American culture has often consigned the Indian to the status of a tragic, permanent victim. Without denying the dramatic changes – and losses – that have taken place in Native America over the centuries, Indian writers have rarely participated in that disempowering custom. Much to the contrary, they have generally disavowed what the Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor has called victimry – the discourse of tragedy, victimhood, and vanishment – promoting instead what Vizenor calls survivance: a term he borrowed from probate law referring to both survival and inheritance.

This class will examine Native survivance as it has taken literary shape for the past century. We will begin with Plenty-coups’ remarkable 1930 autobiography which demonstrates “radical hope” during a period of rapid cultural collapse. Then we will study three key works from the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and 70s, each of them telling powerful stories about healing. We will conclude with a humorous and heartbreaking novel about hope, healing – and, audaciously, confession and forgiveness – from our own time.