Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1996
Abstract
In the early 1970s, at an early stage of the “Native American Renaissance,” a period that witnessed a recrudescence of tribal literary efforts, historical consciousness, and demands for civil rights, Janet Campbell Hale quietly began to make her mark on the Native American cultural landscape. A young member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe, she was then residing in the San Francisco area and had written a novel for adolescents titled The Owl’s Song, which inaugurated a noteworthy career in ethnic fiction and has gone through many printings. Like most other Native American authors, Hale has not been highly prolific with the pen. Nevertheless, she has written books of poetry, autobiography, and fiction. Most of her work vividly reflects her background in a Plateau Indian culture, but it also sheds much light on her displacement from it and on her often tribulative life in ethnically disparate urban areas of the Pacific Northwest and northern California. Coupled with her facility as a writer, this dual cultural-geographical focus (relatively new in Native American literature when she began her career) ensures Hale a place in the annals of Western American literary history. The magnitude of that niche will presumably depend on the scope and quality of her production in the twenty-first century.
Recommended Citation
Hale, Frederick. Janet Campbell Hale. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1996. Digital. Western Writers Series, 125.