Native American Literature

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to make discussion in the American literature, and discuss that what are the main differences or similarities in the writings of Gertrude Bonnin and Standing Bear. This paper discusses that in what ways these two authors have made discussion on the Native American Culture in their writings. The paper focus on two stories of these authors named “Why Am I a Pagan” and “What I am going to Tell Yolu Here Will Take Me until Dark”.

Discussion

The last decades of the twentieth century, was a period when American literature is the process of isolating and understanding of national and ethnic components of the total of the literary process: in addition to African-American literature, which emerged and formed before [see: Graham, 2003], there is written in the English literature of Native Americans - Indian, Chicano literature Hispanic minorities, as well as Asian-American literature (Paula, 34). Asian-American literature is, thus, the second group. This literature is created in English and published in the United States. It not only reflects the unique experience of immigrants first, and most of the second generation, but also provides readers a unique linguistic material, as literary works of Asian American writers are writers with a dual cultural identity in the language indicated by J. Skinner as the receiving language (Krupat, 90). Being accepted into the language and cultural environment, the emigrant writer keeps in his mind national and cultural features of the homeland of their ancestors. Disruptiveness of the author's consciousness, its objective belonging to the two cultural traditions of two has become the leading creative impulse for many of the writer (Dippie, 23).

Gertrude Bonnin is the American writer and political activist born in the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in 1876 and died in 1938. It was the third daughter of Ellen Tate Iyohinwin Simmons, a Sioux and a white man named Felker. When she was eight years, Bonnin had decided to leave his mother and leave the reserve to attend White's Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana, an institute founded by Quakers.

In 1913 she wrote, by the classical composer William Hanson, an opera entitled Sun Dance, a work that had some impact among Native Americans, but has gone unnoticed since 1937 (Derounian, 5). Music was Bonnin's true vocation, she thought through music could work more effective and far-reaching in the struggle for human rights, including through politics or literature. Her musical work is relevant, because no Native American has written before or after Bonnin, an opera.

Gertrude continued her work at the Society of American Indians when she had to move to Washington, DC, where she began to edit the American Indian Magazine. On the other hand, the figure and Bonnin political activities were keys in winning the right to vote and the status of full citizenship for all Native Americans (Berkhofer, 990). However, Bonnin aspirations went beyond, and that by obtaining these privileges sought to achieve unity among all Indian tribes, to this end was born in ...