As the mixed-blood critic and novelist Louis Owens notes in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, before 1968 only nine novels written by Native American writers had been published; however, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, Native American writers have, if not flourished, at least managed to secure themselves a position among the many voices that make up multicultural American literature. This is due in part to the manner in which in public interest about Native Americans grew during the early 1970s.

As Donald Parman notes in an article published in the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, during the turbulent era that encompassed the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the beginnings of the environmental movement, ‘‘many Americans turned to Indian life as an attractive alternative.’’ Native American ideas such as the circularity of time and history, the importance of living in harmony with the earth rather than dominating it, and the communal nature of Native American societies all sparked the imaginations of many Americans seeking either a return to a more traditional and pastoral time or a new age of spiritual harmony.

It was during this time period that the first Native American studies programs were formed. The first one was at San Francisco State University in 1968, followed shortly by the establishment of programs at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Dartmouth University. By the year 2000, there were 112 Native American studies programs in the United States and Canada. Many Native American studies programs were designed not only to study Native Americans but to foster the success of Native American students in the universities. Some Native American writers, such as the novelist Louise Erdrich, who was one of the first students in the Dartmouth College program, gravitated toward these programs, while others, such as Louis Owens, felt that it was only by doing their degree work on established American writers, in his case, John Steinbeck, that they could prove that they were as qualified as their non-Native American classmates.

The general surge of interest in Native Americans and their points of view, however, did encourage many new writers. Poets such as 1970s: After occupying a series of sites (including Alcatraz Island, the headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D. C., and Mount Rushmore), the American Indian Movement (AIM) protests the light sentence given two white men for killing an Indian on the Sioux reservation by occupying the small town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in early 1973. Wounded Knee was the site of a massacre in 1873, when troops led by General Nelson Miles killed 146 men, women, and children. The 1973 standoff lasts for 71 days, during which two AIM members are killed and one federal marshal is wounded by gunfire. On May 5, 1973, a negotiated settlement is reached, and the standoff ends. By the end of the 1970s, AIM’s popularity fades as its militant tactics become controversial, and its leaders are imprisoned. However, it remains a powerful source of pan-Indian pride and unity long after its immediate political power wanes.

Today: Although AIM is a smaller organization than it once was, it remains active in the International Indian Treaty Council, the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media, the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center, and the ongoing fight to free their imprisoned leader Leonard Peltier.

1970s: The American Indian Religious Freedom Act is passed. This federal law states that the U. S. government must take Native American religious practices into account when making land and policy decisions.

Today: Although the American Indian Religious Freedom Act faces serious challenges, overall it contributes to gains for Native Americans, including the 1996 Executive Order recognizing Sacred Sites and the 2000 Religious Land Use and Prison Act, which adds further protections for sacred lands while also granting legitimacy to Native American spiritual practices for federal prisoners.

1970s: N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize for House of Dawn ushers in a new era of Native American publishing for writers of all genres. The 1970s see the emergence of writers such as Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Joseph Bruchac, and Luci Tapahonso.

Today: Native American studies programs become mainstream in many colleges and universities, providing not only teaching jobs to support Native American writers but forums in which Native American writing is studied with sensitivity to cultural context.

Simon Ortiz, Luci Tapahonso, and Joy Harjo began to find outlets for their work and, in some cases, teaching positions in universities to support themselves. In 1969, N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn. Novelists such as Owens, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor brought the conventions of Native American storytelling to the novel form, in some cases significantly reinventing it, and Louise Erdrich became the first Native American writer to routinely break into the best-seller lists. Joseph Bruchac joined them, not only writing everything from poetry to novels to children’s books but also publishing many of his fellow Native American writers through Greenfield Review Press, which he runs out of his home. Native Americans not only began writing, in their own voices, about their experiences starting in the 1970s but began publishing themselves and one another, and teaching students (Native American and not) how to read and interpret works written from a native point Grampa stops to rescue frogs out of the road. of view. Progress has not been perfect, and Native American viewpoints are still far from being universally understood, but the work of these elders who blazed the trail in the early 1970s has gone a long way toward making Native American viewpoints comprehensible to a majority culture who were previously unable to interpret them at all.

• The World Turned Upside Down

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• Charlotte M. Freeman

Freeman is a novelist, freelance writer, and former academic. In this essay, she addresses how in ‘‘Bird-foot’s Grampa,’’ Bruchac uses many literary techniques characteristic of the modern Native American literary renaissance. Since 1969, when N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for House of Dawn, the United States has seen a renaissance in Native American literature.

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