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Ray A. Young Bear (b. 1950)

LINKS

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/youngbear/youngbear.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Ray A. Young Bear.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Marshalltown, Iowa, Ray A. Young Bear is a member of the Mesquakie Tribal community; Mesquakie translated means "People of the Red Earth." Young Bear is the great-great grandson of the Mesquakie Okima (or tribal chief) Maminwanike. After the tribe had been removed to Kansas, he negotiated the purchase of the tribe's sacred lands, returning in 1856 to Tama, Iowa on the Iowa River. From early on, Ray Young Bear had a close relationship to Native American culture, and he received inspiration in storytelling from his maternal grandmother Ada Kapayou Old Bear. "I'm grateful for my grandmother," he has said, "She is all of everything to me." In addition, he received an introduction to contemporary poetry writing through participating in an Upward Bound program at Luther College in Decorah in 1968. Between 1969 and 1971, Young Bear attended Pomona College and went on to study creative writing at the University of Iowa (1971), Grinnell College (1973), at Northern Iowa University (1975-76), and at Iowa State University (1980). Since completing his education, Young Bear has taught creative writing at The Institute of American Indian Art (1984), Eastern Washington University (1987), Mesquakie Indian Elementary School (1988-89), the University of Iowa (1989), and at Iowa State University (1993 and 1998). Since 1975, the year he published his first volume Waiting to Be Fed, Young Bear has also published Winter of the Salamander: The Keeper of Importance (1980), The Invisible Musician (1990), Black Eagle Child (1992), and Remnants of the First Earth (1996). Young Bear views his poetry as an art of connection among the various dimensions of how the Native American heritage is lived in the present. "The most interesting facet in all of this," he says, "has been the artistic interlacing of ethereality, past and present. As such there are considerations of visions, traditional healing, supernaturalism, and hallucinogen-based sacraments interposed with centuries-old philosophies and customs." In addition to his books of poetry, Young Bear is also the cofounder with his wife of the Woodland Song and Dance Troupe.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Ellefson, Elias. "An Interview with Ray A. Young Bear." Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers. Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee, Eds. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Jackson, MS, 1997. 35-44.

Gish, Robert. Beyond Bounds: Cross Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

—. "Memory and Dream in the Poetry of Ray A. Young Bear." Minority Voices: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature & the Arts. 2(1):21-29. 1978.

Niatum, Duane, Ed. Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Parker, Robert Dale. "To Be There, No Authority to Anything: Ontological Desire and Cultural and Poetic Authority in the Poetry of Ray A. Young Bear." Arizona Quarterly. 50(4):89-115. 1994 Winter.

Ruppert, James. "The Poetic Languages of Ray Young Bear." Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization. Bo Scholer, Ed. Aarhus, Denmark: Department of English at the Unversity of Aarhus, 1984. 124-133.

Swann, Brian. Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER