While Native Americans have been contributing to written literature from as early as 1772, Native American Studies, as codified by the academy, is only about thirty years old, and the formal entry of Native American literature into the university canon is even more recent. No surprise, then, that Cambridge University Press has now stepped in to provide the Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature.

Companion volumes can do one of several things: act as dictionary/encyclopedias about a complicated topic, provide further critical analysis of an established topic, or give a wide overview of a topic. The Cambridge Companion chooses to do the latter, and it manages to do this very successfully. An initial and embarrassing comma-splice stumble in the first sentence of the book soon resolves itself into a conscientiously considered and well-edited introductory book on Native American literature(s).

Editors Porter and Roemer have divided the volume into three sections: ‘Historical and cultural contexts’, ‘Genre contexts’, and a section on ‘Individual authors’. Of these, it is the first section on historical and cultural contexts, which shines. Roemer’s introduction is especially good: thoughtful, comprehensive, and cognizant of the complexities of his topic. The introduction not only discusses the limitations of studying a ‘literature’ of which the written portion is the smaller part (much Native American ‘literature’ occurs in an oral, rather than written form), it also raises problems of mediation/translation; how to label this literature; the lumping together of an enormous diversity of tribes under one heading; and even whether there is a group of shared traits in these texts which justify studying them under one rubric. For each of these complex issues, Roemer provides a clear explanation of both the debates and current practices, as well as the editors’ rationale for following certain customs throughout the volume.

Joy Porter’s essay on ‘Historical and cultural contexts to Native American literature’ is equally concise, giving an excellent overview of the history of Indian policy, the Native American response to it, the kinds of expression traditionally used in response, and the intersection of all these. The one thing left out is a discussion of the problem of translating an oral tradition into a written form, but David Murray’s very fine essay, ‘Translation and mediation’ takes up exactly this question. Raising issues such as agency and authorship, Murray declines to locate the debate in the more obvious question of who qualifies as a Native writer and instead concentrates on the linguistic and theoretical elements of the subject. Adopting a neutral stance himself, Murray simply enumerates the points of conflicts, listing arguments and counter-arguments for different parts of the debate.

Both the Genre and Individual Authors sections of the volume are ably, usually admirably, written. If there is a problem with the Genre section it is that we are in the early days of building this canon and thus many of the essays repeat the same information in their efforts to provide context for their own topics of non-fiction, life-writing, poetry, fiction and theatre. Part III includes essays on all the major players thus far. These chapters not only give the biographic and bibliographic details of each author, but also discuss the major themes with which each is concerned. If there is any shortcoming in these essays it is that so few deal with the critical work which has been done on each of these writers, an oversight which could easily have been corrected in the Further Reading section which concludes the volume, but wasn’t.

The Cambridge Companion won’t help anyone who wants to learn details such as what the Ghost Dance or Trickster is, but it will provide a very thorough and thoughtful overview to the subject of Native American writing, the complexities of its study, and the major authors who comprise its current canon.