Honoring LaVonne Ruoff

From the 1970s to the present moment, LaVonne Ruoff was and still is the absolutely essential positivist, if I can put it this way, in a field that had (and sometimes still has) too many vague idealists and wild fantasists. There's much to celebrate in LaVonne's long and ongoing career in Native American studies, but I want to focus on her early seminal contribution to laying out the field bibliographically, to making as clear as possible to any of us who wished to work in this field the full extent of what was available and exactly where to find it.

Of course, by now we also have LaVonne's American Indian Literatures published for the MLA in 1990 and since revised, her 1991 Literatures of the American Indian, along with other bibliographic contributions by a number of people. I am concentrating most particularly on LaVonne's earliest contributions, on the one hand because a little history is always useful and, on the other, because it may be hard for some of the younger scholars in this currently mature and developing field of Native American literary studies to imagine just how little solid bibliographic resource material actually existed twenty, almost thirty years ago.

It was, for example, in 1977 that Karl Kroeber, editor of what was then called the ASAIL "Newsletter," announced the newsletter would henceforth contain a bibliography section, and, of course, the bibliographer was LaVonne. The following year Jack W. Marken published a bibliography called The American Indian: Language and Literature, which was reviewed in the spring 1980 issue of SAIL by LaVonne—who laconically pointed out the authors Marken had omitted and the publications he had missed by authors he had included. These omissions she Wlled in systematically. My favorite moment in that review is a simple parenthesis in which LaVonne points out that the correct name of one of the authors mentioned is "(Gertrude, not Ethel Bonnin)"! In 1983 LaVonne and Karl collaborated on the publication of American Indian Literatures in the United States: A Basic Bibliography for Teachers, and in the same year LaVonne published, in SAIL, "American Indian Literatures: A Guide to Anthologies, Texts, and Research." These were enormously helpful to those of us new to or newly seeking to enter this field.

My first book publication in 1985 dealt with Native American autobiography. But LaVonne had already for many years been championing George Copway and John Joseph Matthews, and she was one of the first to take William Apes—in those days we spelled his name with one s—seriously. She also drew attention to Simon Pokagon, who did not, it seems to me, begin to get the critical attention he deserves until very recently.

I suspect others will be writing about LaVonne's work with the MLA, important work that led to her being honored in 2002 with the MLA's Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award. Still others will also, no doubt, refer to her many critical publications and speak of the unheralded ways in which she never failed to respond to the many individuals who wrote her and asked for help. These contributions to the field I too would honor. But for me what shines brightest is the grounding she provided and continues to provide by her archival work and wide-ranging research (I'm thinking in particular of the very fine edition of S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest [1997]) by her archival work and wide-ranging research, leading to the production of bibliographical resources without which, in the past, a great many of us would simply have been stymied and, in the present, a great many of us have been saved an enormous amount of time and worry. Thanks, Lavonne.