MELANIE BENSON

NATIVE-AMERICAN STUDIES

FAVORITE BOOK TO TEACH:

Bleed Into Me, by Stephen Graham Jones

MUST-READ BOOK IN YOUR FIELD:

Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko

FAVORITE PLEASURE READ:

The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

CURRENTLY READING:

Flight, by Sherman Alexie

Bleed Into Me is a collection of stories that offers a diverse, dynamic and painful panorama of Native life in America today, one that looks nothing like the befeathered and moccasined tableau that many expect; indeed, Jones often denies us any explicit markers of "indigenous" identity at all. But he also writes like a poet, and the more we excavate his transcendently beautiful prose, we find a stunning collection of tropes and ideas that uncover how deeply and often irreversibly a Native past haunts even the most contemporary urban or suburban scenes.

Published in 1977, Ceremony was one of the first novels to be taken seriously as a Native-American text. It is considered canonical, and for good reason. It presents a bleak, evocative portrait of postwar reservation anomie and despair, of mixed-blood angst and dissipating tradition, of addiction and desperation, and of the ineluctable ways that American Indians were absorbed by mainstream American culture with all the violence and loss that process entailed. In the end, Silko provides a message of cultural survival through ceremony, of which storytelling is an integral part. It's very difficult to begin a conversation about Native- American literature without starting here and assessing both the strides and the limitations thatSilko's work represents.

Alexie keeps us all talking-and that is the most important thing we can be doing.