A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff started teaching a composition class for Native Americans at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the fall of 1972, at a time when Indians were demanding greater self-determination along with better government services. Some of her students had grown up on reservations and were grounded in traditional tribal culture, while the students who’d grown up in Chicago knew little about their heritage. Some were older and uncomfortable with younger students. Many had trouble keeping up in class.
After retiring from UIC in 1995, Ruoff served a year as interim director of the Newberry’s D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History. Last December the Modern Language Association gave her a lifetime achievement award, and two months ago, at the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers conference in Lawrence, Kansas, she was given an award for editing the American Indian Lives series–29 volumes of biographies and autobiographies, most written for the series. Two years ago she, along with U. of I. history professor Frederick Hoxie and Newberry vice president James Grossman, set up a Native American graduate program at the library to train students in Native American anthropology, history, literature, and education.
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Now 73 and a professor emerita, Ruoff is preparing the second edition of American Indian Literatures. Because interest in books by Native Americans has increased dramatically over the past decade, she has a lot more material to include, and the new edition will probably be twice as big as the first. “Secretly,” she jokes, “I wish that everybody would quit publishing for a few years so I can get this finished.”
After high school Ruoff studied at the University of Illinois branch at Navy Pier, a two-year institution that eventually became UIC, then enrolled at Northwestern University. “When I applied to Northwestern in 1951,” she recalled in a 1994 speech, “my married friends discouraged me because they felt I should continue to work to save money for a house and to have a family. Even the doctor who gave me my physical examination tried to dissuade me from returning to school because he felt this would be too much for a married woman. Although Northwestern denied me a scholarship because I was married, I received one after my first quarter because of my grades.”
In 1991 the MLA, responding to a proposal by Ruoff, gave the field division status, acknowledging that it had become a major area of academic interest. Since then interest has only grown.
Two years ago Ruoff edited a new edition of Charles East-man’s autobiography, From the Deep Woods to Civilization. A Santee Sioux born in Minnesota, Eastman, like Copway, had adopted white customs after a traditional Indian childhood. His mother died only months after he was born, and when he was four his father, Jacob, went to prison for allegedly taking part in an Indian attack on white settlers. Charles was taken in by his uncle and traditional grandmother. They assumed Jacob had been executed, and for years the three roamed the plains together. President Lincoln pardoned Jacob, and after his release he converted to Christianity and set up a farm in what’s now South Dakota. He eventually found Charles when the boy was 15, and deciding that Charles needed to adopt white ways, he sent him to a nearby mission school. Charles later attended Dartmouth and Boston Medical College, becoming one of the first Native American doctors and working as a government doctor with the Sioux in South Dakota.
Ruoff says these books offer a surprising portrait of their time. The author of the first book she edited, the 1913 story collection The Moccasin Maker, was E. Pauline Johnson, the daughter of a Mohawk chief and an Englishwoman. Johnson became a celebrity by giving dramatic readings of poetry and drama in Canada, the United States, and Europe, and one of the pieces she performed was “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” which concerns a newlywed couple–Christine, daughter of an Indian woman and a white trader, and Charlie, an up-and-coming white government official. After Christine reveals at a party that her parents weren’t married by a priest, Charlie tells her she’s disgraced him, herself, and her family. “I tell you we are not married,” she responds. “Why should I recognize the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the rites of mine? According to your own words, my parents should have gone through your church ceremony as well as through an Indian contract; according to my words, we should go through an Indian contract as well as through a church marriage. If their union is illegal, so is ours.” She leaves him and ends up working as a seamstress. When he finds her and pleads for forgiveness, she turns him away.
