The Archive

LaVonne Ruoff has devoted her career to promoting the study of American Indian literature intellectually, professionally, and personally. Intellectually, she sets the highest standards for other critics, as anyone who has ever heard her serve as a respondent at a panel will know. She expects us to do our work both culturally and in the library. She has a patient understanding of the obstacles we face in developing a new field, but she still holds us to the most rigorous standards of research, of respect for Indian people and cultures, and of feminist good sense. Professionally, LaVonne's American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography sets the paradigm for introducing the field. When people ask where they can learn what's out there in Native American literature and literary studies, I send them to American Indian Literatures. Indeed, LaVonne is the archive. She knows the books, and she knows the people. Yet, even though she seems to know all the novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists, and critics from our own time, LaVonne's intellectual and historicist curiosity have led her to challenge the preoccupation with the contemporary in American Indian literary studies and to call attention to the history and tradition that upholds what we study, not only through her comprehensive and multidisciplinary bibliographical leadership but also through her invaluable editions of earlier, under-read writers: her edited collections of E. Pauline Johnson's stories and of George Copway's (Kahgegagahbowh's) Life, Letters, and Speeches, and her recovery of S. Alice Callahan's overlooked novel Wynema: A Child of the Forest. Personally, the stories are legion of LaVonne's tough-minded, tireless efforts to help other scholars, particularly women and native scholars, launch their intellectual projects in an often unwelcoming environment. At the very moment that I started to write this tribute, I received an awestruck, delighted note from a graduate student who had that moment gotten an email from LaVonne encouraging her research. When I think of LaVonne's personal role in the field, I also think of her infectious, hearty laugh. At a conference, when you hear that laugh around the corner, you know that LaVonne is at it again, inspiring others to the intellectual, professional, and personal challenge, pleasure, and collegiality of American Indian literary studies.