Native American Indian Heritage Month: Individuals

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
The over 550 indigenous cultures of North America, consisting of ten language groups and almost three hundred languages, have produced a rich and diverse literature.

From Encyclopedia of Women and American Politics
Paula Gunn Allen, of Native American and Lebanese descent, was an acclaimed feminist poet, novelist, and literary critic. Allen particularly credited the woman-centered Pueblo culture for many of the insights evident in her poetry. Through her poetry, she explored her multicultural heritage through images of spirits and shadows.

From Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature
Erdrich's works reveal the tension between the Native American people and the white race that threatens the destruction of Chippewa culture and heritage and the conflicts between family members within the Native American world.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
US writer born in Lawton, Oklahoma, to a Kiowa father and an English/Cherokee mother. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel House Made of Dawn (1968) about a young American Indian alienated from both white and his ancestral society. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2007.

From The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story
Simon Ortiz’s life and writing center on Acoma, New Mexico. The stark southwestern landscape and the open skies form the backdrop for the culture and perspective of the Pueblo people whose agricultural acumen and stable sociopolitical structure have endured for centuries

From The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story
“I grew up at Laguna Pueblo,” wrote Leslie Silko in Kenneth Rosen’s 1974 collection of contemporary American Indian short stories, The Man to Send Rain Clouds, where six of her early stories were published.

Mohawk chief, Anglican missionary, and British military officer during the American Revolution.

Native American chief; He was born in the Creek country now within the borders of the state of Alabama, the son of Lachlan McGillivray, a Scots trader, and Sehoy Marchand, his French-Creek wife.

From Encyclopedia of American Literature
An American Indian leader of the Fox and Sac (or Sauk) tribes, Black Hawk was born in a Sac village near what is now Rock Island, Illinois

Leader of a Chiricahua group of the Apaches.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Hiawatha (Ojibwa; “He Makes Rivers”). Legendary chief (c. 1450) of the Onondaga people of the northeastern U.S. He is regarded by tradition as the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy.

Daughter of Wahunsonacook, headman of the Algonquian-speaking Powhatan Confederacy of Tidewater Virginia; mythologized in American literature as an Indian princess and epitomized in Vachel Lindsay’s poem Our Mother Pocahontas as “the mother of us all.”

From The Reader's Companion to American History
Ottawa Indian chief.

Ancient deity and legendary ruler of the Toltec in Mexico.

From Encyclopedia of American Studies The Shoshone woman who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their journey to the western shores of North America.

Native North American leader, creator of the Cherokee syllabary.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
American Indian chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux during the Plains Wars of 1865–90, the struggle between the Plains Indians and the USA. In 1868 Sitting Bull agreed to Sioux resettlement in North and South Dakota. Sitting Bull was not only a chief, he was also regarded as a mystic and seer of visions.

Chief of the Shawnee, b. probably in Clark co., Ohio. Tecumseh set out to bind together the Native Americans of the Old Northwest, the South, and the eastern Mississippi valley.

American photographer and pioneer ethnographer known for his documentation of Native Americans.

US general; died in defeat at the battle with the Sioux at Little Bighorn.

American theologian and metaphysician; At Stockbridge, Mass., where he went to care for the Native American mission and to minister to a small white congregation, he completed his theological masterpiece, The Freedom of the Will.

English missionary in colonial Massachusetts, called the Apostle to the Indians.

7th President of the United States; In the War of 1812 Jackson defeated the Creek warriors, tacit allies of the British, at Horseshoe Bend, Ala. (Mar., 1814) after a strenuous campaign and won the rank of major general in the U.S. army.

Penn became involved in the affairs of the American colonies when in 1675 he was appointed a trustee for Edward Byllynge, one of the two Quaker proprietors of West Jersey. He also established the friendly relations with the Native Americans that were to distinguish the early history of Pennsylvania.