American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place

by Joni Adamson

Book Overview

Although much contemporary American Indian literature examines the relationship between humans and the land, most Native authors do not set their work in the "pristine wilderness" celebrated by mainstream nature writers. Instead, they focus on settings such as reservations, open-pit mines, and contested borderlands. Drawing on her own teaching experience among Native Americans and on lessons learned from such recent scenes of confrontation as Chiapas...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816517924
• ISBN13: 9780816517923
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Recommended

(Planeta.com Journal) -- The author's experiences among the Tohono O'odham nation that crosses the Mexico-United States border serves as a critical backdrop to her in-depth examinations of literature, such as Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. This is a powerful book that focuses attention on the linkages between literature and the envrionment. It's the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice. By exposing the blind spots in our cultural vision, it does create opportunities for building common ground, or as the author terms, "the middle place" where environmentalists, scholars, writers and teachers can come together to work for social and environmental change.