Power: A Novel

The publication of Indigenous American author N. Scott Momaday’s novel The House Made of Dawn (1968) marks the beginning of a literary movement controversially called the “Native American Renaissance.” Before that time, there were a relatively small number of Indigenous American works published in English, and they did not reach a wide readership. It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, during a period of growing activism surrounding Indigenous civil rights and voices, that there was a significant increase in the number and popularity of published, English-language Indigenous American novels and poetry. By the 1990s, Indigenous texts had become a mainstream part of the corporate publishing market, responding to a national educational demand for multicultural literature. Published in 1998, Power encapsulates one of the fundamental elements of Indigenous American literature: the reclamation of their cultural heritage through literary expression.

Indigenous perspectives and philosophy offer critical resistance to colonialist and capitalist modernity. In this way, they share a similar outlook to postmodern thinking, though Indigenous voices have long been missing from mainstream postmodern debate. Frankie Wilmer states the following:

[p]ostmodernism, in particular, not only attacks the foundations (and the very idea of foundations) of Western academic disciplines, particularly the social sciences, but also calls into question the relationship between power and knowledge, and consequently, power and educational processes as a means of perpetuating the privileging of culturally embedded ‘western ways of knowing’ (Wilmer, Franke.