Here First Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers [Paperback]

Here First is an important new collection of essays by Native American writers compiled by Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann, the editors of I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. In Here First, authors such as Sherman Alexie, Greg Sarris, and Elizabeth Woody tell the stories of their lives and their art. Each essay demonstrates the breadth of experience of twenty-seven individuals united in the creative expression of a Native American heritage. Each has a different relation to that heritage, and in describing it through personal and family history, with verse and in anecdotes, the writers give a strong image of the different cultures that have shaped them. This is living history and the kind of collective memoir that makes for fascinating and rewarding reading--one of the most vivid and diverse portraits of Native American culture available today.Arnold Krupat is the author of several books, including The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism & Culture and the novel Woodsmen, or Thoreau and the Indians. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Brian Swann has published a number of collections of poetry and fiction, including Wearing the Morning Star: Native American Song-Poems and Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. He teaches at the Cooper Union in New York City.INTRODUCTION

This book is a follow-up volume to I Tell You Now.- Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 1987. We began putting the collection together more than ten years ago, in 1985, BCQ--Before the Columbian Quincentennial--and also, therefore, before Dances With Wolves, Blackrobe, various "Geronimos," and the Tony Hillerman explosion. The appetite of the American public for things Indian has expanded, as happens from time to time. This has resulted, on the one hand, in an increase in the production of what might be called "cultlÃ-