Native Storiers: Five Selections

by Gerald Vizenor (Introduction)

Gerald Vizenor presents in this anthology some of the best contemporary Native American Indian authors writing today. The five books from which these excerpts are drawn are published in the University of Nebraska Press’s Native Storiers series.

 

This series introduces innovative, emergent, avant-garde Native literary artists and promotes a sense of survivance over the conventional themes of victimry, historical absence, cultural tragedy, and separation that often accompany Native characters in popular commercial fiction. These original narratives demonstrate a new and distinctive aesthetic in the literature of Native American Indians. The five Native authors in this anthology, drawing from the practices of traditional oral storiers, create an active sense of presence, both in the literary world, and the wider world of cultural studies.


Native Storiers includes selections from Mending Skins by Eric Gansworth, Designs of the Night Sky by Diane Glancy, Bleed into Me by Stephen Graham Jones, Hiroshima Atomu 57 by Gerald Vizenor, and  Elsie’s Business by Frances Washburn.

206 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2009

About the author

Gerald Robert Vizenor is an Anishinaabe writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Reviews

[Claire Binkley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure whether to rate this collection of stories a three or a four. Maybe a 3.8 which would round up to a four, but maybe just a 3 due to discomfort with how some foreigners such as Europeans treat the original people of America.

Why don't you see what it's like? It's a dose of ethno-sociology, the people from around this part of the world, the Native American Indians.
(Did you know that when I was a little girl my father helped me make a history disc out of a tree trunk? He told me since we're Cherokee. I don't have this particular object anymore but we had painted a few events onto it in a circular fashion...)

I found the various text faces and distances from the border in this book interesting and not abrasive to the eye. This is extremely helpful. Maybe I really should add that additional star of appreciation...

I just opened to a line that said "Big laugh." OK another star.
This is a good book, especially if you have problems with vision.