Episode Notes

A side character in about 4 pages total sends me on a quest to better understand Steinbeck's dodgy treatment of Native American characters. 

This episode is a bit of an experimental break from the rest of the podcast. I am IN NO WAY an expert on the subject matter, and decided the responsible thing to do would be to do some research. because the project is a document of my experience with the text, and because I really do NOT want to position myself as knowing more about Steinbeck, race, and the place of Native Americans within the literary canon and popular mythology than I actually do, this podcast isn't just my findings, but a narrative of my whole research process. Along the way I discover that Encyclopedia Britannica continues to be a questionable source, JSTOR still sucks, piracy rules, and there was an entire history of Cherokee and Chickasaw migrant workers moving from Oklahoma to California that Steinbeck... pretty much ignores.

I think this is an important subject for a bunch of reasons I talk about in the episode, so I hope I did it at least some justice, and that my description of my research process was useful (and maybe furthers my goals of destabilizing myself as the "expert critic").

The initial interview I mention is "Route 66, John Steinbeck, and American Indian Literature: an interview with Louis Owens" by David Dunway in Southwestern American Literature. I accessed this through Gale via the Seattle library.

The Cherokee Nation FAQ I reference can be found here: https://www.cherokee.org/about-the-nation/frequently-asked-questions/common-questions/?term=&page=2&pageSize=7

and the other articles I found on scihub are as follows: https://sci-hub.se/10.2307/466974 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.2307/40146630 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2012.86.3.33

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