The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature

[...]Brown's chapter, which provides historical context and a meticulous literature review of major players in the field of American Indian literary nationalism (ailn), is likely to prove the most useful-or at least the most used-entry in the Native American literature classroom. Birgit Brander Rasmussen's short yet provocative chapter, "Indigenous Literacy and Language," offers a brief glimpse into the wealth of early literacy systems, arguing that "pictographic scripts fit multi-lingual environments like the Americans" better than syllabary or alphabetic systems (300) and that, read in the context of complex linguistic systems, we find evidence of "polysynthetic languages with a high degree of metaphoric speech" expressing itself in complex ways that describe perceptions and practices of the varied people groups coming into contact in the bioregions of the Americas (302).