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American Indian Literary Nationalism.

Article Excerpt
Weaver, Jace, Craig S. Womack, Robert Warrior. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 2006. xxii + 272 pp.

In the preface to this coauthored text, Native scholars Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior (often called "the three W's" of Native literary criticism) set out nationalism, sovereignty, culture, self-determination, experience, and history as central issues in understanding the relationship between Native American literature and the social and historical realities that underlie the literature. Having each produced important books of their own in the late 1990s (Warrior's Tribal Secrets [1995], Weaver's That the People Might Live [1997], and Womack's Red on Red [1999]), they come together in this text "committed to an old and persisting dream in which indigenous groups in the Americas author their own destinies as distinct peoples with a discrete political status in this world" (xxi).

Weaver, Womack, and Warrior are all scholars committed to "developing Native criticism in conversation with both historical and contemporary Native intellectual work" (xvi). Weaver reminds readers in chapter 1 that "As Native critics, we all have an obligation to know each other's work and to be in conversation with each other" (5). Their commitment to intellectual conversation is evident not only in their own collaboration in this text, but also in their inclusion of a foreword by Simon Ortiz and an afterword by Lisa Brooks, as well as the addition, as an appendix, of Ortiz's 1981 essay "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism." In this way, they strategically place their own conversation in between the opening words of Ortiz,...

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