returning home after service in World War II. It was written by Leslie Marmon Silko, one of the most respected contemporary Native American novelists.
James Welch is a Native American novelist who writes about the American West. His first book, Winter in the Blood (1974), is set in the early 1970s.
A summary of Indian perspectives can be gathered from Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present, 1492-1992 (1991), edited by Peter Nabokov and published by Penguin.
Published in 1970, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was an international bestseller. Subtitled “An Indian History of the American West,” it presents an interesting, readable story.
Among memoirs by Native Americans, Black Elk Speaks holds a place of high esteem. Written by poet and novelist John G. Neihardt in 1932, it was neglected until psychologist Carl Jung’s interest sparked a revised edition in the 1950s.
Leave a Reply