Red on Red : Native American Literary Separatism

Abstract

A Creek National Literature attempts to find a critical vantage point grounded in Native culture from which to understand Native literatures. He argues that the application of postmodern literary criticism to Native literatures does not provide a critical framework which is particularly useful to Indian people because it fails to understand anything about the primary cultures from which these literatures emerge. Recent Native critics like Robert Allen Warrior have pointed out that Indian people have their own intellectual and cultural traditions that provide far more meaningful frameworks for analyzing Native literary production.Womack's work is grounded in an examination of the translation of Creek stories into English in which he compares the contemporary oral stories told in Creek to those collected by ethnographer John Swanton in eastern Oklahoma in 1907-1911. He also traces the development of Creek narratives from oral storytelling to contemporary Creek writing.Womack explores ways in which Native writers can produce a body of literature that Indian people will actually read and find relevant to their daily lives. He argues for a culturally based Native criticism which will encourage Indian people to read contemporary Native novels, short stories, and poems and perhaps be motivated by them toward social activism.