"The literature of this nation": LaVonne Ruoff and the Redefinition of American Literary Studies

LaVonne neither asks for nor needs adulation in this volume, and whatever words I may provide could hardly add luster to her already luminous reputation in the history of Native American literary studies. I don't even feel that she would want us to claim that she, as much as or more than any other scholar, helped to establish the field. Native voices established the field. "The literature of this nation originated with the native peoples," as she wrote in the opening of her landmark work, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. They called for readers, and a global readership responded—with her tutorship. That's what I'd like to address here briefly. LaVonne's immense service to Indian country and to the non-Indian world, in bibliography, in editing and publishing, in institution-building, and in community-building, has been to listen to Indian voices, directing others how and where to listen as well.

How and where or who to listen to—those are fundamental questions of native literary studies to which LaVonne has devoted her life's work. I'd like to put those questions into perspective from my personal experience that links to the work of this profession. My master's degree from the University of South Dakota (USD) served well as an entrée for teaching English in higher education for American Indian students at USD, then at the University of Montana, and eventually at Salish Kootenai College (SKC) on the Flathead Reservation. That work brought me further into Indian communities where the stories that are Native American literature live. In the 1980s at SKC as I began to read early native literary studies to strengthen my teaching, studies by scholars such as LaVonne Ruoff, Kathryn (Vangen) Shanley, Arnold Krupat, and others. I felt challenged by what I read that did and did not make that link between the literature and the communities I was a part of.

So I thought about doctoral work, and because my godfather (in the self-proclaimed Church of the Lesser Known Saints), Thomas Parkinson, was a professor of English at Berkeley, I sought him out for advice on returning to graduate school. Sitting in his living room in the Berkeley hills, he fixed me with his earnest and ironic stare, looming from above his beard and his six-foot-nine-inch frame, and he pronounced the following dictum: "You have to understand, David, that the heart of this profession is bibliography!"

I think he was trying to dissuade me. Indeed, it gave me pause. At the time, it sounded terribly dry. I was full of questions about native literature and native communities, and he wanted me to think of dusty libraries and archives as where the action is. Certainly, my love for libraries and books themselves carried me on his grim advice into an exciting crossroads between text and context, story and community. But it was LaVonne who made me really understand the significance of Tom's words.

Bibliography, simply listing books, is indeed the scholar's fundamental service to both readers and writers. Everything textual spins from that scholarly act across the generations. How many lost or neglected writers, how many lost manuscripts, how many lost voices have been brought to light by devotion to bibliography? (LaVonne herself, working from Daniel Littlefield's and James Parins's 1981 bibliography and Annette Van Dyke's 1992 recovery article in SAIL, is largely responsible for, among many other firsts, editing and bringing (back) to light the 1891 first novel by an American Indian, Wynema: A Child of the Forest, by the Creek writer S. Alice Callahan.) Stories in the blood may be resurrected from stories on the shelves.

On a less dramatic level, the dissemination of collected bibliographic information in classrooms and journals serves the basic tasks of...