Those Treasured Purple-Inked Pages
Rent from DeepDyve- Those Treasured Purple-Inked Pages
It was sometime in 1979 when Lavonne Ruoff had a visiting appointment at Dartmouth College that I had the opportunity to meet her. Late last year at MLA, she recalled her visiting appointment with a smile, but there was no time to ask more about it. Twenty-five years ago, I was just starting out at college, and I remember feeling intimidated as I walked into the dining room of the Hanover Inn by the grandeur of the setting and the strangeness of having been asked to join a group of faculty. At the table with Lavonne and Andy Wiget on a dark winter or fall evening, I'm sure I mostly listened. I remember little of the conversation; it was probably over my head, but I do recall receiving an early mimeographed version of Lavonne's bibliography, then in its infant stages. I've moved a dozen or more times since I first saw those purple-inked pages, and I've taken to talking more than I should. I haven't come across the bibliography in my house in Ohio, but I have faith that it is still in one of my unpacked boxes of papers, crumbling but legible, a wealth of information to me in my undergraduate and graduate studies days. It was a resource of first resort to locate titles, and it gave me a sense of promise that a generation of scholars was so generously building a foundation for youngsters like me to stand on. Even standing on those foundations, I doubt I can ever stand as tall as Lavonne Ruoff, Andy Wiget, and others do for me still.
Martha Viehmann teaches English at Northern Kentucky University. She has published essays on dialogics and mixed descent in Mourning Dove's Cogewea; on Luci Tapahonso and time and place; and on Mary Austin's appropriations of Indian culture and identity. She is working on a book about educated Native North Americans of the early twentieth century and their performances of Indian identity for largely non-Native audiences.
