美国本土文学与经典NativeAmericanLiteratureandtheCanon.doc

0H ________________________________________ 1H The Voice in the Margin Native American Literature and the Canon Arnold Krupat UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley ? Los Angeles ? Oxford ? 1989 The Regents of the University of California ________________________________________ [2HDedication] ________________________________________ Preferred Citation: Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1989 1989. /ark:/13030/ft2g5004sk/ Introduction ________________________________________ ― 3 ― This book is intended as a contribution to American cultural history—of the past, the present, and, at least imaginably, the future—with special reference to the Native American component of that history. I assume rather than argue that, in point of historical fact, American culture has had, has now, and will continue to have some relation to Native American culture—although that relation has most frequently been one of avoidance. As a result, most commentators on American culture generally have managed to proceed as though there were no relation between the two, white and red, Euramerican and Native American, as if absence rather than avoidance defined the New World: as if America was indeed virgin land, empty, uninhabited, silent, dumb until the Europeans brought the plow and the pen to cultivate its wilderness. From the first days of settlement, Americans sought to establish their own sense of American civilization in opposition to some centrally significant Other, most particularly to the Indian savage. Until a scant thirty-five years ago, the cultural history of America was written pretty exclusively from the point of view of those who had triumphed in the contest between civilization and savagism, in Roy Harvey Pearces terms, with the result that the voice of the Other was simply silenced, not to be heard. But there is always a return of the repressed in one form or an