SOURCE: “Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature,” in Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature, edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, University Press of Mississippi, 2000, pp. 73-94.

In the following essay, originally published in 1996, Krupat presents an overview of literary theory defining postcolonialism, placing Native American writing in this context.

In the current climate of literary studies, it is tempting to think of contemporary Native American literatures as among the postcolonial literatures of the world. Certainly they share with other postcolonial texts the fact of having, in the words of the authors of The Empire Writes Back, “emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial Centre” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2). Yet contemporary Native American literatures cannot quite be classed...