An Appreciation

A special issue of SAIL honoring LaVonne Ruoff offers a fitting opportunity to reflect on her many gifts to the profession and to so many of us personally. When the ASAIL e-discussion group sent a call for contributors, I embraced it as both fortuitous and appropriate. Personally, I owe much to LaVonne, beginning with her 1979 NEH seminar, which initiated much of my research, and continuing over the years as I have benefited from her counsel, resources, recommendations, and much more. Now, my recent retirement suggests the symmetry so beloved by us literature appreciators, a perfect time to look back from end to beginning to see the continuity of her contribution in light of recent honors—notably Lifetime Scholarly Achievement awards from the MLA and the Before Columbus Foundation, and the two awards for Writer of the Year from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.

Not surprisingly, as I sifted through testimonials, bibliographies, and news reports, larger issues emerged. In 1986 I wrote a short piece outlining some of LaVonne's achievements recognized that year by the MELUS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Ethnic Studies. One thing LaVonne said about the item was that she "got a chuckle" from the reference in my comment that her "'godmothering' of research and study is, I think, one of LaVonne's most important contributions to better scholarship in American ethnic literatures." Only when I went back to that article in order to begin this one did it dawn on me that my use of "godmother" might have suggested a popular movie title. Of course, I meant the "godparent" sense of mentoring, guiding, and supporting: what Willie Mays was to Barry Bonds, let's say, and nothing to do with any movie star. The men who played ball with him say about Mays that he knew the truth about two things: he knew the game better than anyone, and he knew as well as anyone that it was, after all, a game. Much the same applies to LaVonne (with the tacit understanding that one's protégés in scholarship as in baseball may take unanticipated paths). Moreover, I find the correspondence pleasing as well as apt, having just learned that LaVonne's father was a part-time baseball player who for a brief period in the early twentieth century managed a Native American baseball team in western North Dakota. In one of our emails about this article LaVonne mentions that "Because he lived forty miles from the nearest town, most of his contacts were with Indian families. As a child, I was fascinated by the pictures of these families and his stories about North Dakota." The baseball comparison is personal; so are the reflections about the ways in which LaVonne has shaped the study of American Indian literatures that follow, but I believe and hope that my appreciation of her work is shared by others.

Any account of LaVonne Ruoff's publications must begin with the one book that all of us could never live without: American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. Before the complete volume appeared she shared some individual author bibliographies in SAIL, in those early issues of the first series produced by Karl Kroeber on mimeographed and hand-stapled folios. If she had published nothing besides American Indian Literatures, we would be forever in her debt. Happily, she has published much more. Critical works include Redefining American Literary History, the essay collection LaVonne co-edited with Jerry Ward, and the many pieces in journals, collections, and reference works, including many introductions and forewords to others' publications. An exhaustive summary is beyond the scope of this article, but I want to single out the essay on Leslie Silko's fiction, "Ritual and Renewal," first published in MELUS and subsequently revised and reprinted in several collections, as one of the earliest discussions of ways in which traditional themes and structures can inform contemporary written texts. We take it for granted now that this approach is a standard, in fact a necessary, foundation for analysis of texts by American Indian authors writing today, and we...