In 1969 Vine Deloria, Jr.'s (Yankton-Standing Rock Sioux) Custer Died for Your Sins appeared. In 2001 W. S. Penn (Nez Perce / Osage) published Feathering Custer. Both are witty books by talented Native American writers. Juxtaposing them suggests the rapid development of the study of American Indian literatures. One of Penn's targets is the academic literary critic, while Deloria aims at anthropologists. Why the difference? One obvious explanation is that an invisible target is hard to hit. In 1969 academics specializing in Native literatures were practically non-existent. Anthropologists (along with folklorists and historians) controlled academic Indian country. Today anthropologists, folklorists, and historians still occupy much of the territory. But the dramatic increase in the visibility of Native American literatures has inspired the growth of a substantial body of criticism worthy of recognition, praise, and, as Penn demonstrates, at times, ridicule. Since 1969 in libraries, in classrooms, and on the Internet the study of American Indian literatures has progressed from invisible to marginal to expected status.

The recognition of literature written in English by American Indians (the focus of this volume) was long overdue. The Mohegan minister Samson Occom published a best-selling sermon in 1772, which he followed in 1774 with a collection of hymns, thus initiating the significant tradition of collecting and writing hymns in English and tribal languages. Novels, poetry, essays, and autobiographies written by Native Americans have appeared since the early nineteenth century; John Joseph Mathews’s (Osage) Wah’Kon-Tah (1932) was a Book of the Month Club selection; Will Roger’s (Cherokee) syndicated New York Times columns and “correspondence” for The Saturday Evening Post reached millions of readers – despite these and many other “facts” of Native American literary production and recognition, writing by American Indians was rarely included in university literature courses before the 1970s.