Reading Guide for "Native American Oral Literature"

These questions and vocabulary words found below are used to build our weekly Reading Checks, so you'd do well to print these Reading Guides out and take notes on them as you read.

Vocabulary -- Try circling the words in the text as you find them.  You may need to be able to easily locate them later on.

monolithic sedentary orature Winter Count pictograph
         
epic ode   aesthetics Winnebago trickster cycle

Dates of Interest:

Columbus arrives in the New World

Native Population of the Bahamas begins to die off in great numbers
The Spanish bring the first African slaves to North America
Cortes conquers the Aztecs/The destruction of Tenochtitlan

The wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca
The establishment of Jamestown
Africans arrive at Jamestown
The Mayflower arrives in North America
The Puritans arrive in what is today Massachussetts
The Pequot War
The Salem Witch Trials
Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act


Why was Europe of the 14-1500s considered "monolithic" [the word "monolithic" is not in the reading?

What stimulated the development of literacy and "book culture"? [approx date?]

What, in general, was the biggest socio-cultural difference between the old world and the new?  Can you list some specific examples by making a chart like the one below? 

European

 

Native American

 
<------Language and Literature ------>
 
 
<------Agriculture and economics------>
 
 
<------Religion------>
 
 
<------Art forms------>
 

Define "orature" and contrast it to "littera - tura."

Name several types of literature.  Name several types of orature.

When did the change come that allowed Europeans to think of orature as a type of literature?

What was the name of the philosophical/literary movement that encouraged this change in thinking?

How exactly did this philosophical/literary movement change the way we think of about art and literature?

What controversy did the "orality" of Native forms cause in the translation process?

Optional web sites of Interest?

http://www.firstpeople.us

http://gandhara.usc.edu