Ojibwe Writers: Words Come Speaking In Our Dreams

This dissertation, prefacing creative works, recovers and defines an Ojibwe-English literary tradition as a distinct area of Native American literature characterized by writings in multiple genres, relationships between authors over two centuries, use of Ojibwe language in writing in English, and connection to efforts to recover the Ojibwe language. An Ojibwe-centered reading asserts the Ojibwe-English literary tradition can be understood within a continuum of literacy that includes Ojibwe pictographic writing as well as early works in English. Ojibwe authors' works are examined through the metaphor inherent in the Ojibwe word name'---to leave signs of a being's presence, to leave traces---and that concept is connected to Ojibwe literary critic Gerald Vizenor's concept of survivance, the persistence of culture over time. As urged by scholar Robert Warrior, this essay recovers an intellectual history with a focus on select nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ojibwe-identified authors whose work influenced the creative writing that follows. Contemporary Ojibwe authors are then placed within the context of a literary tradition identified by the use of Ojibwe language, primarily by poets learning their Indigenous language. This contextual reading of Ojibwe-authored writings in English that include Ojibwe language in their work, presents an understanding of a literary tradition within American and Native American literature from the personal perspective of a writer who places herself within the tradition. Appendices contain chronologies of two centuries of Ojibwe authors. As a doctoral project in Creative Writing, the poetry and drama represent engagement of genre (specifically in the context of Ojibwe writers' use of multiple genres) and are original contributions to the body of American literature, Native American literature, and to the emerging field of Ojibwe Studies.