Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel Volume 3

by Louis Owens

Book Overview

This first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806126736
• ISBN13: 9780806126739
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Congruent with Inherit the Tide

I found Louis Owens' book after I wrote Inherit the Tide. Funny I didn't think to look for something like this before. Maybe it was because Inherit The Tide poured forth so spontaneously. With hindsight I would say Owens is right on the mark, alarmingly so. His overarching theme of revealing the main thread of Native American novels as one of self awareness and self identity nails the issue. His familiarity with works of great Native American works and writers links his presentation of examples straight to the reader. I would describe the author as a scholar. I reached this conclusion bsed on the content of "Destiny", not a biography. It is well done, perhaps a bit stilted but this takes it into more believeable territory. It is an admirable work. Good Job.

This sets the standard for examining American Indian Lit.

Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel is solid, a real powerhouse of thoughtful readings and appropriate critical theory applied to highlight the diverse stories analyzed in this text. Owens examines the novels of Mourning Dove, Ridge, McNickle, Momaday, Dorris, Erdrich, Silko, and Vizenor while using an accessible voice and with generous notes, index, and bibliography. In his analysis he visits many of the social and political struggles each writer has encountered in their lives and represented in their writing. Other Destinies is not intended to serve the political ends of issues such as sovereignty, though it does examine the complex political climates in which these works were written. The biographical information on the political circumstances influencing Mourning Dove and John Rollin Ridge are particularly interesting for this reason. There are a few critics, both Indian and non-Indian, who wish that Owens had chosen different baseline issues, (their own political issues), to highlight in his critical examination of these novels. Owens chose, however, what he knows best and what was important to these particular texts.For decades, centuries, the will of white America has largely expressed the desire of the politically powerful to erase American Indians from the North American landscape. Today even, if one views the efforts of such as Slade Gorton, the senator from Washington State, the effort continues. And in many ways, they have been successful. More than 50 percent of those who identify as American Indians do not live on what is today considered "Indian land," and too many have lost all contact with the land and cultures and stories of their people. But many still do retain at least vestigial and often much larger pieces of the old stories and traditions, and are working to place them back into a communal whole. For them, the mere prospect of identity must come before they would even consider the land to which their people were moved decades or centuries earlier. For everything there is a season.In Other Destinies Owens analyzes the writings of a number of full and mixedblood Indians authors whose collective voice is growing louder with each passing year. These writers illustrate issues important to themselves; some authors are strongly rooted in place, others are only just discovering their places following the disastrous relocation Diaspora. Owens has built a sound historical and critical framework from which to examine all of these stories. These authors, like Owens, all write of their family stories and belief systems, and of the importance of place, when they know that place or adopt a new one. They are working to graft those connections into their modern lives through the power of their words.

An essential reference/critical text for Native Am. fiction.

Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel stands alone in its completelook at the history of fiction written by Native American writers. Though(fortunately) there are now so many Indian writers that this book could not include them all, Owens give a good account of many who broke new ground in their relatively recent day of producing literary fiction. Including N.Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko and others, this text, written by Dr. Owens, himself Native American of Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish descent, holds Indian texts to the same literary standards as other modern literature and finds them of equal quality. Though authoritative, this is a very readable text which received a good review in the New York Times Review of Books. Owens also writes good fiction, and could have included his own works in here, but didn't. See Wolfsong, Sharpest Sight, Bone Game and Nightland.