The Annenberg Learner series American Passages is a web-based literature class.  Its resources include videos, links, and comprehension questions.  The chapter on Native American mythology is particularly good, as is the chapter/video on the Gothic.

Native Voices Video Questions

Review the following questions.  Several of them bring up the themes that recur in the course readings.  Be prepared to answer any of these questions after viewing the American Passages video Native Voices.

1. What is the relationship between Native American identity and American identity?
2. How does Native American literature reflect or help create a sense of what it means to be Native American in the United States?
3. What does this literature help reveal about the experience of having a multicultural identity?
4. How does the conception of American Indian identity depend upon the writer’s identity?
5. What makes Native American traditions from different regions distinctive?
6. How has Native American literature been influenced by politics on and off the reservation?
7. How are Native American oral traditions shaped by the landscapes in which they are composed?
8. What role does the land play in oral tradition?
9. How does the notion of time in American Indian narratives compare with notions of time in Western cultures?
10. How does the chronology of particular narratives reflect differing notions of time?
11. How do Yellow Woman stories and the Nightway or Enemyway chant influence Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Storyteller?
12. How do Navajo chantways influence the poetry of Luci Tapahonso?
13. How does the Ghost Dance influence the vision of Black Elk?
14. How does the Ghost Dance challenge nineteenth-century European American notions of Manifest Destiny?
15. How do Yellow Woman stories subvert the genre of captivity narratives?
16. How do the poems of Simon J. Ortiz challenge the notion of what it means to be an American hero?