Reckonings: Contemporary Short Fiction by Native American Women - Hardcover

Unlike most anthologies that present a single story from many writers, this volume offers an in-depth sampling of two or three stories by a select number of both famous and emergent Native women writers. Here you will find much-loved stories (many made easily accessible for the first time) and vibrant new stories by such well-known contemporary Native American writers as Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, and Leslie Marmon Silko as well as the fresh voices of emergent writers such as Reid Gomez and Beth Piatote.

Although diverse in style, language, and tone, all of these stories are reckonings with the brutal history of colonization and its ongoing consequences: they reveal Native epistemologies; testify to historic wrongs; and insist upon an accounting. A reckoning requires diving inward and resurfacing with new insights. These stories share an understanding of Native women's lives in their various modes of loss and struggle, resistance and acceptance, and rage and compassion, ultimately highlighting the individual and collective will to endure. These contemporary stories reflect cycles―mythic cycles, life cycles, cycles of resistance, and healing cycles―that insure Native survival. These are the stories told and retold by Native women who refuse to be silenced.

Their collection celebrates survival and provides readers with an essential new resource.

Hertha D. Sweet Wong is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography; editor of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: A Casebook; and co-editor with John Elder of Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales of Nature from Around the World. Jana Sequoya Magdaleno lives in Northern California where her focus is on Native community health and healing practices.