The Salt Companion to Carter Revard

Introduction Carter Revard was born in 1931 in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, of Osage, Ponca, Irish, and Scotch-Irish heritage. He grew up in the Buck Creek Valley on the Osage Reservation, where he worked in the fields, trained greyhounds, and janitored with his twin sister in the one-room schoolhouse where he and his six siblings completed their first eight grades. After graduating from Bartlesville College High School, Revard won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, where he earned his B.A. in 1952. One of the first American Indian Rhodes Scholars, Revard took an M.A. at Oxford in 1954 and a Ph.D. at Yale in 1959. He taught at Amherst College before beginning a distinguished and prolific 36-year career (1961-1997) at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, as a scholar and teacher of medieval English literature specializing in Middle English, history of the English language, and linguistics. (Bibliographies of Revard's scholarly publications on medieval literature appear in the special issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures [2003] in his honor and in the appendix to Susanna Fein's essay in this volume.) The same year Revard graduated from the University of Tulsa and was named Rhodes Scholar, he was given his Osage name, Nompehwahthe ("Fear-Inspiring," relative of Thunder [1998: 139]) by his grandmother, Mrs. Josephine Jump, in a traditional Osage naming ceremony. As he recalls in the preface to his essay collection Family Matters, Tribal Affairs, it was not until 1973, amidst growing national awareness of American Indian peoples awakened by the political events of the early 1970s-the Trail of Broken Treaties and the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in 1972, the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973-that he began to teach courses in American Indian literatures and cultures. Revard became an organizer in the St. Louis Indian community, helped found the American Indian Center of Mid-America, joined a Gourd Dancers group, and began to publish poetry with American Indian themes (1998: xiii-xvi). Two chapbooks-My Right Hand Don't Leave Me No More (1970) and Nonymosity (1980)-were followed by Ponca War Dancers (1980), Cowboys and Indians, Christmas Shopping (1992), An Eagle Nation (1993), which won the 1994 Oklahoma Book Award, and most recently, How the Songs Come Down: New and Selected Poems (2005), part of Salt Publishing's Earthworks Series. In addition, Revard has published a collection of essays, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs (1998) and a multi-genre memoir, Winning the Dust Bowl (2001). In 2001 Revard was named Writer of the Year in Autobiography by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers for Family Matters, Tribal Affairs. In 2005, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. Carter Revard's complex and beautifully crafted poetry has been widely anthologized in collections of American and American Indian literature, and his poems and essays on Native traditions and literatures have inspired two generations of Indian poets and helped to shape contemporary literary theory about Native American literatures. Revard's interests in languages and storytelling cross multiple cultural traditions and histories in ways that challenge cultural boundaries. In her book The Nature of Native American Poetry (2001), Norma Wilson says of Revard, "No other Native poet demonstrates so thorough a knowledge of British and American poetic traditionshellip;. No other Native poet has been able to so fully articulate in English words the relationship between ancient tribal myth and modern life" (15). Although there are many accomplished and widely published American Indian poets (Simon Ortiz, Maurice Kenny, Duane Niatum, Joy Harjo, Ofelia Zepeda, Wendy Rose, and Luci Tapahonso, to name a few), in addition to many of the most popular contemporary American Indian fiction writers who are also poets (Leslie MarmonArnold, Ellen is the author of 'The Salt Companion to Carter Revard', published 2007 under ISBN 9781844710904 and ISBN 1844710904.