Stories for a Winter's Night

Storytelling has always had an important role in Native American culture. Beginning as an oral tradition, Native stories became the repositories of tribal history and memory, and the story-tellers were revered members of every tribe. As a written form, storytelling took much longer to develop. As Native Americans mas-tered English in school, they incorporated American and European literary genres into their own experiences, and by the late eighteenth century, Native writers were publishing their work. However, because of the importance of educating non-Native atidi-It t Nit ye American culture and history, the published work of Native writers consisted largely of non-fiction. It wasn't until the late 1960s that Native poetry and fiction began to appear. One of the earliest anthologies of Native America short fiction, 'The Man to Send Rain Clouds', published in 1974, contained only six Native writers, and most of them were from the Southwest. This new anthology contains the work of thir-ty-five writers from across the continent.Some of those included have achieved mainstream success, others are little-known outside literary circles, and some are young writers just beginning to emerge. What they all share is a desire to blend imagination with the experience of being Native American to create a rich and var-ied body of work that will be read and enjoyed for many years to come by Native and non-Native alike.

Maurice Kenny is visiting professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He lives in Saranac Lake in New York State's Adirondack Mountains.