| Many Native American women writers explore and assert Indian women's identity to reclaim spaces, resist marginalizing stereotypes, negotiate shifting boundaries of similarity and difference, and protect the future by embracing and reinventing the past. Their literature reveals that Native woman's identity, her sense of being-ness, derives from allegiances, associations, and relationships with respect to gender, community, land, history, and culture. This study investigates these multiple factors influencing identity construction in a variety of native women's fiction and non-fiction, early and contemporary, texts. Analyzing texts by Bell, Erdrich, Harjo, Mourning Dove, Silko, Tapahonso, Tohe, and others, by way of feminist, post-colonial, and Native American critical theory, the study explores Native women's identity through community, landscape, and displacement. Examining identity through these thematic lenses reveals the conscious construction of native women not only as survivors of a colonial, genocidal history, but also as agents of their own and their people's futures. |
