This chapter offers the account of an underexplored subgenre of Indigenous writing, namely, the Native American essay. Historically, these essays bore witness to individual and collective loss and injustice and told the history of murder, dispossession, forced reeducation, exploitation, and mistreatment that characterizes the encounter with European colonizers. In their essays, Indigenous people have proclaimed their existence and continuance and argued for sovereignty. Many of these essays appear embedded in the forms of stories, sermons, appeals, ethnographies, autobiographies, journals, and periodicals, as well as in scholarship. Their style and subject matter are wide ranging, with reflections on the natural world, identity, tradition, self-governance, and spirituality. The contributions of important Indigenous essayists like Samson Occom, E. Pauline Johnson, N. Scott Momaday, Charles Eastman, Winona LaDuke, and Leslie Marmon Silko show the breadth, depth, and beauty of Indigenous writing from the eighteenth century to today.

Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony is an anglophone novel that aspires to heal the effects of conquest and colonization through a decolonial politics that accepts hybridity, recognizes the sensitive work involved in transitions, and embraces Indigenous knowledge. Even as Silko celebrates hybridization, transitions, and boundary-crossing, she recognizes that these processes have a dangerous side – specifically, the potentially world-destroying effects of the nuclear arms race. The novel shows that settler colonialism is one aspect of an unfolding pattern that denies limits and boundaries; with the invention of nuclear weapons, it threatens to destroy the world. Silko’s message echoes Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1974 essay “Non-Violence in American Society,” commenting on the era’s social justice movements. Giving narrative form to Deloria’s message, in Ceremony the multiple strands of Silko’s political thought – the Native American Renaissance and decolonization, environmentalism, feminism, antiwar and anti-nuclear activism – are woven together in a story that is also a healing ceremony for readers. Ceremony aims to create a world where indigeneity emerges as the dominant force for a world at risk that is also a world in transition.

Subjected to violence, disease, and dislocation, indigenous cultures and individuals have found ways to voice both mourning for losses and strategies for resistance, survival, and joy. War for Indian peoples moves beyond the hostilities perpetrated on them by the dominant culture. War is also a response away from victimry and towards resistance and resilience, becoming an active presence, a staking of a place, a demand for recognition – literal and figurative acts of what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” This essay focuses on representations of violent conflicts between Europeans and Native Americans by historical and contemporary Indian voices, such as Hendrick Aupaumut, Black Hawk, William Apess, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie.

This chapter explains how particular Native writers in the US have come to serve as reference points and to receive widespread recognition, while others, equally worthy, have not. In particular, I focus on N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), and Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d'Alene) as the four Native authors who have been most frequently singled out for attention and "canonized" within mainstream American culture. I identify factors that created a favorable reception for their works, and most importantly, I explore what it means for these authors to be "marginally mainstream." On the one hand, to be "marginally mainstream" is to be deemed worthy of recognition by the critical establishment, which often entails overemphasizing "universal" literary qualities to the detriment of tribally specific elements. At the same time, however, to be "marginally mainstream" suggests that these texts continue to speak eloquently to Native audiences in meaningful ways.